Charles Moore is one of the finest essayists around, in my view, and hits the mark with one of the sanest, clearest and most honest appraisals of Islam and the United Kingdom I have read for ages.
Go and read the whole thing, like they say.
|
|||||
|
Recovering as we still are from Thursday’s mass murders in central London, a few questions start to arise. For starters, it seems to me that if, as we are, at war, then the members of Parliament need to be on the same page as far as the defence of this realm is concerned. It does not mean, of course, that MPs should not criticise the conduct of the government’s military operations or anything else, but it does mean that MPs should not actively support groups determined to do us harm. Which brings us to George Galloway. His support for the Iraqi “resistance” (ie, the mixture of Baathist dead-enders and assorted jihadists) is a matter of shameful public record. While not – yet – conclusively proven – there remain serious allegations relating to his financial connections to Saddam Hussein and the Oil For Food Programme. And within hours of the bombings in London, this thug sought to deflect blame from the killings from the monsters who carried them out to the UK government for its overthrow of the Taliban and Hussein. I am an ardent believer in free speech and I would be the first to defend Galloway’s right to say what he wants, no matter how thick or unpleasant. That is a non-negotiable issue for me. It is pretty clear, however, that in the current heightened threat to our national security, that Galloway should be removed from Parliament immediately. July 9th, 2005 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I came across a text of a speech by Democrat Senator Richard Durbin here which, at least from my reading, did not liken what is going on with suspected terrorists in U.S. captivity and the old Soviet gulag, on the other. The speech contains a lot that one might reasonably dispute but it is not rabid Michael Moore moonbattery, as far as I can tell. (Of course, his speech on his website may have been edited later on with the offending para taken out, but one should not assume that out of fairness to the senator). So where did the reference to the “Dick Durbin slanders our boys” come from? Seriously, I’d like to know. I posted similar thoughts over here. It appears Durbin did make a reference to the gulag and the Nazis in the speech text I have now seen, so the guy clearly deserves some of the heat coming his way. But like I said, it doesn’t overall appear to be a rabidly silly speech. June 21st, 2005 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hospital patients here in the UK are occasionally known to get rather tetchy about the waiting times and the bureaucracy. But, thus far at least, none of them has seen fit to take their complaints this far:
Call me old-fashioned but I reckon that even in this crazy, mixed-up world most people making a trip to the hospital dream about leaving it alive. Still, I am sure things will return to normal the very moment the Palestinians get their own state. June 21st, 2005 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am watching the BBC Ten o’clock News, and the lead story is Condoleezza Rice, spelling out the Bush doctrine:
Indeed. In order to have seen this one coming, you would have had to have read some of President George W. Bush’s speeches, in particular his Second Inaugural Address, and to have then made the even greater mental leap of realising that President George W. Bush had actually thought about what he was saying, and had meant it.
As the BBC immediately explained, the worry is that democracy in the Middle East may result in Islamomaniacal governments which “hate America”. As opposed to regimes like the ones in Egypt and Saudi Arabia now, which permit no anti-American sentiments whatsoever. Now the BBC is explaining that Egypt, like the USSR before it, is immovably non-democratic. Mubarak will be followed in the fullness of time only by further Mubaraks. We shall see. President George W. Bush is a physically quite little guy, or so he seems in the photos that I have seen. He has an eccentric way with the English language, his pauses extending to the point where they flirt dangerously with embarrassment. He believes – really believes – in God. So, he is an easy man to underestimate, and all of Europe now does this. Yet if US Presidential greatness is defined as determining a new course for the USA and then making that new course the actual course that is then steered by (which it is, although there is also the matter of whether the new course is good and wise to consider), then President George W. Bush is getting greater by the month. June 20th, 2005 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
As a young kid I remember all those old war films portraying the various RAF air raids on Nazi-held targets like the Ruhr dams or the Norwegian heavy-water plants. The daring achievements of 617 squadron (The Dambusters, as they became known) are part of the folklore of military aviation history. I wonder how many people, however, have heard of a raid that probably helped save the world, at least temporarily, from a serious nuclear threat? I am talking about the bombing of Saddam’s nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981 by the Israeli Air Force. In a recently published book, Roger W. Claire recounts the tale of how an elite group of pilots trained for the raid that hit the nuclear plant, recording along the way Saddam’s massive programme to build a facility able to produce the materials for nukes. Even though the F-16 planes used in the raid are a light-year away in sophistication from the Lancaster or Mosquito bombers employed in WW2 raids, the pilots still endured terrific strains on mind and body in carrying out the missions deep inside hostile territory, knowing they faced a high chance of not returning. Israel’s bombing of the nuclear facility drew worldwide condemnation at the time from governments including that of Ronald Reagan, which seems monumentally ironic now. Indeed vice president Dick Cheney was later to thank the Israeli government during the 1991 Gulf War for the raid. What does this story say about pre-emption as a doctrine? Strict supporters of international law might argue that what the IAF did was illegal, that a sovereign nation like Iraq was entitled to develop weapons and unless there was demonstrable proof of malign intent, no such action would be justified. It remains a point of debate among libertarians, including scribes for this blog. But it is clear to me, in my view, from reading this and other accounts, that Saddam, both from his actions and his own rhetoric, intended to use nukes to intimidate his neighbours into surrendering territory and the threat posed to Israel from a man fancying himself as a pan-Arab leader was no myth. It was real. The actions of the Israeli Air Force have not gotten the praise they deserve, in my view. In considering what might have been, it is worth quoting at length from the following influential book by Kenneth M. Pollack:
The above quotation helped turn yours truly, a formerly fairly isolationist type of libertarian, into a reluctant supporter of the pre-emption doctrine embraced by George W. Bush. Although the failure to find WMDs in Iraq has shown that Saddam’s threat was not imminent – though possibly inevitable – there can be no doubt that the monster harboured a long desire to get and develop a substantial nuclear weapons programme which would have had incalculable consequences. June 4th, 2005 | 66 comments - (Comments are closed)
The AUT boycott of the Haifa University and the Bar-Ilan University has been joined by many British Universities. From Harry’s Place, who is calling on the dissenting members of AUT not to tear their membership cards but act to reverse the decision:
The AUT decision has aroused tremendous opposition, both in Israel and in England. Members of AUT said opponents of the boycott were not permitted to speak at the discussion, and the decision was taken without requesting the universities’ response. In addition, doubts were raised about the legality of the decision. Clive Davis has forwarded me one such sign of the opposition by Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, who wrote an open letter to Sally Hunt, the Secretary General of the AUT and bcc’ed to the Guardian, the FT, the NYT and the Jewish Chronicle. → Continue reading: Academics who do not learn April 29th, 2005 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Totten has been putting some rather compelling articles up on his blog from Lebanon. That Michael, who is clearly a ‘glow in the dark American’, should wander into the ‘Hezbollahland’ section of Beirut with a camera suggests to me that he has some serious stones. Make the strangely named ‘Spirit of America’ Lebanon blog part of your daily bloggage because it is extremely interesting stuff reported from the sharp end… and maybe even drop a dime or two into the plate to help him out. April 15th, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Guardian headline spotted today:  The complete story is here. Basically, and especially in recent months, things are improving. The story ends thus:
So, whatever happens, the West is still wrong. It would not be the Guardian if there was no defeat to snatch from the jaws of the victory they dreaded, but are now having to concede. April 9th, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Like many others I have been watching events in the Middle East, hoping of the best, and remembering that it could still all turn very nasty, and hoping that the White House has that possibility at the front of its collective mind. So far so obvious, and I for one little to add to such responses as these. But, it does occur to me that, what with all the agonising about, e.g., what the Syrians will do next, and what with all the pro-warriors crowing about how they must not crow, and the anti-warriors trying to talk their way out of giving President Bush any credit for what is happening, there is one significant consequence of these events which may have escaped immediate and widespread attention. 9/11 was bad, but almost worse was the amount of celebrating about it that seemed to be going on, and presumably was going on, in the Muslim world, and among Muslims generally. These latest demonstrations have, surely, changed the idea that will from now on be held in the West of popular opinion in the Middle East. For the first time since 9/11, these people no longer look like “these people”, that is to say, utterly foreign and barbaric, all either exulting in the deaths of the innocent, or else silently acquiescing to such exultation, out of fear or out of semi-barbarism. It is not that millions of people of the Middle East have spent the last month marching about with signs saying: “Sorry – We Were Wrong About 9/11 – It Was Horrible And We Should Not Have Celebrated It”. It is merely that a whole lot of different people are now getting their faces into our camera lenses and onto our front pages and magazine covers, with messages that we in the West can thoroughly relate to, like: “Let Us Govern Ourselves Intelligently”. My particular favourite in this connection was the one that went: “Let Muslims and Christians Unite Against The Syrian Occupier”. That sounds very Western to me. Clearly, “these people” are not all barbarians, and from now on, any Westerners who persist in believing that they are will be in a small minority. It may well be that this new message is almost as misleading and un-nuanced as the previous one. But it is very different. And in many ways, the big point here is as much the desire to communicate this new and dramatically more West-friendly message as the matter of whether the message itself is completely accurate. The long term consequences of this different message now emerging from the Middle East are surely huge. And talking of Muslims and Christians uniting against those damned Syrians, let us also notice that we are surely witnessing a come-back of a kind, and a rather interesting kind, for Arab nationalism. → Continue reading: Democracy in the Middle East: good news and bad news March 16th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to the New York Sun, most if not all of the Iranian exile organizations have come together at a Los Angeles meeting.
Some of the delegates feel the current US diplomatic carrot and stick approach to Iran and its nuclear program are a mistake:
This meeting and sense of co-operation is an important development for pro-freedom Iranians. The words of Benjamin Franklin, “We must indeed all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately”, are as applicable to Iranian Patriots’s today as they were to the signers of America’s Declaration of Independence two and a quarter hundred years ago. March 15th, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing me to this horrid little tale:
There is more to it. Much more. The Saudi’s have changed trial dates to keep reporters out; they have arrested the defense attorney… read the linked article above for more of the long litany of stupidity. I really wonder how long these people can survive in the modern world. A friend and sometimes co-worker of mine, a member of the old Hashemite line, does not think the Saud’s are among the brightest lights in the Muslim Times Square. This ham-fisted approach to democracy activists seems to show the truth of his belief. As Glenn and others suggested several years ago, we would all be better off if the cultured and educated Hashemites were once again in charge of Mecca. March 13th, 2005 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||