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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In today’s Telegraph, there is a story about Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, all about how very strange and mysterious and unfair it was for him to be refused entry into the USA.
A spokesman for the US Department for Homeland Security said that Islam had been placed on a “watch list”, compiled to combat terrorism, “because of his recent activities” – he was only allowed to board the plane to Washington because of a misspelling of his name at Heathrow.
Yes, I guess that “Yusuf” bit might be slightly confusing.
It was not his first brush with immigration: he was deported from Israel in 2000 after claims that he had given money to the Palestinian group Hamas 12 years earlier, though he has always vehemently denied the claim: “I have never knowingly supported any terrorist group, past, present or future,” he stated.
But in yesterday’s Sunday Times, there was a piece at the front of the News Review section by Sarah Baxter, called I’m a Democrat for Bush. Ms. Baxter now lives in the USA and used to work for the New Statesman. In her piece, she mentions Yusuf(Cat) Islam(Stevens) in passing (page 3), and what she says throws a somewhat different light on the matter of the US Government not wanting him in the USA. → Continue reading: What sort of Cat?
It will probably now be a widely accepted view that Saddam Hussein had no active weapons programme and was some way off from creating one. But that he intended to create one given a moment’s opportunity, is beyond doubt, and one reason why, given the increasingly porous nature of the sanctions regime, Saddam’s risk-taking behaviour and the corrupt oil-for-food programme of the UN, I felt war was the least-bad option.
Uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan linked this week to a Reuters story about how mothballed nuclear facilities were stripped and spirited out of the country after the Coalition successfully invaded Iraq.
It is one of the most serious charges one can level at George W. Bush that he bungled the aftermath of the war and that the Coalition forces failed to secure sites such as nuclear facilities. It was, after all, supposed to be a central justification for the war that we were securing such sites and preventing weapons getting into the hands of terrorists. Stuff like this makes me wonder whether Bush and Co. really had a clue about what they were doing.
But it is also interesting to note that a Reuters story (that big fat commie news service) implicitly conceded that Saddam did have a nuclear programme. And if it were not for the bravery and brilliance of the Israeli airforce in 1981, he would have had one up and running some time ago.
The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States spurred calls for the Saudi royal family to modernize the country’s political landscape. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers involved in September 11 were Saudis.
Which is obviously why the Saudi political landscape has changed so radically that women… um, still are not allowed to vote. Or drive. Or talk to men in public. Or go out of doors without a big black cloak on.
They would be voting though, if it weren’t for a few major administrative problems that the government can not possibly be expected to solve. Oh yes.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there are not enough women to run women’s-only registration centers and polling stations, and that only a fraction of the country’s women have the photo identity cards that would have been needed to vote.
Well, obviously. Not to mention that:
Many women in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, have balked at getting the ID cards — introduced three years ago — because the photographs would show their faces unveiled.
Right. And anyone who says this only illustrates the extent to which they have had the s*** scared out of them is just a Bush-loving Zionist neo-con. They should be glad that the ban on women voting, “[eases] fears among conservatives that the kingdom is moving too fast on reforms”. Because, moving too fast on reforms would be terrible, obviously. So, hang onto those abayas for a little while longer, girls. You will be needing them.
Overall, it is good to see how things are improving in the kingdom now. Islamism can seem a little off-putting from time to time, but Saudi hotels are super, and the government is surely well-intentioned. And the women are not in any way oppressed: they may have “limited freedoms,” but then again, don’t we all?
Thank gooodness CNN is there to tell it like it is. They even took the trouble to interview women against the idea of votes for women, just to provide a clear and balanced picture of events.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers involved in September 11 were Saudis.
Did I mention that already? Please excuse me.
Here is an interesting effect of the Internet, I think you will agree.
The Telegraph declines to run this article, and Mark Steyn declines to change it until they would.
So, he just sticks it up at his website anyway. (Without the Internet, might he have been more pliable? Without the threat of the Internet, would Mark Steyn be such a good writer?)
Quote:
Paul Bigley can be forgiven his clumsiness: he’s a freelancer winging it. But the feelers put out by the Foreign Office to Ken Bigley’s captors are more disturbing: by definition, they confer respectability on the head-hackers and increase the likelihood that Britons and other infidels will be seized and decapitated in the future. The United Kingdom, like the government of the Philippines when it allegedly paid a ransom for the release of its Iraqi hostages, is thus assisting in the mainstreaming of jihad.
By contrast with the Fleet Street-Scouser-Whitehall fiasco of the last three weeks, consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, “I will show you how an Italian dies!” He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.
If the FCO wants to issue advice in this area, that’s the way to go: If you’re kidnapped, accept you’re unlikely to survive, say “I’ll show you how an Englishman dies”, and wreck the video. If they want you to confess you’re a spy, make a little mischief: there are jihadi from Britain, Italy, France, Canada and other western nations all over Iraq – so say yes, you’re an MI6 agent, and so are those Muslims from Tipton and Luton who recently joined the al-Qaeda cells in Samarra and Ramadi. As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley’s word, “enough”. A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.
That last sentence would make a fine Samizdata quote of the day, and I nearly posted it that way instead.
Commenters will no doubt have all kinds of things to say about Scousers, Italians, the FCO, Mr Blair, etc. But what interests me about this little circumstance is that it is yet one more straw in the wind, gently falling onto the back of the camel that is the Mainstream Media.
It just cannot be such fun being an MSM editor these days. You spike an article. But it gets ‘published’ anyway, with your spike marks on it as a badge of pride.
Where do political ideas end and terrorist acts begin? Is every destructive behaviour in the name of any political ideology just dandy, fine and justified, or are some societies distinguishable from others precisely because they employ civilised means of political expression and government (voting, debate, free speech) as opposed to ruling and arguing by violent threat and patently, deliberately, terrorising violence?
Call me a pro-life extremist but in my view, organisations cease to be mere political debating circles as soon as they reject real opportunities for reasonable discussion in favour of blowing people’s heads off.
The United Nations does not agree. Peter Hansen, the UN relief agency chief in Gaza, says:
Hamas as a political organisation does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another.
Israel begs to differ:
Israel’s ambassador to the UN criticised Mr Hansen’s comments. “The very idea that individuals with clear links to the Hamas terrorist network may be on the Unwra payroll is totally unacceptable and should be properly investigated,” Dan Gillerman said.
→ Continue reading: Beneath politics
The other day, I snapped the following photo, in the London Underground. I tried as hard as I could to get the entire thing in my picture. Had I stepped back any further I would have been (a) electrocuted and then shortly after that (b) run over by a train.
I have not read this book, which is by Jason Burke. But: Naom Chomsky? “Rumsfeld and his clique”? Something tells me that whatever the nuances of the truth here revealed, America will get the blame for it all and Islam hardly any.
William Dalrymple should not be confused with Theodore Dalrymple. Read what Theodore has to say about William (no relation), in this article, this sentence being the one that seems to me to matter most:
… Dalrymple comes perilously close to condoning what he is trying to explain…
I did an earlier posting about William Dalrymple, and the comments there are also well worth looking at to learn more about the man and his views.
The Telegraph reports that an Iraqi-born gunman with a British passport, Mohammed Kasim, talked to an Iraqi translator in Fallujah about the latest video of Mr Bigley where he was shown shackled in a cage. Mr Kasim claimed that this had been staged to “terrify” the British public. There was no way of verifying the claim, particularly in a country awash with rumour and conspiracy theories.
The claims that the British hostage was free to roam his kidnappers’ home in Iraq and was “caged” only for terrorist videos coincide with a raid by Dutch intelligence officers of the home of Paul Bigley, Kenneth Bigley’s brother last, who lives in Amsterdam. He is accused of contact with the Tawhid and Jihad group, which yesterday claimed responsibility for Thursday’s killing of at least 35 children in Baghdad. Mr Bigley has been an outspoken critic of the Government’s handling of his brother’s case and has established his own contacts in the Middle East but denies being in direct contact with the kidnappers.
From yesterday news, Italy’s adoration of the “two Simonas” (Simona Pari and Simona Torretta), the women aid workers abducted in Iraq, began to sour yesterday, as the extent of their sympathy for the Iraqi fight against the allied occupation became clear.
After they were taken hostage on Sept 7, the two Simonas achieved iconic status in Italy and the conservative government and the opposition put aside their differences to work together for the women’s release.
But as the Turin newspaper La Stampa said yesterday, national unity has been short lived since their arrival home, wearing kaftans and thanking their captors in Arabic for their release before the cameras of the Al-Jazeera stellite television network.
There have been reports of a $1 million ransom… No matter, the girls are well versed in international law:
If you ask me about terrorism, I’ll tell you that there is terrorism and there is resistance. The resistance struggle of people against an occupying force is guaranteed by international law.
They have obviously become experts on the local situation – upon their return they gave their backing to insurgents opposing the allied forces. Alas, they did not seem to know about other hostages:
We didn’t know there were any other hostages. No one told us about the British prisoner, nor about the Americans who were beheaded.
An acquaintance sent me a link to an article about the future of Europe and asked me for my opinions in response. As someone with a reputation for having an opinion (usually a fairly inflammatory one) about everything, I find myself untypically, and perhaps rather annoyingly, equivocal. But this is entirely due to the fact that I am unsure whether or not this kind of thing can or should be taken seriously:
How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-laden career to be strangely disingenuous about certain realities of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, told the German newspaper Die Welt forthrightly that “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.”
Or maybe sooner.
I have heard such sweeping assessments before, courtesy (mostly) of some of the more intemperate conservative blogs and websites. But is there any substance to the claim?
On the face of it, it appears both alarmist and far-fetched. Just taking the EU countries alone, I believe that there are, at most, some 20 million Muslim people out of a total population in the region of 470 million. Less than 5%.
But, let us suppose that some profound demographic shifts over the next few decades result in Muslims outnumbering non-Muslims. Does it automatically follow that Europe will then be ‘Islamic’? And, if so, what type of Islamic? Are we talking about the arid, monochromatic, repressive Saudi ‘Wahabbi’ version or the more secular and easy-going Turkish variety? Or could it be some newly-manifest and unique ‘European’ version of Islam?
Also, and given much of Europe’s descent into post-modernist torpor, would any of these scenarios (assuming they came to pass) necessarily be a bad thing?
So many questions with no answers. Or no satisfactory answers at any rate. My own inclination is to regard the article with a high degree of skepticism. Human affairs are sufficiently fluid to make predictions about the next week seem foolhardy, let alone the next century. However, it is worth bearing in mind that North Africa (the Maghreb) was once as European as France or Italy is now and that fully two-thirds of what was once the Roman Empire is now a part of the Islamic world.
But the past is not necessarily a guide to the future, so that just leaves me back where I started. In short, I just do not know and I am hesitant to venture any sort of opinion more definite than that.
On this anniversary of the attacks in America by Al Qaeda, Ayman Zawahiri has produced a video taunting the USA that an article in the Daily Telegraph rightly describes as sounding desperate:
Things may not be rosy for America, particularly in Iraq. But coming from the leader of an organisation that has lost its operational base in Afghanistan, and whose members are hunted and arrested by the intelligence agencies of scores of countries around the world, Zawahiri’s analysis had a ring of desperation about it.
Reaction from ‘on high’ to the tape is also interesting:
Intelligence agencies will be scrutinising the video for evidence of hidden messages and clues to Zawahiri’s whereabouts. But it raises other questions, not least the fate of Osama bin Laden, who has been heard, but not seen for many months.
“He is not popping up on television and he is not showing himself in a way that he can be captured,” Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, said last night, “I believe he is still alive, but I can’t prove that. He clearly is in hiding and he is on the run.”
It seems to me that the notion Bin Laden is still alive becomes more preposterous by the month. If Zawahiri, who is debatably the ‘chairman of the board’ of Al Qaeda, can make a video for propaganda purposes, then so can the biggest fish of all, Osama Bin Laden. For Bin Laden to produce such a video would yield a veritable propaganda blockbuster which would rally the faithful and infuriate his enemies at a time when it is hard to see how anyone could reasonably claim that things are going well for the bad guys.
So unless we see Bin Laden’s ugly face on our screens wagging his finger at us infidels sometime before the Presidential elections in the USA, I will stick to my firmly held assertion that he is rotting in a collapsed tunnel somewhere in Afghanistan and continue with my Elvis analogues when people claim the contrary. And like Elvis, no doubt we will get sighting of him for the next 30 years as both sides have a vested interest in claiming he is alive (one to make him a Robin Hood figure, the other to disarm arguments against whatever ‘needs to be done’).
Yup, I will believe them when Elvis himself walks into a studio in Nashville and does a ‘muezzin remix’ of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. Bin Laden is dead and may he not rest in peace.
Say “9/11”, and we all know what you mean. “Bali”: ditto. Now add “Beslan” to that mass murder list.
I remember thinking, when I saw those children on my TV a week ago, running hither and thither in nothing but their underwear, that this was another of those strategic shooting-in-foot blunders that Islamists seem to have such a genius for perpetrating. 9/11 finally concentrated the minds of the white West on Islamist terrorism. Now Beslan has got even Muslims thinking – and, miracle of miracles, even Muslims of the sort who make public pronouncements saying – that maybe something is seriously amiss with their (for the time being) accursed religion, with no ‘but’.
This from a recent New York Times piece:
The brutal school siege in Russia, with hundreds of children dead and wounded, has touched off an unusual round of self-criticism and introspection in the Muslim and Arab world.
About time too.
And today, Arts & Letters Daily links to this New Statesman piece by Ziauddin Sardar, which is just about the most encouraging thing I have read about Islam since 9/11:
The Muslim world is changing. Three years after the atrocity of 9/11, it may be in the early stages of a reformation, albeit with a small ‘r’. From Morocco to Indonesia, people are trying to develop a more contemporary and humane interpretation of Islam, and some countries are undergoing major transformations.
→ Continue reading: Might Beslan be the turning of the tide?
Austin Bay is right up there with Wretchard when it comes to good analysis, hard common sense, and good info on the current war. He’s back from the front in Iraq with a column on how the current war really is a fight for freedom.
If there is one mistake I think we’ve made in fighting this war, it’s been the way we’ve soft-pedaled the ideological dimensions. This really is a fight for the future, between our free, open political system and the unholy alliance of despots and Islamo-fascists whose very existence depends on denying liberty.
Our enemies are the enemies of freedom within their spheres of influence. In the modern world of jumbo jets and international networks of all kinds, they have already succeeded in reducing our freedom, and seek to do so even more. Because they have chosen to attack us with violence, we are in a war of self-defense with the enemies of freedom. Fighting this war is, in my view, entirely consistent with a libertarian world-view.
There is an interesting article in The Telegraph, which is a translated reprint of an article which appeared in the pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. The author is Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al- Arabiya news channel and he gives a cri de coeur about the state of the Muslim world:
Those responsible for the attacks on residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar were Muslims. The two women who crashed two airliners last week were also Muslims. Bin Laden is a Muslim. The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings, all over the world, were Muslim. What a pathetic record. What an abominable “achievement”. Does all this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies and our culture?
[…]
We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds. These are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image.
We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.
I can only hope this sort of discussion sweeps across the Islamic world. Western civilisation has so much introspection going on that some commentators regularly vanish up their own arses during absurd Sartre-esque displays of posturing left wing ‘analysis’ of bourgeois capitalism or the ‘root causes’ of why some people actually set out to slaughter other people’s children. What we really need is muslims doing a great deal more public soul searching with frank discussions of modern terrorism: without recourse to the word ‘but’…
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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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