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While driving up Israeli Highway 90 along the west bank of the river Jordan from the Dead Sea to Galilee last Friday, I passed the turnoff to the actual site on the river Jordan where St John the Baptist baptised Christ. I really couldn't miss the place where the Holy Spirit descended on Christ in the form of a dove and God said he was pleased with his son, so I turned down the road, and drove towards the Jordan.

Half way to the river, I found this

The Israeli army had erected a barrier preventing anyone from continuing down the road to the river, with barbed wired etc, and a sign saying "Military Area. No Photography" or some such. (The area was closed to visitors from the 1967 war until 2010, but it was supposed to have been open since then). There was nobody there, but as being arrested by the Israeli military in the middle of the West Bank is not my preferred activity on a Friday evening - they are probably particularly annoyed when you ruin their Shabbat - I really didn't want to take any risks. Thus I drove drove some distance back down the road before turning around to take photographs, and then only used the camera in my phone, which makes it less obvious what I am doing than holding up my digital SLR. I don't know the reason for the closure: possibly just that the River Jordan is in some sense the border (although in this part of the world, who the fuck knows where the border is?) and they don't want people too close to it.

In any even, in truth I didn't want to stay too close to it for too long either. The Israeli built and controlled highways are safe enough. Highway 90 is by far the shortest route from south-east Israel to north-east Israel - which was why I was driving on it - but it was clearly built principally for security purposes. In the event of another war, the Israeli army can undoubtedly be mobilised along it very rapidly. However, being off the highway with a car carrying Israeli plates is probably best avoided.

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The above picture is of the Church of Jesus Christ the Adolescent, which is found on the top of a hill in Nazareth in Israel. It presumably gets its name from the fact that Jesus Christ did apparently spend his teenage years in Nazareth. I post the picture merely because everyone I have shown the picture to so far has laughed at the name.

Thinking about it more, though, asking people to complete the phrase "The Church of Jesus Christ the..." with the most entertaining ending is possibly almost as much fun as "For all its faults,...".

(Yes, I think Evelyn Waugh played with this exact idea in The Loved One. It is still fun, however).

(11)

Michael Jennings is now, as he recently said here that he would be, in Israel. Knowing my fondness for amusing multilingual signs, he today emailed me this photo, taken in Acre:

At first I thought that "Crusader" was some kind of business brand, although on second thoughts probably not. Maybe ... actual crusader latrines? To clear up any doubt, Michael added:

It means exactly what it says.

Yes indeed, these are latrines which were once upon a time used by crusaders. And here, I presume, are those very latrines.

Don't you just love the internet?

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I am going to be in Israel from the 20th to the 28th of January. The plan is to be in Tel Aviv for two or three days from the 20th, then hopefully Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth, perhaps a little wine tourism in the Golan Heights, and Beersheba if I have time, which I may not. This will be my first trip and as always, there can be more visits. One of the purposes of a first trip to anywhere is to find out about the interesting things to do and see on subsequent visits.

The aim, as is the case with most of my travel, is to go, look round, and try to get some sense of the place. In Israel, the cultural and architectural magnificence of the place makes this particularly daunting. I am coming with the sense that Israel is one of the most egregiously missing places from my travels, but also with a certain amount of cultural baggage. I attended Anglican Sunday school as a child, of course, but was taught my biblical history in the sense that it felt that these were mythical places. That they were actually real took a more adult understanding.

Plus of course, there is the modern economy: every government in the world has seemingly released press releases stating how "We must create the Silicon Valley of (wherever)" (seemingly failing to understand that by government direction is not how you do it), but Israel seems to be virtually the only country in the world with a startup and tech economy scene that is actually worthy of such a description. My admiration for this is enormous, but my detailed knowledge of it is less than I would like it to be. If anyone wants to tell me more about this / show me how this has happened, I would be delighted to let them tell me and/or show me.

Several of my Jewish and Israeli friends have already offered me advice on what to see and do, of course, but further advice would be welcome, particularly from readers of this blog who may have some sense of my quirky sensibilities. Comments on this post are welcome, as is e-mail to michael.jennings at gmail.com. I promise to write about interesting things that I find on this blog.

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As was flagged up by this recent SQotD, I have been reading The Last Crusaders by Barnaby Rogers, the point of this posting being that some of these Last Crusaders were also the first global explorers. This can't be a review, because I have only reached page 50 out of 481, but I will be very surprised if my good opinion of this book now is in any way challenged by the experience of reading the rest of it.

A question that had always vaguely puzzled me, in a very not-thinking-about-it-carefully way, was: why Portugal? How come Portugal, of all now rather insignificant little backwaters, was the country that lead the way in the European conquest of so much of the rest of the world, a gigantic epoch only now drawing to a close?

It is of course not at all hard to see how this should be. Portugal may now be a backwater (I'll say more about that at the end of this posting) but in the fifteenth century, from the point of view of exploring the world, it was a frontwater. All you need to do to understand how Portugal led Europe into the big wide world out there is to stop looking at the Portuguese East Indies or the various Portuguese parts of Africa or South America (which is what I had been doing), and look instead at Portugal itself, and its immediate surroundings. Once you do that, Portugal making the first big steps in the when-Europe-ruled-the-world story is not just explicable, it is close to inevitable.

Time for a date. In 1415, Portugal captured and, even more significantly, subsequently held the North African trading city of Ceuta, just across the Straights of Gibraltar from Gibraltar itself. They hoped this would drop into their laps all the trade that was done between West Africa and everywhere else through Ceuta. But not for the first or last time, grabbing the physical place turned out not to mean effortlessly controlling what had previously gone on there. Nevertheless, it was a start, by which I mean a start in the process of Europe confronting Islam not in the obvious way, but the other way. The obvious way was to bash on against Islam in the Western Mediterranean and surrounding parts, the Balkans, North Africa and what we now call the Middle East. The other way, of course, as we now all know, was to go round it.

Forget for a moment all the European nations who subsequently did this, and forget all the many places the world over that they arrived at and did business in and with. Consider only the very first steps in that process, that needed to be taken in the early fifteenth century. What did they consist of? Basically, someone European needed to sail down the coast of West Africa, establishing bases and trading relationship along the way.

If this had been easy, Portugal would probably never have lead the way. Spaniards, Genoese and Venetians, even though preoccupied with that Islam bashing in other parts of the Mediterranean world, would probably have overwhelmed those very early Portuguese efforts. But crucially, it was not easy. The Atlantic was a huge barrier, requiring huge efforts before even the possibility of profit could cut in. So far so obvious. But what is less well known nowadays (certainly not known by me until now) is that something similar applied to the West Coast of Africa.

Let Rogerson tell the story (pp. 29-31):

The Arab merchants settled on the coast of Morocco had little interest in exploring the Atlantic, which they called the 'Sea of Obscurity' and the 'Green Sea of Darkness'. For them the land route across the Sahara was more direct and safer. The progress of a series of freebooting Portuguese squadrons sailing south down the Moroccan coast during these years must have further discouraged any Arab trading ship from sailing too far from its haven. But it was not all one-sided, for the roles of prey and predator could be easily reversed. Indeed maritime records show that in this period some forty-six Portuguese ships were captured by corsairs on the Atlantic.

For their part, the Portuguese sea captains were reluctant to cross the southern threshold marked by Cape Bojador (about two-thirds of the way down modern Morocco's long Atlantic coast), and with good reason. The last known expedition, by the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa in 1291, had never returned. It was widely feared that the very strong southern current that sweeps along the shore would frustrate any return. And to this day Cape Bojador marks a climatic, cultural and emotional frontier. For once Cape Noun is passed on the way south towards Bojador, all recognisable signs of Mediterranean life - trees, cultivation, farmland, villages, houses, man and goat - are gradually bleached out of the landscape, to be replaced by the savage intensity of the empty lands of the western Sahara. The region even lacks the customary grandeur of the desert, that romantic juxtaposition of dark mountains and golden sand dunes, and is instead composed of a series of bleak gravel uplands. The shoreline is awesomely sterile, overlooked by wind-eroded cliffs, protected by reefs and with the tidal reach of the rocky shore everywhere presenting a razor-like surface. In addition the whole region is made even more dangerous and impenetrable by salty sea mists, a dense, muggy intensity of climate and erratic compass fluctuations.

However, by 1434 one of the young squires of Prince Henry's household, urged on by words of affection from his master, rather than threats, did manage to break this psychological frontier. Throughout the subsequent century of seafaring nothing halted the spread of Portuguese mariners across the oceans of the world, as Cape Bojador had. The breakthrough was the cumulative achievement of decades of unaccounted and unacknowledged work by shipwrights and observant sailors who had slowly transformed the traditional Arab-derived coastal craft of the Algarve into the lateen-rigged caravel. Together they created a craft strong enough to ride out oceanic storms but light enough to navigate estuaries and river mouths. It had the tactical ability to make use of the Atlantic winds and yet it could also be manned by a scratch crew of a dozen hands. This was the tool with which all the first great European explorers - Columbus, Magellan, Vasco da Gama - opened up the sea lanes of a new world.

I laughed out loud on learning of those unfortunate "Vivaldi brothers", who sound like characters in a Monty Python sketch. "Prince Henry" is of course Henry the Navigator. Even I had heard of him.

It all makes me think of an egg timer. The whole of Europe, without (apart from Henry the Navigator and his cronies) knowing it, awaiting its new destiny. The world beyond, waiting for Europe to crash into it and gobble it up. But, meanwhile, that tiny little stem off the coast of West Africa that had to be squeezed through.

The Spaniards were that little bit nearer to the stem of this egg timer, but the Spaniards had other battles to fight, with each other and with other Mediterranean powers. Those other Mediterranean powers were similarly busy knocking seven bells out of each other and out of any Muslims they could confront, or whom they were obliged to confront. Even the Portuguese had had ambitions to join in the more conventional sort of crusading, and only because that went so badly did they switch to truly concentrating on their southern adventures.

The Portuguese had also had to prevail in a European battle of their own, against the Spaniards, in 1385 (p. 22). How much more significant this battle, Aljubarrota (which I still struggle to spell, let alone pronounce – don't click on that if you prefer silence), now seems to me than Agincourt (which happened in the same year that the Portuguese captured Ceuta and with which, says Rogerson, Aljubarrota is frequently compared), even though I am an Englishman. England's offensive victory at Agincourt led England into a futureless French quagmire. The Portuguese defensive triumph at Aljubarrota gave Portugal the domestic stability and the leeway to set about changing the entire world.

So it was that for several generations Portugal lead the way. Only when the Portuguese had well and truly surmounted the Cape Bajador barrier did the rest of Europe follow, and by then the Portuguese were already putting their own indelible stamp on the world.

A further reminder of which came to me today in the form of an incoming email from Michael Jennings, after a phone call from him to me (concerning a rather remarkable cricket match) had informed him of my interest just now in matters Portuguese:

An interesting recent fact about Portuguese in Africa is that the number of Portuguese speakers in Africa is apparently growing rapidly. Portuguese has long been the language of the elite and much schooling in Angola and Mozambique. With the current rapid growth of literacy in Africa, helped by the fact that Portuguese language popular culture is extremely rich (thanks to the Brazilians) Portuguese is apparently finally becoming a mass spoken language in the former Portuguese colonies, even though the Portuguese left 35 years ago.

Which also chimes in rather well with Johnathan Pearce's posting earlier today about the economic progress that Africa now looks to be making.

The rest of Rogerson's book is, I assume, about how Europe and Islam bashed into each other directly, as they (we) are still doing of course. But what a fascinating preliminary sideshow these early Portuguese chapters are. And what a show it turned into.

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A Janes email newsletter this week reports that:

Israel retains strike option as IAEA strips away Iranian nuclear facade Israel plans to give the international community time to draft and impose a series of tough sanctions against Iran in relation to its nuclear programme but has not ruled out the possibility of pre-emptive military action at a later date, Jane's understands from senior government officials. Their comments followed the 8 November publication of an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report expressing concern based on mounting evidence that Iran is pursuing the development of nuclear weapons, conducting research and tests that are only relevant for the design of a weapon

Next thing you know, they will discover that Israel has teeth enough to respond to an attack or threat... in kind.

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Recently a friend told me something about kibbutzes (kibbutzim?) in Israel, which got me into speculation mode. My friend had, he told me, met quite a few people in the course of his various globetrottings who, attracted by the aura of idealism and general world-savingness that kibbutzes radiate, had spent time in a kibbutz. Such pilgrims, said my friend, had quite soon left, all of them disgusted by the experience. Far from being havens of a higher form of humanity, kibbutzes are incubators of nastiness and personal backbiting and unpleasantness of all kinds. Kibbutz life, said these people, had cured them of socialism for ever. Which makes me speculate that kibbutzes are, for this reason, a spectacularly good thing, for the people thus inoculated, and for the world, in more ways than I can count in a short blog posting.

The only kind of people said my friend, who live well in kibbutzes are, well, the kind of people who live well in kibbutzes. People who thrive under totalitarian socialism, basically. Good at politics, good at screwing people without appearing too obviously to screw them, in accordance with the rules of rigid egalitarianism. There are lots of rules, to suppress individualism, getting ahead, getting richer, and so on, and the individuals who understand these rules use them ruthlessly to get ahead, and even, if you are flexible about how you measure wealth, to get wealthy.

These "alpha personalities", as my friend described them, stick around, ruling the kibbutz with a rod of egalitarian iron. Many of the people lower down the Greek alphabet, without whom these alphas would presumably be rather helpless, are the transients, some of whom my friend had talked with. Young idealists, for whom life on a kibbutz is some kind of rite of Jewish passage. They arrive, serve their time until they can stand it no longer, and leave, taking with them an education in the realities of egalitarian collectivism that is given to few others in what is basically, still, a moderately free world. They experience such a regime good and hard, in a form that they can contrast with a life outside that kibbutz that is still massively freer, and then leave, taking that knowledge with them.

So, in addition to being one of the great new hubs of technological innovation in the world, the state of Israel, by permitting with its laws (including, presumably, a law which says that kibbutzes may not imprison those who no longer consent to being there), and encouraging with its ideological traditions, master classes in the realities of collectivism, is doing the world another huge favour. Kibbutzes are, you might say, re-education camps for precisely the sort of people who most require such re-education, and at a time in their lives soon enough to make a huge difference, to them and to the world.

I am a huge admirer of that human semi-collectivity called Jews, and pretty much an uncritical supporter of the state of Israel in its ongoing struggle to stay in existence and to flourish. But, and please do not misunderstand this next bit, I sort of agree with some of the more admiring bits in the ravings of the world's many anti-semites, present and past. Jews are rather special. A century ago or so, Jews did have an influence on the world that was far greater than their mere numbers would seem to have allowed. (I am a classical music fan, and the sheer scale of the Jewish presence in that world has been and remains extraordinary.) It did not follow from the super-achievements of Jews that therefore the Jews were evil and should all be murdered, and it does not follow now. But, they were a group of people very much to be reckoned with, and they surely still are, again way beyond their mere numbers in the world.

I therefore now surmise that an ongoing education programme, which turns energetic, adventurous and idealistic young Jews from devotees of collectivism in devotees of something more like the opposite, has got to be one of the very best things now going on in the world.

But, this is pretty much all speculation on my part. The question mark at the end of my heading is no mere afterthought. I admire Israel from afar, but have never been there, nor have I travelled very much in the world. (Maybe if I spent more time in Isreal, I would admire it less.) So I end with all the usual questions which thinking-aloud, but-what-do-I-know?, guess postings of this kind generally do and always should end with. Does any of the above make sense to any of our commentariat? In particular, how do the above speculations strike any readers of this who have pertinent knowledge of the matters I speculate about, of the sort which I do not have, beyond that small item of chat from a friend?

I can well imagine that kibbutzes might indeed do a bit of the good I describe, but be doing a lot more harm in other ways. Also, my friend, being of a strongly anti-collectivist inclination himself, could have been suffering from severe selection error. Maybe the world is full of Jews who have lived in a kibbutz and would like nothing less than to kibbutzise the entire world. But, I like to think not.

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There is not a lot for me to add. Just go watch it.

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One thing comes through to me as I hear the stories from those doing their part for the remembrance. Far from destroying America, the lowly jihadi's have created a powerful religious symbol. The World Trade Center has become a site of enormous power. Tiny pieces of metal from the site have been forged into religious icons. They are a part of a warship, a part of wind chimes for a church. They are items treated with great awe and reverence, perhaps as much as were bits of the 'one true cross' to generations of the distant past.

To the Jihadi's and to those who think they will one day bring Shari'a to America, I say, "You have not only failed. You have created icons of greater power than your Mecca."

I will go further. Two thousand years from now you and your icons will be remembered only in dusty historical archives. The World Trade Center site will still be there and will have gained a patina of age and legend, a tale of demons who came from out of the East and carried death, destruction and great evil with them as they battered a brave and honorable people.

But the more evil they did, the more the forces of good grew, until one day the hand of all peoples were raised against them and they were cast back into the lowest depths of hell and provinces of the damned from whence they had come.

Jihadi's, you are done. Your dreams are dead. Your followers are dead or will soon be dead. Your beliefs will be forgotten. You have made us stronger and you and all about you are dust in the winds of time.

I do not have to curse you. You have cursed yourselves.

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I hope the reports of rebel triumph prove to be the case... and kudos to the UK and France for helping things along whist also resisting the urge to get too deeply involved.

But that said, I cannot help but hope the dirty secrets now emerge of how overseas politicians aided and abetted Qadaffi over the years, in particularly the disgusting deal over Abdelbaset al Megrahi. It would be wonderful to see the polities in England and Scotland take one in the face if the unlovely details eventually come out.

(16)

I am a busy person this weekend so I haven't time to do much more than to link to this fascinating interview with a former CIA operative on his experiences of living in Iran. With all the troubles in the world right now, it pays to keep an eye on a country and a regime that continues to be a serious threat. More optimistically, though, if Iran ever did move towards genuine openness and democracy, the impact on the rest of the Middle East region would be immense.

This struck me:

"If the Iranian regime dared for one day, for even half a day, to allow Iranians to come into the streets and say what they really want, then you would see tens of millions of Iranians in the streets shouting “Death to the Islamic Republic!”

"If there were a free referendum today, “yes” or “no” to the Iranian Republic, more than 90 percent would say “no.” If there were a free referendum today saying “yes” or “no” to establishing ties with America, more than 90 percent would say “yes.”"

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I have a lot of time of Michael Totten. That does not mean I agree with everything he says but I rate his commentary and reportage more highly than 98% of the Fourth Estate's professional 'experts' from megacorporate media land.

His latest work, Hanging with the Muslim Brotherhood, is an interview with Esam El-Erian and I commend this to you, not just for its informative content but because it may have the same effect on you as it did on me... some laugh-out-loud moments just visualising what the exchange of views must have been like for the exasperated but ever polite Totten and his redoubtable colleague Armin Rosen.

Read the whole thing and perhaps even drop your mouse on his 'donate' link as he is worth every penny.

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... no, it was the highest institutions of the Netherlands who were on trial with their credibility and very legitimacy at stake.

Although I am delighted he was acquitted of all charges, frankly it is a disgrace that he was ever put on trial in the first place for simply stating his views about Islam and multiculturalism.

And the fact the BBC calls him 'far right' tells you nothing useful about Geert Wilders' views but speaks volumes about the BBC.

(7)

BBC:

Women in Saudi Arabia have been openly driving cars in defiance of an official ban on female drivers in the ultra-conservative kingdom.

My thanks to Antoine Clarke for the h/t. Antoine's Norlonto Review has been only occasional in recent months, but is now active. And Antoine adds this observation:

SAUDI ARABIA NEEDS A BURQA BAN. Women defy government ban on driving and post videos of themselves driving around town. Of course the veil makes it harder to identify them.

I guess those Islamic scholars who insisted that the burqa was a liberation have a point.

Heh.

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As a BBC news announcer gave out the round of story headlines this morning on the television, I heard this particular classic of its type connected to this story about extremism and universities:

"Government money is no longer going to be given to Islamic extremists".

First of all, there is, as readers of this blog know, no such thing as "government money". All money spent by government is, despite what some might believe, owned by you, the taxpayer, or lent to it, by other people. Second, it is not just appalling that money levied on pain of imprisonment (taxes) is then transferred to people who want to impose a particular worldview on their fellows; it would be just as bad if the money were to be given to the forces of sweetness and light. No such groups, whether it be Islamic Jihad, The Women's Institute or the Worshipful Company of Bald People, should receive a penny from the taxpayer. End of subject.

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In the post below, Jonathan quotes Theodore Dalrymple saying the following rather mind-boggling statement.

"[Journalists are taxed at lower rates than normal people] ... this is a considerable privilege, definitely worth preserving. It creates an identity of interest between the elite and the journalists, who are inhibited from revealing too much about anyone with powerful protectors."

He thinks this is a good thing? Seriously? Journalists have an incentive to cover up the wrongdoings of the powerful, and this is good?

Leaving aside the obvious corollary of this, that France effectively licenses journalists, I personally do not think that politicians and bureaucrats should have any right to privacy whatsoever. They choose to go into politics, and they are trusted with our money and are given considerable power over us. In return, everything they do up to and including going to the toilet should be subject to scrutiny. They should have some protection against being libelled (but even then a relatively weak right - the burden of proof should be on the politician and it should be necessary to prove both untruth and malice). In truth I am not that keen on extending much of a right to privacy to anyone else either. As long as you are telling the truth, you should generally be able to say it out loud, in any forum. This is one case where the Americans have it right with the First Amendment.

As for the vulgarisation of culture, London is the most culturally vibrant city in Europe. Culturally speaking, Paris today is about as interesting as English food circa 1955. At least, Paris inside the peripherique is. There are some interesting things going on in rap music, language and art in some of Paris' suburbs, but I doubt that Dalrymple is much of a fan. The price of cultural interestingness may be some vulgarity, but who gets to decide what is vulgar and what is art? Old men decrying the tastes of yoof today, I guess. The Nazis were very keen on doing this, too. As are the Chinese communists.

China is a deeply authoritarian place. As a consequence of that, the country is culturally pretty dead. The Chinese watch imported movies, and encourage their children to learn to play western classical music. What is produced domestically and gets wide distribution is frighteningly bland, which is what happens under authoritarian regimes. Interesting things can be going on underneath, which can sometimes lead to cultural explosions when the authoritarian regimes are gone (see Spanish and South Korean post-dictatorship cinema, for instance), but China is a way from that.

Who do you compare China with, though? There is one obvious rival.

In late April, a couple of days after some unspeakable barbarians had exploded a bomb in a restaurant in Marrakesh, I was sitting in a cafe in Fez, in a more northern part of Morocco. As in many cafes worldwide, there was a television in the room. This was showing a soap opera of some kind on a pan-Arabic TV channel. (There are many, many, many pan-Arabic TV channels. They are run out of Qatar and Dubai. Moroccan roofs have more satellite dishes on them than I have seen anywhere else on earth). This particular pan-Arab channel was showing a soap opera or a popular movie of some kind.

In any event, the program in question contained some Islamic symbols. There were mosques in the background of a few scenes. The TV was showing subtitles in Arabic. I am not sure if that was because the program was originally in some other language or if these were just closed captions in the same language as the original material, turned on because there was a lot of background noise. (It may have been that the program was in fact Pakistani, and the original language was Urdu, but I am not sure). In any event, though, the program contained musical dance numbers of a form that were familiar to me. And there were slightly more bare female midriffs than one expects on TV in an Arab country. I expect there were more than one sees on domestic Moroccan TV, too, which partially explains the satellite dishes. Morocco is authoritarian enough to censor its own TV, but not authoritarian enough to attempt to ban the dishes.

The program was not made in India, but the grammar of the program was entirely that of Bollywood. In North-West Africa, in the Arab world, one of the leading cultural influences is clearly India. This is hardly surprising. Go to Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Qatar and who does the actual work? People from South Asia; Indians and Pakistanis and Sri Lankans. Even when they are making programs for Arab markets, they use their own cultural reference points. Even when making programs for their own market, Pakistanis use Indian cultural reference points. However it happens, and however second or third hand it comes, the cultural influence of Bombay on the Middle East and North Africa is clearly immense

And is Bollywood vulgar? Oh Lord yes. More conservative Indians elsewhere in the country denounce its amoral wickedness as much as anyone in America has ever denounced Hollywood. The entertainment industries of India are run by gangsters at least as depraved as any who have ever run Hollywood or Las Vegas. It isn't any great coincidence that the most savage terrorist attack carried out by Islamic extremists in recent years was on the city of Bombay. This is the heart of wickedness and vulgarity, and they know where the enemy is. Indian culture is vibrant and vulgar. On the surface and in the mass market at least, Chinese culture is dead. And Indian culture is the country's greatest weapon against its enemies.

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A moderate Muslim has not understood Islam.

- Sam Solomon, twenty five minutes into a remarkable video interview of him by Ezra Levant.

Solomon, who was raised a Muslim but is now a Christian, explains, in particular, just what is so explosive about the threat to Islam of Christianity. Built into Islam, says Solomon, is a huge bundle of falsehood about what Christianity actually says. Simply learning about Christianity by reading the Bible, whether you accept in or not, will automatically undermine your Muslim faith.

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"Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism."

- Christopher Hitchens on Noam Chomsky.

(19)

The US Navy SEALs are a remarkable group of individuals, as events in the Middle East highlight. Here is a book about their training by an author I rate, Dick Couch.

In the end, given sufficient force and a pinch of luck, the US was able to get bin Laden. I think that is a very important message to get into the grey matter between the ears of jihadists.

I have been reading some comments over at Facebook and elsewhere about how vulgar and unseemly it is for people to celebrate the death of this man. Forgive me if I spare the tears. This won't bring back all those people killed by his outfit, of course, but a sort of justice of sorts has been done.

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I just returned from a night at the pub with a journalist friend and no sooner had I arrived home than I heard the news. Osama bin Laden is dead. May he rest in pieces and be fed to pigs. Maybe we could even put his head on a pike in front of the White House for a few days and spread bread crumbs around it so the pigeons will roost there... and we could encourage people to walk their dogs around the pike...

Am I sounding barbaric? Yep. He is very "special".

(8)

Some say Gaddafi and the Philadelphia Democratic machine might be a match made in.... well, wherever...

(20)

Like a lot of libertarians who had to put up with abuse from his more "purist" minded fellows for my support for the overthrow of Saddam's regime in Iraq, I had second, third and even fourth thoughts about the whole venture. And my views on the situation are still not really settled eight years on from the start of full combat operations in 2003, and so I am still trying to reach a conclusion.

With that sort of thought in mind, a few days ago I got hold of Douglas Feith's War and Decision, a book by a former senior Bush administration policy man at the very centre of things. Feith's book contains absolute dynamite: links between Saddam's regime and various terrorist groups (established as a clear fact) including al-Quaeda, and also a fair, but in its way devastating critique of the politicking, deviousness and general uselessness of the CIA. And after reading this book it occurs to me, rather like it did to writers such as Mark Steyn, that the CIA had become riddled with bureaucratic do-nothingism around the time of 9/11. There is a very good case for shutting the CIA down and rethinking how to handle such issues from a clean sheet of paper.

The book is also fatal to the reputation and judgement of Colin Powell, former Secretary of State. It also rehabilitates that of Donald Rumsfeld in certain respects, while not sparing criticism where it is due. And the book certainly does fess up to the administration's failure to predict the scale of the insurgency, although Feith argues that one major error - encouraged by the CIA and the likes of Paul Bremer - was not moving fast enough to get Iraqis, both "external" and internal, into the government of Iraq post-invasion. By acting as an "occupier", Feith says, the US gave opponents valuable propaganda. He's got a good a point: consider that one of the smart moves by Churchill et al in 1944 was to get the Free French involved in the invasion of Normandy and subsequent entry into Paris. Getting the Iraqis to have "ownership" of the liberation of that tormented country would have been a smart move. It never really happened. And part of the reason for that was an almost pathological distrust of expat Iraqis by Powell, the CIA and other anti-neocons. This is fascinating stuff I had not really been aware of before. Another big error is over the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction: Feith argues that Bush and others gave needless ammuntion to fairweather hawks by arguing that Saddam had large stockpiles of X or Y; rather, the problem was Saddam's capacity and clearly proven willingness to produce such weapons and use them that was the core of the problem. The 1990s-era sanctions were fast eroding by the turn of the last century; given a few years, it is highly likely that Saddam would be able to re-start his WMD programmes and use such weapons to deter any regime from trying to make him behave, in much the same way that Iran is now dangerously close to the point where it can support terror groups with impunity.

Through it all, the central issues that remains - in terms of foreign policy and defence - is George W Bush's "pre-emption" policy. And it is well to remember that as far as Feith and other wonks were concerned, this was not about spreading democracy at "the point of a gun", or about some dastardly neocon project to completely reshape the Islamic world. Rather, it was about a more specific objective, and one which, in my view, is fully consistent with the libertarian principle that military force in self defence is justified. That objective is to throw jihadists and their state sponsors off-balance: by destroying their bases, cutting off funds, killing key operatives, etc. The more that jihadists have to hide, to run, and spend time playing defence, the less time they have to cause mischief.

It is pretty clear from the letters and information presented by Feith that terrorist groups were using Iraq as a haven, and with Saddam's active blessing. It also nails the idea that because Saddam's regime was, in some ways, a "secular" one, that meant he had no real incentive to support islamic terror against the West. As Feith says, this argument has been greatly overdone: there is plenty of reason to suppose that tactical, for-convenience-sake alliances between "secular" and religious groups can be as lethal as those between religious states and religious groups.

Anyway, having read the book, I can strongly recommend it. I leave with this quote, on page 523:

“But the largest benefit of success is avoiding the horrific costs of failure. Preventing calamities is one of the most important and least appreciated functions of government. When an evil is averted – perhaps as a result of insight, intensive effort and administrative skill – the result is that nothing happens. It is easy, after the fact, for critics to ignore or deprecate the accomplishment. Political opponents may scoff at the effort as unnecessary, citing the absence of disaster as proof that the problem could not have been very serious to begin with. After the Cold War, some commentators argued that the West’s victory was no big deal because the Soviet Union’s demise proved that the communist empire wasn’t much of a power after all. Likewise, because the United States has not suffered a large-scale terrorist attack since 9/11, some commentators have belittled the challenge of jihadist terrorism as overblown and ridiculed the description of it as “war”. And since Saddam has been overthrown, there are critics who speak dismissively of the danger he posed.”

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Instapundit has just asked if, in the words at the top of the piece he links to, Israel will be the third nation on the moon.

Oh I hope so. I really do hope so.

I am an optimist, in the sense that I always want to be an optimist, which I suppose is what an optimist is. But of late, being an optimist has been very hard. This notion, even as a mere possibility, has cheered me up no end. The nearer it gets to actually happening, the happier I will be about it.

And the more all the right people, as in the deeply and repellently wrong people, will get angry.

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There are many reasons to hope that President Obama is a one-term president, and they have been rehearsed on this blog many times. But occasionally there are arguments against him that strike me as seriously off-base. One such has surfaced during the recent commentary about how he is not "doing enough" in the Middle East and North Africa; he is not, apparently, giving enough angry speeches about Egypt, or Libya, or sending vast carrier fleets to the Med, or the Gulf, or generally behaving like a Teddy Roosevelt and doing the "let's give those furriners hell" thing. Well, at the risk of drawing heavy fire from the hawks who lurk around this site, I would argue that funnily enough, there may be a measure of method in this supposed madness.

For instance, I fail to see what, really, the US or other major powers could or should have done about Egypt. Far better, in my view, to let the Egyptians take ownership of their country's problems and challenges. If anything positive does come out of the "Jasmine Revolution" (whoever comes up with these terms?), better that it be an achievement by the locals, a source of pride and genuine self esteem, not something associated with "abroad". For far too long, the Middle East, and many other places besides, have had this oh-so-convenient excuse that their problems were all the fault of the Great Satan and his arrogant, silly interventionism in pursuit of oil, or whatever. The US has often played the part, not always willingly, of being the world's designated driver (the person who stays sober so he can drive his drinking buddies home at the end of the evening). The trouble with being a designated driver is that it starts to encourage the drinkers to drink even more, become more rowdy, and then they can start to vomit on the street, get into fights, or then almost resent that goody-goody who is always there, with the car, to take them home again. Time for some adult responsbility rather than constant reliance on the West.

I am not of course suggesting that Obama has necessarily been taking a wise, cautious stance based on thoughtful reflection. Other issues may have played a part. But I think we should perhaps give a bit more credit where it is sometimes due here. There are limits on what even the most powerful of countries can and should do. In the case of Egypt, and possibly Libya, the smart policy may be to watch, pay close attention but in general, to stay out of the mess. It is, in fact, a conservative stance. Maybe, just for once, The Community Organiser has shown a bit of common sense. He may, in short, be behaving like a "Swiss", but I fail to see why that is necessarily terrible or something to be ashamed of. (It should be noted that since Obama's ascendancy to the White House, the US has put the Swiss banking system under relentless, even hysterical, attack).

Normal service will be resumed later. Stay tuned.

UPDATE. Well that did not seem to persuade anyone. But read carefully, gentle readers. I am not suggesting that this is all a consequence of deep thought, or of anything broadly benign. It may well indeed be that The One is paralysed, out of his depth, a silver-tongued twerp who is in over his head, whatever. But unlike Christopher Hitchens in the article to which I link, I do not think that what the North African crises call for is mass-scale US interventionism. Sure, the US could and should have been quicker to get US nationals out; maybe also it should have acted faster to realise the fallout of all this. But why should the US, given its heavy commitments in other areas (Iraq, Afghanistan) feel called upon to sort out the mess of yet another region of the world?

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This is pure class, pure, unalloyed hilarity from today’s Evening Standard newspaper editorial, page 14, as it talked about how Britain has paid some sort of bribe to Gaddafi to get landing rights and extract British nationals:

“As with other aspects of the rescue effort, the comparison with the response of other nations does ministers no credit. It is difficult to imagine the French military asking permission for its air force to rescue French citizens earlier this week, much less paying special bribes to do so.”

The French don’t pay bribes. Riiiiight. (Cough).

A less daft argument, in the same newspaper, comes from Sebastian Shakespeare:

“It is a sad indictment of modern Britain that a crisis immediately turns into a blame game and everybody expects to be mollycoddled when the balloon goes up. But the days of gunboat diplomacy are long behind us. The time has come to put aside sentiment and face economic reality. The FO [Foreign Office] cannot perform miracles when natural or geopolitical disasters occur. Nor should it be expected to foot the entire bill."

"And why should the FO be bailing out oil workers, of all people? Yes, they are British citizens but many won’t be paying tax in the UK but earning tax-free salaries. The companies who employ them are enough to charter a whole fleet of 747s to repatriate their staff. They should bear the costs. And why should we put the SAS at risk? BP could hire its own private army.”

Hmm. I guess if people travel and work for high salaries in places known to be dangerous – and Libya and many other thugocracies are clearly dangerous – then it is a bit much to get this sudden surge of moaning when the home country does not immediately come to the rescue. Fair point. And it is also a fair point that oil companies could afford to give good security to their staff. Many do so. Security is a huge growth industry not just for oil industries, but also for the likes of many other multinationals, such as banks. I know of a few ex armed forces guys, including an ex-SAS officer, who earn very good money in this area. This topic has a slight connection to my posting about piracy on this site.

Having said all of which, I think Shakespeare is perhaps being a bit too dismissive, here. A citizen from country A who temporarily - a key point - lives in country B while working for a firm does not, in my view, surrender the protection of his host nation entirely. Of course, simple prudence and commonsense suggests that people who choose to work in a dangerous place are taking a risk and cannot expect that risk to be underwritten by fellow taxpayers who live in safer places. But I am not entirely at ease with the idea that we say to expat workers, even very rich ones, that we leave them to their fate. This is particularly so if such people are working for firms that play a part in the prosperity of say, the UK. This is not a cut and dried issue, in other words.

In the meantime, this whole business must be surely forcing some people in the Ministry of Defence to wonder whether recent UK defence cuts - driven more by understandable cost issues rather than strategic thinking - need to be thought through more carefully. For instance, does it make sense for the Royal Navy to go without any kind of working aircraft carriers for years until the new ones arrive, leaving the UK with no real ability to project airpower to protect things like UK shipping? Here is an interesting associated article at Standpoint.

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The current eruptions of civil unrest and protest across North Africa and the Middle East - no wonder oil prices are surging - has also thrown into unflattering relief the issue of Western arms sales to some regimes, such as that of Libya. And no doubt the argument will be made that, for example in the case of the recent, unlamented Blair/Brown governments in the UK, the administration put export earnings (oil, arms contracts) above such niceties as basic morality or even, arguably, long-term national security.

But here is a thing: according to Shariah law, it is prohibited for Muslims to invest in things such as the arms trade. Making weapons of war is put on the same banned list as pork, gambling, usury and pornography (sounds like all the really good things, Ed). So let me get this straight: some of the most fanatically Muslim regimes on the planet, such as Saudi Arabia, insist on sweeping prohibitions on making arms, but are more than keen to spend all that oil wealth on buying Typhoon fighters or whatever. This is surely an example of the contortions that Islamic law imposes on people. Another case being usury, as I have noted before.

Of course, all belief systems, secular and "religious" variety, come up against the issue of awkward realities and human hypocrisy. But when you next read a story bashing Western arms manufacturers for shipping instruments of death to the Middle East, perhaps it would be well to remember that the locals are apparently banned from making these instruments, but some of them are quite happy to reach for the wallet and buy them.

And lest you think this is just an issue for Islam, it is arguable that even those investors who put money into "ethical" funds that avoid arms trades would do well to reflect on where they think governments buy weapons for even strict self defence? I make this point in case anyone claims I am singling out Islam in general; I mention it in this case since obviously, much of the current buying of weapons is being driven by the Middle East.

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I know this kind of thing has long been known about and talked about, but the single thing that I most like about David Cameron's speech about multiculturalism, terrorism, and so on, which he gave in Munich on Saturday, is that I can read it, in its entirety. I don't have to rely on a journalist, however conscientious he may or may not have tried to be, to pass on to me whatever small fragments of the speech he considers to be significant, along with hostile reactions to such fragments that he has got or read from various people with axes to grind, many of these reactions having probably been supplied by people who haven't actually heard or read the original speech and are only going on what the journalist tells them it said. And then somebody else gets angry about one of these critical reactions, and it all spirals away from anything that actually got said in the original speech. And the bloke who gave the original speech says to himself: why do I bother? Time was when that kind of thing was all that most people had to go on. But those days are now long gone. Good riddance. Disintermediation, I think this is called.

As I say, hardly a blindingly original observation, but in the matter of this speech, I have never before felt this internet-induced improvement so strongly. The subject matter of Cameron's speech is a minefield. Although I do not agree with everything that he said (see below), I am glad that he is at least talking about this stuff, at a time when many of our more thoughtful political leaders are scared to. The existence of the internet is the difference between a much-overdue, semi-intelligent public conversation about these vexed issues and mere mudslinging.

So, given that I am able to read it all, what did I make of it? Here are a few early thoughts.

One of Cameron's most important points is that insofar as "multiculturalism" means double standards in how Muslims are treated by the British law, them being allowed to behave far worse than us indigenous ones, then multiculturalism is a bad idea. It is also a bad idea if it involves state support and encouragement for groups which encourage terrorism. Well said, and about time too.

He makes many other points, which I agree with rather less. He uses, for instance, the now established habit of curtailing the freedom of speech of racists and fascists to justify further curtailments of free speech, for Muslims. But if we all get to hear what they all have to say, fascists, Muslims, (fascist Muslims?), then we can take issue with such notions. And whenever something nasty happens that some nasty has said should happen, the police will at least know where to start looking. Free speech, quite aside from being a human right and everything, is actually quite a practical policy for maintaining civil peace. It helps a lot that most of us think that merely saying nasty things shouldn't be a crime, and that in a world where people can say pretty much what they like, the police must confine themselves to chasing after those who actually do nasty things.

I also take issue with the way that Cameron muddles together two distinct, although related ideas. On the one hand there is the idea that Islam itself is a problem, rather than just "Islamic extremism". And then there is the further idea that therefore Muslims ought to be deported, forbidden from speaking their minds, from building mosques, and generally from going around being Muslims. He opposes the second idea, but makes it seem like that necessarily means opposing the first idea also. I support the first idea, but not the second. I definitely think that Islam itself is a problem, but I believe that the answer (see my previous paragraph) is to argue with it, to tell it that it is a problem and why it is a problem, and to invite people who are wondering about it to leave or stay away from it, rather than stick with it or join it. If you must be a believer in something religious, let that religion be something like Christianity rather than Islam, because Christianity, although at least as odd from the merely is-it-true? point of view is, at the moment, so very much nicer than Islam.

Everything I observe in the reactions of the nastier kinds of Muslim tells me that they are acutely sensitive to such arguments, to the point where they would very much like such arguments to be banned, whether such arguments include deportation demands, mosque-banning and so forth, or not. To me, Cameron's thinking says, first, that banning free expression for racists and fascists is absolutely fine, and that therefore banning free speech for "Islamic extremists" is fine also. But what next? Banning people from even saying (as I do not say) that Muslims should be deported and mosque-building banned? Or even from saying (as I do say) that Islam itself is a disgusting and evil body of thought and that the only absolutely morally correct thing to do if you are a Muslim is to damn well stop being a Muslim?

Which means that I was disappointed, but not surprised, that Cameron made no mention of the right of a person to stop being a Muslim, without being subjected to death threats and worse. Disappointed, but not surprised. For Cameron, being a "devout Muslim" (as opposed to an extreme Islamist) is more than sufficient, as far as he is concerned. As Prime Minister, he is not in the business of wanting anyone to convert this way or that, other than in the very feeble sense of wanting people to vote for him and for his political party. I see that. But he ought, I think to be ready to defend the rights of those who really do want to convert, from anything to anything else, and in particular out of Islam. Cameron called for "muscular liberalism". So, when push next comes to shove in the form of a big ruckus (will this be that?) concerning someone who has stopped being a Muslim, will Cameron apply a dose of muscular liberalism to that argument, to allow such a person to believe whatever they want to believe, and to be as public as they like about it?

I confess that the phrase "muscular liberalism" did appeal to me when I first read it, and no doubt this phrase has tested positive with the focus groups. But what exactly will it mean in reality? Might it mutate into the government telling people like me that we can't be rude about devout, law-abiding Muslims and the things that such people say they believe in? ("Muscular liberalism" in the USA would be a terrifying idea.) I am sure that many Muslims already fear - are being encouraged by each other to fear - that it may degenerate into a mere excuse for Muslim bashing, in the physical and wrong sense, by the government and its employees, and by many others. Perhaps (actually I'm inclined, as I read this through before posting it, to make that: probably), as we all challenge the phrase from our various different positions, muscular liberalism will degenerate into one of those mush phrases that mean whatever anyone listening wants it to mean, and then by and by, whatever the powers that be want it to mean. In other words it may degenerate into meaning nothing, just like the words "Big Society" have, in the minds of nearly everyone I meet or read.

But I want to end where I began, with the pleasure I feel that I and all others who choose to comment on this speech, here or anywhere else, are at least able, if we want to, to read the speech itself. Last night, for example, at the Christian Michel evening that I alluded to in an earlier posting, I got talking with an acquaintance about Cameron's speech. After he had begun to opine about it, rather intelligently, I asked him: Have you actually read the speech? Yes, he said. Me too, I said. This exchange pleased me then and it pleases me still.

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I don't know about my fellow Samizdatistas, but I am having a hard time responding to the latest events in Egypt with anything other than a resigned shrug.

My understanding is that this is not one of those enjoyable melodramas where there are Good Guys and Bad Guys, when we here in the comfortable seats (the ones outside Egypt) can all cheer the Good Guys and jeer the Bad Guys. My understanding is that there are the Bad Guys as in the government, the Good Guys as in the people who would just love to be living in a nice civilised country which respects human rights and where there is dignity and freedom and whatever is the Egyptian for apple pie, with a thriving economy for all etc. (with no Jews or Americans screwing everything up) … and then there are the Other Bad Guys, aka the Muslim Brotherhood, who would like nothing better than to see Egypt reduced to ruins, to take charge of the ruins, and then to ruin the ruins a whole hell of a lot more. The Good Guys are now so angry with the first lot of Bad Guys that they either don't realise or don't care that they may be playing right into the hands of the Other Bad Guys.

I would love to be proved wrong. Whether I am proved wrong or not, I would still bet that there are lots of others out here in non-Egypt who now think exactly as I do.

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The government can take away my freedom, but if they take away my internet porn, they're going down

- @arabist

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I like this, from Claire Berlinski:

My Muslim Brotherhood threads gave rise to a bit of confusion about which book I was talking about. Obviously, I made a mistake in assuming that everyone on Ricochet was reading every word I write, 24 hours a day. Now that I think about it, that's more than a bit silly and self-involved. A beginner's mistake, really. Sorry, I'm learning on the job. On the bright side, I'm not the President of the United States.

Nice writing. I read on, and learned about Ms Berlinski's take on what I now believe to be the biggest debate in the world about how to see off Islam, namely: is "Islam" the enemy, or something more like "Islamism"?

I think that, difficult though this truth is to face, the enemy is Islam, the thing itself, and that all Muslims, simply by calling themselves Muslims, give aid and comfort to the enemy, Islam. "Good Muslims" must be persuaded to stop being Muslims at all, and to leave, in large numbers. Only when large numbers do start leaving, in numbers so large and so public that the very momentum of history itself starts to drain out of Islam, will the civilised world start to get on top of this problem.

But Claire Berlinski thinks differently:

McCarthy's entirely correct that Islamism is mainstream, rooted in Muslim scripture and favored by many prominent Islamic commentators. No one who knows anything about the subject would disagree.

But there is also significant dissent from this view in the Islamic world. Those who dissent from it are our friends and allies. Why on earth should we pronounce categorically, say, that "In Islam, homosexuality and adultery are capital offenses," if there are practicing Muslims who think otherwise? Are we truly saying that we're more qualified to interpret the Koran and all of its associated scholarship than Muslims who have come to another conclusion? Why would we shoot ourselves in the foot this way?

Indeed. And there were a lot of Communists who significantly dissented from actually existing Communism. But still they helped actually existing Communism, big time, not least by supplying a veneer of apparent civilisation to spread upon this totally ghastly creed. They also spent much time moaning about civilisation itself, for also not being Communist in their preferred, virtuous way. Do I say that I had - and that I have - a better grasp of what Communism really meant than these dissenters from the Communist orthodoxy? Damn right. I did and I do.

The one big thing that "practicing Muslims" must do if they are on the side of civilisation and against Islam, is to damn well stop with their practicing, and - if straight atheism is too strong for them, too cold and too true - to find a civilised way of gratifying their religious impulses instead of the barbaric one that is Islam.

(2)

Former US representative in Kandahar, Bill Harris, told the paper that the embarrassing mistake was not Britain's alone, saying "something this stupid generally requires teamwork."

Many thanks to Taylor Dinerman for the heads up on this QOTD material:

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The story of Waleed Hasayin, a Palestinian West Bank atheist blogger, is indicative of the nightmare that is inevitable in any system where state, society and religion are completely intertwined.

[Muslims] believe anyone who leaves Islam is an agent or a spy for a Western State, namely the Jewish State.

The mere existence of an outspoken atheist is intolerable in such an environment... but the thing about tolerance is it is only appropriate when it is reciprocated and Islam does not tolerate views that deny their God's existence, so why should any non-Muslim tolerate Islam? Tolerance for intolerance is cowardice, not to mention suicidal.

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Surfing on the blogs, I came across this item that I have not seen anywhere else. Israel has, potentially, some pretty handy oil resources.

Wow, better tell Halliburton & all those nasty right-wing neocons and advise them to cook up some fake reason for invading the place...

This article has more.

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Rand Simberg makes a subtly profound little point, in an email to Instapundit, as reported by Instapundit in an addendum to this posting, which links to a piece about newspapers that provide a spew of complicated reasons for not printing stuff that Muslims might be offended by, omitting only the real reason, which is that they're scared.

"So who are the ‘Islamophobes’ again?"

The point being that the Islamophobes are clearly not those who publicly defy Islam's threats and attacks and who just go ahead and publicly criticise it anyway and publicly mock it anyway. Where's the "phobia" in that? No, the phobia - the fear - is being shown by those who refrain from such criticism and such mockery, because they are afraid, and are afraid even to admit that they are afraid (because that too might be interpreted as an implied criticism of the thuggishness of that which they are refraining from criticising or mocking).

Although I have long been irritated by the suggestion that to fear Islam is in any way irrational, I had truly never thought of this particular point. Next time you dare to criticise Islam for being, oh, I don't know, evil, or something along those lines, and somebody says you are an Islamophobe, say: "Well, yes, I am a little bit scared of Islam because it is indeed scary. But you are even more scared of it, so scared that you dare not admit the truth of what I am saying. You are even more of an Islamophobe than I am."

This is a meme that deserves to get around.

With apologies to all those who had worked this particular thing out years ago.

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With apologies to all for whom this is stale news, I want to report on Ezra Levant's latest book. Remember Ezra Levant? Yes, the guy who put his head way above the parapet to defend freedom of speech against the ridiculous 'Alberta Human Rights Commission', which had been busy trying to stamp it out.

I have not been paying much attention to Ezra Levant lately, but last night I happened to re-visit his blog, and I soon struck gold. Or rather: black gold. Oil. Shale oil, to be more precise.

A commenter on this later posting by me here about Levant mentioned Canadian shale oil, and now Levant has written a whole book about this.

Canadian shale oil is taking a huge bite out of the market share of those Middle Eastern terror paymasters who have been such pestilential opponents of free speech in the West in general and of Ezra Levant's free speech in particular, which could just be how Levant got interested. The Greenies hate Canadian shale oil, probably for that same reason. The Mainstream Media ... well, that bit's obvious. What's not to love about a book saying hurrah for Canadian shale oil?

As I say, lots of Samizdata readers will have seen these bits of video, of Levant talking about this book, Ethical Oil (brilliant title, yes?), at least a week ago. I've only had time to watch and hear half of the first bit of video, but already I know that any Samizdata readers who do not yet know about this book will likely be very glad to hear about it now.

Many bad things have happened during the last decade. One of the best things to have happened during that same time is that books like this one of Ezra Levant's - thanks to all of, you know, this - can now become as widely read as they deserve to be.

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This just in from a Jane's newsletter:

Nation state may be behind computer worm attack on Iranian nuclear plant. The first known example of a computer worm designed to target major infrastructure facilities has infected the personal computers of employees in Iran's Bushehr nuclear power station. The malware, known as Stuxnet, is capable of taking control of an industrial plant by targeting weaknesses in systems designed by German company Siemens that are used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other utilities.

I pretty much thought this had to be the case. The problem is, this is a double edged sword. Stuxnet has been seen in the wild enough to be picked up and reported on by Symantec. That means it has also been picked up by white and black hats alike and will be reverse engineered and used for other 'payloads'. This is the inherent problem with the viral software attack. Once you use it, you might as well have posted the source code with a Gnu Public License on it.

So, now that we have proof by example that embedded process control systems can be hijacked by a virus, we had better start worrying who else is going to get targeted by slightly modified versions.

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Geert Wilders is on trial today for telling it like it is with his film 'Fitna'.

If you are a blogger, read up on the subject and get out the support. Europe may not have Freedom of Speech with teeth in it, but perhaps you can provide that poor benighted continent with implants.

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Reading this item over at National Review's Corner blog, which relates to recent attempts by Al-Quaeda types to attack targets in Western Europe - apparently foiled for now - got me thinking. One of the possible targets, judging by the comment, was the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It makes me wonder when the "blame-the-West-First" crowd are going to understand that it was always idiotic to claim that 9/11, or the Madrid atrocities, or the London bombings/etc could ever be described as the West getting some sort of "blowback" for its allegedly dastardly deeds against Muslim lands. Whenever this argument is made, the implication, explicit or not, is that the appropriate policy to adopt is the equivalent of hiding under the bed.

France, let's not forget, has more than its fair share of bad relations with some Muslim lands - Algeria in the 1950s being a case in point - but in recent years, the country's government has been at pains to distance itself from the supposedly "cowboy" policies of Bush/Blair, although possibly things might have hardened a bit under Sarkozy.

But it makes no difference. Whether you are an isolationist, multilaterialist, or neocon interventionist, the outcome is the same: the Islamists will try and kill you and your fellow citizens without discrimination. We can try and placate the crocodile, but it is ultimately a futile strategy. It is occasionally necessary to remind people of this grim fact.

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I must admit to being a bit gobsmacked by this:

Israel and the Jewish people found an unlikely defender in Fidel Castro, the retired dictator of Cuba, on Tuesday, when he came out strongly against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust and supported Israel's right to exist.

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In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America's eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take "risks for peace."

- George Will.

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As someone who has consistently been in favor of in-your-face attempts to offend Muslims (e.g., "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"), I can't very well advocate any governmental effort (or any violent effort by other parties) to prevent the building of this in-your-face attempt to offend non-Muslim Americans. But to suggest that this center is not provocative, and that Americans should not see it as such, insults my intelligence. There is no right to NOT be offended, but we have every right to be offended, and to protest loudly to that effect.

- Commenter Gene

(43)

This comment by Tim Sandefur pretty much captures my own view on the row over the "Mosque" at Ground Zero (or whatever this building is meant to be called).

In a separate forum, I got into quite a heated debate with folks over the fact that I said that while I defend the rights of owners of property to do what they want with said property, that does not mean I cannot be angry at the gesture of say, building a Islamic centre right next to the scene of an act of mass-murder by Islamic fanatics. My anger, apparently, has led to a few folk calling me out as a sort of bigot. Not so: I can see both sides of the argument here: the families of 9/11 victims feel, with cause, that the location of this building is a fairly crass and provocative gesture and are concerned at the possible choice of name - the Cordoba Center, and about the possible sources of funding for it.

On the other, let's not forget - and this is a point that needs to be made regularly - that Muslims going about their lawful business were murdered on that terrible day, and their families might want to have that fact acknowledged in some sort of way by having a place to worship in a place that gives meaning to their grief.

But it would help things if those who are concerned about the motives of this centre would not automatically be dubbed as stooges of Sarah Palin or some sort of great right wing conspiracy. Part of the annoyance that folk feel about this is that there is a sense of injustice that while Islam benefits in the West from the broad protections of freedom of expression, that that tolerance is not reciprocated in the countries where this religion holds sway. Try building a Catholic church in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, after all, is a country that has funded dozens of mosques and other places, including those encouraging some of the most extreme forms of Islam. Saudi funding is akin to a government grant rather than a donation from a private individual.

(53)

I was about to stick this up as a(n) SQotD, but I see that there already is one. Never mind, here it is anyway:

Belief in magic and faith in spells runs strong in political Washington. The New Republic’s print edition describes the reaction of the Administration on “April 14, 2009 as Barack Obama’s standing in the polls was beginning to slip”. Obama was looking for a phrase to bring back the love, “something that would evoke comparisons to Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”

Obama had hit on the phrase the New Foundation. He tried it out with Presidential historians at a private dinner in the White House. Doris Kearns Goodwin nixed it. She said it sounded “like a woman’s girdle”. Goodwin was right. But it underscores the complete vacuity of a public policy built on wordsmithing. The administration was trying on words like a courtier at Versailles might try on a hat or a dress thinking it would make a difference.

Not that there is anything wrong with hats or dresses or deckchairs. The only thing wrong is imagining that rearranging these articles on the deck of the Titanic will keep it afloat. There’s something crazy about that, something pathetically crazy.

That's Richard Fernandez reflecting on the declining esteem in which President Obama is now held, abroad and at home.

Two thoughts. First, I'd have put a comma where it says "hats or dresses or deckchairs", to make it "hats or dresses, or deckchairs". There is a slight change of gear there, which, I would say, needs a bit of punctuational acknowledgement.

But second, more seriously, is Obama's present nosedive in esteem, well described by Fernandez, irreversible? Having just watched our own former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, damn near levelling out from what looked like a nosedive towards total catastrophe for himself and for his party, and achieving a very decent, under the circumstances, crash landing that nearly saved both. Brown only lost by an extraordinarily narrow margin, given how things had looked only a few months earlier, and his main opponent, from having looked a winner by a mile, had to make do with leading a mere coalition. Seemingly doomed politicians - inevitable losers, to use the word that Fernandez also uses - can make comebacks. Can Obama? Can this Titanic yet be kept afloat?

One thing that might improve matters for President Obama is that just now (or so it looks to me from over here) even the one party media who got Obama elected are now criticising him, a bit, partly for real, but partly in order that their next burst of slavish support for him will look honest instead of slavish.

On the other hand, if what happened here with Gordon Brown is anything to go by, Obama's saviours will not be his media cheerleaders, or for that matter his own speechwriters, but his leading opponents, who will somehow contrive to look as clueless as he now looks.

(14)

The blogger, David Thompson, who seems to have the knack of unearthing all matter of weird and wonderful stuff for his Friday postings, also has a posting about a far less amusing subject: the cringeing of certain Western, post-modernist types when confronted with a direct, brutal example of violence by the Taliban.

This is what I meant in my previous post about the fact while radical Islam poses a threat that should not be underestimated, there is nothing inevitable about that threat succeeding. What is necessary is for the heirs of our great institutions to start growing a pair, so to speak.

(71)

Thoughtful, long article here by Alex Massie at the Spectator on the real and presumed issues surrounding Islam and the UK, and whether some commentators on the subject are seeing phantom menaces:

"To my commenters and the others worried by the "Islamification of Britain" I would ask only this: why are you so afraid and why do you lack such confidence in this country and its people's ability to solve these problems? Perhaps my confidence is misplaced but I think we can probably do it. This is, in many ways, a better, more tolerant place to live than it has been in the past and, unless we blunder, it should remain so. The annoyances of idiotic council regulations about Christmas trees and crucifixes or inflammatory articles in the press ought not to distract us from that fact. The open society is an achievement to be proud of - for conservatives and liberals alike - but the most likely way it can be defeated is if we allow ourselves to be defeated by our fears and, thus, in the end by ourselves."

"Diversity need not be a threat, though diversity cannot work unless all are equal under the law. But Britain is changing and doing so in often interesting ways. It is, in general, a comfortable, tolerant place made up of people with complex identities that make it a more, not less, interesting and decent place. Yeats' famous lines do not quite apply here. On all sides, the worst may indeed be full of passionate intensity but the best do not lack conviction even if we don't shout about it. Perhaps we should do so more often."

Definitely worth reading the whole article. I think one point to make straight away is this: if we have more confidence in the resilience of Western civilisation and the virtues of a post-Enlightenment, pro-reason culture, and encourage support for such things in our places of higher learning and in the opinion-forming world, that in itself might encourage more moderate-minded Muslims in the West realise that the long-term trend was not on the side of the Islamists. Showing a confident front to the world is not bravado - it helps us to win.

(9)

It seems that the Saudis and the UAE have got upset about the use of Blackberrys for such evil purposes as enabling young men and women to get a date. Various so-called "national security" issues are also cited.

Sheesh.

(25)

Oh, and anyone in the government opposing [calls for Islamic dress for women to be banned in Britain] is to be conditionally applauded...

A burqua or any item of islamic dress for women is as "ok" as a Nazi arm band... and people's ability to wear Nazi arm bands also should not be banned, but they sure as hell should not be applauded.

- Perry de Havilland

(9)

Readers may find it odd that students are being encouraged to express solidarity with totalitarian terrorist movements that set booby traps in schools and boast of using children as human shields, and whose stated goals include the Islamic "conquest" of the free world, the "obliteration" of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people. However, such statements achieve a facsimile of sense if one understands that the object is to be both politically radical and morally unobvious.

- David Thompson ruminates on the perverse intellectual incentives that face academics

(4)

Al Rigga, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. January 17 2010

My apologies about the blurry photo. I was a little preoccupied with other things at the time. Not that I would do anything to encourage speculation.

(9)

At my personal blog, I like to write about skyscrapers. Basically, my attitude is: skyscrapers are good.

A particularly choice one is being erected in London just now, the so-called Shard, despite fears all round that the economic meltdown would demand that it be aborted. And of course I have recently also been taking note of that huge tower they've just opened in Dubai. I recently did a posting saying that maybe Dubai is not such a daft place as many are now saying. Maybe all those towers actually make some sense, basing my very tentative optimism on a photograph which included not just the towers but their surroundings.

But Michael Jennings, who has actually been to Dubai (on account of him having been everywhere), recently emailed me to suggest that the Dubai-is-daft tendency is probably right:

Dubai is just about the oddest place I have ever been to. I failed to go up the tallest building in the world because something went wrong and they closed it (a story in itself I would guess). The structure of the whole place is completely wrong though. It is as if someone has taken the most impressive looking bits of all the cities of the world - built new versions two or three times the size in the desert, and then attempted to weld them together into a city, but without any idea whether such things can or should fit together, and if they can, how to make it work. Virtually all the low level structure of a city is missing, and the overall question is simply who is supposed to be doing business in this place? I don't get it at all. However, given the many tens or hundreds of very large structures half built in Dubai (the number of which rather boggles the mind) a few Arab bankers exposure to one little shard in London must be the least of their worries.

More of my speculations on the links between our "little shard" and the towers of Dubai here. But, as that posting says at the end, Michael was wrong about them building the Shard. He said they'd scrap it. Actually he went further than that and said that if they built it, he'd eat his laptop. So maybe he's also wrong about Dubai being daft. I'm sure some of our commentariat, like Michael and unlike me, have been there. What did they make of the place?

Michael tells me that he intends to write again at greater length about Dubai, and also that he is not wrong about it.

(7)

This is an amazing example of one those archetypal political processes, which happens when a regime that still commands the present nevertheless manages to lose all control of the future:

One of the most fascinating aspects of the current phase of the Iranian revolution is that many of those arrested knew it was coming, had the opportunity to hide, but chose to go to jail. They viewed their arrest as a badge of honor, and (not to make light of the horrors of Iranian jails) perhaps even a good career move. They expect the regime to fall, and they are building up credits for the next government.

Recently a posting of mine here about an SD card was honoured by a re-run in the comments of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, where they take it in turns to boast with ever greater ferocity about the awfulness of their childhoods, or in this case about the vast expense and extreme non-capaciousness of their very first hard discs. You mean you had a hard disc? - We dreamed of having a hard disc, etc.

Soon, Iran will be entertained with similar jokery, in which Four Iranian Ex-Oppositionists indulge in similarly competitive boasting about their hellish sufferings under the previous regime, thereby justifying their subsequent social and political elevation.

Sadly, they may not need to exaggerate.

(69)

An Islamic group called islam4uk, who are a front organisation for the islamo-fascist group al-Muhajiroun, want to march through Wootton Bassett carrying "symbolic coffins" as a protest against the ongoing British participation in the Afghan civil war against the Taliban.

My suggestion is that the good people of Wootton Bassett reply by throwing "symbolic bricks" at the Islamo-fascist protesters, should they actually ever march down that town's streets. Just symbolic bricks of course, made of sponge cake... or maybe bricks of good English bacon or Danish butter as I am sure the cheerful chaps of al-Muhajiroun will get the joke... not real bricks, because we do not want any Islamo-fascists to get their brains bashed out by our jolly japes... well, not whilst they are in Britain at least.

But what I would really like to see is for Islam4uk carry out a march carrying symbolic coffins through a street in beautiful downtown Bazarak in Panjshir Province in Afghanistan. Just about everyone there is a muslim, so what could possibly go wrong, eh? Go on, guys, give it a try.

(30)

Yet another intellectual gem from a senior member of the Church of England:

The Rt Rev Stephen Venner called for a more sympathetic approach to the Islamic fundamentalists. The Church of England's Bishop to the Forces said it would be harder to reach a peaceful solution to the war if the insurgents were portrayed too negatively. [...] "We've been too simplistic in our attitude towards the Taliban," said Bishop Venner, who was recently commissioned in his new role by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

"There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the West could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation. The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other."

Could not the same have been said about the formidable soldiers of the Waffen SS? But how is 'conviction' and 'loyalty' in the service of evil somehow admirable? And how is noting this quality in an enemy going to "help the situation"? And what if the nature of the enemy simply precludes any possibility of a "peaceful solution"? This is the Taliban we are talking about.

Well in a way he is right I suppose... we should note that they are loyal to their faith and to each other, and understanding this, it should be understood that no accommodation can possibly be reached with fundamentalists, be they Nazi ones or Islamofascist ones. They need to be confronted, culturally, politically and when needed, militarily when they wander "off the reservation"... precisely because of their "conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other".

Getting that set in people's minds would indeed "help the situation".

(10)

Just in time for the Season of Festive Cheer, The Times (of London) reminds us all again of what is likely to be the biggest foreign policy issue for the next few years. There appears little likelihood that a future possible Conservative administration will have much of an idea of what to do about it, and of course we have a Nobel Prizewinning Chicago-machine politician in the White House. Not an encouraging state of affairs.

(60)

According to Peter Hitchens:

The Atheists must reject Christianity as well as Islam. Alas, for them, Islam responds to their rejection by ignoring them, whereas Christianity tends to retreat before them. And a weakened church laces a vacuum into which Islam can move. Result? The growing power of Islam in our society, our culture, our government, our political parties and our schools, so that an essentially Atheist state pays increasing obeisance to Islam. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the new Atheists, by attacking Christianity, are simply clearing a space for Islam to establish itself in the space they have swept and garnished.

Discuss.

(187)

The result is in: the Swiss public has voted in favour of a proposition prohibiting the construction of any new minarets in their country. Note: this is not a ban on Islam or even the construction of mosques, just minarets.

Aside from all the obvious reprecussions (which are not hard to predict), it does occur to me that this raises an interesting and very thorny questions for libertarians because this is not a straightforward case of state repression. In fact, it appears that both the Swiss government and parliament were firmly opposed to the proposition which has been put to the public by referendum following a petition which was endorsed by a sufficient number of Swiss citizens. The Swiss state urged the public to reject the proposition but, having lost, is now forced, reluctantly, to change the constitution to enact the minaret ban into Swiss law. This was ground-up not top-down.

When a government says no to freedom of religious worship, it is easy to mount our high horses and ride forth bearing gleaming swords of indignation. But when a clear majority of the demos say no, well, then it gets rather harder. At least, it does for me.

(16)

You may have forgotten this.

(42)

I suppose it says something about The Daily Telegraph's admirable commitment to freedom of speech that it let this comment I paste up below through, or possibly, the laxness of its editors. Following a comment piece about the forthcoming trial of the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, we get this remark, by someone dubbing itself "Lord Barnett":

The trial will be a farce,held in New York for the benefit of the jews and the media of the World,The people who should be on trial are the Israelis,George Bush senior,Bill Clinton,the Bush Administration and American jews.Nobody is interested in why 9/11 happened,you can also lay the blame at the door of all Western Govenments for doing nothing to stop the holocaust on the Palistinians by Israel.Every American Administration has stood by,watched and helped Israel steal Palistinian land and murder its people, then call them Terrorists when they try to get it back,we have all watched and read about it,what is going on there is an absolute disgrace,lets just have a look at the Middle East today,Saudi Arabia,run by dictators with American backing to keep them in power,well its either that or the mad mullas who would switch the oil tap off,who would you rather have in power?, Its the same with Kuwait,Bahrain,Oman and the rest,but then you have Syria and Iran,the only Arab Nations who are trying to fight America and its dominance in the Middle East,they are called pariahs because they speak out against America,Iran is developing nuclear weapons,just like the Israelis,why should Israel have them but not Iran?, And then yesterday we have Netanyahu saying he is going to build around nine hundred more new homes on stolen Palistinian land,and what does America say to this? "Its Disappointed", wow,there`s a strong statement that will have the Israelis quaking in their boots,until the West stands up to Israel and America there will never be peace in the World,but i am sure there will be another 9/11.The United Nations is a farce,not one single resolution it has brought against Israel has passed because America has vetoed them,whats the point? Then Independant Inquiries done by jewish people outlining all the crimes that Israel has committed have been dismissed by Israel and America as biased,who is going to stand up to these criminals?.

This character repeats the trope that Israel has "stolen" land from others, that it is a terror state, and that its fear about Iran's having nuclear weapons is somehow groundless or unfair. This moron presumably is deaf to the fact that from the time of its founding, various Arab powers have been vocal in their desire to crush this relatively tiny state; he - I assume it is a he - is deaf to the fact that Iran is led by a man who is openly in favour of wiping Israel out.

As I said, it is perhaps right for the Telegraph to let people like this rant and rave about the Jews, Israel, blah-blah. It is sometimes salutary to be reminded of the depths of hatred and ignorance that exist in the breasts of those who wish that country and the Jewish people harm. It pays to know that there are enemies out there, if only to encourage continued vigilance.

About the only half-truth admitted by this idiot is the point about Western backing for Saudi Arabia. That remains, in my book, a serious failing of Western foreign policy. The sooner we can reduce our use of oil from that nation - which has financed a good deal of anti-western terrorism - the better.

(34)

I have my doubts - which grow by the day, to be honest - about what exactly we are achieving by the operations in Afghanistan. This story is picked up by me at random, but of course there are hundreds of deaths that hit home the mesage about what a grim struggle that conflict is proving to be. May this gallant soldier rest in peace, and my condolences to his friends, comrades and family.

(46)

Indonesia, the most populous muslim nation in the world, is often held up as an example of how moderate islam can be reconciled with modernity.

Indonesia's province of Aceh has passed a new law making adultery punishable by stoning to death, a member of the province's parliament has said. The law also imposes severe sentences for rape, homosexuality, alcohol consumption and gambling.

Apparently not.

(7)

There have been so many incidents that some have described as being the death blow to the current UK government that one wonders whether any single news event will finish this lot of creeps off. But for a glimpse at the sheer, wanton corruption and venality of this administration, the story of the various relationships between those involved in handing over a convicted mass murderer to Libya gives you some idea of the morality of this government. It is appropriate that the article was written by Andrew Neil, a proud Scot and Anglospherist who is justly appalled at the behaviour of both the UK and Scottish administrations.

And yet the capacity of such stories to shock, while it should not be underestimated, needs to be put into some sort of perspective. Let's face it, governments of Left and Right, be they French, American or British, have sold weapons and munitions to often odious regimes in the past, or done commercial deals that don't bear too much scrutiny. Remember the UK Matrix-Churchill "supergun" affair of the 1990s? Remember the 1986 Iran/Contra kerfuffle that marred the second Reagan term, or the recent issue of British defence firm BAE Systems and sales to the Saudi government? There has been a history of Western governments willing to set aside certain scruples in the name of exports.

The Libyan affair is a grubby business, to be sure. But there is, alas, nothing remotely surprising about how the various parties have behaved.

(60)

Sometimes it is the willingness of a person to be brutalised, rather than its enforcement as such, that chills me to the bone. Check out this story.

Of course, if the woman genuinely consents to such treatment, then I suppose it would be no different to that of a person who visited S&M bars and liked being beaten up, etc. But a lingering suspicion lurks that this woman, and many others, are not really acting with a great deal of control over their lives.

(32)

In France a group of MPs has said that France ought to investigate the possibility of banning the burqa.

In Britain, 'More than 700 "controlled drinking zones" have been set up across England, giving police sweeping powers to confiscate beer and wine from anyone enjoying a quiet outdoor tipple.'

If you want to keep your freedom to drink what you please on the public street then fight for the freedom to wear what you please on the public street.

But what about public drunkeness, then, and the fear and misery of those whose nights are blighted by drunks fighting at their windows and pissing in their gardens? And what about the cloth-entombed women, projecting an image of both slavery and Islamic aggression, who may or may not have chosen to wear the black bag?

My answer is substantially the same to both social problems: as a society we have chosen to deny ourselves the very tools of private social action (no, that is not a contradiction in terms) that could make things better.

For decades we have denied ourselves disapproval. For decades we have denied ourselves property rights. For decades we have denied ourselves the right to free association, which necessarily includes the right not to associate.

These tools are the ones we have the right to use. They are also the right tools for the job. They, unlike the tools of coercion, will not turn in our hands and cut us.

Bad form to quote oneself, I know. However it saves writing time, so tough. Last time I wrote about this sort of thing I said:

In general, I would say that strong private institutions are a bulwark against the type of creeping Islamification - or capture by other minority groups - that concern many of the commenters to this thread ... Contrast that with the position of state institutions, which includes state laws. These are a much more realistic target for capture by determined minorities. If, say 3% of the population feel really strongly about some issue and 97% are apathetic it is actually quite a realistic proposition for the 3% to get laws passed to steer things their way. Much easier than out-purchasing the other 97%, certainly.

However that brings me back to the main point of the article: the best (perhaps only?) long term defence against unfair treatment by "the authorities" is to keep the authorities out of our daily lives.

(50)

Peter Beaumont has an interesting article on Iran that notes how our understanding of the local complexities must trump simplistic perceptions shaped by our own foreign policy assumptions. A valuable lesson, though Beaumont commits the same sin when he artificially divides foreign policy debates into two camps, so that he can pose as the voice of sense.

Of value in his article is the lack of knowledge that we have in the Iranian regime. That Iran is an Islamist conservative state with wider freedoms, though severely circumscribed, than is commonly supposed, must be accepted. This has allowed space for a democratic pillar to develop as a channel for aspirant social mobility and as a safety valve for the competing interests within the elites. When the inherent clash between the revolutionary drive of the rulers and the risk of a democratic vote endangering their goals emerged, a crisis of legitimacy was assured. For Khameini and Ahmedinejad, the crisis preceded and precipitated their decision to rig the election, leading to the current conflict.

Many of the demonstrators want reform and counter-revolution; the maintenance of the Islamic republic without pursuing the destabilising geopolitical foreign policy of the hardliners. Some want a liberal democracy and a westernised state. The current clash over the future of the Islamic Republic of Iran posits a revolutionary hardline or the transition to a post-revolutionary polity.

What an unpleasant choice for libertarians in Iran: an unstable, brittle Islamic dictatership or a republic progressing towards an illiberal democracy. It isn't a choice. Support is required for the courage of the demonstrators as the value of freedom exercised has the potential for effecting more radical change.

(8)

Warning: for the irony-challenged, this is a spoof.

Or maybe not.

(24)

It's been an open secret for years that Israel possesses nuclear capability. It's an interesting comment on the genuine - as opposed to rhetorical - threat that the Zionist Entity is deemed to pose that it's only now, when Iran is on the verge of joining the nuclear club, that other Middle Eastern and Arab countries get concerned about developing their own programs.

- Mick Hartley

(6)

All those folk who voted for The Community Organiser in the hope that he would lift some of the allegedly more questionable measures enacted by the previous administration to deal with terrorism are likely to be disappointed, at least if this report is accurate.

Shutting down Gitmo is just a stunt if all that happens is that terror suspects and other folk rounded up in the Middle East etc are locked up indefinitely in a different place. If people like Andrew Sullivan, who have hammered the institution of Gitmo, try to make excuses for this by arguing that such detention is somehow "different", they deserve to be treated with contempt.

(37)

I just picked this out as a potential SQOTD:

Political professionals have little time for activist true believers and their pesky principles. Freedom of speech is one of those fundamental principles in a free democracy. It requires that you especially defend the rights of those with whom you disagree. Guido has gone to the trouble of watching the Fitna video, it contains no call to violence, in fact it condemns violence.

In the past and at great cost diplomatically, a Conservative government defended Salman Rushdie's freedom of speech. It is therefore profoundly disappointing that the Tories have chosen to be officially agnostic about Geert Wilders. The decontamination strategy has turned into moral cowardice.

However, follow that last link and you will learn that the Conservative Party, in the person of Chris Grayling, may be retreating, a bit, from its former public position of craven retreat, so the Conservative bit of this story is not over yet. Yes, ban Wilders, says Grayling, but ban lots of others also. The Conservatives may well split on this, and I for one do not give a damn.

Two further quick thoughts:

First, I find all this elaborate condemnation of Geert Wilders by the Right-On tendency rather nauseating. We abominate what he says, but free speech is sacred and therefore he should be allowed in rather than being given the oxygen of publicity, but if he has broken the law then, blah blah blah, he should not be allowed in. This seemed to be the default position on Question Time last night, which I semi-watched. Usually there is only one but in these kind of weasel statements, but in this case there have often been two buts, with the second but being the but that craps all over everything before it, including whatever less ignoble turds emerged from the first but. But according to Guido, Wilders has not broken the law. And what Wilders says is that Islam is a huge problem because it preaches violence to those who do not submit to it. Which it does. Read the Koran, like this guy did. It is a vile piece of writing. People who grumble and splutter about statements like that are either Muslims or cowards or both. They just do not want to have to think about it because if this is true, which it is, it is all just too depressing.

Second: democracy. What we are witnessing here is democracy, not some perversion of it. If enough voters threaten violence, then the state will cave in, and nothing like fifty percent is required. Half a percent threatening to dig up pavements or set fire to things is more than enough, provided another five or ten percent, sprinkled around all those marginal or potentially marginal constituencies, are willing to back, defend, not condemn, such threats with their votes. Votes, in other words, are violence. I fondly remember an ancient black and white movie telling of how, towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, the plebs of Britain got votes. A key moment was when a brick came crashing through the window of a room where some political toffs were discussing it all. Either we get this organised, they told each other, in other words either we have more democracy, or the bricks will keep on coming. I am still for democracy, for the usual Churchill reason of it being better than the alternatives, but it is messy.

Personally, I am grateful to Geert Wilders, and even a little bit grateful to whichever coven of scumbag politicians it was who banned him from coming here. Some life has consequently been breathed into an argument which, while being just as important as ever, looked like it was becoming, what with all these Credit Crunch dramas, a bit passé.

(76)

This is not the first time that the Home Office has used its discretionary powers to bar someone from entering the UK, nor surely will it be the last, but I cannot recall in my adult lifetime such powers ever being used against an elected, serving politician from a friendly, democratic country. And a member of the EU to boot!

Geert Wilders had been refused entry to the United Kingdom to broadcast his controversial anti-Muslim film Fitna in the House of Lords.

Mr Wilders said he had been told that in the interests of public order he will not be allowed to come to Britain.

Under normal circumstances, I would devote the rest of this article to speculation about the reasons behind this extraordinary decision. But, in this case, that would be redundant.

We all know why.

(31)

I am sure my title is no surprise to most of you, however the scale of the trouble is even worse than I had believed.

Unlike the fringe tribal areas, Swat, which has 1.3 million residents and a rich cultural history, is part of Pakistan proper, within 160 kilometers of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the capital.

After more than a year of fighting, virtually all of it is now under Taliban control, marking the militants' farthest advance eastward into Pakistan's so-called settled areas, residents and government officials from the region say.

I very much hope there are contingency plans in place to blow the &$#^& out of Pakistan's nuclear capability should worst come to worst. The alternative is a nuclear war against India in the name of Allah, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions in the region.

(6)

I ran across this interesting article a few minutes ago.

The educated conclusion right across the Middle East is that Iran is determined to become a nuclear power. How to deal with this conclusion is far more controversial.

"Indeed", as our good friend Glenn is wont to say.

(15)

A civil liberties pressure group has called for the resignation of Prof Janet Hartley, the academic responsible for banning Islam critic Douglas Murray from chairing a discussion tonight at the [London School of Economics].

Modern Islamists will cut a women's face if she uses make-up and kill women for such 'crimes' as being raped, but they are in favour of wild spending and printing ("expansionary fiscal and monetary policies for a counter cycle effect" as the scum of the Economist would put it) - even though such antics are actually denounced by the Koran.

That so many academics sides with the forces of radical Islam should come as no surprise - for the modern left (including modern mutant forms of Marxism that have combined Marxist and Keynesian doctrines in ways that Karl Marx himself would have had nothing but contempt) and radical 'Islamists' favour many (although not all) of the same economic policies - as Comrade President Barack Obama would have been reminded by both his leading Marxist (well mutant heretic modern Marxist) and leading Islamist neighbours in the Hyde Park area of Chicago. Although, of course, this is what he had already been taught as a child (both by his Mother and by Frank) and then at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard. Before he was ever sent to Chicago to join the operations of the Comrades there.

"You are off the point Paul - we are talking about academics and free speech".

Well Pigou (the Cambridge 'Economics' Prof who Keynes implies was free market in one of the in-jokes in the 'General Theory'...) held that anyone who questioned the need for more government spending should be sent to prison.

Collectivist academics have never been pro free speech (it would not be consistent with collectivism if they were in favour of free speech) - the academic that Dr Gabb attacks was following in the tradition of Plato himself.

The function of a university (as explained by Gramsci and Marcuse) is to produce minds indoctrinated with 'progressive' thought - so indoctrinated that any ideas that are hostile to the cause will be rejected by them (without consideration), and reject them with great hatred.

Universities are not totally successful - in that most students are just given a vague mind set of support for 'progressive' ideas and a built in hostility to 'reactionary' ideas, but only in a very loose way, enough to, say, vote for Obama - but not enough to kill for him. They become the sort of people who think the Economist is free market, laugh at the "humour" of the Communist comics on Radio 4 without actually sharing their ideology and do not see anything odd in the selection of books in British bookshops.

"But what has this got to do with radical Islam".

Sadly quite a lot - as far from being seen as reactionary (with its hatred of women's rights and so on) radical Islam is seen as progressive. And it is (if one defines progressive in the way the academics would) - Islamic socialism (the word "socialism" is used) is common among both the Sunni and the Shia radicals.

And communist groups (in spite of the atheism of Karl Marx and co) ally with them - look for the banners on the demonstrations (they are there). Students are taught to be anti-American (this will continue in spite of Comrade President Barack Obama) and anti Israeli - and anti capitalist. And radical Islam is all three. Therefore they feel vaguely "pro" it - in spite of its tearing women to bits, and so on, and so on... after all plenty of female radical Islamists can be found - and we must not be "culturally imperialist".

As for reforming the universities - they can not be reformed. They must be de-funded - no more taxpayers money for them (directly or indirectly).

Oh and if anyone thinks I am judging the 'educated classes' too harshly, then spend five minutes in a British book shop (not just the wall of Obama books, but the other books you will find - and the books you will not find) or listening to the news (or film reviews) of private broadcasters such as 'Classic FM'

They know their market - the people who accepted (or half accepted) the 'progressive' ideas they were taught at school and university, such as a 'progressive conservative' leader who attacks 'big government' whilst at the same time explicitly promising to... increase the size of the government.

(14)

Following on from Perry's post below, I am pleased to note that there is something we can do to help Geert Wilders.

For those among you who want to actively help, go to his website and donate what you can to help defray what will likely be a ruinous legal bill. The link is here.

Geert Wilders is one of the pitifully few public figures in Europe who is willing to confront the Islamist menace. As a result, his enemies have sentenced him to death (because all they want is peace, don't you know) and his own government has decided to prosecute him.

Even if you cannot contribute financially then I urge you at least to get a message to him to let him know that he is not alone and that he has many, many friends. He needs them.

(71)

A court in the Netherlands has ordered the prosecution of Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, for daring to express his opinions. Wilders is the author of Fitna, a critical polemic against Islam.

The three judges said that they had weighed Mr Wilders's "one-sided generalisations" against his right to free speech, and ruled that he had gone beyond the normal leeway granted to politicians.

"The Amsterdam appeals court has ordered the prosecution of member of parliament Geert Wilders for inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs," the court said in a statement.

"The court also considers appropriate criminal prosecution for insulting Muslim worshippers because of comparisons between Islam and Nazism made by Wilders," it added.

This judgement completely destroys the myth of both Dutch civil liberties and the nation's reputed tolerance for differences of opinion. It seems you can have a difference of opinion just as long as it is not inconvenient to the state for you to express it. Yet again, the Dutch state proves that when the going gets tough, the Dutch state has a backbone of rubber.

So here is Fitna for you to watch. And to the authoritarian thugs in their court in Amsterdam... up yours.

And as a little bonus...

(36)

Andrew Roberts, the UK historian, pens what can only be described as a robust defence of soon-to-be-ex-US President, George W. Bush. It has stirred up a hornet's nest of comments, some of which include open support for OBL's cause, which makes me wonder about who edits the Telegraph blogs these days, if at all.

Unfortunately, this piece suffers from a number of basic factual errors that make one wonder about the quality of the editing of the Daily Telegraph's print edition, never mind the electronic version. He says, for example, that Oliver North directed a movie about Bush, when in fact he meant Oliver Stone. These Olivers are a bit of a pest: I mean, there's Oliver Reed, Oliver Cromwell, Oliver Twist, and loads of others. It might rather tickle both Messrs North and Stone - one a rather controversial soldier, the other a former-soldier-turned leftwing filmaker, to be so conflated.

On a more serious note, though, Mr Roberts suffers from over-reach in his understandable desire to set the record a bit straighter. For a start, any believer in the small government brand of conservatism, even a hawk who supported the overthrow of Saddam and the fight against the Taliban, has to confront the continuing expansion of government and debt under the Bush administration. Bush went over the heads of Congress to support the bailout of the US auto industry. Then there is the whole nonsense of No Child Left Behind, Prescription Drugs, Patriot Act, and the rest.

As for protecting America from attack, it is true, that he deserves - as I said some time ago - some, if not a lot, of credit for the fact that there has been no major repeat of a 9-11 sort of attack on US soil since that terrible September morning; and yes, I happen to agree with Mr Roberts that paying a pure "wait-and-see", defensive posture after that day was not really plausible.

Libertarians continue to argue among themselves, never mind with others and often vehemently, about the proper scope of foreign policy, or whether a libertarian foreign policy is an oxymoron. For me, the principle of self-defence cannot rule out the need, in certain circumstances, to go after declared enemies with a track record of violence and mayhem. Bush went after some of those enemies and made mistakes along the way. But I think, that on foreign policy at least, the judgement of history on this man will be rather kinder than at the present time.

(66)

Daniel Finkelstein says what needs to be said. Brilliant article.

(1)

Blogger and soldier Andrew Olmsted was mentioned on a Fox News report I listened to on the net tonight. His posthumous last post from January of this year seems worthy of Christmas Eve.

If I (and apparently he) are wrong and there is an after... I sincerely hope it is populated by souls such as his.

(12)

I have just heard on an infrastructure mail list that India has lost much international bandwidth and the problem is due to failure on the SeaMeaWea3, SeaMeaWea4 and FALCON submarine cable systems at Alexandria.

There were multiple failures in Alexandria just a few months ago if I remember correctly.

(7)

I agree with all those who are now saying that the England cricket tour of India should not be interrupted, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. My understanding of terrorism is that what makes it such a headache to defend against, given that in India people generally are not allowed to carry guns (correct?), is not knowing when or where they might strike. But if you have a number of set-piece, high profile events to defend, with definite times and places attached to them, you can. It will be cumbersome and tiresome, and expensive, with lots more frisking of people who look like they might be terrorists, and lots more frisking of people who do not look at all like terrorists, both to avoid upsetting people who look like terrorists and to make sure that any terrorist plan deliberately not to look like a terrorist is also guarded against. But if the authorities and people of India are willing to put up with all that, then so should our cricketers be.

I am even opposed to the final two one-dayers being cancelled, although I daresay the Indian authorities would not have had the time to make their dispositions, given that the one-dayers would have been very soon. But the test matches should definitely go ahead, including and especially the second one, which they have already, regrettably, moved from Mumbai to Chennai. I guess the Mumbai police have enough on their hands already, or think they have.

Playing those two one-dayers would have changed nothing in a cricketing way. 5-0 to India would almost certainly have become 7-0 to India, but playing those games, and the Mumbai test in Mumbai, would have made another and bigger point. I daresay that, because of their disappointing cricket, England's cricketers are not now very highly regarded in India. This would be a chance to get back into India's good books. Risky? Maybe, a little. But also, given the money now disposed of by India's cricket fans and by Indians generally, to make this small stand against terrorism might also been, you know, rather lucrative. But headlines like Pietersen wants security assurances don't strike the right note at all. This guy had a great chance to make a much more positive statement than that, but he muffed it.

As James Forsyth put it yesterday:

Imagine how we would have felt if after the 7/7 bombings the Australian cricket team had headed to Heathrow.

And commenter CG added:

Some of the star players in the Australian Rugby League team wanted the team to pull out of their English tour in 2001. When they were told that they would be replaced by more willing players, and may not get their places back, they decided to come after all.

I know, I know. The reckless courage of the non-combatant. But I didn't stop using London's buses and underground trains in the immediate aftermath of 7/7, still less run away to the country.

(39)

YouTube blocks Pat Condell’s attack on sharia in Britain. As my friend Geoff Arnold reminds us:

... as John Gilmore famously said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". So here is the Condell video. Watch it, and pass the word along.

My favourite phrase (slightly paraphrased):

... a small child describing them as 'letterbox ladies' (women in burkhas), which was, of course, deeply offensive and so we had the child put to death ...

If you are a Brit (resident or expat), please sign the petition that Pat mentions.

(111)

Once the financial markets have hopefully calmed down, this development is likely to gain much greater significance:

Five sharia courts have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester and Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The government has quietly sanctioned that their rulings are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Previously, the rulings were not binding and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.

What has been predicted has come to pass. As I discussed on a previous post while attacking the Archbishop of Canterbury and a senior UK judge on the matter, this move undermines the core principle of a free society, namely, that all are equal under the rule of law, and that a polycentric legl code, while fine in theory, tends to be unacceptable in practice if some people, such as Muslim women, are at risk of being coerced by their families into submitting to such courts. Given that in matrimonial disputes, men are favoured over women under Muslim law, this development is bad for women. Now, where is the chorus of complaint from feminists?

The article continues:

Muslim tribunal courts started passing sharia judgments in August 2007. They have dealt with more than 100 cases that range from Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours. It has also emerged that tribunal courts have settled six cases of domestic violence between married couples, working in tandem with the police investigations.

In tandem?

The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.

That has to be the crucial point, but the worry must be that women, for example, will face considerable pressure in marital disputes to submit - that is what Islam means - to sharia law. The whole point about everyone being under the same legal code is that pressure is at least lessened somewhat.

This comment was telling:

In a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons. The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.

Well, exactly. Now that the Tories are miles ahead in the opinion polls, it would not be too much to ask for a future Tory administration to shut these courts down if it can be shown that parties to a dispute had been under any duress to accept them in the first place. Also, where children are involved and therefore the child is clearly not able to consent, such rulings should be declared inadmissable, period. The same point would apply to any other network of courts or arbitrators from any other religion, for that matter. For example, as far as I understand it, Jewish courts do not have binding powers if they are at odds with the existing UK ones.

At the very least, this development plays straight into the hands of bigots of all stripes, including the Far Right, of course. Equality before the law may sometimes be an empty phrase, but it touches on a vital principle in jurispudence in a free society.

(72)

I ran across this item in a Janes newsletter today:

US warns Iran on threat to close oil strait. Senior US military officials have responded to Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in the event of a strike against its alleged nuclear facilities. Any attempt by Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to an attack on its nuclear facilities would be an "act of war", Commander of the US Fifth Fleet Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff said

Now however much anyone may wish for a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, such a strike will be a clear and unmistakable act of war. I find it exceedingly strange anyone would believe it would not be considered a casus belli. The Iranian leadership would have to either accept the war gauntlet or hang themselves then and there and save someone else the trouble. If attacked, they damn well are going to fight back. That is to be expected and any one who believes otherwise is a damn fool.

For us to say a war will only be started if Iran closes off the straits as their first counter attack is utterly dishonest.

Let us get this straight. Nations act in their own interest. If the US government decides it is of overriding Interests of State to take out the nuclear facilities of Iran, then it has declared war. Iran could, like the US with the Panay, choose to ignore the incident... but I doubt it. You may argue over the need for starting that war but calling black, white is not going to pass my semantic muster.

I have long said we should change the name of the DOD back to the Department of War. If you are going to make war, then you should damn well be a man and say so.

That said, I would really prefer we not do so.

(65)

Another senior UK figure - one of the most senior judges in the land - has argued that some aspects of Sharia law should be permissable when it comes to settling certain disputes between Muslim couples. This re-ignites the controversy sparked by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who argued for the same.

Once more, the bedrock principle of a liberal order, that men and women should be treated equally before the law, is potentially at odds with a code that, by definition, does not accept this equality as part of its essence. The inherently anti-women bias of Sharia is not a bug, it is a feature. Take cases where, for instance, a young English guy who is an atheist or Christian tries to take a Muslim girl out on a date and the latter gets physically intimidated by her family (this is not a hypothetical situation, it has happened). To what authority should the woman or man appeal in dealing with such cases? Unless the judge is able to answer that sort of hard question, which goes to the heart of why sharia is considered unworkable in a liberal order, the judge would be well advised to focus on his core responsibility, of seeing that justice is done under the laws of this land. This is one of those examples of why I do not think that a polycentric legal order can really work unless it is possible for its members to elect to choose under which code they wish to be treated. Muslim women would not have that choice if sharia law was incorporated. More importantly, they do not have the key right of "exit", the right to choose no longer to be treated under a specific code of their families.

The judge, like the Archbishop, is proof to radical Islamists that some of the most senior figures in what might pass for the British Establishment lack the intellectual or moral fibre to defend the core values of this nation.

(12)

Some of our long term readers may have noticed I have not posted a great deal on Iraq over the past several years. This is not due to any change in my support for the war or for the fine soldiers who have fought through dark times and bright. The real reason is the type of war being engaged in the last several years is one in which I have insufficient expertise to really comment on. Weapon systems and correlations of forces and international intrigue I deal with well... but cointerinsurgency strategy and tactics is not one of my strong suits. As an example, I was not for the surge when it was first proposed because I felt a too heavy foot print would cause us more trouble than not. I was decidedly wrong, but at the time no one seemed to be making a clear and cogent case for the other way.

Now some one has. I recently finished reading Michael Yon's "Moment of Truth In Iraq" and found it a marvelous learning experience. While some of this material may have been published on his web site at the time it was happening, the book puts the events and tactics in perspective.

He shows how at one point we really were making a muck of things by applying the wrong tactics. There were things happening in the middle phase of this war that I found disquieting but was unable to place into a broader context. Michael Yon has done so.

Michael shows how General Petreaus consistently succeeded where ever he was placed in Iraq because he did indeed know how to go about things. Where I would have thought putting a few soldiers here and there right in the middle of the population would make them think more of us as invaders, Yon shows how it did the exact opposite. It created trust and faith that we had their backs. You could really only know this by being there.

He shows how misunderstanding the tribal power structures was a mistake of the first order and that learning that lesson and working with the grain of the culture instead of against it has led to success.

I highly recommend this book.

(28)

"I'm not sure what is more sickeningly ironic to hear at a food summit - the thoughts of a brutal tyrant such as Robert Mugabe or a would-be genocidal murderer such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Tough call."

- Stephen Pollard

(22)

As the UK administration implodes, the sort of idiotic ideas that might once have been swept aside by a pliant media can be now guaranteed to get wide coverage. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is obviously determined that Mr Brown's fall from grace is swift and brutal. Oh but the voters are going to like this:

Islamic extremists could escape prosecution and instead receive therapy and counselling under new Government plans to "deradicalise" religious fanatics.

The Home Office is to announce an extra £12.5 million to support new initiatives to try to stop extremism spreading.

What, so being an Islamist is like being an alcoholic or crack addict. I am not sure how Muslims will react to the idea that the more extreme representatives of their faith are somehow mentally ill. In a way, the therapy culture undermines what ought to be the most important message of all: that we are rational, responsible beings, with free will, able to take the consequences of our behaviour. Islam means "submission": to challenge that viewpoint does not involve putting some hate-filled fuckwit on a couch, but by advocating the values of reason and freedom without apology.

The idea that our tax pounds should be used in some daft attempt to "cure" Islamic fanatics is frankly laughable. It also shows how profoundly unserious this government is about the problem. What next, therapy for "extreme" Christians, Jews, atheists, Communists, Fascists, Jedi Knights (okay, that was meant as a joke), Jehovah's Witnesses?

When Islamic extremists are caught for offences of violence or plotting terror, the correct object of public spending should be on things like these instead.

(24)

If we want to build the country, maintain our dignity and solve economic problems, we need the culture of martyrdom.

- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran replies to his critics (also quoted by Mick Hartley)

(35)

I am not sure if there is an upsurge in what the BBC inaccurately refers to as

part of a popular trend in some Muslim societies of seeking to find Koranic precedents for modern science.

The impact of scientific theories upon Islamic beliefs has not acquired attention from the media. There are strands of creationism in this religion, and an unsurprising bout of natural theology has come to the fore. This differs from arguments concerning design in the nineteenth century, since these accepted and celebrated the successes of natural philosophy, the forerunner of today's sciences.

Indeed, the attempts of Islamic scholars is to wed Quranic and scientific authority with some perverse results:

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.

Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers.

The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice. One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca's was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

The odd combination of divine jurisprudence and natural authority is welded by the Islamic scholar in a bizarre Copernican alchemy.

A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim "qibla" - the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray.

It is called "Ijaz al-Koran", which roughly translates as the "miraculous nature of the holy text".

The underlying belief is that scientific truths were also revealed in the Muslim holy book, and it is the work of scholars to unearth and publicise the textual evidence.

If Islamic scholars attack scientific knowledge, they will sound backward and primitive, reducing their own influence over a society that becomes more literate and educated year after year. The other strategy is to co-opt this power, a power required to strengthen Islam, yet ensure that it does not undermine the truths of the Qu'ran that they perceive as poor.

Science will go hand in hand with awkward manifestations of Islam. But the premutations can amuse:

The meeting also reviewed what has been described as a Mecca watch, the brainchild of a French Muslim.

The watch is said to rotate anti-clockwise and is supposed to help Muslims determine the direction of Mecca from any point on Earth.

(14)

AntiCitzenOne comments on this posting at David Thompson's blog, thus:

I think we should give Muslim men with self control problems horse-blinkers, rather than cover women from head to toe.

The posting itself makes a vital point about how to defeat intimidation by Islamofascist zealots, which is not to leave anyone they pick on isolated. Thompson links back to this excellent piece.

This is why a general piling in with the insults against Islam and Islamic nastiness (the former leads directly to the latter in my opinion) is so important. Quite aside from being true and worth saying and a valid contribution to the debate and all that kind of stuff, these insults establish the principle that we can do them, and you can not stop us. There can be a debate. If and when you stop with the death threats, we will make the insults less insulting and more decorous, and some of us will go completely silent on the subject. Your choice.

This also explains why I do not denounce Christianity nearly so often or nearly so harshly. On those occasions when anyone does do this, the Christians do not respond with riots and death threats. So, beyond the occasional polite criticism of their (I think) odd theological views, together with praise for their more positive qualities, leave them alone, I say.

(2)

Michael Totten has yet another great article from Iraq, this time about Fallujah, once the scene of such bitter and intense fighting. The article is a condensed version of the material he has published on his web site and if you wanted to really get a feel for the place, this is the article to read

The whole article is interesting (as ever) but in my opinion the 'money quote' is to be found in the final paragraph:

That said, Fallujah’s worst days are likely behind it. "The al-Qaida leadership outside dumped huge amounts of money and people and arms into Anbar Province," says Lieutenant Colonel Mike Silverman, who oversees an area just north of Ramadi. "They poured everything they had into this place. The battle against Americans in Anbar became their most important fight in the world. And they lost".

Read the whole thing.

(45)

I brought prejudices acquired during the Cold War to the struggle between civilisation and Islam, but tried – and try still - to be careful to see the differences as well as the similarities between the two struggles.

In this spirit, I at first thought that whereas Soviet communism was ideologically breakable, Islam is not breakable. More than a billion souls believe in it, and however true it might be that it is evil and repulsive nonsense, saying this would accomplish very little. It would merely poke the hornet's nest with a stick. But slowly, I have been coming round to thinking almost the complete opposite. Not only does denouncing Islam as evil nonsense establish the mere right, of us civilisationers, to denounce Islam - along with our right to say anything else we might want to say - true or false, nice or nasty, sensible or daft. Such talk also, I am starting to believe, strikes a dagger into the heart of the enemy camp, by spreading doubt in it about basic beliefs and hence sewing discord and confusion. I used to think that Islamists were indifferent to such ideological attacks. Now, I am starting to believe that they fear them very much. Hence all the murder threats. They sense that this is one of their weakest and potentially biggest fronts in the struggle. The biggest front of all, in fact.

And even if only a few "apostates" materialise, they are of huge significance, for they bring with them deep knowledge of the enemy we face and how we can see the enemy off.

Another advantage of ideological attacks on Islam is that arguments about - and in favour of - "apostasy" unite civilisation, and divide its enemies. We civilisationers argue fiercely with one another about how to oppose Islam, but almost all of us believe that if you want to criticise a religion non-violently you should be allowed to, and that if you want to abandon a religion you should be able to do that without getting extremely violent grief, or even the threat of it, from those who still do believe in it. Talking like this or doing this may be rather daft, and very unwise, and get you shunned by polite society (i.e. scared society), but ... yes, it should be allowed. I am content to regard all who say that they disagree with the claims in this paragraph as the enemies of civilisation that they are, not just from the point of view of the mere truth, but on tactical grounds. Put such cretinous pro-Islamist fellow-travellers on the defensive also, I say.

And now I read this article (linked to about a week ago by Instapundit) in which it is claimed that the trickle of converts from Islam that was all I had so far noticed is actually whole lot more than that. It tells of a spectacular growth in the number of converts from Islam. Conversions have been happening in a steady flow for decades, but recently they have become a torrent, world-wide. Mostly these people are converting to Christianity, but sometimes just to not-Islam. Bossiness and terrorism and constant fighting is, it seems, not just repulsive. It actually repels. People are leaving the religion of war and joining the religion of, approximately speaking, peace - or joining no religion at all. Islam is only still growing numerically because it is growing so quickly by purely biological means. As far as the flow of converts is concerned it is now in headlong retreat.

So, is this true? Is this allegedly huge exflux really happening? I have heard nothing about it before, but that could merely mean that I am ignorant. Or is the exflux just wishful thinking on the part of Christians, talking nonsense to keep their spirits up?

(29)

Now this is something I look forward to seeing, at least virtually:

The Mile High Tower will be double the height of its nearest rival, and will be almost seven times the height of the Canary Wharf tower in London. Visitors will be able to see Africa from the top of the tower, the Sunday Times newspaper reports [...] The project will push architecture and engineering to new limits, as the tower must be robust enough to withstand the extremes of temperature and strong desert winds in the region.

What a pity it is going to be in Jeddah as much as I would like to see it up close, not even that marvel could induce me to set foot in that theocratic hell hole.

(38)

I suspected this much would happen but perhaps not quite so quickly.

In the post below, I provided a link to 'Live Leak', the only internet video site that was willing to host the movie. Apparently, YouTube and Google were approached but their joint and several response was to hastily gather up their skirts and run away screaming like a pair of Victorian maiden aunts.

The owners of Live Leak are clearly made of stronger stuff but they can hardly be blamed for pulling the plug once their lives had been threatened. The film has been removed from their server. Their official statement says:

Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could directly lead to the harm of some of our staff, Liveleak.com has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

[Emphasis mine].

I cannot say that I am entirely surprised by this development but what I do find discomforting is the reference to 'certain corners of the British media'. Which 'corners' are they talking about? I think we ought to know. Does anybody have any details here?

Anyway, it seems that the film is now being spread virally on all manner of mirror sites so, if you are interested, you will still be able to find it, albeit that you may have to dig a little deeper.

(8)

Fitna. The film made by Dutch MP Geert Wilders.

Make of it what you will.

WARNING: May not be worksafe.

(3)

Michael Totten's latest from Iraq is up and as usual highly recommended:

The Middle East beyond Israel strikingly lacks anything resembling political correctness. I hear much more severe denunciations of radical Islam there than I do in the U.S., and I don't mean from Americans. I hear it from Arabs, and from Persians and Kurds. I hear it in Lebanon all the time, and in Iraq too.

Sabah Danou walked with Commander Summers and Admiral Driscoll. He's an Iraqi who works for the multinational forces as a cultural and political advisor in Baghdad. "Look," he said to me and gestured toward a local man with a long beard and a short dishdasha that left his ankles exposed. "He's a Wahhabi," Danou hissed. "He is linked to Al Qaeda. That's their uniform, you know, that beard and that high-cut dishdasha. God, what pieces of shit those fuckers are."

In less dissembling mealy-mouthed times, that would simply be described as saying it the ways he sees it.

(4)

...rather a lot actually.

Michael Totten continued to climb in my estimation after a very good article called The Israel of the Balkans on the interesting parallels between Kosova and Israel.

Strongly recommended.

(45)

Islam is winning.

(1)

According to Jane's:

Evidence emerges of Iran's continued nuclear weapons research Documents shown exclusively to Jane's indicate that Iran is continuing its pursuit of the advanced technologies necessary to develop a nuclear weapon, regardless of Tehran's claims that its nuclear programme is purely peaceful. Jane's was shown the information by a source connected to a Western intelligence service, and the documents were verified by a number of reliable independent sources in Vienna.

Who'd a thunk it?

(15)

Iran is also the theatre of very optimistic developments. Hashem Aghajari is an Islamic revolutionary-turned-history-professor. He was one of the student activists of 1979 who later fully participated in the brutal repression after Khomeini's coming to power. He is now challenging the infallibility of the ruling mullahs and calls upon Iranians to think for themselves instead of blindly accepting whatever is preached in Friday sermons, a piece of advice for which he has been sentenced to death. But he is now supported by the students and professors at most of the country's universities and thousands of ordinary citizens, workers, and cultural leaders.

Where Aghajari wants to reform Islam; the students want a total separation between mosque and state. He wants an Islamic Reformation, but the demonstrators are interested in the creation of a secular civil society. He is a reformer, but they are revolutionaries.

- Ibn Warraq who is both optimistic (as in the above quote) and pessimistic (as elsewhere in the same piece) about whether the Muslim world can become civilised

(40)

Michael Totten's latest bloggage from Iraq is as informative as ever, but the thing that fascinated me most was a brief but interesting discursion into the use of the English word 'Supermarket' on a sign in a small town in Iraq.

What struck me about the sign on that store, and on many other stores in Iraq, was the English word “supermarket.” The only people in Saqlawiya who find English helpful are the Marines. And me.

I’ve seen this far beyond Iraq. Even in small towns in Libya – one of the most closed societies in the world – I found store signs in English. The amount of English in a genuinely cosmopolitan city like Beirut is even more striking, though no longer surprising. Beirut, at least, has a huge tourist industry. Imagine how differently you would think about Arabic civilization if small towns in Kansas and Nebraska – not to mention large cities like New York and Chicago – had storefront signs in the Arabic language even though no Arabs live there. Perhaps the word “imperialism” wouldn't seem so much like a stretch. Of course no one forces Iraqis or Libyans to put English words on their signs, so it's telling that they do so anyway, and that they did not choose Chinese or Russian.

I disagree with Michael's use of the word 'imperialism' and I think he answers that point himself in the very next sentence. An even more demotic variation on the inexplicable prevalence of English puzzled me many years ago BB (Before Blogging). I spent some time in a few fairly rough parts of Croatia and one can hardly miss the prevalence of racist and sexist graffiti on the communist-era concrete tower blocks. The odd thing is that mixed in with the usually 'Jebi Se' varient epithets in Croatian, you will find floridly racist threats or extravagant anatomical references in more or less grammatically correct English. And this in an area that was not exactly a magnet for English speaking tourists, particularly in the middle of the then on-going war.

The huge number of people who speak English in Croatia can be easily explained by the ubiquity of satellite dishes, which is why I often referred to the local Croatian English dialect as MTV English. But that does not answer the question of why in a linguistically and ethnically homogeneous area (such as unlovely New Zagreb in Croatia or Saqlawiya in Iraq), people use written English when there is no commercial or political pressures to do so.

Interesting.

(3)

If you do not regularly read Michael Totten's Middle East Journal, you really are missing out on something you just do not see in the MSM. He delivers straightforward reportage not just of The Big Issues when they happen but of the mundane realities of what it is to be in the Slums of Fallujah with the USMC.

Lieutenant Lappe overheard our conversation. I think he was worried that I was getting nervous. "No one can lay down an IED anymore without somebody calling it in," he said.

Very revealing.

If you like his stuff as much as I do, consider dropping your mouse on his PayPal button and support truly independent journalism.

(33)

Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Marion Cotillard, Oscar-winning actress and qualified electronic engineer:

Marion Cotillard, the Oscar-winning French actress, will not apologise over remarks she made describing the 9/11 attacks as a conspiracy and believes that the comments had been taken out of context and misunderstood...

Cotillard said that the towers were destroyed not as part of a terrorist plot, but because it would have been too expensive to rewire them. She also reheated an old conspiracy theory about the 1969 moon landing never having happened.

Of course, working in the entertainment industry does not disqualify Ms. Cottilard from having opinions, nor (heaven forbid) should she ever be restrained from expressing them. However, and equally, I am not disqualified from calling her an ignorant jackass. I hope she spends the rest of her career in French dinner-theatre emoting pointlessly before an audience of coughing, hawking, shouting, farting, senile old-age pensioners who are slupring down a mediocre bowl of bouillabaisse before shuffling home to die alone in a heatwave. How do you like them pommes, Ms. Cotillard?

(43)

Michael Totten has a superb article up that compares the approach to counter-insurgency followed by Israel under the dismal Ehud Olmert, and that of the US in Iraq under General David Petraeus.

What Totten points out is that the policies promised by Barack Obama for Iraq (in essence remove the army and drop bombs on anyone who seems to be the Bad Guys) is essential the same as the demonstrably failed approach used by Ehud Olmert in Lebanon. Israel blew the crap out of Lebanon from the air and achieved precisely zero of its war aims.

Read the whole article.

(35)

We get emails! Some people still entertain the idea that it is possible for sharia law and its adherents to operate cosily alongside a code such as the English Common Law. I have already described why I think sharia and a liberal legal tradition on matters of marriage and treatment of women are like oil and water; it is also remiss for the Archbishop not to spell out what criteria he would use to judge which bits of sharia are okay in England and which are not; he is far too vague on the latter point. Rod Liddle, writing in this week's Spectator, points out that is rather presumptious for the Archbishop to lecture Muslims about which bits of sharia are legit and which bits are not in England. As Liddle says, it might be a more productive use of this man's time to focus on preaching the message of the Gospels, although I accept that talking about the love of Jesus, sin, redemption and all that boring stuff is so, well, Bible-Belt, dahling.

Anyhow, a gentleman wrote the following email to Samizdata HQ:

Johnathan Pearce criticized Archbishop views on sharia law but didn't seem to actually have read Dr. William's speech, which seems to me eminently reasonable from a libertarian point of view.

Alas for this correspondent, I have read the speech all the way through - all the way through its tortured logic, non-sequiturs, question-begging expressions and the rest. A second reading or a third does not improve one's experience. Dr Williams' feeble grasp of the subject means a second or third read is like the experience of drinking another glass of an indifferent red wine; it only tastes good if you are already slightly pissed.

Matthew Parris, a libertarian to the core, has also read the speech. In his civilised, gentle way, Parris states what is painfully obvious: the Archbishop of Canterbury is not a particularly intelligent man. Having a white beard does not make one smart or benign.

(4)

You have heard about the captured 'Diary of a Despondent Al Qaeda' but have you had a chance to actually read the whole thing?

I also recommend you download this DOD Blogger Press Conference Audio which includes well known war bloggers such as Austin Bey talking to USAF Col. Donald Bacon, live from Iraq.

Enjoy!

(33)

Andrew Sullivan, one of the most prolific and widely read bloggers, has not been exactly slow off the mark to attack the US administration of George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and certain conservative bloggers and writers, of encouraging what he calls "Christianism". He has a certain point: there is no doubt that the influence of Christianity, at least in its more evangelical forms, has increased in parts of the Right. The US, despite what some historians like Paul Johnson might claim, is not just a product of Christianity but is also a child of the Enlightenment, with all the scepticism about religion that implies, and long may it remain so. Sullivan is right to call for a clear separation of church and state to be preserved. Ironically, that separation is one of the reasons why religion flourishes Stateside, while is often tepid over here.

But I have to say, given the appalling treatment of gay people by fundamentalist Islam, that Andrew, a gay man recently married to his other half, has been remarkably silent about the remarks by the Archbishop of Canterbury on allowing sharia law to become the law of this country, at least for certain folks benighted enough to fall under its ambit. Sullivan has certainly been ferocious about the Islamic treatment of gays, and women, before, so it is a bit odd that he has not written about this issue now. However infuriating Sullivan can be with his volatile punditry - one minute hailing George W. Bush as a potential Truman, the next damning him to eternity - he is one of the great voices of the Anglosphere. Go on Sully: fire a broadside at Lambeth Palace.

(31)

The UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Human Rights has recorded the death of 133 women in Basra, 79 for breaking 'Islamic laws' and 42 'honour killings', though this does not add up to the total number of deaths. In 2007, the grip of conservative Shi'a militias on Basra tightened after the withdrawal of the British army and hastened the atmosphere of fear that grips the women of that city.

Sawsan, another woman who works at a university, says the message from the radicals to women is simple: "They seem to be sending us a message to stay at home and keep your mouth shut."

After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Sawsan says, the situation was "the best." But now, she says, it's "the worst."

"We thought there would be freedom and democracy and women would have their rights. But all the things we were promised have not come true. There is only fear and horror."

The control of the militias has resulted in barbaric and violent actions designed to cow the inhabitants of Basra and enforce the power of the gangs. The punishment of infractions is designed to ensure that the militias maintain their control over their neighbourhoods, their families and their women. Such examples are deemed to be required by the militia since well-educated, civilised women had more freedom and, therefore, more to lose. The insecurity of the militia fuels their violence:

One glance through the police file is enough to understand the consequences. Basra's police chief, Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf, flips through the file, pointing to one unsolved case after another.

"I think so far, we have been unable to tackle this problem properly," he says. "There are many motives for these crimes and parties involved in killing women, by strangling, beheading, chopping off their hands, legs, heads."

"When I came to Basra a year ago," he says, "two women were killed in front of their kids. Their blood was flowing in front of their kids, they were crying. Another woman was killed in front of her 6-year-old son, another in front of her 11-year-old child, and yet another who was pregnant."

The killers enforcing their own version of Islamic justice are rarely caught, while women live in fear.

Boldly splattered in red paint just outside the main downtown market, a chilling sign reads: "We warn against not wearing a headscarf and wearing makeup. Those who do not abide by this will be punished. God is our witness, we have notified you."

The security forces in Basra are unable to protect the population from the actions of the gangs. Western charities may wring their hands and salve their threadbare consciences by blaming the security forces for not achieving miracles. Yet, these militia members are cowards and maim or kill their victims because they are defenceless. These barbarians would think twice about inflicting pain if their victims were well-armed rather than unarmed and could shoot back.

It is of lasting shame that Britain scuttled back to the airport and left Basra in the hands of these lunatics.

(4)

If you do not read Michael Totten's blog regularly (and why the hell don't you? It is one of the best damn things on the internet!) then you may have missed this treasure.

And this comment is pretty good too:

This video proves that the surge has failed miserably. The Iraqis are running wild with their scissors and refuse to drink milk and wear seat belt. The pitiful American forces can't even muster the courage to summon insurgents to a shootout themselves. Instead, they have to order random drivers on the road as "human invitation cards". This is sickening.

Heh indeed.

(42)

Following on from my post yesterday, I scanned the front pages of the main British papers today; with one or two mild exceptions, the headlines - including the Guardian - were pretty damning (David Blunkett was admirably blunt; proof that the former Home Secretary has his good points). As far as the general thrust of commentary is concerned, as well as the straight news reports, the tone is that the Archbishop has made a right royal berk of himself.

I disagree with fellow Samizdata contributor Guy Herbert that the Archbishop is not an 'ass' but guilty at most of over-optimism; frankly, a man of such supposed learned views as Dr Williams should know that a religion that has a legal code that applies to women in the way that it does is outrageous; doubly outrageous, considering that the Church, with all its faults, has in the past acted as a moral beacon on stirring up consciences on issues like the slave trade. I am sure there are admirable aspects of sharia: it is hard to believe that it would not have died out were it not to have contained such features. But let's be crystal clear: if the Archbishop thinks it is right that whole groups of the UK population can choose to deal with issues like marriage, divorce and treatment of women outside the structure of the English Common law and its insistence upon treatment of women as consenting adults in matters of marriage, then he might as well hang up his cassock.

I do not know if he will resign over this, or indeed if it is right and proper for anyone to call for his sacking. Some commenters might know of how these things work, but it seems to me that the General Synod of the Church of England might want to discuss this issue, vigorously.

(16)

Whooptie-Fuckin-Doo!

(10)

...Good.

It is also insensitive to Catholic feelings, Nazi feelings, Buddhist feelings, Communist feelings, Capitalist feelings, Manchester United Supporter feelings, Surrealist baboon trousers, Scientologist feelings, Creationist feelings, Darwinist feelings...

"Since Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group."

The whole point of a reference book or reference wiki, is to present information regardless of anyone's 'feelings'. And if some Muslims do not like that... tough shit, here is a link to the 'Mohammed Cartoons' for you because to my mind it is not enough to just ignore them, intolerant Islam must be confronted and loudly defied. I could not care less whose 'feelings' get hurt by publishing something and thankfully to their credit neither could Wikipedia.

Samizdata is also fairly insensitive to Muslim feelings

(4)

In yesterday's Pentagon Press Briefing, Commander, Nato International Security Assistance Force Gen. Dan McNeill had this interesting comment:

I'm also reminded of the headlines that said there was a resurgent Taliban, there was a coming spring offensive, and they were going to hold sway on the battlefield. And I think a retrospective look at calendar year '07 says that clearly was not the case. They did very little on the battlefield. They were very successful in staying in the press, and they continue to be, but they have done little on the battlefield.

Do the Taliban have sufficient strength to pull off another Spring News Offensive or have we precluded this by sufficiently weakening the elite al allah al Press Relations over the preceding year?

(11)

If you are of a conspiracy orientation, you are going to love this report I just picked up off a network admin mail list:

A fourth submarine cable in the middle east was damaged Sunday between Haloul, Qatar and Das, United Arab Emirates.

This is in addition to the damage affecting FLAG, SAE-ME-WE4, FALCON cables.

After reviewing surveillance video of the area, Egypt's ministry of maritime transportation is reporting no ships were near the FLAG or SAE-ME-WE4 cables 12-hours before or after the cable damage near Alexandria, Egypt. The reason for outage of the cables has not been identified yet.

Did anyone notice the NSA black-ops sub leaving the area (I should add a smiley here... I think)?

More information can be found here. There has also been a suggestion this report may be an 'echo' of a previous report caused by mis-communication across language barriers. I have no idea myself.

We now cue the Secret Squirrel theme and search for our tin hats as 'The Galloping Beaver' asks: "Where is the USS Jimmy Carter?"

(40)

There was an interesting but infuriating article in The Times by Simon Jenkins today where he describes the current state of affairs in Afghanistan. The shorter Jenkins is that things are not going very well. The crux of the problem is that Nato's force in Kabul is in shambles with the United States and the United Kingdom in disagreement over their basic strategy, the Canadians having had enough, and the Continental Europeans contributing more trouble then they are worth.

But what really struck my nerve with this article was the praise that Jenkins heaps on the Taleban adversaries. He describes them as the 'toughest fighters' on earth. I am admittedly not qualified to pass judgement on that score, but I would have to question the real fighting skill of men who are barely literate, fed or able to maintain basic hygiene. Given the disarray that NATO forces are in, and the difficulties that they are inflicting on themselves, it is no wonder that a numerically larger, motivated and home based insurgency is able to maintain a serious military challenge.

If the challenge posed by the Taleban is to be met by NATO or the government of Afghanistan, then NATO have to take this crisis seriously. The chances of this happening are approximately zero, of course, so the rational thing to do is to look forward to the day when the Taleban regain power in Afghanistan. Given the total bankruptcy of NATO's military strategy and the weakness of the United States, it is likely that terrorists will regain their safe haven in Central Asia in the medium term.

Such an outcome would be to the total discredit of Western political leadership. Had they committed a serious military effort to Afghanistan, and united behind a common strategy, Afghanistan would have settled down under corrupt but peaceful leadership years ago. But there is no evidence of any politician in the West taking Afghanistan seriously.

(10)

Iraq is still in a descent to normalcy according to this DOD report:

Weekly attacks in the Baghdad security districts for the past 15 weeks matched levels last seen consistently in 2005. Bombings increased last week, but remained below the long-term average for the 23rd week in a row, he said. Throughout Iraq, weekly casualties decreased by three percent last week, continuing to remain below the long-term average for the 21st week in a row, Anderson said. Civilian casualties have dropped from 1,700 in January 2007 to 170 this month.

I think I can speak for the rest of the Samizdatistas when I raise my glass and say to our armed forces: "Well done lads!"

(39)

The perception of Islamic science, perhaps properly called natural philosophy, has been shaped by Bernard Lewis and his strong programme of senescence instead of renaissance. The development of scientific knowledge follows a pre-ordained path to scientific revolution and those cultures that failed to ignite need to be explained. Is not exceptionalism the oddity? A review in the Times Literary Supplement adds to our understanding:

After all, the scientific and industrial revolutions did not occur anywhere in the world except in Europe, and therefore one needs to explain the peculiarity of European history, rather than adduce some kind of Islamic brake or blinker.

We know that Islamic philosophers acted as a conduit for preserving part of antiquity's heritage and transmitting mathematics and other ideas from India and the Orient to Europe. Some of this work was achieved by non-Islamic philosophers working within the Caliphate or Moorish kingdoms. There is evidence of scientific innovation up to the late Middle Ages and one can see equivalents to natural theology; one of the drivers of the Scientific Revolution in Europe:

He [Muzaffar Iqbal] points out that the Arab scientific movement in the eighth century pre-existed the translation movement of the ninth and tenth centuries. He draws attention to a curious genre of literature that developed later, called shukuk, which was devoted to casting doubt on the findings of the Greeks, and he has no difficulty in adducing instances of Muslim scientists improving on, empirically testing or refuting Greek ideas.

But Iqbal is successful in arguing that the "Quran itself lays out a well-defined and comprehensive concept of the natural world, and this played a foundational role in the making of the scientific tradition in Islamic civilization". Faith impelled rather than impeded the Islamic scientist. The Koran commands man to study Allah's creation. The eleventh-century cosmologist al-Biruni wrote: "Sight was made the medium so that [man] traces among the living things the signs and wisdom, and turns from the created things to the Creator". At a more practical level, astronomy and mathematics were studied and further developed to assist in such matters as the orientation of mosques, the determination of prayer times and the division of inheritances according to Islamic law.

Islamic science appears to have a developed a heliocentric system before Copernicus and continued its mathematical traditions up till the fifteenth century. We should debate the causes of the decline in these traditions during the Middle Ages and their replacement by religious debates. Robert Irwin, the author of the review and Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement provides his own big picture around complacent empires, religious education and a lack of resources that could kickstart an industrial revolution.

Only part of this big picture rings true.

I [Irwin] would suggest that the spread of the madrasa, or religious teaching college, throughout the Middle East in the central and late Middle Ages led to a certain narrowing of intellectual horizons. While scientists continued to do research and publish, they do not seem to have founded scientific societies of the sort that proliferated in Western Europe in the seventeenth century.

The Ottoman Empire, as a strong state, did not allow the flourishing of a civil society as we see in Europe during the Reformation and the Wars of Religion. Printing presses were effectively banned. In Europe, scientific societies could publish journals off printing presses and contribute to an increasingly literate population, supplemented by the Republic of Letters. There are no equivalents in the Middle East, as permanent institutions of polymaths would be viewed as dangerous innovators; perhaps similar to the attitude that Oxford took to Locke.

Through comparison, we can understand some of the general causes of Islam's path, but greater detail is required to comprehend whether we see a continuation of a long-term preference for religious debate to natural theology in current Middle Eastern attitudes to science. Perhaps we over-emphasise religious factors at the expense of poor education, parasitical elites and populations raised on Nasserite nightmares rather than capitalist dreams.

(11)

In 2004 in this space, Gabriel Syme noted some disturbing revelations from an FBI translater, Sibel Edmonds. It turns out that Edmonds had, in fact, plenty more to say, but had kept her own counsel. Until now.

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The allegations, to say the least, are explosive. The FBI has denied everything, as you might expect. But a disturbing picture is emerging, and given the fairly dodgy reputation of American government officials to start with, it is not hard to believe that Edmonds, if anything, understates the scale of the dirty dealings going on between the United States and various regimes.

(69)

Would sharia law be preferable to the regime that our current ruling class has in store for us?

(175)

I just do not understand it. When Spain capitulated to attacks from Islamic fascists and elected a socialist government who promptly pulled its troops out of coalition operations... a policy we have been told by many that the USA and UK should follow in order to stop provoking the Islamists... that should have been the end of Spain's non-Basque terrorist problems. Presumably the nice people from the Al Qaeda Global Franchise were utterly delighted by the developments in Spain and were certain to fulsomely reward this behaviour. After all, we are often assured by writers in both the mainstream media and paleo-conservative/paleo-libertarian circles that this is what governments in the West must do if we are ever to sooth Islamic sensibilities: we leave them alone and they will leave us alone, right?

Yet strangely, far from redirecting their efforts and assets to ply their 'trade' against the more active members of the coalition, Islamic militants continue to get arrested in ever so repentant Spain.

Gosh, one might almost think that leaving them alone is not enough! Surely some misunderstanding?

(5)

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has been in Tehran talking to the regime there about it's nuclear program. He asked a few questions about Iran's intentions. The response? We'll get back to you- see you next month.

“We will try to solve all the outstanding questions by mid-February before Mohamed ElBaradei presents his report in March to the Board of Governors,” the head of Iran's atomic energy organisation Gholam Reza Aghazadeh told the ISNA news agency.

“We are hoping that all the past and present questions about our dossier will be solved and that we will return to a normal situation,” Mr Aghazadeh said.

(21)

The incident reported the other day of Iranian Pasdaran threatening the USN has produced an Iranian rebuttal of the US version of events.

Press TV said the video, released by Iran's Revolutionary Guards a day after the force dismissed the Pentagon video as fake, included a recording of what it said was the exchange between the two sides. Guards Brigadier General Ali Fadavi said Iran's boats had only approached the US ships to examine the registration numbers as they had been unreadable, Press TV said.

My take on this? The incident probably did happen but from what I have read, unlike the Iranian regular navy and the army, the Pasdaran only has tenuous control over its own people, who are more or less by definition religious nutters. The incident in question may well have horrified the powers-that-be in Iran as much as folks in the west. If I am correct, the possibility of a war due to an incident that neither Tehran nor Washington wants is a very real one. Maybe a good time to have a few Crude Oil call options tucked away if you have some spare cash.

(7)

If you are not a regular reader of Michael Totten's truly outstanding Middle East Journal (and why not?), I recommend his latest offering The Rings on Zarqawi's Finger.

Michael is going to be able to dine out on this time in the Middle East for a very long time, methinks. Damn, I wish blogs were around in the 1990's.

(36)

The latest antics by the Iranian Pasdaran in the Strait of Hormuz doing their damnedest to get the USN to fire on them has me a tad baffled. In this era of near omnipresent video footage, the chance of this being a questionable 'Tonkin Gulf' incident is greatly reduced (so please, if you have Bush Derangement Syndrome, resist the urge to comment), therefore it does seem like this was a real action by the Iranians... so presumably they are doing this for a reason rather than some desire to get themselves shot full of holes just for the hell of it. But what reason is that exactly? Or even approximately?

So what is the upside for Iran in this in military or political terms? This is not a question I have an answer for. If they actually want to start a war, all that will take is a single Silkworm missile launch, so what is this idiocy setting out to achieve? Also whilst the USN clearly showed commendable restraint, I am astonished that they did not fire on the Pasdaran boats given the descriptions of what they did and given recent memories of what happened to the USS Cole.

(8)

As I sit here warm and safe at Christmas I cannot help but think of those of you who are far from home and have placed your lives on the line to make the world a better place. There is every appearance we are well on the way to Victory In Iraq this coming year and I sincerely hope you are all home and safe with your families this time next year.

I send my very special Merry Christmas to our rough men and women on the frontiers.

(58)

This remark was made by some individual called jsbachUSA at the Guardian's Comment is Free site:

But if the Arabs choose to attack Israel with conventional weapons and Israel loses, so be it. As the cliche goes those that live by force die by force. Even if Israel ceases to exist, as long as it doesn't nuke the world in a spasm of anger in the process, Jews will still be welcome and prosper in many part of the world, just like they did for thousands of years. The end of the Israel mistake will not be a bad thing.

"Just like they did for thousands of years".

Priceless.

(14)

Some time ago I wrote a piece here about whether Mark Steyn had exaggerated the threat of a fast-growing Muslim population in Europe (I argued that demographic prediction is a notoriously inexact science); I argued, and still do, that it is a bit odd for a conservative skeptic on doomongering scares like global warming to be so keen on pushing a doomongering prediction of his own. But I also maintain that while Steyn may be guilty at most of extreme pessimism, he's no racist. Islam is a body of ideas (including some very bad ones); it makes universal claims about the place of men and women in the world that are designed to apply to the entire universe. If humans had terraformed Mars, you'd be certain that radical islamists would be keen to convert the people who lived there. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with race.

So to accuse him of racism on the basis of a quote not by Steyn but by someone else is pretty stupid. And to then not issue a short, honest apology but then to more or less recycle the racism charge in a long, meandering post, is even worse. And that is what the blogger, Jim Henley, has done. I used to read his blog quite a bit; I disagree partly with his strict non-interventionist foreign policy although I think his argument that "Hayek does not stop at the water's edge", suggesting that intervenionism is as dumb in foreign policy as it is with domestic affairs, is generally wise. But in this latest case, Jim has made a royal ass of himself over this issue and continues to dig a hole in the ground for himself. A shame, because there is a reasonable case to be made criticising Steyn, but this is not the way to do it.

(64)

A Muslim lawyer in Canada is trying to use the profoundly illiberal notion that 'contempt and hatred' should be criminal offences (which are by definition 'thoughtcrimes'), to silence Mark Steyn for his critical remarks about Islam. Bizarrely, the move to sanction Steyn is being billed as a 'human rights' action. That said, I suppose it is indeed a 'human rights' action in the perverse sence that the intention is to abridge Steyn's human right to express his opinions in favour of allowing Islamists to have a veto over anyone printing anything they dislike.

Well, that sort of fascistic behaviour makes me both hold the likes of Faisal Joseph and the Canadian Islamic Congress in utter contempt and to hate them. I suppose I better give my lawyer a heads up then. Or then again, as it is their behaviour which makes me hold them in contempt and hatred, can I sue them for making that happen? Would that actually be any more unreasonable than what they are doing?

Just askin'.

Of course do not kid yourself that thoughtcrimes do not get prosecuted in Britain, or that it is only something Islamofascist lawyers do to us non-believers, because sadly nothing could be further from the truth.

(51)

On the BBC Newsnight television programme on Wednesday evening, the host, Jeremy Paxman, was joined by a Sudanese government official working in Britain, and a young fellow from the Muslim Council of Britain, to discuss the plight of a woman who faces the prospect of being jailed or flogged with 40 lashes for the crime of allegedly insulting Islam.

You can read the details of her supposed misdemeanour here. At the very worst, this woman is unwise for not realising the depths of mental insanity that is gripping the country she has chosen to live in, but she is guilty of nothing in my eyes. Quite what the British government does about this, including the possible use of military action, is another matter. At the very least this country should persuade any remaining Britons to get out of Sudan, break off diplomatic relations.

What I found so interesting about the BBC show last night was Paxman's performance. He sat in the middle of these two men as they "debated" the issue of whether the thugs of the Sudanese authorities should show "mercy" to this woman. The Sudan government guy, who spoke with a subtle hint of a grin, kept going on about how this woman should have realised the "sensitivities" of the situation; his performance was one of the most hateful that I have ever seen on such a show. The MCB guy, who seemed very young and almost terrified, was pleading in the most abject fashion for the punishment not to be carried out. No wonder, this story hardly is going to make folk think well of his faith, now is it? All the while, Paxman, who is usually an aggressive interviewer to the point of gratuitous rudeness, sat almost dumbfounded as these two men spoke. But maybe it was deliberate: from his body language I could tell that Paxman thinks that Islamists like the Sudanese official are beneath contempt. Sometimes you are glad of Mr Paxman being around for a programme like this.

(32)

Grayson Perry to be exact, a Brit artist, of the sort that makes you want to reach for the sneer quotes. But, I do give this Other Perry two cheers if not three for saying even this much:

"I’ve censored myself," Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. "The reason I haven't gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat."

This may seem like a half-arsed attack on Islam and/or Islamism, but it is way better than nothing, I think. Half an arse is better than no arse at all. These kind of remarks are adding up. The project of denouncing Islam as the evil crap that it is gradually gains ground, inch by inch, and what Other Perry says is another inch advanced. And I do mean attacking Islam, rather than merely those accused of 'betraying' it by... doing what it says. The word is gradually spreading.

If you are a serious Islamist, who does believe in doing what Islam says, we infidels, even our artists, are starting seriously to understand you. Watch out. We take our time to understand these kinds of things, but we get there, and when we do... On the other hand, if you are, as so many Muslims are, a nice person, and accordingly not a serious Islamist, but if you merely say periodically in a self-hypnotic way that you do believe in Islam, then for goodness sake read the damn stuff properly and stop saying that you believe in it. You are trying to have it both ways. Stop this. Stop encouraging something that you say you don't believe in. Make up your mind.

A good first step in denouncing Islam as the scary stuff that it is is to admit that you are scared of it, and not in any 'phobic' way but for good solid reasons. Grayson Perry has admitted this, and rather than complaining that he goes no further, I say, good on you mate, for at least going this far.

(51)

A Muslim is somebody who believes that a man called Muhammad… passed on certain revelations and instructions directly from God Himself. By logic, a non-Muslim is somebody who does not accept that Muhammad was any such prophet, and thereby rejects his teachings as not having come from God… If, contrary to Muhammad's claims (assuming he has been represented correctly), we do not believe that he was any such prophet from God, what do we truly think of the man?

Whether or not such a portrayal may appear 'gratuitous' or provoke widespread anger, it would nonetheless be a justifiable expression of dissent. Therefore, to place legal sanctions on any such piece of literature is to necessarily outlaw opposition to, and disagreement with, Islam to a logical denouement; this suggests we are implicitly calling for the abolition of the right to proclaim oneself a non-Muslim in clear and in certain terms. That is, one may still be a nominal 'non-Muslim' free of harassment, but one cannot explain and defend one's position in any significant detail without committing the act of blasphemy.

- from On the Right to Give Offence by Steve Edwards quoted today by David Thompson

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The Malaysian carmaker Proton has announced plans to develop an "Islamic car", designed for Muslim motorists.

Any suggestions as to a name?

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Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, has given an interview to the Telegraph which neatly puts on display the vast cultural gulf and complete lack of understanding on the Muslim side when they discuss how Muslim and Western cultures can learn from each other. Dr. Bari says...

"Terrorists are terrorists, they may use religion but we shouldn't say Muslim terrorists, it stigmatises the whole community. We never called the IRA Catholic terrorists."

The various global franchisees of Al Qaeda do the things they do precisely because of their interpretation of the values and imperatives of Islam. They are motivated 99% by religion and therefore they can only be correctly described as Muslim or Islamic terrorists. Describing them as 'Asian' as the BBC often does (as in "two Asian men were arrested today and held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act...") is a grotesque bit of racism, because their race and ethnicity is utterly irrelevant to why they were arrested. They were arrested because they are suspected Muslim terrorists, not Asian terrorists.

The IRA on the other hand was a secular Marxist Irish nationalist paramilitary organisation that just happened to be drawn from the Catholic community. What they were not doing was trying impose Catholicism on anyone. They were trying to end British sovereignty in Ulster and make Ulster part of the Irish Republic, hence they were called 'Republican' terrorists...Being a Catholic but supporting the Union still made you an enemy of the IRA, as many people found to their cost. This is also why opposing paramilitary outfits like the UDA were usually called 'Loyalists' paramilitaries rather than 'Protestant'. If anyone seriously thinks the Troubles in Ireland were a religious conflict, they have clearly not been paying attention. That Dr. Bari did not bother to figure this out suggests to me that like so many of his ilk, he cannot see the world through anything other than the distorting lens of religion.

Sir Salman Rushdie should never have been knighted, he says. "He caused a huge amount of distress and discordance with his book, it should have been pulped."

The 'Satanic Verses' should have been pulped by whom? I assume Dr. Bari means the State, in order to prevent 'distress and discordance'. So if a large number of non-Muslim British people find the Koran causes them "distress and discordance", as well it might, is Dr. Bari really wise to want the State to take upon itself the role of pulping books in order to sooth people's distress and prevent discord?

According to a recent report by the Policy Exchange think-tank, the bookshop at the east London Mosque, which Dr Bari chairs, stocks extremist literature.

"The bookshops are independent businesses," he says. "We can't just go in and tell them what to sell ... I will see what books they keep, if they have one book which looks like it is inciting hatred, do they have counter books on the same shelf?"

So he wants Rushdie's book pulped but is quite sanguine about Islamic books calling for violence and hatred just so long as contrary Islamic views are also available. All animals are equal but some are more equal than others, eh Dr. Bari?

He says we should look favourably upon arranged marriages and learn from Islam by become less overtly sexual and more modest. Why exactly? I met many Bosnian 'Muslims' who had learned quite the opposite lesson and saw no reason not to wear miniskirts and enjoy their sexuality rather than becoming psycho-sexual cripples.

But when I read this bit, it became clear to me that Dr. Bari was not merely well meaning but wrong:

Is stoning ever justified? "It depends what sort of stoning and what circumstances," he replies. "When our prophet talked about stoning for adultery he said there should be four [witnesses] - in realistic terms that's impossible. It's a metaphor for disapproval."

I see...

Don't worry, dear, what we are about to do to you is just a metaphor

It is pictures like that which fill my mind with homicidal rage. The Muslims depicted partially burying this Muslim woman, in preparation for her being stoned to death in accordance with the Koran, all deserve nothing less than a bullet in their brains, to be put down like rabid dogs. And when I hear people like Dr. Bari describing this practice as a "metaphor for disapproval" rather than a method of theocratic execution, my feelings towards him move from mere disagreement into transcendent loathing. Take a moment and really look at that fucking picture because that actually is how it is done: the victim is partially buried and then battered to death by having rocks thrown or dumped on them. According to Dr. Bari, if there were four witnesses, that is perfectly okay then. Try getting your head around that.

And so when a man who cannot bring himself to unequivocally condemn such barbarity tells us that we have anything whatsoever to learn from what he sees as Islam, it would be fair to say "I do not think so". As I discovered in Bosnia in the 1990's, being a Muslim and accepting the norms of western post-Enlightenment civilisation is entirely possible... 'Muslim' becomes more of an ethnic identity rather than a religious one, in which you just have to ignore large chunks of the Koran or 'interpret' them into something harmless (and face it, there are parts of the Old Testament most Christians prefer to gloss over too). The key is that the Bosnian Muslims became more and more secular (i.e. less religious), more western, the west did not become more like them.

That said I am sure you can be a practising Muslim and still embrace western modernity. I would be astounded if Tory MEP Syed Kamall, who is well and truly on the libertarian wing of his party, would have any problem whatsoever condemning stoning as a barbarous throwback regardless of how many witnesses there were to a woman's infidelity. People like Syed have simply grafted many of the best bits of the European enlightenment onto their religion and as a result made themselves wholly compatible with any pluralistic tolerant society. Is it still Islam? Well I am sure Syed would say it is and I have no reason to doubt him.

But sadly the Pakistani and Saudi flavour of Islam that Dr. Bari is part of have done nothing of the sort and show no signs they actually want to embrace modernity at all. Their notions of Islam, which is clearly the most evangelical version of the religion, is a toxic political and philosophical creed that is simply incompatible with liberal modernity and Dr. Bari's equivocation about stoning people to death tells you everything you need to know about where he is coming from intellectually.

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I was watching the Channel 4 news coverage of the state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain, when something I saw nearly made me fall off my chair laughing.

So what does the British Army band for the guard of honour strike up as The Man himself steps out of his limo to high-five Her Majesty?

The Darth Vader March from Star Wars (click on 'watch the report' to see for yourself). I kid you not.

Someone somewhere deserves a medal.

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For quite some while now, I have been meaning either to write this myself or to come across someone else writing this. Since the Australian blogger Russell Blackford beat me to it and I read him saying it this afternoon, here it now is:

Unfortunately, the impression has been created by many Muslim leaders that Islam seeks to control all aspects of individuals' lives and does not shrink from using secular power to achieve its aim. We are all well aware of extreme examples in recent history, such as Afghanistan under the benighted Taliban regime. Until that fear is laid to rest, it is quite rational for the rest of us to fear Islam's political ambitions - which is one reason why the word "Islamophobia" is so stupid. A phobia is an irrational fear, but secular Westerners actually have perfectly rational reasons to be at least wary of Islam ...

In my experience there is nothing quite like the best sort of Australian academic or intellectual for calling bullshit bullshit.

Forgive me if someone has already said this exact thing here already. What many writers and commenters here have definitely said many times is that much of the art of the propagandist lies in the inventing of and the destruction of words. The bad guys invent bad words and destroy good ones. We good guys invent good words and destroy bad ones. And "islamophobia" is a very bad word indeed.

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Insofar as the Americans are now winning in Iraq, as they do now seem to be, this is, first, because Al Qaeda have shot themselves in their stupid murderous feet by being stupid and murderous, and pissing off the Iraqi people; and second, because the Americans switched strategies, from (the way I hear it): sitting in nice big armed camps doing nothing except maybe training a few Iraqis to do the nasty stuff, to: getting out there themselves and doing it, thereby giving the Iraqi people something to get behind and to switch to, once they had worked out what ghastly shits AQ really are.

The first bit is very interesting, but this posting is about the second bit. Instapundit linked yesterday to this, and I particular like the first comment. Here, with its grammar and spelling cleaned up a little, it is:

The Democrats missed a great opportunity. Bush would not have changed strategy if the Dems did not win as big as they did. They could have said it was them that made Bush change to a successful strategy.

Over the summer I reread one of my favourite books of the century so far, How The West Has Won: Carnage and Culture From Salamis to Vietnam by Victor Davis Hanson (which was published in October 2001). In this, Hanson makes much of the Western habit of what he calls "civilian audit" of military affairs. Armchair complaining and grilling of often quite successful generals for often rather minor failures in the course of what often eventually turn into major victories. Sidelining Patton for winning some battles but then slapping a soldier. Denouncing Douglas Haig forever for winning too nastily on the Western Front. Votes of Confidence in the Commons during the dark days of World War 2. Most recently, General Petraeus being grilled on TV. That kind of thing.

Above all, there are the journalists, wandering around the battlefield being horrified and sending photos back of people who died during disasters, or during victories, thereby making those look like disasters also (which they were for the people who died.)

Unlike many with similar loyalties to his, who describe all this as a Western weakness, Hanson sees it as a major Western strength. Yes it is messy, and yes it is often monstrously unjust. Yes, it often results in serious mistakes and failures, especially in the short run. Yes the questions put to returning generals and presiding politicians are often crass, stupid and trivial. But the effect of all this post-mortemising and second-guessing and media grandstanding and general bitching and grumbling is to keep the West's military leaders on their metal in a way that simply does not happen in non-Western cultures.

It must really concentrate the mind of a general to know that there are literally millions of people back home who are just waiting for him to screw up, so they can crow: we told you so.

It also results in Western armies filled with people who know quite well what the plan is and what the score is, having just spent the last few hours, days, weeks or even years arguing about it all. Western armies invariably contain barrack room lawyers and grumblers, to say nothing of people who sincerely believe that they could do better than their own commanders and who say so, courtesy of those interfering journalists.

Central to the whole idea of the West is that you get better decisions, and better (because so much better informed) implementation of those decisions by the lower ranks, if lots of people argue like hell about these decisions first, during, and then again afterwards. In fact if you argue about them all the time.

Take Iraq now. The narrative that is now gaining strength goes as follows: Iraq invaded for dubious reasons, but successfully. Peace lost because no plan to win it. Two or three years of chaos and mayhem. Change of strategy. Now war may be being won. Maybe this story has not quite reached the MSM, but I believe that it soon will, if only because of bloggers like this guy and this guy.

Strangely, Hanson has, during this particular war, been one of the most vocal complainers about the complainers, so to speak. He has gone on and on about how suspect are the motives of the complainers and how ignorant they seem to be of what war is necessarily like and how bad it would be if the West lost this particular war. Yet is not the way this story may now be playing out yet further evidence of the important contribution made by anti-Western kneejerk anti-warriors to the good conduct of Western wars by the West's warriors? What these people want to do is stop the war by making the warriors give up and lose it. But what they often achieve instead is to bully the warriors into doing better, and winning. They are, so to speak, an important part of the learning experience. Hanson returns again and again to how the West often loses the early battles, but ends up winning the war.

Under heavy political pressure, President Bush switched in Iraq from a failing Plan A to what now looks as if it could be a successful Plan B. Would this switch have happened without all the pressure? Maybe, but it is surely reasonable to doubt it. The next commenter after the one quoted above says that it is still not too late for the Dems to do a switch of their own, and to start claiming that had it not been for them and all their grumbling, the switch by Bush from failure to success would never have happened. If and when they do start talking like that, they will surely have a point.

(Patrick Crozier and I recently discussed VDH in this podcast, more about which here.)

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Mick Hartley quoted at some length the other day from this TimesOnline piece by Sarah Baxter, but I have only just read the thing itself. The first few paragraphs, which Mick Hartley did not recycle, are particularly choice, and I do quote them here, now:

A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between "the left and revolutionary Islam" at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America's "earth-devouring ambitions" were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a "truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union".

Che's daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. "My father never mentioned God," she said, to the consternation of the audience. "He never met God." During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. "By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence," the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the "supreme guide" of Guevara, was also a man of God. "The Soviet Union is gone," he affirmed. "The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words."

Don't say you haven't been warned, comrade, when you flirt with "revolutionary Islam" as if it were a mild form of liberation theology. ...

LOL indeed.

I am actually quite optimistic that at least some (more) lefties will wake up, as time goes by, to the absurdity of them being in alliance with radical Islamists. The only rationale for this otherwise ridiculous arrangement is (see above) that the enemy of your enemy (the USA) is your friend, no matter what. If you really do think that the USA is the biggest baddest thing in the world and that curbing its power is the only thing that matters (think Hitler Churchill Stalin), then this alliance makes a kind of primitive sense. Although even if you do think that, encouraging the development of rampant capitalism everywhere except in the USA would make a lot more sense. That really would reduce the USA to the margins of history. But, if you think that lefty-ism is anything at all to do with positive support for civilisation, decency, freedom, female (in particular) emancipation, life being nice even if you do not submit to Islam etc., then you should surely turn your back on all such alliances.

Meanwhile, I cannot help noticing and rejoicing that those Islamists have such a genius for pissing off their potential allies. From what I have been reading, they have achieved this same feat in the last year or two with the people of Iraq, no less. Compared to that momentous own goal, if own goal it turns out to be, pissing off the Guevaras is small potatoes indeed.

Unless of course millions of lefties around the world read of this outrage and exclaim with one voice: "That does it. Not the Guevaras. How dare they silence these hereditary paragons of revolutionary virtue. We will now support the USA against the Islamists until the Islamists are utterly crushed. Then we will sort out the USA." That would change things a bit.

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I make no secret of my boundless admiration for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and so let me strongly commend an article in the International Herald Tribune called A refugee from Western Europe by Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie (the later of whom I confess I may have judged too harshly in the past).

It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society, and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, "Infidel," has been an international bestseller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in The New York Times, "Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him."

"There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice"... truly words worth burning into one's soul.

Given the craven dishonour of the Dutch government, whose promises to protect her wherever she went have proven to be worthless (as indeed the people of Srebenica discovered in 1995), if anyone knows if someone has organised a place for donations to pay for her security from the fanatical vermin who wish to silence her, I for one am certainly willing to put my money where my mouth is.

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The Israeli raid on a Syrian target earlier this month has mostly faded from the news, but to my knowledge there has been no definitive report on exactly what was bombed. My own best guesses are either a big Hezbollah staging area or a Syrian nuclear weapons related facility, but my gut guesses and ten cents will buy you a cup of coffee if you have access to a TARDIS.

This item, by a former Jerusalem Post editor is about the best discussion I have run across.

What's beyond question is that something big went down on Sept. 6. Israeli sources had been telling me for months that their air force was intensively war-gaming attack scenarios against Syria; I assumed this was in anticipation of a second round of fighting with Hezbollah. On the morning of the raid, Israeli combat brigades in the northern Golan Heights went on high alert, reinforced by elite Maglan commando units. Most telling has been Israel's blanket censorship of the story - unprecedented in the experience of even the most veteran Israeli reporters - which has also been extended to its ordinarily hypertalkative politicians. In a country of open secrets, this is, for once, a closed one.

Read the article and make up your own mind.

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In both the USA and UK, much of the debate about how to react to the military situation in Iraq really strikes me as really odd. If a person thinks the available facts indicate we are not doing well against the insurgents, surely the choices should be either:

1. Conclude the enemy will inevitably win and no military and political victory is feasible, therefore accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
2. Conclude the enemy can be beaten, but not at an acceptable cost, so accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
3. Conclude the enemy can be beaten and therefore reinforce to improve the military force levels (i.e. the 'Surge') in order to actually win

What does not make any sense to me is any talk of reducing force levels by a person who does not think we have either already won or already been irretrievably defeated... and the stated position of most politicos on both sides of the Atlantic is neither of those things.

Yet surely to argue for any reduction in military force levels in Iraq by anything less that 100% and to argue that things are not going well, is tantamount to saying you support a policy to make the allied military situation even worse.

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There is an interesting article in The Times about Ehsan Jami, a former Muslim who rejected his religion in the aftermath of 9/11. He is organising a movement to fight for the rights of people who leave the Muslim faith and as a consequence face the threat of death, as mandated by the Koran.

This is not an issue on which there can be any compromise whatsoever. However it is also an issue which needs to be highlighted not just for the sake of former Muslims but as a means to rubbish the advocates of multicultural relativism. This is an issue that must be forced down the throat of anyone who wishes to practice Islam in any civilised country.

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He could have taken his article to this conclusion but perhaps he thought the baggage that would come with it would distract from his intended points. In order for my 'friendly amendment' to make sense, it is important to understand what "multiculturalism" really means. Multiculturalism is not a recent ideology. Only the name is new. Most of you are far more familiar with it as "separate but equal". Wikipedia says:

Multiculturalism is an ideology advocating that society should consist of, or at least allow and include, distinct cultural and religious groups, with equal status.

Separate but equal ... segregationism. Multiculturalism as an ideology is diametrically opposed to integration and assimilation. Some have noted a difference in the formation of terrorists in America as compared with Europe but without necessarily attributing it to America's still comparatively high cultural emphasis and expectation of newcomers to assimilate.

The absence of significant terrorist attacks or even advanced terrorist plots in the United States since Sept. 11 is good news that cannot entirely be explained by increased intelligence or heightened security. It suggests America’s Muslim population may be less susceptible than Europe’s Muslim population, if not entirely immune, to jihadist ideology. In fact, countervailing voices may exist within the American Muslim community.

So what does this have to do with Richard Miniter?

He wrote an excellent article published in The American Legion Magazine reviewing several researcher's findings on what traits terrorists have in common.

Miniter says [my underscore]:

Terrorism is an extension of politics by deadly means. Its goals are inherently political, not economic. The chief aim of most significant terrorist campaigns – from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka to al-Qaeda – is to force a government to yield sovereign control to the terror group over some slice of territory. ... These are not economic goals, but political ones.

I emphasized that point because wherever control is extended, whether in the banlieues of France, by withdrawal of troops from other regions by Spain, or communities anywhere in the first world where policing is stymied and made ineffective by a cultural barrier, terrorists have achieved their goal and are ready to extend their ambitions.

In his review of the studies, Miniter makes a list of three phases in the making of a terrorist.

Alienation. Sageman’s sample reveals that 80 percent are in some way totally excluded from the society in which they live. They are foreign students who do not fit in, or they are immigrants to Europe who do not assimilate. Seventy percent of the terrorists in Sageman’s sample joined a terror group when they were living outside their home countries.

This is where multiculturalism excels. By preventing pressures for, and benefits of assimilation, multiculturalism creates and entrenches precisely the metrocosms where terrorism best germinates. Healthy societies embrace newcomers. While sometimes sloppy or crude, this social embrace is always far better in the long run than encapsulating aliens in a cocoon of 'respect'. This misguided segregation and self censorship is the surest way to leave people from other cultures feeling alien and unwelcome.

Personal bonds. Eighty-eight percent of terrorists in the Sageman study are related by blood, marriage or friendship to other terrorists. Sixty percent worship at one of 10 mosques worldwide or attended one of two now-closed schools in Indonesia. "You’re talking about a very select, small group of people," Sageman concludes.

Like this one, perhaps? Once a mindset of terrorism has caught flame, it needs protection and encouragement to develop. It benefits from cultural isolation with highly constrained outside contact and networks independent of the host culture. There must be cultural barriers in place that confine bonding and loyalties to the like-minded. Terrorism cannot thrive in a diverse and interactive community where the structure of the society compels interaction with the larger community. We see this also in some communities in the US where it is considered preferable to shield a violent criminal than to 'snitch' to the outside police.

Group dynamics. Once a network of friendships evolves into a cell, certain group dynamics take over. Cell members feel they cannot betray their friends. The suicide bombers in Spain are a perfect example, Sageman writes. "Seven terrorists sharing an apartment and one saying, 'Tonight we’re all going to go, guys.' Individually, they probably would not have done it.

Once the mindset is established and the ambition is formed, it needs to grow, protected, so that it can finish its material and spiritual phase of preparation. It must be located in a place wherethe law and law enforcement is held at bay and, when it cannot be, is at least unable to recognize or understand the dynamics and significance of what little it does see. Terrorism comes from a social group that seals itself against outside discovery and investigation.

Multiculturalism allows each layer of protection to exist like a matryoshka doll. The inner most doll is the terrorist with each of the outer dolls representing another of the necessary shells protecting it. It is this final phase at which most of our interventions are occurring. It should be small consolation to us that we are catching terrorists only after they leave the protection of the many shells and begin taking position for their attack, when we are simultaneously harboring the incubation of a steady supply of them as a consequence of our multicultural policies.

We need to recognize Multiculturalism for what it is. "Separate but equal" in a politically correct wrapper.

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Correlli Barnett, a long-standing critic of the Coalition overthrow of Saddam's Ba'ath dictatorship, gives us this in this week's Spectator:

"In Saddam's strictly secular Iraq, al-Qa'eda and other forms of Islamist extremism were ruthlessly put down. Is it not plainer every month that we would all (including Iraqis) now be much better off if Saddam Hussein had been left in power,but under continued allied air surveillance?"

The regular trope that Saddam was a "strictly" secular leader won't wash. The "strictness" was in fact pretty variable. What is Barnett trying to say, that Hussein kept copies of the complete works of Voltaire and Richard Dawkins under his bed? Surely, to be serious, Saddam was capable and willing to use and invoke religion when it suited his purposes; I have no idea whether he thought there was a supreme being or not, but frankly, what consolation would it be to the tens, hundreds of thousands of people who were brutalised by his rule to be told that he was "strictly" secular? The Marsh Arabs, the Shiites, the Kurds and other groups may want to ask Mr Barnett what benefit they had from being oppressed by a "secular" ruler. Stalin was "strictly secular", as was Mao, at least as far as I know.

In fact, this argument is so silly that it got me wondering about what exactly is so marvellous about "strictly" secular regimes that cause havoc on a mass scale; Stalin's Russia, for example, with its attendant mass famines, the Gulag, and the rest, surely drives a stake through the notion that the absence of revealed religion automatically brings a better state of affairs. I am a lapsed Christian, and no admirer of much that goes under the name of religion (that's puttting it mildly, ed), but there are so many examples of evil, secular regimes, that it is hard to summon breath to point this rather obvious fact to someone like Barnett.

Then there is this claim that Iraqis and others would have been "much better off" with the old brute in power. That is frankly impossible to judge, and sitting here in the comfort of my apartment, is not one I feel fit to make, but then neither does Mr Barnett. I guess the henchmen who ran Saddam's torture chambers and his security services feel that their circumstances have taken a big turn for the worse; George Galloway and the various other lowlifes clearly may mourn his passing; arms dealers in the West, East and elsewhere may rue the missed orders and deals no longer struck (that includes Britain, I am ashamed to say), but if Barnett wants to make this claim with seriousness, he needs to weigh the costs of what is now happening in Iraq with the toll of the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, the gassing of villagers in northern Iraq, etc. And he needs to consider whether, and for how long, Saddam's regime could have lasted, even without sanctions, and what would have happened thereafter.

The other problem I have is Barnett's casually thrown-in comment about the Allied air surveillance - he means the "no-fly zones" in the north and south of Iraq. They cost money to enforce, there was exchange of fire between the airforces and the Iraqi forces on the ground (breaches of the 1991 Ceasfire, for those who bleat about the "illegal" invasion of 2003). It is naive to imagine those flights could have remained indefinitely, or have been enforceable beyond a certain point. Sooner or later, the air cover would have been reduced, leaving those in the north and the south to the tender mercies of Saddam's/his son's forces on the ground. Not a happy prospect.

There are good arguments to be made against the war: Saddam posed us no immediate threat; his armed forces were degraded after 1991 and there were more serious threats around which required more of our attention. There are also prudential grounds to avoid war if possible, starting with the old adage, which ought to be familiar to libertarians: the law of unintended consequences. I have found myself, more than once, rueing the entire enterprise as an object lesson in the folly of interventionism and chided myself from falling off the wagon in this respect. But the only problem is that I start getting those neo-con urges as soon as apologists for dictatorship like Barnett put pen to paper. The anti-war folk may have many arguments in their favour, but so many of them give me the creeps.

(Update: topic heading changed: this article has nothing to do with Korea!)

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What I find so infuriating about the situation in Southern Iraq is that it was all so avoidable, and by that I do not mean by not getting involved in the first place. Clearly I was wrong to assume that just because the British government did the right thing helping with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, they would do what was needed to actually secure victory in the aftermath and focus Britain's resources on achieving military success against the Iranian based insurgents in their area of responsibility. Silly me.

What US generals see, however, is a close ally preparing to "cut and run", leaving behind a city in the grip of a power struggle between Shia militias that could determine the fate of the Iraqi government and the country as a whole. With signs of the surge yielding tentative progress in Baghdad, but at the cost of many American lives, there could scarcely be a worse time for a parting of the ways. Yet the US military has no doubt, despite what Gordon Brown claims, that the pullout is being driven by "the political situation at home in the UK".

A senior US officer familiar with Gen Petraeus's thinking said: "The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it. Britain is in a difficult spot because of the lack of political support at home, but for a long time - more than a year - they have not been engaged in Basra and have tried to avoid casualties.

"They did not have enough troops there even before they started cutting back. The situation is beyond their control.

It is not like Britain lacks the troops to send in order to apply the needed force to Basra and its environs. What exactly are the 23,000 British soldiers defending Rheindahlen, Saxony and Westphalia from at the moment? It is extraordinary that the standard response to things getting rough militarily these days is not to reinforce but rather to cut back in-theatre thereby increasing the pressure of those troops left behind... hardly an approach calculated to bring success.

I thought the one thing the damn state was capable of was waging wars, particularly ones of its own choosing. If it cannot even do that, what the hell use is it? Even less than I thought, and that is saying something.

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Paul Staines takes a very gloomy view of the situation in Britain's two wars

I take no pleasure in reporting this, but it seems to be going unsaid in the British press. British forces are painted, particularly by broadcasters, as having achieved a measure of success in Basra due to superior British peace-keeping techniques honed in Northern Ireland.

The truth is very different. To quote from a report;

Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors," a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.

The Washington Post reported a senior U.S. intelligence official yesterday saying that "The British have basically been defeated in the south".

The article went on to say that British forces

... are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.

In May Blair visited the Basra HQ and came under mortar attack - not a sign of pacification.

The head of the armed forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, told the BBC that success depends "upon what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place... I'm afraid people had, in many instances, unrealistic aspirations for Iraq, and for the south of Iraq." The reality is that once British forces exit Basra the fighting will escalate into a full-scale civil war: Mission failure.

This begs the question - what now is the plan in Afghanistan? They are a people who fought the Red Army and won. The Soviets were brutal and were still defeated. Is NATO going to match and exceed that brutality in pursuit of "victory"? Afghanistan should be monitored closely and elements that present a clear and present external danger should be eliminated. It is not the job of NATO to impose Western values by force as Rome's Imperial Armies once imposed Roman law.

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9/11 was blowback. It was blowback for the USA making movies featuring nudity. It was blowback for rock and roll and Jack Daniels and hog-roasts and pornography and Marilyn Monroe and Baywatch. It was blowback for not being part of a caliphate. Mohammed Atta was an architect(!) and what really wound him up was that in his native Cairo the Hilton Hotel and the Bank of America towered over the medieval mosques. Oh Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine always gets dragged up as a "legitimate" grievance but that's pure window dressing. Why has no Arab state done a bloody thing to aid the Palestinians? And by the way, my definition of "aid" does not include bunging $25000 to the family of a "martyr" who has blown up in a Pizza Hut. The PA has basically been bank-rolled by the EU and oddly enough not in fact by their fellow Arabs and brothers in Islam of the Arab League. Why do you think the oil sheiks didn't pony up the dough?

- Regular commenter Nick M in this thread.

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But that wasn't quite his intention. He was attempting to declare a failure but accidentally got his facts right. On Sunday's Meet the Press with Tim Russert, a debate waged between Senators Jim Webb and Lindsay Graham resulted in the following statement by Senator Webb.

And with respect to al-Qaeda, quite frankly, al-Qaeda didn’t come to Iraq to try to destroy a democracy. That’s a very, very flimsy democracy there. We all recognize that. Al-Qaeda came to Iraq because the United States was in Iraq, and the people in al-Anbar are not aligning themselves with the United States. It’s “The enemy of the enemy is my friend.” This hasn’t been the Iraqi military, the national military that’s been taking out al-Qaeda. It’s been a redneck justice. It’s been these sectarian groups out there who don’t like al-Qaeda. And if we leave, they still will not like al-Qaeda.

His statement is right on so many points, it's more than a little heartening.

First, democracy or no, Al-Qaeda is in Iraq to attack the United States. Where would the Senator rather rather have them attack us? Second, he is correct that this is a case of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." But in terms of Al-Qaeda, that is called aligning themselves with the United States. We share a common enemy and are fighting it together. That is all "ally" means. What is he expecting? Conversions? Third, al-Anbar is a Sunni province. al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization. Sunnis have been their support base. And now a major part of that support base is turning against al-Qaeda. The biggest sign of success is when we no longer need to count on the military solutions but rather, the support base itself turns against the terrorists. Yet he is bemoaning the absence of a military component to this accomplishment. Senator Webb has done us the favor of highlighting some outstanding signs of imminent success although it was rather ambitious of him to spin them the way he did. It is also difficult to reconcile his belief that this revolt by the support base is "redneck justice" with the following statement taken from his own website.

Looking at these [Viet Nam] examples, you come to a conclusion about the use of force in this situation. In my opinion, we need to articulate clearly that we do not have a quarrel with the Muslim world. But the part of the Muslim world that considers itself at war with us must be on notice. Who are these people? They are the ones conducting terrorist activities and those training and providing logistical support to them. All those people, in my opinion, should be fair game. Over time, we should see the people who are conducting this international campaign of terrorism being cut away from their support base. Many good people were cut away from the support base of the South Vietnamese government. I think there’s a direct parallel.

Senator Webb is delivering good news suggesting that resistance to terrorism may soon be strong enough for us to reduce support levels. But he sounds greatly disappointed that this resistance is at the grass roots, and not a military accomplishment. Why do I suspect that if it was a military accomplishment, he would be lamenting the absence of grass roots support?

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I have come up with yet another in a long line of 'Modest Proposals' for solving world problems, this time for successful suicide bombers.

When someone is prepared to kill themselves because their religious belief assures them of an eternal party or an eternal peace or large numbers of subservient soon to be non-virgins, there is not a great deal that can be done to sway them from their evil course... or so one would think.

I propose hitting below the belt.

What is important to these folk? What do they want? Why do they do what they do?

They want everyone to be believers of their one true faith.

What else is important to them?

Family.

My modest proposal is a very biblical one. When a terrorist succeeds in not only blowing themselves up but in also killing innocent civilians we should round up their family, nuclear or extended as is appropriate to the culture; men, woman, children and elderly;and give them a very simple choice:

Convert to the religion represented by the majority of the innocents killed... or die.

This strikes at the heart of the belief system of these murdering swine. The message would be that success is a failure worse than their worst nightmare. How many Hamas would want their daughter converting to Judaism and then marrying a doctor? Or even worse... a lawyer!

Thus Sunni wouldst become Shia; Shia wouldst become Sunni; Palestinians would become Jews... and for that matter if any Christian committed a similar heinous act, the same would apply to them.

Fair is fair.

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I just ran across the apocalyptic biblical quote:

And in those days shall men seek death and not find it and shall desire to die and death shall flea from them - Revelations 9:6

In a sudden heavenly flash of deep preternatural understanding and prognostication the true meaning of this ancient prophecy suffused my being.

We are going to capture all the suicide bombers and lock them up for life! I also inferred from it that we will soon have the nanotechnology necessary to extend life to lengths most find unimaginable. This will allow us to lock up these self-portable munitions for even longer.

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There is a very interesting article in the Telegraph about middle class Islamic terrorism. For me the 'money quote' came from Ed Husain, a former member of the extremist Hizb ut-Tahir group.

Mr Husain, whose book, The Islamist, exposed the workings of Hizb ut-Tahir, is contemptuous of the idea that the latest plots were inspired by the West's intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. "This is just an excuse. They reject Western culture full stop, not just 'slags in night clubs'. They would have supported the bombing of Muslims attending the cinema in Cairo in the 1950s. They do not want Muslims to enjoy social freedoms. If it was not Iraq they would cite Chechnya. Or Palestine. These are angry men. Accommodation is not an option. It has to be containment or annihilation."

That is what makes these people so different from the IRA or ETA or any of the West's entirely indigenous terrorists: there can be no possible meeting of the minds or compromise or middle ground to be found with the current crop of Wahhabi inspired mass murderers. It really is them or us.

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The attempted London bombings were, we will be told, a consequence of US/UK actions Iraq or Palestine or Afghanistan or something or other about George Dubya Bush or Halliburton or Global Capitalism or Social Injustice. You may be certain that all these bullshit excuses will be trotted out by the disingenuous left who crave the accusations or the deeply provincial Americocentric faction of libertarianism who pretend bad people will leave you alone if only you stay in your mountain bunker in the Ozarks, do not ever send soldiers abroad and refuse to trade or interact with the rest of the world.

However I wonder what these people will make of the possibility that the attacks could well have been about Britain daring to grant an honour to Salman Rushdie. Yet again I am delighted that Rushdie was so honoured, thus subjecting so many of western civilisations' enemies, domestic and foreign, to the harsh light in which their true natures are revealed.

Of course I have no doubt this will all be used to bring in yet more regulation of our lives, reducing even more of our already grotesquely abridged civil liberties whilst leaving us not even slightly safer.

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I for one was delighted when I heard Salman Rushdie was going to be knighted... which might sound odd given that I regard the puffed up popinjay as a caricature of the very worst traits of the 'meejah' class, truly an example of how the empty vessel makes the most noise (though I cannot fault his taste in crumpet).

But the fact UKGov did something that was so obviously going to put one in the eye of the Islamists is a good think in and of itself regardless. Like the Mohammed cartoons incident and its aftermath, the reaction across the Muslim world to this serves as a very useful reminder that the 'moderate Islam' is a myth (for a superb account of this 'from the inside', I recommend Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and that not only helps in the battle against intolerant Islam directly, it helps in the culture war closer to home against Islam's host of useful idiots in the western world.

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The book is now officially open...

Muslim radicals burned an effigy of Queen Elizabeth Tuesday as Pakistan summoned the British ambassador over Salman Rushdie's knighthood and Iranian hardliners turned their fury on the monarch.

...so time to place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

Will the British government buckle? Yes or No?

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The Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, has issued a strong rebuke to the Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister for saying that the UK's decison to award a knighhood to author Salman Rushdie was a justification for suicide bombing.

Mr. Haniyeh was quoted as saying:

"Ejaz-ul-Haq is a dog. The whole world knows that the reason for suicide bombing is the suffering of the Palestinian people. Now he is saying it is Salman Rushdie. Does he want the world to simply forget our plight? Is he in the pay of the Zionists now?"

The row has prompted EU officials to express concern that there was a "risk of public confusion" as to the genuine justifications for suicide bombers and other terrorist acts. EU Ministers are expected to convene an emergency session to determine the real root cause of terrorist acts which member states will be required to officially endorse.

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In Lebanon media bias goes to a whole new level:

A Lebanese TV news presenter has been sacked over comments in which she gloated over the assassination of anti-Syrian politician Walid Eido.

The presenter, who has not been named, then went on to name a Lebanese MP who would be assassinated next.

She was unaware that her microphone was on and that the comments were being broadcast live.

That is taking character assassination way over the top.

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If you are not regularly reading Michael Yon, you are really missing out on something interesting.

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I am not particularly in favour of sucking up to the Saudis, or of political subsidy for the British arms industry; but can someone please explain why this is vicious nasty corriuption that ought to be internaltionally banned even if it is the custom where the deal is done, and this is a UK local government policy raising a mere £2,500 million a year, in extortion bribes grateful contributions from property developers (on top of which HMRC now is trying to arrange to take a further20% rake-off supplement)?

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"Blair calls for homegrown Imams"

A quiet revolution is taking place in this green and pleasant land. In allotments and smallholdings all over the country the age-honoured and customary rows of marrows and ornamental cabbages are rapidly being replaced by a new and exotic species.

Spurred on by a combination of Tony Blair's exhortations and the availability of generous government grants, farmers and market gardeners from Penzance to Perthshire are nurturing the first green shoots of what they hope will be a bumper crop of Muslim clerics.

Competition between growers is already hotting up as early adopters of the new fashion vie with each other for horticultural prestige. At the 78th Annual Chipping Sodbury Country Fair, Mrs. Gladys Whinge of Tetbury won First Prize for her record-breaking 254lb Imam which she calls 'Yusuf'.

"The important thing is to use plenty of steaming, fresh horse manure", said Mrs. Whinge "so I read the Guardian to him every day".

The retail markets is already gearing up for what they hoping will be a huge demand for the homegrown Imams in 2008 with supermarket chain Waitrose leading the way by announcing that locally-produced Imams will be sold under their new 'Koranic' range.

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Which Western country will be the first to become an Islamic state?

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There is an excellent article in the Telegraph by Charles Moore called What if Israelis had abducted BBC man?, addressing the morally demented attitude amongst the tranzi media and government set.

But just suppose that some fanatical Jews had grabbed Mr Johnston and forced him to spout their message, abusing his own country as he did so. What would the world have said?

There would have been none of the caution which has characterised the response of the BBC and of the Government since Mr Johnston was abducted on March 12. The Israeli government would immediately have been condemned for its readiness to harbour terrorists or its failure to track them down. Loud would have been the denunciations of the extremist doctrines of Zionism which had given rise to this vile act. The world isolation of Israel, if it failed to get Mr Johnston freed, would have been complete.

If Mr Johnston had been forced to broadcast saying, for example, that Israel was entitled to all the territories held since the Six-Day War, and calling on the release of all Israeli soldiers held by Arab powers in return for his own release, his words would have been scorned. The cause of Israel in the world would have been irreparably damaged by thus torturing him on television. No one would have been shy of saying so.

But of course in real life it is Arabs holding Mr Johnston, and so everyone treads on tip-toe. Bridget Kendall of the BBC opined that Mr Johnston had been "asked" to say what he said in his video. Asked! If it were merely an "ask", why did he not say no?

Whatever one thinks of Israel's policies on various issues, the nauseating double standards so consistently in play by so many 'news' organisations are something that need to be pointed out often and unapologetically. Charles Moore is to be commended for his article. Read the whole thing.

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Guy Herbert this morning posted a piece commenting on Australian Prime Minister John Howard's decision to "ban" the Australian cricket team from touring Zimbabwe later this year. I generally have little time for Mr Howard, but in this case I can not personally be very harsh on him. What clearly happened is that the Australian Cricket Board (which these days prefers to call itself "Cricket Australia") begged him at length the make such an announcement, and he eventually gave in despite considerable resistance, and he did this because the alternatives open to him were probably worse. I have no disagreement with Guy that the outcome is essentially a dishonourable one, but the other easy options were worse. Some background.

In international cricket, there are only three countries for who the game is directly profitable. These are India, Australia, and England (in decreasing order of profitability). The other countries that regularly play international cricket make money by playing the national teams of these three countries, and then selling television rights and other sponsorship opportunities for these matches. Thus it is very important to (say) Sri Lanka for (in particular) India and Australia to regularly tour Sri Lanka and play matches.

In order to assure its members of some sort of regular cricket and regular income, the International Cricket Council (ICC) has in recent years created a mandatory tour program, requiring each of its members to play each other both home and away over a five year period. Reactions to this rule have varied, and compliance with it has been variable. The rule allows two sides to postpone a series if both are in agreement, which has allowed India and Australia to at times get their way by offering more money or more matches if the matches are played at some undefined "later". However, if a team takes a hard line, then (at least theoretically) the other side must tour, or must pay a fine to the ICC which will be then forwarded to the host team as compensation for the lost revenues from the matches that were to have been played. The ICC's rules allow for two situations in which a fine is not payable: firstly in cases where there is a genuine issue of safety - tours of both Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been called off for this reason in times of high political tension and terrorist threat - and in cases where a government forbids a tour. This second rule has come into play more in cases where Zimbabwe were potentially the touring side, most notably when Zimbabwean players were refused visas by the government of New Zealand.

Zimbabwe are a full member of the ICC. In the mid 1990s Zimbabwe had quite a decent cricket team (of mostly but certainly not entirely white players) but in the years since then Zimbabwean cricket has gone the way of most other things in Zimbabwe. At the demand of the government, white players were pushed out of the team, as were any non-white players who dared to say anything critical of the government. Officials who ran the game and actually cared about cricket were replaced with compliant government yes-men. The organisation of cricket in Zimbabwe became a shambles, and we are not sure right now to what extent the domestic cricket is even taking place. (The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians has recently been complaining about being unable to get scorecards for the domestic Logan Cup, which it has documented with no trouble for over a century). Inevitably, the standard of the national team has dropped from "decent, but not world beating", to utterly woeful. Their performance in the recently completed World Cup was dreadful, and they have dropped to 11th in the world rankings, way behind the rapidly improving Bangladesh, and behind even Ireland, a side just consisting of part time Australian and English expatriates and who are not a full member of the ICC.

However, through all this Zimbabwe has maintained its full membership of the ICC. Zimbabwe has been "temporarily suspended" from playing test matches due to its declining standards, but it is still playing one day international cricket, and other teams are expected to tour in order to play these games. Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe this year.

The obvious thing to do would be to expel Zimbabwe from the ICC, not necessarily on political grounds explicitly, but simply because cricket in Zimbabwe is no longer being administered and organised properly, that the board is no longer independent of government, and because selections are no longer taking place on the basis of merit. However, there are two reasons why this has not happened. The first is that there is a "third world" versus "first world" divide in international cricket, and some aspects of the administration of the game are a post-colonial nightmare. For many years Australia and England (and, prior to their expulsion from international cricket in the apartheid days, South Africa) had the right of veto over any decisions made in the ICC, and the other countries still have a lingering resentment of this. Once this veto was abolished, the Asian cricketing powers were eager to elevate other countries to membership of the ICC so as to gain a voting majority against the former "colonial" powers, and this is one factor that led to the elevation of Zimbabwe in the first place. Expelling Zimbabwe would increase the voting power of the "first world" bloc, and many people in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka do not want this.

Secondly, what are the objections to Zimbabwe playing international cricket? For one thing, Zimbabwe is ruled by a dictatorship that restricts civil liberties. Well, other members of the ICC include Bangladesh and Pakistan, who are not exactly wonderful on this score either. South Africa is ruled by people who consider Robert Mugabe to be one of their old comrades in arms. If Zimbabwe were kicked out of world cricket on these grounds, then this would "set a bad example" to Pakistan and Bangladesh in particular. Did I mention that the governing body of cricket in Pakistan is traditionally a branch of the army and the head of its board is usually a general? That complicates matters further, and rules out the "We should expel Zimbabwe because the government controls cricket in the country" argument. The government of Sri Lanka appoints that nation's cricket board too (although not through the army). As for "Zimbabwe selects players on something other than merit", well, South Africa does that too. (Affirmative action with respect to black and coloured players). One would think that "Zimbabwe should be expelled because Zimbabwean cricket is a shambles" might be enough, but the organisation of cricket in a number of countries is a shambles (most notably Pakistan again, also (sadly) the West Indies). The ICC is also a shambles, having demonstrated in its organisation of the recently completed World Cup that it is an organisation that could not collectively get pissed in Porto)

Australia was scheduled to tour Zimbabwe later this year. The Australian players did not want to make the tour. The Australian government definitely did not want the tour to go ahead.

However, until recently it stated that as Cricket Australia is a private organisation, then it is not the government's job to decide. The Australian board mainly cares about making as much money as possible, but in the crunch it did not want to tour either, and really would have just preferred that the whole issue would go away. However, it did not especially want to upset the ICC, and it did not really want to pay a fine. Quite typically, the board asked the government to solve its problem for it.

When it initially got this request from Cricket Australia, the Australian government made comments about how it did want the tour to go ahead, and about how it might be willing to "indemnify" Cricket Australia against a fine from the ICC. What this means is that Cricket Australia would have cancelled the tour as this is what the government wanted and that the government would then have paid the fine on its behalf. This would have been an easy enough thing for the government to do - after all it was only taxpayers' money,. However, when the government said this, it had not comprehended the full implications, which was that the fine would be paid to the Zimbabwean board in compensation, and that as the Zimbabwean board is controlled by Robert Mugabe, paying the fine would essentially mean giving a gift of $2 million directly to Robert Mugabe.

Once the Australian government comprehended this, paying the fine was not a feasible option. The Australian government was not going to give Robert Mugabe a $2 million gift. The only other option was to take advantage of the ICC's rule that a government ban could stop a tour without a fine. In defence of John Howard, I believe he genuinely did this as a last resort. The alternative was worse.

However, from the point of view of Cricket Australia, there was another alternative, which was to simply withdraw from the ICC. The ICC is very culpable concerning Zimbabwe. The participating teams in the recent World Cup and other ICC tournaments have been given a share of the profits of the tournament. This includes Zimbabwe. The ICC is already partly funding Robert Mugabe, and Australia is partly implicated simply by participating in the ICC's tournaments. The recent World Cup was such an organisational debacle that there is no great loss in not participating in future such events. If Australia were to leave, the ICC certainly could not stop Australia playing its traditional series against England, and if they tried then the national boards of England, New Zealand and probably other nations as well would follow Australia out of the ICC. Australian cricket is also based on expectations of receiving money from playing India frequently (next January's series between Australia and India is anticipated to be extremely lucrative), but it is hard to imagine that India would not find a way to continue playing Australia - they need the revenues they receive from playing such games

What Australia should have done was called the ICC's bluff. It may have suffered some short term financial insecurity as a consequence, but it would have regained control over its own destiny and would have at least fixed these kinds of problems for good.

This would have been good, because there is another cricketing crisis in the background. When Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was murdered in March after Pakistan's elimination from the World Cup. most of us speculated that the murder was in some way connected with subcontinental bookmakers, as cricket's problems with match fixing and betting were well known. I expected that this would confirm and the details would leak out relatively quickly, but it did not happen. One thing I did not take adequate notice of was a series of strange articles that were published about the religious devotion of certain members of the Pakistan team, in particular captain Imzamam-al-Haq. Apparently a significant portion of the Pakistan team were devotees of the Islamic Tablighi Jamaat movement, which stresses living a pure and authentic Islamic lifestyle and which is aggressively evangelical. Apparently the team was factionalised between devotees of this movement and non-devotees, and there were prayer rooms set up in team hotels and Tablighi Jamaat clerics mingled with the team and were present in the dressing room. Allegedly Bob Woolmer saw this as divisive and detracting from the team performance.

There have been various leaks and observations since Woolmer's death suggesting that he must have been murdered by someone he knew and who was connected to the team. The possibility is very real that he was murdered by someone in or closely connected to the team, and the reason that he was murdered was mixed in with fundamentalist Islam rather than bookmaking. There are now doubts that the final e-mail sent by Woolmer (resigning his position as coach) before he died was written by him (it does not sound like it was written by a native English speaker). which again suggest that the murderer may have been some what connected to the team, and somehow had access to his laptop. (Of course, this story has already long passed six impossible things happening before breakfast, so perhaps it was some bizarre combination of the two). The fact that we still do not know who killed Woolmer after two months does make me wonder if some sort of cover-up has gone in within the Pakistan team, and if so the "Islam" explanation becomes more likely and the bookmaking explanation less so, I think

I do not know what happened, obviously. The story gets stranger and stranger. It may be that the state of the Pakistan cricket team is symptomatic of the decay and radicalisation of the country of Pakistan every bit as much as the decay of the Zimbabwean cricket team is as symptomatic of the decay of that country. If so, countries such as Australia and England should not be playing Pakistan either. However great the rivalry between Pakistan and India, one cannot imagine some of these revelations increasing the eagerness of India to play Pakistan regularly either. If the ICC mandates regular tours of Pakistan, then this may well be another reason why the ICC is not an organisation that it is advantageous for cricketing authorities in Australia, England, or elsewhere to be connected to any more.

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This news<