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]
|
It is a given in Middle Eastern politics that whenever a politician is feeling the heat, the default tactic for distracting people from whatever woes are pissing them off is to start throwing wild accusations at Israel. For extra added points they can even accuse the ‘Zionist entity’ of whatever it is that you are in fact doing.
Given that Israel had the opportunity to kill Yassir Arafat a thousand times over once he became a (more or less) regular political figure with a regular address in Palestine and a daily routine, for Assad of Syria to start suddenly claiming that Israel assassinated Arafat, a man who was well known to be sick and old and who was really an increasingly irrelevant figure towards the end, strikes me as the sort of thing that would be done by a man who is frantically looking to divert attention away from something else (like maybe his propensity to bump people off in Lebanon).
The Israelis are usually pretty upfront about their willingness to conduct assassination against their enemies, so perhaps it is time the Israeli airforce paid Assad a visit and when asked why they killed him, they should reply “Why not? We wanted to give folks in Lebanon something to smile about and in any case we would have been accused of killing him anyway regardless of how he eventually snuffed it”.
I spotted this in a Jane’s newsletter:
“Crash wipes out IRGC ground forces leadership”. A civil-registered Dassault Falcon 20E VIP business jet operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) crashed on 9 January killing the crew and much of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Ground Forces. [Jane’s Defence Weekly- first posted to http://jdw.janes.com, 13 January 2006]
I feel soooo bad!
There is an article by Simon Heffer with the simple title of Doing nothing in Iran is not an option which seems to be stating the obvious to me. Given the leadership of Iran are self-declared apocalypse enthusiasts, I for one do not regard just waiting until Tel Aviv gets nuked as acceptable and I rather suspect the Israelis heartily concur. The shit is going to hit the fan soon, that much is certain and no amount of risible European diplomacy will change that.
As for something that could be done more or less immediately, it was gratifying to see Mark Steyn has come around to my view on how to apply pressure in ways that might really destabilise this regime… do to the Iranians security services exactly what they are doing to British troops in Southern Iraq: fight a proxy war with them, only do it openly and without apology.
Fact is, Britain is already at war with Iranian backed forced in Iraq and has been for months. So the government just needs to take this to its logical conclusion and escalate the war so that the Iranian state finds itself at war with British backed Iranian insurgent forces in Iran. It is not like there is any shortage of Iranians who want to be rid of their theocratic nutters. Sounds like a nice convergence of interests to me.
U.S.-based libertarian blogger Jim Henley is none too impressed with the latest story in the Weekly Standard by one of its correspondents, Stephen F. Hayes, to the effect that there are loads of documents proving that Saddam’s Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists. Hayes has been mining this particular seam for years. He recently published a book focusing on the alleged terror link to Saddam.
I am not quite as skeptical as Henley is about the credibility of what Hayes says(Jim does a great line in snarkiness). At the very least, if Hayes is half right, then it does rather undermine one of the standard tropes of the opponents of the war: Saddam was not in cahoots with radical Islamic terror, no way, nothing to look at here folks, etc. In any event, it would be good if all the documents that Hayes talks about could be put into the public domain so we can nail down this controversy once and for all.
Iran made another step forwards towards its long held goal of obtaining nuclear weapons yesterday by restarting its uranium enrichment program.
While Iran’s long term strategic goal is quite possibly insane, it must be conceded from a Realpolitik perspective that Iran is playing a very strong hand, and their tactical moves are precise and well executed.
For Iran has played the Europeans charged with negotiating them out of their nuclear ambitions with finesse and skill. While some European figures, such as the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, have talked a good game about bringing Iran before the United Nations, others are taking measures to ensure talking is as far as it goes.
Thus, even as Iran announced plans to break the IAEA seals on the centrifuges of its Natanz uranium enrichment facility, Austrian Chancellor (and temporary president of the European Union) Wolfgang Schüssel warned that it would be premature to discuss sanctions. Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, added that “every effort must be made to convince the Iranians to return to the previous situation, to negotiations.” Mr. Solana’s idea of getting tough with the Iranians is apparently to beg them to show up for lunch.
Of course, the real negotiating tool is the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force. With American troops still in Iraq, Iran knows that it has to tread warily, but the cunning men in Tehran may well be counting that the US will not feel able to take decisive action before the 2008 Presidential elections change the political landscape in a possibly decisive way.
I personally am very pessimistic about these developments.
I have written a couple of times before about the very useful cultural confrontation with intolerant Muslims that occurred when Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published some less than flattering cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed.
Well in case you are curious what those cartoons actually looked like, here they are (sorry, but I do not have a larger version and the original link no longer works):
If Salman Rushdie wrote the ‘Satanic Verses’ and incurred the ire of the moonbat faction of Islam, I guess the Jyllands Posten publication must be the ‘Satanic Cartoons’.
Here is a link that shows the cartoons more clearly so you can see what all the fuss is about.
There is a good article about the Iranian blogosphere in the Times by Ben Macintyre. I think Iran’s bloggers deserve as much credit and support as possible as they are very much on the front line of resisting Islamo-facism and blogs there are truly the heirs to the Soviet era dissident Samizdats.
Update: Alan Moore has a few things to say on the subject as well.
The best possible antidote to ignorant and irrational Indonesian Muslim clerics forcibly imposing Sharia and claiming the tsunami was punishment for women not wearing veils would be for people to respond to their violence in kind and simply run the bastards out of town.
The religious police have not always had it their own way. In one incident on the island of Sabang, attempts to humiliate a bareheaded girl backfired when angry villagers turned on them. By the time the civil police arrived to rescue the enforcers they were surrounded by an angry mob flicking lighted cigarettes at them.
This is an encouraging start but they need to get rather more serious than flicking a few cigarettes at them.
Michael Totten, who has clearly been having some interesting times in Lebanon, has a fascinating article in LA Weekly about his first hand experiences attending a Hezbollah event as the ‘Party of God’ is trying to improve its image in the West.
He does a good job of giving a sense of what these people are like and what their ideal vision of the future would be.
Officials from the Israeli security services, not usually thought of as the Europhiles’ favourite, are apparently in France at the moment advising that country’s security services on riot control, following the mass mayhem in France a month ago. It strikes me as rather ironic, given the anti-Israel tilt of French foreign policy in recent years, that the country’s leaders are calling for help from Israel. Strange days indeed.
Spending a few days in Turkey and reading their newspapers makes it very clear that the Kemal Ataturk’s vision of a modernising, secular Turkish republic is still very much an ongoing battle. It should also be noted that very few secular Turks seem to be anti-Muslim, they are just pro-secular and as the overwhelming majority of people in Turkey are indeed Muslim (at least nominally), that the whole structure of politics are avowedly secular makes Turkey the front-line on the struggle against Islamist governance.
The news is abuzz with political skirmishes on that subject. Articles in the New Anatolian and Turkish Daily News (no individual article links unfortunately) discuss opposition to some municipalities trying to introduce alcohol serving ‘red light districts’ and banning its sale elsewhere. As many Turks drink raki (Ataturk’s favourite drink in fact), this is not just a matter for tourists.
Other articles tell of five teachers in Mersin being driven from their jobs and moved to different schools after pressure from local imams who were angry they were teaching evolutionary theory, on the grounds they were “destroying the religious beliefs” of children. The teachers’ union in Mersin responded furiously that their members have been punished for engaging in “secular, democratic and fact-based teaching”.
In another article, retired General Hursit Tolon has said that Turkey is “edging away from secularism, which is the first pre-condition of modernism”. He is in the process of forming a new political party to try and combat that drift. He also seems to be saying that “the intervention of the West, the European Union and the USA” are behind many of these problems. Exactly what he means by that I do not know but at least in once sense I suspect he is quite correct, though I do not see a conspiracy at work here (and as I cannot read Turkish, I cannot easily find out precisely what General Tolon means unless some Turkish blogger wants to clue me in) but rather the bull-in-a-china-shop threat springs from the parochial and often simplistic underpinnings of so much of the received wisdom that spews forth from the West.
Obviously the struggle between those who want to see laws enforcing Islamic principles and those who demand Turkey remain a secular state out in the open now. I do not know enough about Turkey to venture an opinion on how strong and coherent the political and social forces are defending secular values but historically the final bulwark against Islamic governance has been the Turkish military, who simply take over via a coup d’etat if it looks like the core principles which Ataturk set out are in danger. The US has a constitution to limit the scope of democratically sanctioned change, but for better or worse the Turks have their military fulfilling that function.
There is nothing wrong with the wishes of the plurality being thwarted if what they want amounts to tyranny, so whilst I deplore the past excesses of the Turkish military, I really have no problem the basic idea of them simply refusing to countenance the end of the secular Turkish republic. Democracy is a tool, nothing more and if a measure of it leads to an increase in liberty (and it usually does), then that is good. But it an excess of it leads to tyranny, no matter how popular that tyranny might be, then some sort of effective check is needed to unalloyed democratic politics. Are the social and political forces of secularism strong enough to survive without that final drastic check on Islamist aspirations? I am certainly not qualified to know but I have not heard that question even being asked by all to many people in the West when the subject of Turkey joining the EU comes up.
Yet should Turkey join the EU, without doubt the democracy fetishists will require the military to entirely step back from any political role and I cannot help wondering if the net result of that will be the inevitable progress towards an impeccably democratic but Islamic Turkish Republic that no longer seperates ‘church’ and state.
Some said much the same about secular Iraqi Ba’athism being a ‘good thing’ because it kept the Islamo-fascists at bay in that country, but although previous Turkish military regimes may have been no respecters of humans rights (to say the least), it does not seem to me that secular Turkey circa 2005 is comparable to secular Iraq under the Ba’athists. Yet do you think there is any chance the EU could see a positive role for the institutions in Turkey which simply will not countenance the development of an Islamic state? Not a chance. The great and good that make up Europe’s political elite are simply not smart or sophisticated enough to see past the simplistic notion “more democracy always good”. And of course given the crazed over-emphasis on the importance of democracy (rather than liberty) in Iraq, much the same can be said of the intelligentsia in the USA.
My brief stay in Turkey and exposure to its English language press gave me a tantalising glimpse of what is going on. However I just do not have enough of a feel for the country to know how things will shake out and it might be interesting to see what the Turkish blogosphere has to say.
Back in November I commented on how some Islamists in Denmark were getting worked up into a lather over some cartoons run by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in which the prophet Mohammed was portrayed in a less than endearing light.
Well it seems that this story is destined to run and run. People in Srinagar, the largest city in Indian controlled Kashmir, have gone on strike in protest over the Danish cartoons. Now am I the only one who finds this truly bizarre? It is hard to imagine a provincial Danish town, say, Esbjerg, suddenly downing tools to protest a comic saying rude things about Lutheranism in a newspaper in the Indian sub-continent.
Still, it does go to show that there truly is a globalized culture war going on and that is it has nothing to do with the “evil plots of the Bush-Hitler Illuminati”. The fact people in Srinagar even know about the Danish cartoons is remarkable. That the Islamists should have taken the bait Jyllands-Posten dangled in front of them is rather splendid because you cannot win a war, cultural or otherwise, by just defending yourself.
And this is a war we can and must win and, best of all, we get to fight it on ground of our own choosing because what the people of Srinagar have shown is that the enemies of open society can be easily goaded. It is not about ‘social justice’ or ‘economic deprivation’ or any of those smoke screens generally deployed by the Fisks and Galloways of this world when they make their apologias for Islamo-fascism, it is about confronting a culture of intolerance and refusing to tolerate that.
|
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.
|
