A reminder for our readers: the next few days are a time of demonstration in support of Iranian students. Oxblog has posted a list of times and places he is aware of. If any are near you, by all means go!
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Samizdata.net’s many spies have told us that these are being stockpiled in Iran for use during the coming ‘transitional times’. July 7th, 2003 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
 It has been known for some time that Britain plays a significant role as a support base for al-Qa’eda. So much so that even the government conceded the fact. Details about the activities of British-based Muslim fanatics were given during a series of appeals by suspected foreign terrorists against their detention without trial. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission, sitting in London, heard how a dozen terrorist attacks and planned attacks around the world could be traced in part to Britain. At the centre of the network was a number of radical clerics, including Abu Hamza, the hook-handed north London imam who faces the loss of his British citizenship. Today, a report published by Charity Commission, a statutory organisation that regulates charities in the UK, has concluded that Abu Hamza, drove away moderate Muslims from the mosque in Finsbury Park, took over and used it as a base to spread extremist views and shelter his supporters. The Telegraph reported last week that although now removed from his post at Finsbury Park mosque, Hamza has not been detained and continues to address his followers outside the building every Friday. An attempt to strip him of his British citizenship has been stalled because Hamza has lodged an appeal that will not be heard for several months. The US authorities are delaying their extradition request until they are satisfied they have built a strong enough case to succeed in the British courts. Why does it take so long to remove such obvious threat to the British society? Abu Hamza is a self-professed enemy of the West, with links to Taliban and Al Qa’eda. The only thing the British authorities managed so far, is to get him banned from the mosque and strip him of his many welfare benefits. I feel so much safer now! July 1st, 2003 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tomorrow? June 30th, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Paul Wolfowitz is on my wavelength on this one:
It’s far better for us if we attract the crazies to a killing ground of our choosing. The more the merrier! June 27th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I suppose one of the chief attractions of being in the apocolypse business is that nobody can ever prove you wrong. If the catastrophe you have predicted doesn’t happen this year, well, there’s always next year. Point in case being this starkly gloomy article in The Spectator from a certain Sanjay Anand:
Certainly this is not the first time that such melancholy warnings have been issued but the broad scope of these ones make me wonder if the ‘Western Intelligence Services’ are engaging in a bit of back-covering here. Not Mr.Anand though. He is very adamant:
That certainly fits Al-Qaeda’s modus. They do like popping up with an attack whenever and wherever they are least expected and, hence, prepared for. From a strategic point of view they do need to do something big and spectacular and reasonably soon. It should be borne in mind that Al-Qaeda’s attacks are not a message to the West, they are designed to boost the moral of the wider Muslim world (the ‘Umma’) by reassuring them that the ‘infidel’ is vulnerable and can be beaten. Following the pants-down rout of the Iraqi regime, Al-Qaeda are under pressure to respond in style, lest their legend being to fade and the support that they count on among the people they consider to be their constituents begin to trickle away. But, perhaps, they are no longer able to function at that level. Who can say what damage the work of Western security forces has done? Mr.Anand is rather dismissive but, then, he needs to be in order for his article to retain any punch. Clearly the editors of The Spectator felt it important enough to give it front-page prominence. Even pre-supposing I had a back garden (which I do not) I am not about to begin digging it up in order to construct a concrete bunker. But neither can I entirely dismiss Mr.Anand’s dire warnings with anything like the necessary degree of confidence. June 20th, 2003 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
There appears to be no end in sight yet to the rioting and civil disorder in Iran which is now entering its fifth day:
How very interesting. Meanwhile, and strictly in keeping with Western press policy, Islamofascist nutjobs are referred to as ‘Conservatives’:
Times must indeed be bad for the Mullahs. Their tin-foil hats are starting to slip. June 15th, 2003 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Right now, in the Middle East, Palestinian Arabs are being driven from their homes at gunpoint and forced into refugee camps. Only it is not the Israeli Army doing the driving, nor is this happening in Judea, Samaria or Gaza. Actually, it is happening in Iraq:
What a curious and disturbing example of the duality of the Middle Eastern mind. We are constantly assured that the plight of the Palestinians is the ‘root cause’ of the rage and anger evident in the Arab (and wider Muslim) world. Yet, as in Kuwait and now Iraq, it is a plight which their fellow Arabs appear only to eager to exacerbate. June 9th, 2003 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Another masterpiece from our favourite Frogosphere dissident, both graphically and morally. Note: For Macintosh users version and installment guide go here. June 8th, 2003 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
I bet I know what Tony Blair dreams about at night. I’ll bet that while he is tossing, turning and crying out in his sleep, his dreams transport him to the dusty, fetid alleyways of Baghdad. There, he strides forth like a grand, confident colossus surrounded by a squadron of husky, shaven-headed Royal Marines. Gaggles of excited Iraqi children bay and yap around the fringes of this entourage, hoping that the Great White Leader From Across the Seas will stoop to confer some benediction on their tiny heads. But he cannot stop. He is too busy. He is too single-minded. He knows what he wants and he is determined to find it. All other priorities are rescinded and greeting the thronged masses of downtown Baghdad will have to wait. Suddenly, through the whirls of settling dust, he spots it. A big warehouse miraculously untouched by Cruise missiles or JDAMs. He points. “There” he says, “that’s where they are”. Tony and his bodyguards break into a trot and then a run as they draw near to the entrance of the warehouse. One of the squaddies produces a bolt-cutter and snips off the padlock with a flourish. The great doors are swung wide open and, inside, gleaming and shimmering with pointy Ba’athist menace is a phalanx of stonking, great missiles, each one marked ‘London’, ‘Manchester’, Birmingham’, Leeds etc. “I was right, I was right” yells Tony triumphantly. “I told them so. I told them Hussein had WMDs and they didn’t believe me. Well I’m going to make them eat their weasel-words. I’m going to shove it right up ’em and show ’em whose boss and….. → Continue reading: It’s the WMDs, stupid! June 5th, 2003 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
We now know that Salam Pax worked for a time as an interpreter for New York Times and Slate journalist Peter Maass. Maass had absolutely no idea of his interpreter’s secret identity until he returned to the US, found out some more about Salam Pax, and eventually realised that Salam Pax had been blogging about his experiences with Maass (although he hadn’t revealed Maass’ identity either – presumably to protect his own). We thus had a situation where Maass and Pax were working together, and both were writing for large global audiences, but one of them was unaware of who the other was and what he was doing. There were no doubt people in the west who were reading both Maass and Pax, and had no idea that the two people were talking about the same things – quite literally – from different points of view. Plus we have the fact that the blog and the blogger are a much more interesting story than anything in the New York Times. (It’s probably possible to relate this to Dave Winer’s bet in Wired that the blogosphere would be more authoritative than the New York Times by 2007, but I am not sure quite how. I don’t think anyone thought things would unfold like this). When Maass first met Salam, Salam was reading a copy of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Dick was the master writer about issues of identity. His books are full of questions about who is who, and who is real, and what is real. Although Dick wrote most of his books in the 1960s and 1970s, the issues raised in them have steadily become more relevant and fascinating to people as the decades have gone by, and the world has come to seem more like the world he envisaged. Hollywood has been influenced more and more by Dick’s work, both in terms of direct adaptations like Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report, as well as by works obviously Dick influenced, such as The Matrix, Dark City and Vanilla Sky. The Man in the High Castle is set in an alternate world in which America has lost World War Two, and America is partitioned into a Pacific Zone ruled by Japan and an Atlantic Zone ruled by Germany. And it is about occupying powers becoming fascinated with the question of the authenticity of the culture of the country they occupy . By being seen to read it, Salam Pax almost seems to be making some kind of deeply ironic statement about his situation. And that seems to me the odd contradiction. Pax seems largely unaware of the extent that he is famous in the outside world (or at least claims to be unaware) and yet at the same time he is reading and referring to cultural items that are about the kind of awareness and interconnectedness that he is denying. The question is to what extent he is doing this deliberately, and to what extent this is simply a consequence of the zeitgeist of the age. As I discussed a few weeks ago, Pax previously compared the situation in Baghdad to something out of a William Gibson novel, unaware that Gibson himself, on his blog, had already compared Pax to a character out of one of his novels. Then of course we had Gibson commenting about Pax commenting about… And that is the extraordinary thing about all this. Salam Pax is the most Gibsonian and Dickian figure to ever actually exist, I think. The writings of Gibson and Dick are about the muddiness, murkiness and complexity of the modern world, and the patterns that arise from that muddiness and murkiness. As Maass observes, Iraq is very muddy and murky, and Salam Pax himself appears to be a pattern coming through this, as well as a suberb chonicler of it. And through his actions, Salam Pax seems to be making a peculiar commentary on himself. And yet to make that commentary one thinks he would have to understand more than he actually does, and indeed understand more than it seems possible that anyone in Iraq could understand. From his writing it is easy to tell that Salam is very smart, but is he that smart? This is why I am finding the Salam Pax saga to be such an extraordinary story. (This is also why I am finding the “Salam is a tool of the Ba’athists” theory steadily less likely. The more detailed and intricate the story gets, the less I simply can believe they could have the imagination to dream something like this up). June 3rd, 2003 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jim Henley is right about one thing… Iraq is indeed a quagmire. Rather than a quick campaign with decisive results that vindicated their views, they are still fighting to prove their position was justified, struggling to massage the facts, trying to divert attention away from the reality of the effect of overthrowing a nation’s government as their loudly trumpeted ideas of a few short months ago ‘circle the drain’. I am of course referring to the people who were Saddam Hussain’s ‘useful idiots’ and who opposed the armed overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism… and who are now desperately clutching at daily US casualty rates which can be counted on one hand as some means to snatch a tiny measure of victory from the jaws of absolutely crushing intellectual defeat. I expect more Americans are murdered by other Americans in any one of several major US cities every day than are dying in fighting in Iraq now, just to put it all into some perspective. One does not have to support the way the US is going about running (or not) Iraq to nevertheless admit that the war itself was a triumph not just for the allies but for the Iraqi people. So to borrow Jim Henley’s tone, damn to hell all the ‘cowardly’ paleo-libertarians and their socialist confreres who really did not care what Saddam Hussain’s regime was doing to the people in Iraq and who still feel no remorse that all the horrors of Ba’athism would still be happening in Iraq today if they had gotten their way. May 31st, 2003 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
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