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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’
There is an article in the National Review by former Sunday Telegraph journalist Tom Gross what lifts the lid on what the British taxpayers who fund the BBC gets for their appropriated money… not that CNN et al are much better:
CNN senior international correspondent Nic Robertson admitted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18 about civilian casualties in Lebanon was stage-managed from start to finish by Hezbollah. He revealed that his story was heavily influenced by Hezbollah’s “press officer” and that Hezbollah have “very, very sophisticated and slick media operations”.
[…]
Yet Reliable Sources, hosted by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not have had the opportunity to learn from CNN’s “Senior international correspondent” that the pictures they saw from Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hezbollah.
[…]
First the BBC gave the impression that Israel had flattened the greater part of Beirut. Then to follow up its lop-sided coverage, its website helpfully carried full details of the assembly points for an anti-Israel march due to take place in London, but did not give any details for a rally in support of Israel also held in London a short time later.
Without the internet to fact-check and contextualize what the media shows us, our ability to form opinions about what is happening in the world would be totally at the mercy of organisations whose reportage comes filtered through world views that are perhaps no more or less distorted than any other but which claim, without any justification, to be ‘objective’. Blogs like Samizdata do not claim to be ‘objective’ as we do not hesitate to say who we think that the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ or ‘less-worse-guys’ (we do try to be truthful however) as we take the view that as long as our biases are transparent, the reader can make his own mind up about the things we say. Bias + Transparency = Credibility. You make not agree with our conclusions but we will not intentionally lie to you.
However when organisations like CNN or the BBC claim to be ‘unbiased’, they are quite simply lying. I recall that pool reporters during the last Gulf War often said words to the effect “we are reporting under the restrictions imposed on us by the US military” before delivering their reports, which is fair enough as a disclaimer. I have yet to hear anything similar said by a reporter in Beirut reporting under Hezbollah restrictions (although I did hear one in Israel mutter that he was being prevented from saying exactly where Hezbollah rockets had struck), which in effect makes them a willing participant to Hezbollah’s propaganda efforts. In short, you are being deceived.
With the IAF striking border crossings with Syria and the Syrians shooting down an Israeli reconnaissance drone in Lebanon, perhaps a greater Middle East war is indeed at hand. As Israel really has no viable options that do not involve destroying Hezbollah and destroying Hezbollah probably requires preventing Syria from acting as either a safe haven or supply source, a wider war was probably inevitable.
Seeing the last of the Ba’athists in Syria crushed would be splendid but of course the most likely people to fill their still smoking shoes would be Islamists of some ilk. Not easy to see a happy outcome no matter what happens and yet doing nothing is not an option for Israel either given that it would be pointless to try and negotiate with such intractable enemies when in truth they will be satisfied with nothing less that Israel’s annihilation.
A woman who had (what I certainly think was) a humorous sign on her gate saying “Our dogs are fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses” was forced to take it down by British police because it is “distressing, offensive and inappropriate”. Yet seeing as Muslim extremists can walk down the street holding signs threatening to decapitate people, all with a police escort, it is clearly time to stop co-operating with the police and being so damn polite to them. Instead urge them not to allow themselves to be used to repress people’s right to express themselves and force them to fill out as much paperwork as possible. Got a lawyer? Call him. Just do not meekly co-operate.
We need to establish that there is no right not to be offended that trumps the reasonable right to self-expression. In fact I would argue that police escorted Muslims have already established that. If Muslims extremists can threaten people with death unless they express themselves in accordance with the restrictions Muslim activists want imposed on them, then we clearly do indeed have the right to make jokes about feeding Jehovah’s Witnesses to our dogs.
So stop making the job of the police easy when they try to impose such restrictions. If they want to stop you expressing themselves, do not threaten them but do not feel any great need to be unduly polite, make them arrest you and take the matter to court, every single time. I often go out wearing a tee-shirt saying “My Imam went to Mecca and all he got me was this lousy Tee-shirt”. Offensive? I do not think so but if anyone disagrees, I will not take it off and will force any policeman who takes issue with it to arrest me if he wants to stop me walking around wearing it.
Spain’s socialist government is turning its back on the post-Franco ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ approach with regard to the Spanish civil war. It plans to prohibits any political event at the location of Franco’s tomb in the ‘Valley of the Fallen’, outside Madrid. Yet whilst I am hardly a fan of Franco, the notion that a socialist government has any moral authority to suppress pro-Franco sentiments strikes me as absurd. There were no ‘good guys’ in the Spanish civil war and if the current Spanish socialists see themselves as the heirs of those who fought Franco then they see themselves as heirs to despicable would-be tyrants who were in no way admirable just because their enemy was little better. It was a war between mass murderous collectivist socialists of various dispositions against mass murderous collectivist national socialists.
In many ways the one thing Franco had to commend him was that his system of government was always unlikely to outlive him whereas a socialist system might have lasted longer… which is to say it might have lasted until the late 1980’s and in which case more the mass graves being dug up now would be filled with falangists and their families as opposed to socialists and their families (not that the left was shy about slaughtering its civilian enemies during the war).
People who get misty eyed over the resistance to Franco in the Spanish civil war are fools. It did not really matter who won, Spain was going to lose regardless. A pox on both sides of that terrible war.
There is an very commendable article on the LFB blog which applauds an Ohio Supreme Court ruling that economic development is not a sufficient reason under the state constitution to justify taking homes, in other words overturning Kelo in Ohio. However what makes the article so interesting is that it correctly identifies the poor thinking behind Justice O’Connor’s interpretation of the issues:
I need not merely infer that O’Connor is one who believes in “balancing” the interests of victims and thieves. In her formal opinion, available at the web site of the Ohio State Supreme Court, O’Connor states that the Norwood case is about “the constitutionality of a municipality’s taking of an individual’s property by eminent domain and transferring the property to a private entity for redevelopment. In doing so, we must balance two competing interests of great import in American democracy: the individual’s rights in the possession and security of property, and the sovereign’s power to take private property for the benefit of the community.”
But, as the Founders themselves should have better understood and stated in framing the Constitution, the only “benefit of the community” that may properly be attended to in most possible cases has to do with the actual rights of the individuals who make up that community. The community is best off, in fact, if no member of it may ever be robbed by government and at the behest of “the community,” whether that “community” is a group of home owners who want to forcibly prevent a mall from being built on somebody else’s property by the persons who own that property, or a group of developers who want to forcibly impose a mall on the property of home owners.
Excellent article.
Commentators who have been lambasting Israel for reacting ‘disproportionately’ in its military reaction to Hezbollah strike me as making a mistake as to what ‘proportionality’ really means within the context of a war. If a man hiding behind a wall fires a rifle at you, proportionality does not mean you must only fire a rifle back at them… it means you should only attack them with enough force to kill the enemy hiding behind a wall, which may well mean returning fire with a 120mm tank round or a 500 kg HE bomb. A nuclear warhead would be ‘disproportionate’.
I would argue that Just War Theory’s notions for ‘proportionality’ only makes sense as meaning proportional to the imperative of effectively attacking a legitimate target, not proportional to a legitimate target’s specific actions.
The welfare state is the engine of so many of the problems that the people who run this country complain about you would think its inherent problems would at least be a topic of discussion by the political class. But no. Yet a culture of entitlement without responsibility is not just a consequence of the welfare state, it is pretty much the objective of the welfare state. As a result it seems odd that the political class who presided over the growth of the all encompassing nanny state should decry the fact that people do not take responsibility for their health or behaviour when the very system they created is designed to prevent people paying directly for the health consequences of their life styles.
Yet because the welfare state is sacrosanct, it is not permitted to even suggest that it is the system itself that has produced the overweight chav generation that seems to irk the Islington set and their Tory imitators so much.
Blair said the government was banning the sale of junk food and fizzy drinks from vending machines in schools. He said if voluntary moves to limit advertising of junk food to children had not worked by 2007, new laws would be introduced. The government was also encouraging supermarket chains to adopt a single-system of labelling to identify healthy options.
“It will be much better if the industry comes together voluntarily around this scheme but once again, we are prepared to act if the voluntary system does not work”
And so if the threat of force does not work, yet more regulations will follow. Sure, that is it, we need more regulations. Yet all this dances around the issue that people buy what they want not because the labelling says this or that, but because they like it and there is no clear economic motivation to worry all too much about long term medical consequences when the NHS takes care of all that stuff. It is almost as if the Tories, LibDems and Labour are shouting at each other across the floor of Parliament, all pretending not to notice the large and very hungry elephant standing in their midst who is crapping all over the statist paradise that we would all live in if only we had a few more regulations.
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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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