We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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There is an interesting article on the Social Affairs Unit blog which discusses New Civilisation magazine. The magazine’s opening declaration was:
As a conflict between Islam and the West is engulfing the world in a cycle of violence, the walls between peoples are now being raised and fortified, yet the world is shrinking. I believe that New Civilisation is a unique attempt to break down the unreasonable barriers that are the tragic irony of modernity post 9/11.
Which all sounds promising. This publication has also sent me a few e-mails, though I must confess I never took any notice, though that was not because it did not sound interesting but rather due to the e-mail overload that I have to deal with from folks trying to interest Samizdata in new publications.
However Shiraz Maher does seem to have taken notice and he did not like what he found after a little digging. To see what he found take a look at his article at the Social Affairs Unit. It seems New Civilisation is a front Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation whose objective is a global totalitarian Islamo-fascist Caliphate.
The indispensible Michael Totten is blogging from Northern Israel and has some great stuff to read. And while you are at it, consider dropping a dime in his tip-jar to support his first class reportage.
Muslim ‘moderates’ in Britain are calling for changes to British foreign policy as the only way to prevent Muslim ‘extremists’ in Britain from attacking the rest of us.
This is of course the same approach used by Sinn Fein and other Republicans in Northern Ireland, who held that only by political engagement and accommodation with ‘moderate’ political figures (i.e. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness) could the wicked IRA be stopped from blowing people up. Of course the fact Sinn Fein and the IRA were actually inseparable parts of the same movement was something only a reader of the Guardian could have failed to notice.
And so a ‘moderate’ Muslim, a member of the Tory Party no less, tell us that ‘Muslim anger’ must be recognised (our old chum root causes). Is that so? Well I think increasingly it is being recognised. It is being recognised as an excuse used for getting a non-democratic Muslim veto over British foreign policies just as a majority of Muslims also appear to want a Muslim veto over freedom of expression in Britain.
If the solution to Muslim extremism in Britain being offered by ‘moderate’ Muslims is to give the extremists what they want (i.e. changes in British foreign policy), then the so-called ‘moderates’ are nothing more than the mouthpieces of the extremists they claim to reject. No doubt if given the changes they want, we will be told that only if yet more legal restrictions are placed on what we kuffir can say about Islam will we be able to to placate Muslim ‘anger’ and thereby prevent those wicked extremists from blowing us up. And homosexuals must be legislated against in order to placate those wicked extremists. And alcohol must be banned in order to…
I think it is well past time for some British anger and a great deal of it needs to be directed at the British establishment for allowing this to happen via a policy of appeasment towards domestic Islamists.
If Israel really does accept and implement a ceasefire on Monday, it will have accepted the worst of all possible worlds. If it agrees to an end to the fighting which does not disarm Hezbollah, or even push it behind the Litani River, and does not get a third party force capable of fighting Hezbollah into Southern Lebanon, it would be fair to say Israel has achieved none of its war aims whatsoever. In short, Hezbollah will have won and we will soon be seeing celebrations in the streets across the Islamic world to that effect.
The primary Israeli method of attack, a series of destructive operational level1 air strikes against Lebanon’s infrastructure, only made sense if it was intended to isolate the enemy and dislocate its logistics as an adjunct to a massive and robust attack on the ground with a significant portion of its formidable army, with the intention at crushing Hezbollah as military force.
Otherwise, what was the point of the non-tactical strikes? As Hezbollah already had large numbers of artillery rockets deployed as organic supply with its front line units (demonstrably so), the air interdiction only made sense if Israel was planning an extended campaign for as long as it took to destroy Hezbollah, which means preventing Hezbollah’s resupply. Why else blow power-stations, fuel depots, bridges, roads and runways deep into the country rather than just strike tactical targets where Hezbollah is deployed? Bringing the Lebanese transportation system to a standstill was surely done to stop movement of supply so that as Hezbollah formations expended their munitions (a process that would increase as more units were engaged directly by the Israeli army), they would quickly become much less effective due to logistic dislocation. This is ‘Air Interdiction 101’, the sort of thing military planners have understood since ‘Operation Strangle’ in Italy in 1944.
But what Israel has done so far is a robust air offensive in support of little more than a series of limited objective raids with only a small fraction of the army. This has not only failed (unsurprisingly) to destroy Hezbollah, it has failed to even displace them far enough back onto Lebanon to prevent them firing rockets into Haifa on an almost daily basis throughout this campaign.
And now, having killed a great many people but still leaving a large number of Hezbollah fighters very much alive and still in possession of both their Katyushas and the positions from which to fire them, the Israeli government plans to stop? Having weathered what Israel threw at them (but not what the Israelis inexplicably failed to throw at them), Hezbollah can, quite justifiably, claim victory and greatly enhance their stature simply by virtue of Israel failed to gain any of its publicly stated war aim.
Can anyone tell me what the hell the Israeli government is thinking?
1 = I would argue that the attacks against Lebanon’s infrastructure were ‘operational’ (i.e. above tactical but below strategic). A ‘strategic’ attack would need to be against the supply terminals, which is to say targets in Syria or Iran. I realise this is an arcane issue of military semantics
Julie Burchill is a person about whom I oscillate between revulsion and admiration but she is in good form at the moment. In an article called Bleeding-heart ignoramuses, she ridicules the British media establishments anti-Jewish diatribes and the plain stupidity of some people’s analysis of the region. In the later category she points at an article by Matthew Parris that could well be the most poorly thought out “what Israel must do” article by someone who presumably does not want the extermination of all Jews in that country. The money quote being where he suggests that in order to be ‘loved’ by international opinion, Israel must return to its pre-1967 borders… and this at a time when the existing borders scant enough protection from long range attack. Parris writes:
That settlement has to be a return to her pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure her future permanently. It would bring her back within the pale.
So presumably if only Israel would place itself at the mercy of its sworn enemies, that magnificent body of strength and moral rectitude ‘the international community’ would make everything alright… after all, what is the value of mere survival if Kofi Anan, Jacques Chirac and several thousand Guardian readers in Islington think poorly of you? To which Burchill aptly replies:
Personally, I’d far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead – and that’s what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I’ve always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I’m living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.
Indeed. When Burchill is right, damn is she right.
What I am about for argue for may strike long time readers of Samizdata as strange, given that I have written so many articles deploring racism, calling for open borders and taking various pro-immigration positions. None of my views on those things have changed one iota but clearly Britain and the western world generally has a problem with the Muslim communities in their midst. If Muslims really do share a broad consensus of opposition to free speech and the social liberalism that defines us, then Muslims are quite unlike any other community who have demonstrably integrated and assimilated over time, such as the Irish, Poles, Afro-Caribbeans, Sikhs, Hindus, Chinese, etc.. If Britain’s Muslims wish to both be separate but also have a veto over how non-Muslims are permitted to discuss them, then they are a cohesive political and social problem. So how does a tolerant, cosmopolitan, pro-immigration, free market capitalist, social individualist (‘libertarian’ if you insist) react to the threat posed by an intolerant and even barbaric cultural-religious minority in the midst of his society? Here is where I put myself ‘beyond the pale’ with some people. The short answer is… discrimination.
I have long argued that intolerant Islamic values are a problem that needs to be opposed, not accommodated. However people in the Muslim community need to be opposed not for being Muslims but for refusing to integrate into British society. As so many ethnic groups have successfully (even if not always effortlessly) integrated and assimilated into tolerant British society, the problem is not mass immigration, the problem is Islam and the antithetical values it brings. In short, the problem is Muslim mass immigration and the refusal to reciprocate tolerance for tolerance.
However it is important to keep in mind that Islam is not a race or an ethnicity, it is a religion, and therefore it is a choice. As a result, when the BBC says that the police have arrested a group of “Asian men on suspicion of terrorist offenses”, they are doing everyone a great dis-service by making a remark which is by any reasonable definition racist in the most literal sense. It does not matter that the people in question are ‘Asian’, what matters is that they are Muslim. Race and ethnicity is not the issue and to suggest otherwise is racist: the political consequences of a specific religion and its associated culture, that is the issue. → Continue reading: In praise of discrimination
There is an interesting article in Newsweek suggesting capitalism is on the march in more minds than you might think.
In France, books approved by the Education Ministry promote statist policies and voodoo economics. “Economic growth imposes a way of life that fosters stress, nervous depression, circulatory disease and even cancer,” reports “20th-Century History,” a popular high-school text published by Hatier. Another suggests Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were dangerous free-market extremists whose reforms plunged their countries into chaos and despair. Such blatant disinformation sheds new light on the debate over why it is that Europeans lag so far behind Americans in rates of entrepreneurship and job creation.
[…]
a recent poll by the IPOS Institute finds the market economy’s approval rating rising to 59 percent among Germans under 30, with only 32 percent saying the state needs to play a bigger role. Ten years ago, the figures were reversed. “The values shift is already underway,” says Bürklin. It’s about time.
Indeed it is about time. The absurdities and contradictions of the statist world view is our biggest ally and gradually more people do figure out better theories for understanding reality regardless of what they are taught.
The Channel 4 programme the other day called What Muslims Want raised a number of important issues. The presenter Jon Snow showed evidence that Muslims are not, as I had hoped, assimilating and in fact the process may be going backwards. If so, that means Muslims are unlike any other major immigrant group in Britain: Blacks, Eastern Europeans, Jews, Huguenots, Sikhs, Hindus, etc. have all become intermingled and inter-marriage is increasingly common. Not so for the Muslims. Snow also made the rather interesting distinction that most alienated Muslims in Britain are not ‘extremists’ so much as ‘separatists’: they simply want to live a separate Islamic life that draws little from British society. His argument on this was quite well made but it is also quite incorrect as I will soon explain.
Snow pointed out that there is considerable diversity of opinion amongst Muslims in Britain but there are a small number of key issues in which there is a very considerable Muslim consensus indeed, namely that of opposition to any British foreign policy that involved force being used against Muslims anywhere, opposition to free speech and opposition to common social liberalism (particularly issues relating to sexuality).
The first is an issue which should properly lie within the purview of democratic politics: at some point in the future Muslims may be able to find enough non-Muslims to support their apparently widely held views on foreign policy matters, though in truth I have my doubts. Nevertheless it is by no means impossible that British policies could one day be more to their liking. The second and third however are quite different matters. It is intolerable that any attempt even be attempted to find ‘middle ground’ on free speech and social liberalism because there can be no middle ground. Muslims say that people should ‘respect’ each other, which is clearly both a lie as that suggest they too are willing to ‘respect’ values they clearly oppose, and in any case the whole notion of respecting things you oppose is arrant nonsense. Tolerate, perhaps, but respect? No. One of the issues that seems to have a very broad basis of support, according to Jon Snow at least, is a spectacular lack of respect for people exercising social liberal values.
Now I have no problem with Muslims refusing to respect homosexuals, adulterers, women in short skirts or whatever else, because speaking personally I neither want not expect Muslim respect. I insist on their tolerance but their respect, or lack thereof, means less than nothing to me. As long as they do not try to stop women with short skirts walking down the street, or throw rocks at homosexuals and adulterers, I really do not care what they think.
But this is also where Jon Snow is incorrect to describe them as ‘separatists’. If all Muslims in Britain wanted was to live in ghettos where Muslim social norms are accepted, well I really think that is a ‘manageable’ problem. However it seems that what they also want is to prevent me, by law, from poking fun at their religion and demonstrating just how much I do not respect the things they hold dear. They insist I tolerate their beliefs, which I regard as deeply offensive barbarism based on superstitious nonsense, yet will not tolerate my belief in the unlimited nature of civil free expression, because they find what I will say offensive. They are not ‘separatists’ because they want their prohibitions on poking fun at Mohammad to also apply to me. There ain’t nothing ‘separate’ about that.
And so when Jon Snow suggests this issue is what may lead to violence and inter-communal strife, he is no doubt correct. And that may well be a process we need to go through. If the majority of the Islamic community in Britain truly does think that, they must not be accommodated, they must be utterly denied without apology and their repressive aspirations condemned.
Tolerance they get (for now), but it needs to be made clear that Muslim sensibilities do not trump secular values and they do not get a veto on what gets said about them or the things they value. They are free to respond in kind. However if that leads to violence by some extremists, well, so be it. They can say what they like about my values, I do not care and I suggest they take a similar attitude because I intend to say what I like about their values and any politician who tried to pander to them to prevent that from happening is someone to be implacably opposed.
Here is a link to a Getty image with the following information:
Caption:
Tyre, LEBANON: Rockets fired from Israel are seen falling in the outskirts of the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre, 06 August 2006. Israel’s army will carry on fighting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon until two soldiers, whose capture sparked the conflict last month, are returned, its ambassador to Washington said today. AFP PHOTO/SAMUEL ARANDA (Photo credit should read SAMUEL ARANDA/AFP/Getty Images)
Copyright: 2006 AFP
By/Title: SAMUEL ARANDA/Stringer
Date Created: 6 Aug 2006 12:00 AM
City, State, Country: Tyre, -, Lebanon
Credit: AFP/Getty Images
Collection: AFP
Source: AFP
Date Submitted: 6 Aug 2006 10:44 AM
Take a look and tell me what you think and although I do not claim to be an ‘artillery expert’, my interpretation of what that image shows is outgoing rockets (i.e. Hezbollah firing at Israel) rather than incoming rockets (i.e. Israel firing on Tyre). My reasoning is as follows… firstly the rockets are burning, suggesting launch rather than impact, secondly the back-blast is visible slightly behind the location of what I take to be the launcher rather than an impact area.
Alternative explanation: the rockets were fired by an Israeli aircraft just out-of-shot (hence rockets are still burning) and are indeed incoming fire. The reason I doubt that is the rockets seem to be producing a large signature suggesting they are long range artillery rockets (i.e. Katyusha) rather than free flight aircraft rockets (which are much smaller, do not produce such impressive flames and whose rockets burn out very quickly)
Why am I interested? Because presumably the stringer, Samuel Aranda, saw this incident (i.e. could clearly see in which direction the rockets were flying) and presumably also created the caption. Is it in fact the truth?
I wrote to Getty images asking for clarification but have received no reply yet. If there are any artillery experts out there I would be keen to hear what they think. As I have said, I am not an expert on the subject but I am sure there must be some folks out there who can confirm either that the caption is most likely correct and I am mistaken, or my interpretation is the more plausible one.
Update 1: Take a look at this image of outgoing Katyusha rockets.
Update 2: Getty have corrected the caption and now admit it was outgoing Hezbollah fire.
Over on Media Influencer, Adriana has an article called Wikiality, discussing both the rise and rise of Wikipedia and just how badly some commentators misunderstand what Wikipedia is and is not. The issue is not “can bogus content end up on Wikipedia?” (yes, it can) but rather “does it get discovered and corrected?”
Just as bloggers can write any old cobblers they want about some subject, does that mean nothing on blogs can be trusted? No, because not only are blogs generally quite open about where they are coming from (i.e. their ‘biases’), unlike MSM with their untenable claims to be ‘unbiased’, when a blog makes some questionable assertion it is subject to an army of peer reviewers who will pull apart inconsistencies and errors. Moreover the more influential the blog, the quicker and harder errors or fanciful interpretations of events are pounced on in the comments and (more importantly) on other blogs.
The rapid retraction of a photoshopped image of ‘Beirut burning’ being offered for sale by Reuters just a few hours ago indicates that the era of the deference for the purveyors of The News is well and truly over. Peer review, it is not just for blogs and wikis anymore.
Following a precision strike by bloggers from around the world, the mainstream
media’s reputation can be seen going up in photoshopped smoke in Lebanon
The astonishingly skewed reportage relating to the Middle East, and the reactions to it on the internet, reminds me of the reportage in the aftermath of 9/11 and how that changed the way a great many people understood how news is reported. The reaction to ideologically or commercially motivated massaging of facts in the mainstream media, which claimed to be objective reporting, is what more or less created the pundit blogosphere as we know it today.
The spotlight is once again on the reporters and networks who accept staged ‘photo-opportunities’ and rebroadcast them as factual ‘news’ (suitably edited). It is on the journalists who report every single Lebanese casually as ‘civilian’ even if they are members of Hezbollah (true but completely misleading). It is on the reporters operating within Lebanon under close Hezbollah direction and yet not adding a disclaimer to their reports pointing out this. It is on major western news agencies selling obviously photoshopped images of the aftermath of Israeli bombing.
Of course not every journalist allows themselves to be used in return for a ‘sexy’ story, as this July 30th article shows…
THIS is the picture that damns Hezbollah. It is one of several, smuggled from behind Lebanon’s battle lines, showing that Hezbollah is waging war amid suburbia. The images, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Herald Sun, show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-calibre weapons. Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon. The photographs, from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut, were taken by a visiting journalist and smuggled out by a friend.
So why is that not ‘front page’ news on the BBC or the hilariously named ‘Independent’? Could it be because it suggests that what the ‘Zionist entity’ has been claiming all along might actually be true?
To quote the movie Network, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more”. We can fact-check your ass.
For those who missed this in the Samizdata comment section a few days ago, take a look at this and make of it what you will.
Horray for Hollywood Pallywood. Truth is all in the editing it would seem.
Update: And that applies to still images as well. Reuter’s has its ‘Dan Rather moment’ as a picture of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike is proven to be a Photoshop ‘enhancement’
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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