The Proud Islamist

Respect for the dead

2012-01-14T22:45:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times to the White House, US media and government are making a big deal about the video that was leaked of US troops urinating on what are claimed to be the bodies of dead Taliban fighters. The outrage appears to be over the lack of respect shown to the corpses.

US (and Canadian) troops crossed two oceans to kill these men.

How is it that urinating on their corpses is the obscenity that everyone is wringing their hands about?

A Terrible Anniversary

2012-01-05T21:13:00.001-08:00

There is no more potent sign of the depths to which Pakistan has sunk over the past decade than the public response to the assassination of Salman Taseer, and the heroic status given to his murderer.

From Dawn:
Taseer's killing - Symbol of a withering state

Alhamdulillah!

2011-12-18T21:55:00.000-08:00

Every now and then something reminds me to be thankful that I am Muslim.

Loonwatch hits!

2011-12-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

Two fantastic videos I found through the always-incisive Loonwatch:

Islamophobia and Antisemitism - Same message, different minority:

Ron Paul campaign video: Imagine.

A familiar tune

2011-11-29T20:31:00.000-08:00

I'm almost done reading William Darymple's The Last Mughal , a history of the city of Delhi in 1857, during the tragically self-defeating mutiny against the British East India Company by its native soldiers. Having not read much at all about the place or the period, I can't say much about the accuracy of Darymple's account, but damn, the man can write. If this book were a Hollywood movie, it could easily be a blockbuster.

(To those to whom I have promised to read other books, I'm sorry, but this recommendation came from a source I couldn't refuse).

Central to Darymple's narrative is the tragic figure of Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the title character, who by the end of the book is locked up in the dungeon of his own palace, and put on trial by the British for masterminding a rebellion that he never wanted. His prosecutors alleged that Zafar, a syncretic Sufi Muslim emperor who participated - and believed in - Hindu rituals and festivals, was a participant in a vast conspiracy stretching from Turkey through Persia and into India to unseat the enlightened British Empire. To quote the chief prosecutor:

"The known restless spirit of Mahommedan fanaticism has been the first aggressor, the vindictive intolerance of that peculiar faith has been struggling for mastery, seditious conspiracy has been its means, the prisoner [Zafar] its active accomplice, and every possible crime its frightful result . . . The bitter zeal of Mahommedanism meets us everywhere . . . perfectly demonic in its actions. . . "

As Darymple points out, however, 65-85% of the rebel army that joined the soldiers who first rushed into Zafar's pristine audience hall with their horses and muddy boots were, in fact, Hindus.

To English people who didn't know any better, however, the idea of a global Muslim conspiracy directed against them seemed appealing.

The words change, but not the tune.

Amira Hass on Negotiations

2011-11-02T14:43:00.000-07:00

The only Israel journalist who actually lives in the territory that it is her job to report on:

Palestinians must say no to negotiations with Israel

The Palestinians' application for membership in the United Nations was welcomed, even by critics of the Palestinian Authority, because it was understood as the close, albeit belated, of an overly long chapter. This was the chapter in which the Palestinian leadership, in exchange for dubious guarantees and slivers of privilege for a small group, took part in a charade of negotiations, while in reality, the area intended for the realization of the Palestinians' right to self-determination kept being reduced and fragmented. This chapter exposed the fact that the parties in Israel's various coalition governments disagree on only one thing: the number and size of the Palestinian Bantustans in Israel's master plan.

The Americanization of Canadia Media

2011-10-08T20:58:00.000-07:00

Our national media in Canada have always had its share of fiscal conservatives and dogmatic free marketeers, and CBC is, contrary to what its detractors say, is no exception. What we didn't always have in our national media, however, was the loud, confrontational, sound-byte-driven drivel that passes for news in the United States. That seems to be slowly changing. For example:

"Listen, don't take this the wrong way, but you sound like a left-wing nutbar."

The statement itself betrays a mind that was not in gear before its owner engaged his mouth. There is only one way to take a statement like "you sound like a left-wing nutbar." Kevin O'Leary must have thought he was delightfully clever when he put that one together, and must have been rather dismayed when Chris Hedges both gave him the verbal thrashing he richly deserved, and, having made his arguments clear, made it clear what he thought of the "Lang and O'Leary" exchange.

Recently, CBC distanced itself from remarks made by Don Cherry, the star of its Hockey Night in Canada sideshow "Coach's Corner." Of course, anybody in Canada who doesn't live under a rock has some idea of who Don Cherry is, and the remarks he made about fighting in Hockey shouldn't surprise anyone. Everyone knows that Don Cherry is there specifically to entertain, not to inform.

CBC's News programming, on the other hand, should be there to inform. Yet O'Leary's attitude towards his guest as well as the garbled attempts he made at responding say far more about the CBC than anything Cherry said.

Will CBC distance itself from O'Leary as well? Don't hold your breath.

Perhaps, given the attitude of the Harper government towards public institutions in general, their silence has some wisdom in it.

6 words Israel should say if it is serious about peace

2011-09-18T10:36:00.001-07:00

We

Will

Stop

Taking

Your

Land

The fact that Netanyahu refuses to say it betrays his intentions.

Pamela Geller in her own words

2011-09-05T22:38:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you don't need a shorter, folks.

"The Obama legacy will not only be the degenerate spending which led to the economic downfall of this country, but he will also go down in history as the first anti-freedom leader whose foreign policy led to a universal caliphate across the world."

It's not just a phobia. It's a complex of fixed, false beliefs that cannot be exorcised or even called into question by facts or reasoned argument. It's a delusion.

The Hatemobile

2011-08-27T14:36:00.001-07:00

From Loonwatch:

Farewell Jack

2011-08-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'oun

". . . Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one - a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world's environment. We can restore our good name in the world. We can do all of these things because we finally have a party system at the national level where there are real choices; where your vote matters; where working for change can actually bring about change. In the months and years to come, New Democrats will put a compelling new alternative to you. My colleagues in our party are an impressive, committed team. Give them a careful hearing; consider the alternatives; and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. . . "

- From Jack Layton's Open Letter to Canadians, written two days ago.

Courage

2011-08-21T22:27:00.000-07:00

Most Norwegian kids have never lived in a war zone, and so have never been stalked through the woods by a ruthless killer, intent on their extermination.

The immigration and diversity that Anders Breivik and his ilk hate so much helped to save Norwegian lives.

From the Moscow Times:

Chechen War Prepared Teens for Norway Terror

16 August 2011

By Nikolaus von Twickel

Two Chechen teenagers who survived last month's massacre on Norway's Utoya Island said they pelted right-wing extremist Anders Breivik with stones and saved lives.

Movsar Dzhamayev, 17, and Rustam Daudov, 16, told the Norwegian Dagbladet daily that they were reminded of the war in their native Chechnya after seeing Breivik killing three people in front of their eyes on July 22.

"I have seen people being shot before in my country when I was small and had flashbacks," Dzhamayev said in the interview published late last week.

But after speaking to his father by cell phone, he pulled himself together. "My dad said, 'Attack the perpetrator and do it properly,'" he said.

With a third unidentified friend, the teens armed themselves with stones and returned to the scene only to witness Breivik killing another young camper on the island outside Oslo.

"We stood three meters from him and wanted to beat him, but then he shot one of our friends in the head. So we just threw the stones and ran for our lives," Daudov said.

While he was unsure whether he hit Breivik, Dzhamyev said he was certain he had.

"First he howled and then turned to me and shouted, "[expletive] [racial slur]," he said.

The teens said they decided that it was too difficult to stop the gunman and better to save lives. They discovered a cave-like opening in a rock where they managed to hide 23 children from Breivik, who ended up killing 69 people at the camp and eight more people in a bombing in central Oslo.

Dzhamayev, who kept guard outside, also dragged three youngsters from the lake who were close to drowning.

The two Chechens, who both live in Norway, said they first met each other at the summer camp and immediately became close friends.

Norway has a sizable population of Chechens, most of whom came as refugees from the wars that have ravaged the North Caucasus republic over the past 15 years.

Dzhamayev and Daudov are not the only Chechens reported to have survived the camp. A third, Anzor Dzhukayev, 17, was briefly arrested after the massacre on suspicion that he was an accomplice, Norwegian media reported last week.

A police spokesman said he was suspected of throwing away his gun and blending in because he showed no emotions, the Verdens Gang newspaper reported Friday.

Dzhukayev, who was released the following day, explained his coolness with his childhood experiences. "When I was little, I lived in a house full of bodies. I remember seeing dogs eating them," he was quoted in media reports as saying.

Attacks of some kind

2011-08-19T22:11:00.000-07:00

I don't agree with Akiva Eldar's perspective on Israeli-Palestinian peace, but he is right about one thing: Netanyahu will use the attacks to justify even harsher treatment of the Palestinians, and the blood of those victims will then be used to pull the Palestinians back towards a maximalist position, since every other strategy seems to end in failure.

"The attacks in the south should remind us that in the Israeli-Palestinian military arena there is no knockout victory. Whoever didn't want the Palestina Liberation Organization got Hamas. Whoever didn't want Hamas is getting Al-Qaida."

The myth of Israel's Goliath image has been slain
From Ha'aretz

Akiva Eldar

The planning, time, place and methodology of the attacks in the south indicate that the intention was not just to kill Israelis, avenge Palestinian deaths, or speed up the end of occupation. Whoever sent the terrorists is no friend of President Mahmoud Abbas and his people, who are scurrying around trying to lobby support for a UN General Assembly vote for a Palestinian state next month.. . .

Read the rest.

A website I wish I had made. . .

2011-08-11T10:57:00.001-07:00

. . . and, in fact, did.

A couple of years ago, when I had a lot of time on my hands, and the quantity of subject material was more manageable, I created a blog called The Mozlems Are Coming! I had intended to devote it to ridiculing the xenophobic conspiracy theory, forwarded by Spencer, Geller, Wilders and co., that there is a vast and ancient Muslim plot to conquer and subjugate non-Muslims everywhere.

I'm only slightly kidding.

Then, a combination of being busy, being lazy, the mushrooming of the Fear-O-Sphere genre, and the limited hit-count of this blog itself led me to put the project on hold indefinitely. It's something I regret. Since then, what used to go on in the darker corners of the internet has gradually moved into the mainstream, from the anti-Mosque protests in New York to the appearance of the many books penned by anti-Muslim wingnuts in hands of strangers I see on busses and trains. Before he spectacularly and gruesomely disproved every argument ever made about Scandinavians and racial profiling, Anders Breivik added his own 1500-page magnum opus to this growing body of hate literature.

For Spencer, Geller, et al to claim they weren't responsible is a bit like saying that Wagner wasn't responsible anti-Semitic violence. It's true, but he did inspire some people who were.

It is, therefore, regrettable that there aren't more people engaged in countering this burgeoning industry, whose intellectual products have already made a bloody imprint upon the world. Fortunately, a few brilliant people have stepped into the gap:

The site provides profiles regular updates on all the activities going in the Fear-O-Sphere, well-informed refutations of its (ahem) "scholarly" works, and unlike most political blogs (including and especially the anti-Islam ones), some healthy debate and disagreement in the comments, with regular contributions from a haters themselves.

I highly recommed the exposé on "Muslim Reformer" Wafa Sultan, one of the leaders of the cottage industry of Islam-Experts-With-Funny-Sounding-Names that professional hatemongers have come to rely upon.

None other than anti-Islam kingpin Robert Spencer himself has taken to flailing wildly at Loonwatch, calling it an "Islamic hate site." No comment from me is needed.

In summary: TheProudIslamist <3 Loonwatch.

Rock Bottom

2011-07-23T23:50:00.000-07:00

Even though I haven't actually read any of the Harry Potter series, nor seen any of the movies, and even if their global success has been more the product of some well-designed marketing than of their literary merit, their author has, nevertheless, accomplished something remarkable.

So I thought I'd share an interesting quote from J.K. Rowling that I came across in an unlikely place:

“I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised…I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

An absence of Schadenfreude

2011-07-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

Despite my criticism of its government, its military, and its founding ideology, there has always been one positive fact about the State of Israel that has provided a true - if generally non sequitur - argument in its defense:

Out of all the Middle Eastern states, within the territory it captured in 1948, freedom of expression has been the strongest.

It's been hardly ideal, mind you, considering that people were still jailed for advocating against Zionism, but it has still, traditionally, been legal for people within the Green Line to write, talk, and demonstrate for the Palestinians, about what has happened to them, and it has remained legal for some of them (particularly Jews) to point out the problems that Zionism has wrought.

All of that is changing.

With the passage of these laws, Netanyahu and Lieberman have again changed the score in the Middle East, and not in Israel's favour. Where the Arabs are moving towards freedom, laying down their lives for the right to write and say what they want, the Knesset is curtailing those rights. While the Turkish government is finally making some move to reduce the restrictions on Kurdish culture and language, the Israeli government is making it illegal to talk about what happened to the Palestinians in 1948.

I don't say this with any schadenfreude. It would be nice to feel some pleasure at watching the State of Israel descend into fascism, but it isn't humanly possible. It is, however, possible to hope that this signals the conflict entering its final phase, and that Zionism will finally be forced to take a look at itself in the mirror to see what it has become.

The Universal God

2011-06-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

A fantastic article I stumbled accross.

Allah Hafiz vs. Khuda Hafiz

Trust me, my God can understand all the languages he created.

Driving change

2011-05-29T21:25:00.000-07:00

There are fewer things more symbolic of the mysoginy of Arab culture than the Saudi ban on women driving. With no basis in any Islamic text, and the majority of scholarly opinion from Iran to England being against it, the ban epitomizes the backwardness of this 21st century kingdom, not just for non-Muslim liberals who cluck admonishingly at the repression of women, but for Muslims whose feeling about it range from anger to embarrassment.

Thanks to this woman, it might be about to change:

Story here.

Shorter Danny Danon (Likud)

2011-05-19T18:57:00.000-07:00

Hat tip to an associate of mine stranded in the US of A, who found this gem in the NYT:

Making the Land of Israel whole

The Palestinians had better not declare independence, or else we're gonna occupy them.

Bibi, I've figured it out!

Shorter Michael Taube

2011-05-18T22:01:00.000-07:00

Stephen Harper's former speech writer, published every Saturday in the loony bin of the Postmedia news empire:

Geert Wilders' Canadian hosts did us a favour

While I knew that he felt threatened by Islam and wanted to ban the Qur'an, I was shocked to find out that Geert Wilders also doesn't like Muslims.

60% of us didn't want it

2011-05-02T20:23:00.000-07:00

But we got it anyways.

Now, we are in the uncomfortable position of praying that we were wrong about the implications of a Konservative majority.

. . . Or that whatever damage is done to this country and its institutions over the course of the next 4 years can be repaired as quickly.

Stephen Harper: Still Hating Canada

2011-04-09T10:47:00.000-07:00

Either Stephen Harper doesn't understand Canadian democracy, or his opinion of the Canadian public is so low that he believes that we don't.

Either he has no recollection of what he himself proposed in 2004 in order to bring down Paul Martin, or he believes that Canadians have such a poor grasp of history that we won't recall it.

Either he is being profoundly - if honestly - mistaken about a matter that he has chosen to make the centrepiece of his campaign, or he is being viciously mendacious with the public, along with his own supporters.

As the always astute Gilles Duceppe pointed out, here is what Harper himself wrote to Adrienne Clarkson in 2004:
I don't know whether or not Harper's focus on process issues rather than policy will be successful or not. On both counts, however, his party is taking Canada away from its traditions as a parliamentary democracy and towards an American-style of politics. On the process front, they are doing this by:

1) Fostering the impression that we directly elect the Prime Minister (as in a Presidential system) rather than local MPs.

2) Trying to collapse the opposition parties, who together represent the Canadian tradition of the representation of significantly divergent viewpoints, into a single entity - the "Coalition."

3) Relying on personal attack ads, both during and before the election, to shift the discussion from issues to personalities.

4) Ending the per-vote subsidy, without which parties rely on individual donors with deep pockets to finance their operations.

5) Finally, and perhaps by doing the above, he is trying to destroy the Liberal Party of Canada, particularly where finances are concerned, which the party has come to rely upon since Jean Chretien (perhaps in a final flipping of the bird to the hapless Paul Martin) placed limits on campaign contributions. I don't have any special place in my heart for the Liberals, but if they are defeated, it should be because their ideas were bad, and not because the party was outspent.

On policy, there are no shortage of reasons to suspect that Stephen Harper Hates Canada. Some are documented in this blog. On foreign policy, his is Canada's Likud government. On the economy, his is the party that has perpetually ignored homelessness as an issue. On health care, his supporters have long cried for an American-style health care, even if the party itself denies it. On the environment, his was the government that was instrumental in scuttling the Copenhagen talks. The list goes on . . .

So if you love Canada please, please, don't vote Konservative.

Failing to resist

2011-03-20T15:13:00.000-07:00

So the die is now cast. The UNSC has voted, and it has voted for war against Gaddafi - that is, after all, what this is. This isn't a "no-fly" zone - as the resolution itself says, it's an authorization to use military force to protect civilians; and if a few civilians get killed along the way, so be it. Allied forces are claiming that there have been no civilian casualties from all the missile strikes and bombings. I don't believe them.

Some intelligent arguments have been made over the last 2 days by people who are less than thrilled about this. They argue that the motivations of those involved in the airstrikes (the usual suspects) are less than pure, and that very similar action against Saddam Hussein in 1991 led to a 12-year stalemate in which millions of civilians were killed, and the relative strength of the regime against its opponents on the ground provided one of the myriad excuses for the 2003 invasion and occupation of the country.

These are not baseless arguments. The Americans, British, French, Italians, and yes, Canadians too, likely do not have purely humanitarian concerns at heart. The question is, exactly who does? The argument that Western governments will be condemned no matter what they do isn't entirely hollow - if America had sat by and let Benghazi fall, I know lots of people who would have said it was because they privileged Libya's oil supplies over its people.

The missing question in all this debate is "Where are the Arabs?" For sure, most of their leaders actually have no interest in seeing the rebellion against Gaddafi succeed - as current events in Bahrain demontrate (another place where you won't see the Americans leaping to the defence of civilians, despite having a base on the island). It was heartening for sure to see the Arab league demanding action to reign in one of their own colleagues. It was equally disheartening to see them doing absolutely nothing about him themselves.

The ever-plaintiff Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League, was among the first to complain when the bombs and missiles started hitting Libya, as if he had expected something different. Moussa, an Egyptian, is himself now a favourite to win Egyptian presidential elections, and a former Egyptian foreign minister.

And where has Egypt been all these days, exactly? One might imagine that post-Mubarak Egypt migh have a bit more interest in helping to - at the very least - stabilise the situation in neighbouring Libya. It certainly has the wherewithal: Egypts armed forces are, after the IDF, the most well-armed in the Middle East, receiving $1.3 billion in military aid from Washington each year, and with an army and air force that are more technologically advanced than anything Libya has to put on the field.

Yet Egypt sits on its hands, it's leaders pining away (at least, publicly) for London, Paris, and Washington to come and save the Arabs from one another.

And so the Arabs continue to receive the treatment reserved for those who cannot take care of themselves - to be continually taken advantage of by those with the means to forward their own interests. This situation will not change until the Arabs choose to change it. That process started in January with the people of Tunisia. Time will tell whether they succeed. Western intervention in Libya is, however, another example of the Arab failure to resist.

Say it with a smile

2011-03-15T22:08:00.001-07:00

There's been a lot to watch in the world this week, and a lot I have wanted to say - not just about the history being made all over the Arab world, but about other things closer to home. For now, I just wanted to highlight this photo from the Independent, of protesters in Bahrain.

Seat of the pants

2011-03-12T17:09:00.000-08:00

Ahead of Business Class
Ahead of First Class
Ahead of Executive,
Gold Star, Diamond,

And of course, Super-Elite,
Are special seats,
Reserved for those who fly,
By the seat of their pants.

Because everyone in this section,
Is rushing towards some destination,
The section uses the abbreviation
"SOP,"
To save time.

And many of them are sops indeed,
Dishevelled poets, most of these,
Overcoming their tribulations,
With romantic sentimentality.

But not all of its denizens,
Are inhabitants by choice.
And near them you can sense,
Frustration in their demeanour,

Hurling profanity,
At the connection they missed,
And swearing quietly,
At a loved one they miss.

Look, it's totally not apartheid. . .

2011-02-27T22:40:00.000-08:00

They support equality, but please, no Arabs . . .

The secretary of the settlement of Elazar, Yossi Kaufman, told Haaretz: "[Residents of] Elazar have approached the regional council and requested that the settlement's buses not have an Arab driver. If army directives require a guard for an Arab entering the community, there can't be an Arab school-bus driver. If someone wants to earn a living, be my guest. In fact, Arabs built the houses in Elazar. When it comes to children, that's an issue of safety. We were notified that the driver is not Arab and that was the end of the story."

Evil or stupid?

2011-02-24T18:26:00.000-08:00

"I feel a lot of respect and empathy [for] Mubarak. He was an important leader for his country, I believe he enjoyed the respect of many Egyptians," Barak said, adding that Mubarak was "quite successful, under the circumstances" in dealing with Egypt's many challenges.

-- Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, speaking to CNN.

Help the revolution

2011-02-22T21:36:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine with a lot of experience in activism recently told me that he hates awareness-raising. In the discussion that ensued, he made an awfully good case for ignoring how media outlets will report an event, and instead working to change the facts on the ground.

I don't know if this will actually work. While there are probably lots of men of conscience in the armies of the Arab world, there are also probably lots of opportunists (especially in the top echelons) who will only refuse their orders if they know that they will be caught on camera, and the images broadcast to the world.

So I think this is a pretty good idea:

Blackout-Proof the Protests

Give what you can.

Subjects of History

2011-02-13T08:30:00.000-08:00

January was a historic month for Egypt and her neighbours. On the far side of Libya, Ben-Ali was tossed out by the popular uprising that inspired Egypt's own. To the south, Sudan may finally know a lasting peace. All the while, the monarchs of the Arab world and the Israelis are watching nervously, seeing their cherished stability unravel in the face of popular sentiment that loathes the injustice necessitated by that stability.

We in the West are used to thinking of Muslims, and particularly the Arabs, as the objects of history. They are like surgery patients, lying paralysed on the operating table, waiting for people with power to do various things to them - usually without anaesthetic. They may have opinions, but they do not matter, because those opinions are rarely rational, and generally dangerous. Edward Said only wounded Orientalism. He did not kill it.

As many have pointed out, including a few of the Middle East's wiser observers and denizens, the danger remains that it will be the Egyptian military leadership, and not the people of Egypt, who will determine the nature of the new order. As the formidable Robert Fisk wrote:

. . . the future body politic of Egypt lies with up to a hundred officers, their old fidelity to Mubarak – sorely tested by Thursday's appalling speech, let alone the revolution on the streets – has now been totally abandoned. A military communiqué yesterday morning called for "free and fair elections", adding that Egyptian armed forces were "committed to the demands of the people" who should "resume a normal way of life". Translated into civilian-speak, this means that the revolutionaries should pack up while a coterie of generals divide up the ministries of a new government. In some countries, this is called a "coup d'etat".

Fisk, however, for all his decades of experience living and working in the Arab world, didn't predict the uprising to begin with - to my knowledge, no one did - and so we can hold out some hope that his grimmer instincts may yet prove wrong.

No matter what happens from here, though, the precedent has been set, and the principle established. Kings and generals may have power and influence, but the final say goes to the population, if they all want the same thing badly enough. They are no longer passive objects, but active participants in their own history. They have an opinion, and it matters.

Karachi

2011-02-09T22:22:00.000-08:00

Evocative, poetic writing in Dawn:

Karachi: The Great Work

2011-02-05T21:34:00.000-08:00

Blocking the tanks in Tahrir Square

A Change Gonna Come

2011-01-27T18:54:00.000-08:00

Mohammed Bouazizi, 1984-2011

At the end of his 26 years in this world, Mohammed Bouazizi doused himself in solvents and set himself ablaze, and died of his burns 3 weeks later. Did he have an inkling of the fire that his own self-immolation would spark?

As I write this, people are waking up for Fajr prayer in Cairo. There are massive demonstrations planned after Jumah prayers. As my previous post demonstrates, I tend to be conservative in my predictions - I tend to bet on things staying the same, because that has been, in my experience, the safe bet.

I'm going to revise that prediction now. Many of the dictators of the Arab world are finding themselves backed into corners, particularly in Egypt and Yemen, but also in Jordan, Algeria, and probably also Libya. When they heard of what happened in Tunisia, some Libyan associates of mine seemed uncharacteristically ecstatic, especially given their typical reticence to discuss politics.

I don't know if Mubarak will fall tomorrow. Even if he does fall, I don't know if he won't just be replaced by one of his current associates, an opportunist who sees that the old man isn't going to get any younger anyways.

It does seem apparent, at this point, though, that a sea-change has taken place in the world of Arab presidents-for-life - the pseudo-monarchs who don't call themselves kings, but nevertheless rule as despots and groom their own family members to take power when they retire or die. An Arab president has been forced to leave office against his will, and that does set a precedent. If it didn't, the streets of Cairo and Sana would not have thronged so.

There is also a tremendous irony, that the American rhetoric about bringing about a flowering of democracy to the Middle East has proven so empty. They, along with the British, French, and Israelis, have been publicly professing a desire to free the people of the Middle East, all the while building stronger and harsher cages for them, frightened of the reckoning that would come if their prisoners ever got loose. Yet a vegetable seller with a can of paint-thinner has accomplished far more than the entire might of the US military-industrial complex could have, even if it had been honourable in its intentions.

I pray, and I urge anyone reading this to do the same, that the demonstrators are successful in influencing their governments in a meaningful, permanent way. I fear, though, that Mubarak in particular won't allow that to happen. Something big will happen, but if the security forces cooperate (and I pray they won't) the response could be extreme, designed to make an example of the poor earnest souls who will take to the streets in a few hours.

Either way, I don't think that the sparks lit by Mohammed Bouazizi will fizzle without something dramatic happening.

Tunisia

2011-01-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

I have had a lot of thoughts about what happened recently in Tunisia, and people who are familiar with the politics of the Arab world all wondering aloud "Will this spread?" Maybe, but not soon, is my guess. At any rate, Maher Arar wrote this very insightful piece for the Globe and Mail. While I'm mildly upset at the title, and the linguistic trap it perpetuates, it's still worth a read.

. . . The White House remained quiet about the situation in Tunisia almost until the end, although police had by then killed dozens of peaceful protesters. It wasn’t until Mr. Ben Ali was over the Mediterranean that Mr. Obama applauded “the courage and dignity of the Tunisian people.” This face-saving statement came just two days after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated that Washington was not taking sides.

The French position was similar, although with the twist that Nicolas Sarkozy’s government offered to send anti-riot police to help crush the uprising. After learning that Mr. Ben Ali had fled, Mr. Sarkozy had a change of heart, refusing French residency to the dictator. . . .

The Phantom Menace

2011-01-05T17:50:00.000-08:00

While I frequently deride the Ottawa Citizen for being the looney bin of the Postmedia newspaper empire (formerly the CanWest media empire, before the company brightened my day by going broke), it has to be said that a glimmer of sanity is occasionally seen from the paper, despite its propensity for American-style wingnuttery.

While the wording of this piece by Dan Gardner is occasionally unfortunate (as I discussed in this post from 2008), the diction doesn't negate the importance of the point he makes. Nor does it make his shots at professional bedwetter Mark Steyn any less delicious.

Anyhow, here is the article .

Review: Images of Muhammad

2010-12-26T17:36:00.001-08:00

If it wasn't already widely known in the Western world that Muslims were vehemently iconoclastic, it certainly must be by now, given the violent reaction in many majority-Muslim countries to, among other flare-ups, the Danish cartoons affair. The iconoclasm, both literal and figurative, that is taken as part and parcel of Islam does not, however, mean that Muslims do not create images of their prophets. We just don't create visual depictions of them. As Palestinian scholar Tarif Khalidi shows in a well-researched, 303-page volume, textual depictions of Muhammad (peace and blessings upon him) have been in constant development in the Muslim world ever since the first known biographies of the Prophet were penned in the latter 8th century.

Khalidi, being first and foremost a historian, seeks to catalogue all of the sources from which Muhammad's life can be viewed, including nearly 14 centuries of Sira (prophetic biography) literature through the course of the book, noting along the way the cultural and geopolitical forces that shaped the portrayal of the life of the last Prophet. Throughout this book, Khalidi's own views on the Prophet himself are kept at a generous distance - only occasionally do we get a sense of which of biographers he was more or less sympathetic towards.

While the book is panoramic and spans over a millenium of literature, two Khalidi does a particularly excellent job with two topics: 1) Controversial reports in the Sira and 2) The diversity of opinion on Muhammad's life, prophethood, and message that has existed within Muslim societies.

Thanks to Salman Rushdie (or perhaps, more approriately, the Islamic Republic of Iran's reaction to Salman Rushdie), a famous example of the first is the episode of the so-called Satanic verses, a report found in the Sira in which Muhammad ostensibly recited a verse negating the Islamic teaching of tawheed (unadulterated monotheism) for the Meccan leaders, and then recanted it, saying was from Satan. Examining the writings of the earliest scholars of the Sira, Khalidi explores the mindset and sense of purpose that let them to adopt an inclusive approach to reports - even reports that were unflattering to a subject whome they revered. Unlike the scholars of Hadith (prophetic narrations), the early Sira was written by men more concerned with completeness than with accuracy, more occupied with preservation than with filtering.

The diversity of thought on Muhammad is highlighted throughout the book. We see Muhammad taken up in the cause of traditionalists, rationalists, poets, and lawyers. We see the evolution of the Sunni view of Muhammad as the Perfect Man, and the Shi'a view of Muhammad as the progenitor of a holy family. Refreshingly, the view of Muhammad in Islamic apologetics, a subject that seems to consume so many Muslim intellectuals to the point of paralysis, is put into perspective, and treated with a calm clarity of thought not seen elsewhere.

Anyone interested in the intellectual history of the Muslim world should read this book.

The wisdom of old men

2010-12-11T14:41:00.000-08:00

From Ha'aretz:

Leading Haredi Rabbi refuses to endorse letter forbidding the rental of homes to Arabs

Rabbi Steinman, 96

. . . A source that was present at the scene said, "As soon as Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu introduced himself, Rabbi Steinman, who knew why he was being approached, said 'I won't sign,' and immediately left the room.". . .

One of Steinman's confidants related the rabbi's words to Haaretz: "They are making a fierce nationalistic statement. We will not irritate others, that is not the Haredi way. There are things that should not be done; what if there would be a similar call in Berlin against renting properties to Jews? Where is the public conscience? What will this do to Jews around the world? We must act responsibly.". . .

Emphasis mine.

Yet another moron . . .

2010-11-28T09:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11852953

The plot was actually hatched by FBI agents, the device was a fake, and the only person in the USA sincerely involved with (allegedly) trying to kill anyone was a like a villain in a Loony Toons episode.

Which, even if we take the FBI story as gospel truth, only further demonstrates the well-established pattern: that the only people currently trying to hurt Americans are people who are not very smart.

Scanning every crotch at the airport probably does little to contribute to their downfall. They do most of the work themselves.

For Omar Khadr

2010-11-11T14:37:00.000-08:00

We spent our youths in such different ways.

When I was sleepy from staying up late,
You were half-mad from sleep deprivation,
When I was being interviewed,
You were being interrogated,
When I was threatened with failure,
You were threatened with rape,
When I had clever words,
You had tears,
When I was kicked,
You were shot.

When I complained about my government,
About a search here and a frisking there.
You were betrayed by that government,
Its treason against you:
That it had sworn never to let a child,
Be treated like a soldier.

"He's not a soldier!"
Said their sages,
"So his deeds are a crime,
And he deserves no protection."

"He did it on the battlefield"
Said the same,
"So we will not try him,
As a civilian.

Or even as a human being."

When I lashed out in anger,
At the bare-handed boy,
They called it "self-defense."

When you struck out in fear,
At the armed soldier,
They called it "murder."

Not unfathomable for them,
To be blinded by vengefulness and spite,
But 40 years?
As if you had crossed an ocean ,
To make war upon them.
As if you were more
Than a boy.

Not equal in the eyes of God are we,
For how can the one who suffers,
Be equal to the one who is free?

But despair is not a pious trait,
For one day God will decide your fate,
And you will walk into the sun,
Their gates and cages will rust and seize,
And you will finally be free.
And waiting for you will be crowds,
Thronging to see you,
And I among them,

Cheering.

It's more complicated than that. . .

2010-10-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

This is a thought-provoking article on land reform in Dawn:

Myth and reality of land reform

. . . The populist redistributive land reform model bifurcates the city from the countryside. The latter is intuitively treated as a world unto itself where the issue of inequity would be resolved through localised methods of giving land to the tiller. In this portrayal the village appears mired in tradition and backwardness. If village life was captured in a poster, the caption would be: ruthless landlord oppressing the hapless peasant. . . .

2010-10-17T07:57:00.000-07:00

Peace will be an outcome of liberation, not its starting point.

- Moshe Machover

And now for something completely different. . .

2010-10-13T21:40:00.000-07:00

I am aware that the content of this blog can be a little bit . . . negative. So let me share with you my own feelings of elation today at a story which has no dark underbelly.

Regardless of how this came about, regardless of what will happen next, I don't think there is a human being on this earth who didn't feel a little pang of relief at hearing that the last miner was out.

In 2000, when the Russian submarine Kursk was reported to be sitting at the bottom of the ocean, the news that all of the survivors of the initial explosion had asphyxiated was profoundly saddening for me. For some reason, I had some special sympathy for all those young men sitting in the dark at the bottom of the sea, waiting for a rescue that ultimately never came. When I heard that 33 miners were trapped at the bottom of a collapsed mine in Chile, I feared a similar result.

Alhamdulillah, this time we got a happy ending.

Who else argues like this?

2010-10-06T22:12:00.000-07:00

Perusing the Fearosphere so you don't have to! That's right, it's another edition of our ongoing series "Teh Mozlems are Coming!"

Today's entry comes from the "Center for the Study of Political Islam" an institution (to use the term loosely) that has been polluting the internet over the last 4 years with it's self-published erudition - available to you in print form starting at $8.95 per book, plus taxes and shipping!

In a seminal high-school english assignment, entitled "Statistical Islam", the good folks over at the CSPI (yes, they get an acronym!) demonstrate how thoroughly they have mastered Islam.

"The Koran, in turn, points directly to Mohammed. It says 91 times that Mohammed is the perfect Muslim. He is the divine human prototype, the only pattern acceptable to Allah. The actions and words of Mohammed are so important that they have a special name—Sunna. We find the Sunna in two texts. The Sira is the biography of Mohammed and the Hadith is the collection of hadiths (small stories, traditions) about Mohammed.

"Islam is based on Koran and Sunna. Since the Sunna is found in the Sira and the Hadith, this means that three books contain all the doctrine of Islam—the Trilogy. If it is in the Trilogy (Koran, Sira, Hadith), then it is Islam. If something is not in the Trilogy, then it is not Islam. All of the Islamic doctrine is found in the Trilogy. Now, we have the complete information with no missing pieces."

There is a proverb that goes "Associate yourself with seekers of truth, but stay away from those who have found it." Amongst Muslims, there are a host of groups and individuals who use a chauvinistic sort of reasoning to claim that they have cornered the market on spiritual truth. And yet the traditional Muslim schools of thought are filled with hundreds of volumes of exegesis of the Qur'an, of the Hadith, and of the work of previous scholars. The so called "Trilogy" (which, aside from the Qur'an, is comprised of dozens of books of varying authenticity) may be a solid data-set, but its interpretation is obviously more complex.

With the assistance of a handy graph, the sages at the CSPI go on to argue:

. . . If Mohammed had continued with preaching religion we can extrapolate that there would have only been 265 Muslims when he died, instead of the 100,000 that resulted from his politics and jihad. This gives us an estimate of 265 conversions due to religion and 99,735 conversions to due the political jihad process. We can calculate the relative contributions of religion and politics in growth. Islam’s success was 0.3% religion and 99.7% politics 7 at the time of Mohammed’s death, 632 AD. . . . The statistical conclusion: Islam is primarily a political ideology.

The obvious conclusion that the authors are trying to lead us to (unsurprisingly, they made up their minds before they started this little study) is that Islam is not like Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism, or any other religion, but more like Communism or Nazism - a material ideology rather than a faith tradition.

This is, of course, because the authors never considered (or at least, never wrote an essay on) what would have happened if, for instance, the Jews of the Torah hadn't been instructed to drive out the inhabitants of the land of Canaan following their Exodus from Egypt. The authors never take notice of how Hinduism privileged the invading Aryans over the native (and vanquished) Dravidian peoples by giving domination of the priestly Brahmin caste almost exclusively to Aryans.

I don't think I really need to explain how the spread of Christianity was, ahem, "accelerated" through politics and warfare.

A religious practice that exerts no influence and has no political consequences is not likely to spread. While a few highly intellectual people might find satisfaction in a private spiritualism, the majority of people look to religion not only to answer their philosophical questions about the universe, but also provide them with guidance in how to order their relationships with other people. All of the major religions encourage a communal practice, around which a community can be built that strives toward a common set of virtues. That necessitates politics.

Of course, if your goal is to convince people that Islam is more like Communism than Christianity, then pointing out the political success of other major religions doesn't help.

What does help, however, is to claim that Muslims have more in common with Nazis than they do with Neopagans:

The Trilogy of Medina is even more negative about the Jews than Hitler’s Mein Kampf. What marks the biggest difference between Mein Kampf and the Trilogy is that Hitler did not write first section in Mein Kampf detailing how much he admired the Jews. There is a contradiction about how the Koran treats Jews in Mecca and how they are treated in Medina. Due to dualistic reasoning, both attitudes about the Jews are true, at the same time.

So now we have the Qur'an being portrayed as worse than Mein Kampf. Now, I've never read Mein Kampf. For all I know, it's mostly about how much Hitler hates Austrian prison food. The comparison, however, is useful for the conclusion that our self-styled "Islamic Scholars" are driving us towards, because Mein Kampf is nonetheless associated in the popular consciousness with the attempted extermination of the Jews.

The alternative hypothesis is, again, not considered: that the positive references to Jews are general, dealing with the religion as a whole and its great prophets, while the negative references relate to specific circumstances, like being surprised from the rear by a Jewish tribe in Medina, even as you were trying to defend yourselves from an external attack by the Meccans.

This reasoning is not unique to critics of Islam, but also to its self-declared stalwarts. Much of the anti-Jewish sentiment that has spread through Muslim communities (particularly after 1948, but also before) is based upon a similarly decontextualized reading of the Qur'an. Ironically, the strongest allies that the anti-Islam movement has are some of the most ostentatiously religious elements within the Muslim ummah.

Both groups claim to have an indisputable hold on what Islam is, and both groups employ a simplistic reading of primary sources in order to justify their views. "This is Islam," each says "and anything else is something you made up." They are fond of quoting one another, each to inspire fear of the other in their audience. Ironically, the protagonists act to strengthen their opponents.

It's almost as if they want a conflict.

Here is the real road to peace

2010-09-21T21:44:00.001-07:00

From Ha'aretz:

Author questioned for allegedly smuggling Palestinians into Israel for a day of fun

. . . Avoiding the security forces at West Bank checkpoints, they took the women out to eat in a restaurant in Jaffa, swimming in the Mediterranean, and took them home via Jerusalem where they could see the Old City walls from afar. . . Most of the Palestinians had never seen the sea or visited certain holy places. None of them had permits to enter Israel. . .

They had grown up less than an hour away, but they had never seen the sea.

The outrage of Zionism is that it proposes that a Jew who cannot trace a single ancestor to anywhere near Palestine should have a greater right - a "birthright" - to live and travel in that land than an Arab whose family has lived and worked there for generations. That is why those of us who have no other ill-feeling towards Jews or Judaism find the Zionist project to be so morally nauseating.

Peace will not come from the hollow theatrics on now display in Washington and New York. Peace will come when ordinary people resolve, as Ilana Hammerman did, to disregard the racist laws that maintain the status quo. Ordinary people have to act first, and only then will the leaders be dragged, kicking and screaming.

Spot the darkies

2010-09-14T22:58:00.000-07:00

From this weekend's anti-mosque protest in New York.

There are, by my count, at least two clearly non-white people in the photo, one in the foreground and one in the background, and at least 2 people of ambiguous ethnicity.

I'll acknowledge that the anti-Islam movement is an open tent. It's just that only white people seem real anxious to go in.

September 11th

2010-09-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

On September 11th, 1973, the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was ousted in a bloody coup by a military junta, led by Army General Augusto Pinochet.

As the military surrounded the presidential complex in Santiago, captured government workers were laid in front of tanks, and those remaining inside were told that if they did not surrender, the tanks would roll over their colleagues. Allende himself was found dead - according eye-witnesses he had been killed by machine-gun fire. According to the new regime, Allende had committed suicide.

The Pinochet regime went on, in partnership with other fascist South American governments and support of the CIA and US State Department under Henry Kissinger, to hunt down South American activists associated with leftist movements, in what became known as "Operation Condor."

(If you're interested in knowing more, the events of that day are presented in further detail in a documentary by the same name, subtitled "The Last Stand of Salvador Allende." It's a riveting and sometimes heartbreaking watch. The US State Department has also declassified a large volume of material which is now available online here, although large passages are redacted.)

The significance of what happened on September 11th, 2001 is not diminished by the fact that it shares a date with a massacre that happened in another country, exactly 28 years prior. It's historical significance lies in the fact that people from other countries were responsible for the deaths of thousands of people on American soil.

The reverse is usually the case.

Presumptions

2010-09-04T22:13:00.000-07:00

An excellent piece by an inspiring man:

Muslims habitually judged before trial

. . . When we do speak up, we are expected only to assert our "Canadian-ness," rather than raise serious questions about due process and intelligence agencies with poor human rights records -- questions shared by many Canadians and sorely in need of addressing. . .

My prediction, based upon not only the content by the style of reporting that has followed this case, is that we will see essentially the same pattern that emerged in the "Toronto 18" case: most of those accused will be found to have been innocent bystanders, the danger will be found to have been exaggerated, and one or two people convicted who displayed malice not exceeding their own bumbling stupidity.

The announcement

2010-09-04T22:07:00.000-07:00

For those of you who aren't sure what exactly it means that the Canadian government is "matching" funds donated for flood relief in Pakistan, here is the government's own announcement, through the CIDA website.

http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/acdi-cida/ACDI-CIDA.nsf/eng/NAD-82282153-GHR

Note that the funds must be donated to a registered charity in order to qualify for being matched, and must be received by September 12th.

No other topics

2010-08-29T10:52:00.001-07:00

It's been a week now, but I still can't bring myself to write about anything else. The flood waters are moving southwards, and I don't know how long it will take Pakistan to recover. This is what my prayers are about - that sheer mass of humanity that has so much tribulation ahead of it, from all the challenges of homelessness to the horror of water-borne disease.

There are many reasons why the average Canadian has an interest in donating to the relief efforts, and an interest in making sure that 1/5 of Pakistanis aren't plunged into worse destitution than they were in previously. For now, though, forget your politics, and help out simply because it is right, and because the act needs no further justification than that.

No sehri and no iftar

2010-08-22T11:01:00.000-07:00

Never in a million years would I want to be seen as the niggardly, mean-spirited type of person who would discourage people from donating to relief efforts. On the contrary, those of us who enjoy a better life than the people in the affected areas need to remember that our wealth is a test, and that to withhold it from those in need is to fail that test. This is the biggest disaster facing humanity since the 2006 Tsunami, and it deserves the attention of our entire species.

It must be said, however, as it was said about the United States during Hurricane Katrina, that if Pakistan didn't spend so much on "national security," it would probably be able to afford some national security.

Unlike the United States, Pakistan has some good reasons to maintain a large military - it lives in a dangerous neighbourhood - but this is a country that spends more on its military than it does on health and education combined. The lack of those does more damage to the country every day than any army ever could.

Like it or not . . .

2010-08-21T01:00:00.000-07:00

A company like Newscorp can turn anyone into a sensation, even a third-rate fearmonger like the zany Randroid proprietor of the blog "Atlas Shrugs." Salon.com's Jason Elliot lays out a neat summary of how the media giant has turned a relatively uncontroversial construction project into America's national anti-Muslim hatefest.

How the "ground zero mosque" fear mongering began

. . . In short, there is no good reason that the Cordoba House project should have been a major national news story, let alone controversy. And yet it has become just that, dominating the political conversation for weeks and prompting such a backlash that, according to a new poll, nearly 7 in 10 Americans now say they oppose the project. How did the Cordoba House become so toxic, so fast? . . .

Fortunately, this would probably never happen in Canada, because it is a better country.

I think.

Tales from the Fear-o-Sphere

2010-08-03T18:44:00.000-07:00

Teh Mozlems are coming, teh Mozlems are coming!

From the unintentionally funny folks at FrontPageMag, and Pamela Gellar, the queen of cheap internet fearmongering, comes this lovely passage, as FPM's editor interviews Ms. Gellar about her new magnum opus about the Obama presidency:

FP: Tell us a bit about how anti-Semitism plays into all of this. We know Islam’s disposition to Jews and so, perhaps, Obama’s bullying of Israel is no coincidence at all?
Geller: Indeed Jamie, Islamic anti-Semitism is part of the Koranic imperative and the pervasive influence of Islamic Jew-hatred cannot be ignored when assessing the impact of Barack Obama’s early life experiences upon the later trajectory of his career. If a devout Muslim prays the obligatory five daily prayers, he will repeat the Shehadah*, the first chapterof the Koran, seventeen times; that chapter concludes with prayers that Muslims generally understand as asking Allah not to make the believer like the Jews (“those who have earned Allah’s anger”) or the Christians (“those who have gone astray”). The prayers generally conclude with the dua qunoot, a prayer that Allah’s wrath would overtake infidels.
Imagine the influence that all this – inculcating contempt for Jews and Christians seventeen times a day – might have on a young mind and a future president. Troubling psychological wiring might have been set in place for a lifetime.

Yet Obama has never spoken about the influence his early experiences with Islam had upon his mind and heart – in sharp contrast to others who were raised in Islam and left the faith. Obama would have had to make a decision to reject Islam.

If so, when did he make that decision? How?

Muslims who have left Islam are generally vocal about why they left: Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Walid Shoebat, and others have spoken out fearlessly on these issues. Obama may not wish to engage in critiques of Islam, but if he left Islam, he must have very definite thoughts about it. And even if this is simply not an important issue to him, then he can still appreciate how important it is – knowing what he knows about Islam and apostasy.

Apostasy is punishable by death in Islam. Yet there have been no calls for Obama’s death from the Islamic world. Why is this? Islam gives no free passes.

That's right Pam, we're all in cahoots. Thank goodness someone is blowing the lid off this global conspiracy.

-------------------

* Actually, the Shehadah contains no such thing - it is simply the sentence "I bear witness that there is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Messenger." What Pam is refering to, in her pretense of expertise, is Surah Fatiha, whose meaning is certainly open to interpretation, but definitely not open to her interpretation.

A witty saying

2010-07-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Attributed to John Kenneth Galbraith

Shorter David Warren

2010-07-20T01:55:00.000-07:00

For today's shorter, I was tempted to use this little gem from CanWest-Global's most flatulant gasbag, with a minor editorial modification:

Horrid Little Game

"The idea that I know nothing about [this subject], and therefore should not write about it, occurred to me just before starting this sentence, but I will not let that slow me down."

That, while humourous (maybe even "funny") would be a bit of a cheap shot, especially if you actually read the piece. This, however, would not be:

New governor

Finally, Canada has a governor general who is a posh white man.

And the biggest problem facing Pakistan is . . .

2010-07-19T20:46:00.000-07:00

Poverty?

Inflation?

Low literacy?

Enmity with India?

Relations with America?

An electricity grid that can't cope with demand and a water system that never could?

According to some, it's none of the above. Nope, apparently the biggest problem facing Pakistan today is too much religious pluralism. . .

The biggest problem facing Pakistan is the cruel stupidity of a chunk of its population.

Slow, methodical, cruel

2010-07-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

From Ha'aretz:

Gestures to the Palestinians

Israel declares huge amounts of private Palestinian land as firing zones and expels the residents under the false and self-righteous guise of concern for their welfare, lest they be harmed by the military training; but these firing zones are always to be found solely on Palestinian land, and never on settlement land. Have you ever heard of any settlers being expelled from their homes because their settlement was declared part of a firing zone? But against these wretched shepherds in the Jordan Valley, anything goes. This is Israeli justice, this is equality as practiced by the Israel Defense Forces.

The slow death of Canadian democracy

2010-06-29T06:48:00.000-07:00

Before what happened in Montebello , I thought that Canada was a country where the police actually care about public security, and did not engage in deceit and brutality in order to suppress and subvert political opposition and democratic debate. The sight of police posing as protesters, however, and then visibly making mischief unrelated to any political cause, gave me serious misgivings.

Seeing images like this from the G20 in Toronto only deepens my worries:

It's gotten so bad that even the even-handed Steve Paikin, TVO's scion of neutrality, has become uncharacteristically vocal about it.

We have a wonderful history of peaceful democratic protest in this city. But democracy took a major step backwards this weekend. And many will have to answer for that.

4 undisputed facts about the Gaza situation

2010-06-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

Unless you've been completely out of contact with any form of news media in the past twelve days, you've probably heard a great deal about an Israeli commando raid on a Turkish aid flotilla bound for the Gaza strip that left 9 civilians dead.

Since the raid occured, two competing narratives have emerged, one supporting the point of view of the aid workers who were trying to bring humanitarian supplies into Gaza, and one supporting the Israeli government position.

Regardless of the arguments and evidence presented by the protagonists for either side, there are (at least) 4 facts that remain undisputed by any party.

1. A civilian ship was raided by Israeli commandos. An Israeli craft was not raided by a civilian ship

2. The raid was conducted at night, from a helicopter.

3. The raid took place in international waters

4. The siege of Gaza was a response to the victory of Hamas in Palestinian legislative elections.

One may draw different conclusions from these facts, but I have yet to see any source, representing any point of view, that disputes that they are facts.

My conclusions are as follows:

The first is important because it is mostly forgotten by spokespeople of various zionist organizations who want to blame the activists for being raided. "They had pipes and knives!" they say, "clearly this was a premeditated attack on Israel." Clearly, if Israel's enemies have been reduced to attacking its soldiers with pipes and kitchen knives, the threats to the country are greatly overstated.

#2 is important because it the timing of events was completely under Israeli control. If they had wanted to intercept the ship in broad daylight and tow it to another destination, they could have - they have done this with previous flotillas that have tried to run the Gaza blockade. If we make the charitable assumption that Israeli planners did not mean for violence to occur, the fact that its plans may have gone awry cannot be blamed on anyone but them.

#3 is not of relevance to what occured during the raid, but tells us something about the international reaction. This was an act of piracy. The Turkish reaction is, therefore, justifiable - Turks were killed on the high seas by a foreign power while not themselves violating any international statute. The American lack of reaction is equally unjustifable, given that an American citizen was also killed.

#4 needs to be pointed out because the justification for the siege - and therefore the excuse for the humanitarian crisis that the Israeli government has created - is often made out to be Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities. The Hamas campaign of firing homemade rockets into Israel, however, really only picked up in response to the siege. At the time that the siege was implemented, the rationale was to weaken a democratically-elected Palestinian government by punishing the population from which it drew its greatest support.

The claim, therefore, that the siege is necessary to keep weapons out of Gaza is, therefore, a post facto justification, dredged up to justify a policy that failed in its original goals.

The hasbara machine, however, has a conveniently short memory.

Why the Konservatives hate UNRWA

2010-05-21T20:48:00.001-07:00

Canada's New Government (TM) has ordered CIDA to stop giving money to the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency formed to provide humanitarian relief for Palestinians displaced by the creation of Israel.

According to Embassy Magazine, the move has been puzzling for agency officials, Canadian public servants, and regional diplomats:

Jordan's ambassador to Ottawa says the Canadian government still hasn't explained exactly why it stopped providing direct budgetary support to the UN agency responsible for helping Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, 1.9 million of which live in his country.

A representative for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, says the organization is similarly mystified, but that Canadian budgetary support is essential as the agency struggles with a $90-million shortfall this year.

What has become clear, however, is that despite allegations made by pro-Israel groups—and alluded to by some Cabinet ministers—CIDA staff were extremely confident that there was "minimal" risk of Canadian funding to UNRWA being directed to terrorist groups. Rather, internal CIDA documents say the agency was "quite strong in its relevance to Canadian priorities" and financial management.

If you are one of those souls who are mystified by this move, then please, allow me to explain:

The Palestinian refugee problem exists for 2 reasons.

a) Zionist militias drove Palestinians from their lands in 1948 (a second wave fled their homes during the Six-Day-War as the IDF advanced).

b) Arab countries where most of them currently reside won't give them citizenship, and those living in the West Bank are living under IDF occupation.

The existence of UNRWA facilitates b). By providing Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt with food and shelter, UNRWA takes pressure off the Palestinians to scatter in search of sustenance (which the pro-Israel camp hopes would be the end of the Palestinian nation), and takes the pressure off Arab governments to either accomodate or eliminate by force a restive and hungry refugee population. Accomodating the Palestinians sounds attractive, until you realize that most Egyptians and Lebanese people are not that well off, and would not take kindly to their governments doling out food and housing to people who are already very explicit in their own desire to live elsewhere, i.e. home.

Harper and his cabinet don't see any problem with a). In their eyes, a Jew from Toronto has more of a right to live in Jerusalem than an Arab who was born there, because, in a nutshell, God said so. Consequently, impoverishing UNRWA and thereby starving the Palestinians of the means to stay alive suits their goals.

If all this sounds a little far-fetched, it isn't just my theory. The abolition of UNRWA has been on the wishlist of radical zionist groups for decades. While individual websites offer detailed explanations of how this would benefit the zionist cause, a simple Google search for "abolish UNRWA" drives the point home well enough.

The Konservatives deeply sympathise.

The trouble with George Galloway. . .

2010-05-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

. . . is that he sometimes reveals that he operates under a misconception that is, unfortunately, common amongst people at his end of the political spectrum, and that is also, unfortunately, something that the wingnuts and bedwetters are not entirely incorrect about. Specifically, he believes that people of all faiths, on average, take their scriptures equally seriously. The result is this somewhat embarrassing exchange between Galloway and this British documentary film-maker. I'm posting it here because I have, in the past, posted clips of Galloway laying waste to opponents on a variety of issues related to Muslims and Anglo-American involvement in Muslim countries.

The discussion, which begins with a civil tone, ends with Galloway assuming the tone of an interrogator, while simultaneously himself refusing to give any response to what was a completely fair question repeated ad nauseum by the guest.

Much has been made of Galloway's other public gaffes, but for me these have only called into question his judgement, and not his character or the soundness of his positions. This exchange, however, does create doubt about the latter.

While the Old Testament does contain far more violence than the Qur'an, for one reason or another, the overwhelming majority of British Jews or Christians don't take it all that seriously. That's not to say that they don't have any faith at all, but it does say that they have developed a variety of rationales (some less convincing than others) to effectively ignore most of it.

Amongst Muslims, particularly within the reactionary neo-Salafi school promulgated by the ibn Saud, not only the Qur'an, but Prophetic narrations from canonical secondary sources are taken, in a decontextualized form, as literal instructions that are binding upon Muslims for all eternity without qualification.

This does not validate the anti-Islam thesis that Muslims are all therefore suspects in a vast conspiracy to crush Western Civilization, but it does mean that one would indeed have a harder time finding a British church in which people were prescribing the death penalty for apostasy, than a mosque in which the same was being said. Without a knowledge of the Muslim community from the inside, that fact provokes either blind denial from those sympathetic to the Muslim community, or blind hate from those with xenophobic or imperialistic tendencies.

Ultimately, though, what infuriates me about the school of Islam promulgated by the ibn Saud is not that it creates a distraction from the genuine material grievances that create anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world.

As for Galloway, he lost his seat in the British election. I have a feeling though, that this isn't the last we shall hear of him.

The comments are actually intelligent

2010-05-01T15:18:00.000-07:00

Generally, the comments section of any online newspaper, blog, or YouTube video represent a sample of the gutter of the internet. This goes for a rag like the Notional Pest as much as it does for a quality daily like the Ha'aretz or the Independent.

The comments on this article over at the Dawn Blog, on the challenges faced by Pakistani immigrants to Canada, are remarkable for that reason - in that their authors actually seem to have put some thought into what they were writing, as opposed to randomly mashing expletives into the keyboard.

Maybe there is hope after all . . .

The xkcd classic: "Listen to Yourself"

A new kind of politics for Pakistan

2010-04-17T22:13:00.000-07:00

Dawn's Murtaza Ali Jafri introduces the MMM to Pakistan.

Man-Made Movement

Pakistanis need a new kind of political force to sweep the nation, and no, not another sycophantic NGO or dissident party. I think it’s time for a party to represent men. Allow me to introduce the manifesto of the Man-Made Movement (MMM), not to be confused with the dissident Jamaat-i-Islami offshoot ‘Majalis and Maulanas Rock Movement.’

The party shall be run by the Council of Man: members are to include movie star Shaan, rocker Ali Noor, cricketer Shahid Afridi, celebrity George Clooney, golfer/womaniser Tiger Woods, and man of the hour Ijaz Butt. I nominate myself as communications director and chief councilor of the MMM.

The first issue the MMM will address is the paucity of bills defending the rights of men. After all, there seem to be a lot of bills floating around to empower women and safeguard their rights, and I think men ought to get in on the action as well. For instance, we could do with a Men’s Anti-Bazaar Bill, which would outlaw forcing men to roam bazaars with womenfolk for it would be deemed an affront to a man’s emotional condition.

This will be followed up by the Men’s Anti-Bazaar (Room to Breathe Amendment) Ordinance, which will allow for more space dedicated to men in shopping malls. We envision spaces teeming with gaming arcades, Kabaddi rings, indoor football and cricket fields, and more. This will address the socio-psychological phenomenon by which men get bored while their wives shop, and feel pathetic following their womenfolk around (and we can’t let them go out alone… that might compromise their morality and our manliness!).

There are other issues, too, for which the MMM will advocate. Man-ic depression, for example, should be recognised as a medical problem and a curative special vacation is to be legally established. After all, which man wouldn’t go nuts working fulltime and managing his wife and children all at the same time, without frequent breaks.

A Man Rehabilitation Centre should also be established. Men will be re-taught the basics of fight club, will be shown how to blow smoke rings, given the chance to brush up on Kabbaddi skills, and be beaten to a pulp on a daily basis and conditioned not to cry in response. For extra fees, complete emotional detachment courses will also be included.

The MMM will also advocate for a permanent five-day work week. Yes, we know women feel as if they contend with a seven-day work week, balancing professions with caring for their homes. But we still demand shorter working hours. If we get an extra day off, we’ll be less irritable, work better on our communication skills, and help out more with the house work… maybe.

Unlike other political parties that make false promises, the MMM will actively champion the development of infrastructure for the betterment of our constituency. For instance, in the arena of sports, we would like to sponsor and host the first-ever Man Olympics. Contests will include burping and eating show-offs as well as tests of endurance to see who can watch sports for the longest time without falling asleep. To ensure the success of such events, we’d like to occupy all seats on the parliamentary committee for sport. And while it may seem corrupt (mostly because it is) we will be taking free tickets to all local sporting events. In exchange, the party guarantees support for any legislation related to religious morality.

The MMM also has an eye towards boosting Pakistan’s economy. We promise to work for subsidies on foreign electronic equipment such as big-screen TVs, Play Stations, and cars (no Mini Coopers or any other feminine looking cars; a proof of manliness certificate will be required, listing the copious number of cup-holders, ashtrays, tinted windows, and noise-making gadgets).

Above all, though, the MMM promises to work endlessly and tirelessly to guarantee that Pakistani women be given as many rights and privileges as are legally permissible. Female empowerment, we believe, is the highest priority of the MMM manifesto, for no other reason than the more rights our women have, the less they will whine. And the less they whine, the more we can enjoy our cricket matches, TV shows, and video games in peace.

A lack of self-awareness

2010-04-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not an Obama booster, but I thought Sarah Palin said something . . . curious . . . about the new nuclear deal with Russia.

Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor, weighed in on this supposedly ‘landmark’ blow for world peace by saying Obama’s new policy “was like a child in a playground who says ‘punch me in the face, I’m not going to retaliate.’”

Wasn't that child also her Saviour?

Hiatus again

2010-03-13T13:15:00.001-08:00

Life has once again gotten in the way of blogging, so while I'm busy rolling with the punches, enjoy this old NFB documentary about Norman Bethune, a Canadian surgeon who worked with what today we'd call "marginalized populations" long before it was the cool thing to do.

Are you sure it's not apartheid?

2010-03-01T04:44:00.000-08:00

The comparison just got harder to ignore. From the Guardian:

Barak: make peace with Palestinians or face apartheid

'If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state' – Ehud Barak Photograph: JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, last night delivered an unusually blunt warning to his country that a failure to make peace with the Palestinians would leave either a state with no Jewish majority or an "apartheid" regime.

His stark language and the South African analogy might have been unthinkable for a senior Israeli figure only a few years ago and is a rare admission of the gravity of the deadlocked peace process.

There have been no formal negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in more than a year, but Barak was speaking at a rare joint event with the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, as part of an annual national security conference in the Israeli city of Herzliya. The pair shook hands and both were warmly applauded.

Barak, a former general and Israel's most decorated soldier, sought to appeal to Israelis on both right and left by saying a peace agreement with the Palestinians was the only way to secure Israel's future as a "Zionist, Jewish, democratic state".

"As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic," Barak said. "If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

He described Israel and the Palestinian territories as the historic "land of Israel" to which Israelis had a right.

"We have to demarcate a border within the land of Israel," he said.

"We have a linkage, we have a right, but the reality of standing on the stage of history in realistic terms requires us to pay attention to international constraints." Barak is in a delicate political position. He leads the Labour party, supposedly a centre-left movement, but accepted a position in a rightwing coalition under Binyamin Netanyahu, a decision that split his party.

Though Barak articulates a willingness for peace talks, he represents a government that has defied US and Palestinian calls for a full settlement freeze as a prelude to any negotiations. He was also defence minister during last year's Gaza war in which nearly 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

The Herzliya conference has echoed Israeli concerns about growing international criticism, particularly in the year since Gaza. Barak himself alluded to the danger that Israel might lose legitimacy if no peace deal was forthcoming. "The pendulum of legitimacy is going to move gradually towards the other pole," he said.

He acknowledged that Washington was pushing the two sides towards "proximity talks" but said this was "only an initial stage" before any return to full negotiations.

Fayyad, who has a limited political following among Palestinians, called on Israel to stop settlement building in the occupied territories and to halt military incursions in Palestinian cities as a sign of seriousness about negotiations.

"Things have to begin to happen in order to give the suggestion that this occupation is going to end," he said. "That Palestinian state is supposed to emerge precisely where settlements are expanding." Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has refused to start fresh negotiations with Israel unless settlement construction stops, in line with the 2003 US road map. Nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers live in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, even though settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law.

"How confident can we all be that once relaunched that political process is going to be able to deliver that which needs to be delivered, the permanent status issues and the key question of ending the occupation?" Fayyad asked.

Subcommandante Marcos

2010-02-28T18:01:00.001-08:00

The voice of Mexico's Zapatista rebel movement:

Not Terrorism

2010-02-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

Phew!

. . . Federal investigators said two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled from Houston as a precaution, but were returned after initial details showed no terrorist connection to the crash.
“At this time, we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity. We continue to gather more information, and are aware there is additional information about the pilot’s history,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. . . .

Good job guys. Keep the homeland free. Nothing to see here.

Clearly just a mentally disturbed individual. After all, he left no indication that he had some sort of political grievance.

So, no further investigation will be required into the shadowy association he may have been a member of. We won't need to detain hundreds of his sympathizers, and we won't have to make the agonizing, though ultimately necessary decision to torture them.

Nothing more to see here.

But wait! He does have sympathizers!

The pilot of that plane attacked a terrorist organization known by the initials "IRS".

Our federal government has become "organized crime with a flag on the wall" and the IRS is the government's "bag man". . .
. . . It's a bloody shame this had to happen, but when I heard on Limbaugh's program that the target of that plane was the building where the IRS was HQ'd in Austin I was not the least bit surprised.

First of all, let us all join hands to repudiate this notion that a man would kill himself for the sake of avenging some material complaint against the group he attacked. After all, we're not talking about some oppressed kid from the ghettoes of Brooklyn. We're talking about a software startup entrepeneur, with his own house and a private plane!

But . . . who is this "Lim-bah" she speaks of? What is his role in inspiring likeminded individuals to these martyrdom operations? Does he hate our way of life? But of course he doesn't!

After all, it's not like the guy's a Muslim or something.

Avoiding certain colours

2010-02-15T19:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not the only person to have noticed this, but what do you notice about the logo for "Canada's Economic Action Plan?"

How about the TV ads?

Similar things have been noticed by people who watch the ad business . . . and possibly by everybody else who has seen the work.

It's propaganda, but at least it's hamfisted propaganda.

Dousing the Olympic Flame

2010-02-10T20:59:00.000-08:00

This post has been a long time coming. For many years - most of my life - I could never understand opposition to the Olympics that would occasionally make the headlines. "Who were these fun-hating killjoys?" I would wonder.

"Bread NOT Circuses" one group called itself, opposing the Toronto bid for the 2008 Summer Games. Succinct enough, but the logical argument was not one human beings can practically live by - there will always be hungry people; for most people, this isn't a good enough reason to stop having fun.

Even if that weren't the case, how could you be against the "Olympic Movement"? A "movement" (for that is what all of its proponents, from Wayne Gretzky to the people running VanOC, like to call it) that sought to bring people together in the spirit of cameraderie and sportsmanship, in the hopes that perhaps, through healthy competition, we could all eventually see one another as human beings.

What could be more idealistic?

Coca-Cola certainly doesn't object.

Still, negative consequences have been hard to cover up - as I noted before here, cities that hold the Olympics have this strange penchant to become extremely conscious of homelessness in the lead up to the games. Not concerned enough to actually do something to address the problems, but concerned enough to try to lock up all those unsightly vagabonds.

The marketing campaign that precedes any Olympics is a great example of yet another public-private partnership. The public's part of the partnership involves taking all of the risks for the sake of that warm and fuzzy feeling conferred by "the movement" while the private end of the bargain involves taking home all of the profits. The Olympic Torch relay epitomizes this, with cities and local police departments preparing the way for the Olympic relay, covered by all the of the major news outlets with an overwhelmingly positive tone. So when the torch relay was disrupted in Espanola, Ontario, my reaction to the protesters turned from disdain at the killjoys to a mild sympathy for their cause.

So what exactly were their grievances?

Like all aggregations of leftists, anarchists, associated activists - the DFH set, as they are known (I will not provide the expansion of that acronym here) - they are manifold.

One of the protest websites, no2010.com makes its primary objection fairly clear in its banner - that the Olympic venues have been built on land that is subject to unsettled land claims. In the words of the activists, "stolen land," and not in the sense that all colonial countries are on stolen land, but in the sense that Israeli colonies built on confiscated land are on "stolen land." Just because time has elapsed since the crime was committed does not make it any less of a crime.

Of more relevance to the residents of Vancouver, however, is the pressure on the homeless, not only from draconian new laws, but from the explosion in property speculation that the Games have brought. A fairly detailed report on this can be found here. With rising rents, more and more people have been moving into the city's notorious Downtown East Side (DTES), currently the poorest urban postal code in Canada and the North American epicentre of injection drug use and HIV infection. The homeless population is thought to have doubled. The Games cannot have been good for everyone.

I had the opportunity to visit Vancouver a few weeks ago on business - nothing too long, just a night and a day. Riding the new "Canada Line" train from the airport, and passing the large neon olympic logo that glowed gaudily in the night, I didn't expect to see many signs of opposition. The next day, though, at a bus shelter near my "Olympic Partner" hotel (a Best Western on the outskirts of downtown - I myself am not made of money) there it was - a satirical poster of the 3 Vancouver Olympic mascots, except that the very talented artist had drawn menacing expressions on their faces, the larger two with their fists clenched, the smaller one tapping the Vancouver 2010 Olympic torch in the palm of his other hand like a gangster would do with a baseball bat while approaching some sorry debtor.

The little people of Vancouver had a sense of humour. And I wasn't even in the DTES.

The Olympics in Vancouver will not make money (certainly not after they've had to truck in all that snow to compensate for the generally un-Canadian weather). The VanOC's own budget is based on a break-even model, which would be fair enough if that didn't almost always imply a large debt.

Most of the arguments in favour of holding the games are rubbish. If the public won't make any money from the games, then it isn't true to say that Vancouver owes its transportation improvements to them, except in the political sense where the games provided an excuse for reticent city councillors and provincial government officials to provide the funds for them. The games might attract attention to the problems of drug use, HIV, and homelessness, but if they do, it will in spite of the organisers' best efforts, not because of them. Before the games, the IOC people were taken on a circuitous route through the city to avoid the DTES. During the games, VanOC has created various ways to mitigate, hide, or downplay the impact that they have had on the city's poorest people. After the games are over, the world will have little reason to remember Vancouver again, or at least, little reason to remember the city's problems.

So when you watch the opening ceremonies this weekend, or take in the various spectacles, remember that what you are watching is only incidentally a celebration of athleticism, and that some unlucky people most likely were confronted with another bout of misfortune for the sake of your entertainment.

And remember that Coca-Cola certainly isn't complaining.

Vanity Projects

2010-01-31T18:30:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I posted a Robert Fisk article, but I'm going through his hefty tome on his travails in Lebanon from 1976 onwards, and have been struck by the sheer volume of field experience that the man has. This recent Independent article is worth a read. I'm seriously considering a subscription to the print edition.

-----------------------

The stakes get higher as Arab princes try to outdo each other

Do the Saudis not have the slightest idea of what is going on around them?

Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia is quite a man.

He says he doesn't want to be the prime minister of Lebanon – everyone who wants to be the prime minister of Lebanon says that – but he is immensely wealthy. True, his bank balance has sunk from $23.7bn to a mere $13.3bn since 2005 (thus sayeth Forbes magazine). But he's just announced that he wants to construct the world's tallest building – a 1km-high goliath which will dwarf his neighbour emir in Dubai who last month opened the paltry 25,000ft Burj Khalifa amid the sand dunes of his bankrupt creditors. The nephew of King Abdullah, al-Waleed understandably calls his company Kingdom Holdings. He also happens to be a major shareholder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp – which is why you won't be reading these words in The Times. Long live Kingdom Holdings, I suppose.

Because yesterday morning, I was taking an al-Jazeera television crew around the repulsive, obscene, outrageous, filthy, stinking slums of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps not far from my home in Beirut, a place of such squalor that the gorge rises that human beings even live there. Sabra and Chatila – yes, the site of that infamous massacre in 1982 when Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians while the Israeli army surrounded the camps, watched the killings – and did nothing. They were the survivors of the great exodus or ethnic cleansing of 1948 – or their sons or grandsons – who fled Galilee for the "temporary" safety of Lebanon and, like the visa applicants of the movie Casablanca, wait and wait – and wait – to go home. Which they will never do. "I am very positive," Prince al-Waleed said when he announced his new priapic tower, to be constructed in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. "We are always looking for new investments."

Now I know that there are a lot of fine philanthropists in the Gulf, Prince al-Waleed among them, but what is one to make of all this? Afghanistan is collapsing in blood; Iraq remains a state of semi-civil war; the Israelis continue to thieve land for Jews and Jews only from the Arabs who hold the title deeds to that property – and Prince al-Waled wants to build a tower reaching a kilometre into the sky. Do the Saudis – who gave so much largesse to the Taliban (we have to forget this, of course, along with the fact that the Saudis provided most of the murderers of 9/11, which is why we bombed Kabul rather than Riyadh) – not have the slightest idea of what is going on around them?

For example, we all know that the Americans maintain stocks of weapons among their allies. They keep munitions in South Korea and, indeed, in the Arab Gulf (aka Saudi Arabia). But very quietly this week, they agreed to double their munitions supplies in Israel from $400m of weapons to $800m. Of course, Washington's gift of $9bn to Israel up to 2012 – never, of course, to be spent on those illegal colonies which are built against international law on Arab land but which Barack Obama now pusillanimously ignores – has nothing to do with this. But don't imagine that – in the event of a new "preventive" war – Israel cannot draw on these supplies for its own army and air force. After all, it was a missile taken to Saudi Arabia by the US marines for use against Iraq in 1991 that ended up in the hands of the Israeli air force as part of a quid pro quo for not joining in the war against Baghad - and which was subsequently used to kill civilians in a Lebanese ambulance in 1996.

But these days, Arab compliance reaches new heights every day. Now, for example, we have the Egyptian government – and its ever popular president (see the American-approved presidential election results which are way above 90 per cent) – building a wall around Rafah, part of the vast mass of poverty which constitutes Gaza, thus preventing food, gasoline (and, no doubt, weapons) from reaching the trapped Palestinians of this prison camp. A camp, one has to add, which meets with the full approval of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, whose honourable involvement in the invasion of Iraq has now been outdone by is extraordinary success as peace envoy to the Middle East.

Egypt's intelligence boss (a certain Mr Sulieman who might be the next president of Egypt were it not for his pattern of heart attacks) approves of this wall, which is a very definite assistance to Israel and which will yet further impoverish the Palestinians of Gaza to the point at which the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila might actually feel themselves lucky they don't live in "Palestine".

In Israel itself, the deputy foreign minister humiliates the Turkish ambassador – while complaining about an anti-Semitic series on Turkish television – by forcing the diplomat to sit on a low sofa, refusing to shake hands and addressing him, with two colleagues, from higher chairs. The foreign minister himself, our dear friend Mr Lieberman, has now acquired the habit – every time poor old (and I mean old) US envoy George Mitchell raises the question of Jerusalem – of walking out of the room. That's what Obama's point man is worth. Israel's crazies – Netanyahu is a moderate chap by comparison – now prove that Israel can be just as much a banana Raj as the rest of the Middle East.

But fear not. The princes and the emirs and the caliphs and the presidents will be able to outbid each other in towers and hotels. I have a bigger painting set than yours. I have a sharper pencil, more crayons, a larger train set (Qatar, please note), a bigger bear than yours. And the world will watch this tragedy and marvel at the toy boxes now being opened in the Middle East. And, by the way, how many crayons do the children of Sabra and Chatila have?

"We all fail the failed state test"

2010-01-22T22:09:00.000-08:00

Fantastic opinion piece in the often-obtuse Grope and Flail.

. . . This is the perennial underside of charity and generosity: a chance to feel simultaneously kind and morally superior while reinforcing the relations between those who have power and those who don't. Plus a component of taking vicarious pleasure, in a quasi porn-like way, in the misery of others. I'm thinking here of the insatiable news programming and the repeated requests by interviewers to “Tell us how you feel. . . "

The best thing ever written about Mark Steyn. . .

2010-01-12T09:35:00.000-08:00

Offering something other than music trivia, or cultivated ethnic resentment wrapped in prurient humour, is tough. . .

The rest of the article is as informative as the above was entertaining.

Unskilled Religion

2010-01-09T10:49:00.000-08:00

Karen Armstrong is a remakable person, an ex-Catholic nun and now a self-described "Freelance Monotheist," who has taken some strong criticism from as varied sources as the Christian right, the Anti-Islam brigades, and the so-called "new Atheists" (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and co.) for her writings, in which she defends essential ideas of religion.

I thought this was a particularly interesting response to a person with anti-religious feelings.

From the TED blog, Q&A with Karen Armstrong:

enlashok asks: How bad does an idea have to be before the appropriate reaction is to discard it?

[KA:] This question comes from Enlashok, but he has asked a lot of other questions and makes a lot of other points too, particularly about the harm religion does. I will try to give as comprehensive an argument as possible.

First, I freely admit that a great deal of religion is indeed "unskilful" -- there is bad religion just as there is bad art, bad sex, and bad cooking. I have written books about this type of destructive faith. Far too many people, as Enlashok points out, are uncritical of themselves and their tradition; they have indeed "maintained and propagated immoral, racist, sexist and homophobic policies, promoted tribalism, and shielded extremism." Religion -- like any art or science -- is very difficult to do well. Religion may, for example, teach compassion, but far too many people -- secularists as well as religious -- prefer to be right rather than compassionate.

Enlashok says that he realizes he has asked a lot of questions and that he would be content if I would simply answer his first question, which I have cited above. So let me say again: religion is not an "idea." Its doctrines can only be verified when they are consistently translated into practical action. They are certainly not ideas that can be "factually supported from available evidence," to quote Enlashok again. As I have tried to explain, the notion that religion is an idea that can be empirically proven is a great fallacy that developed in the Christian West during the early modern period, when theologians tried to force theology into a scientific idiom that was alien to it. As soon as they did this, atheism became inevitable. When you mix mythos with logos, you get bad science and unskilful religion. Unfortunately, as globalization proceeds and more and more people adopt the Western ethos, this unviable, "scientific theology" is spreading to other faiths and other regions.

Instead of seeing religion as a science manqué, I think it is more helpful to regard it as an art form. Like art, religion at its best helps us to find meaning in a tragic world; like art, it holds us in an attitude of wonder and introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is not dependent upon logic or empirical truth. Music, for example, is not about anything and you cannot verify the meaning of a late Beethoven quartet, but it has a powerful and enriching effect upon us. Poetry pushes language to the limits and makes us aware of the difficulty of expressing some of our more profound insights in a purely logical way. Religion has always expressed itself most effectively in terms of art: poetry, music, dance, song, architecture, calligraphy, drama, and sculpture.

Religion differs from art in its summons to practical action. It is not sufficient to have an aesthetic or "spiritual" experience. The Buddha explained that, after achieving enlightenment, a person must come down from the mountain top, return to the market place and there practice compassion for all living beings. A spirituality that focuses only on a numinous warm glow is "unskilful" and selfish. All art is transformative; it is meant to change us. Religion -- at its best -- is a form of ethical alchemy that helps us to limit the egotism that causes so much human suffering, both to ourselves and to others.

Like art, religion was not meant to provide us with information and explanations that lie within the remit of scientific logos. It helps us to consider problems for which there are no final solutions -- mortality, the prospect of our inevitable and painful extinction, sickness, injustice, and cruelty. It does not mean that we will suffer less but, if we work hard enough, we might be able to endure our own pain and to assuage the suffering of others.

Science deals with verifiable ideas; scientists struggle with a problem, and when that is solved move on to the next one. There is continuous improvement, progress and development. But the humanities do not function like that. Philosophers are still meditating on the same issues and problems that preoccupied Plato. Harold Pinter is not necessarily a better playwright than Shakespeare, simply because the sum of human knowledge has advanced since Shakespeare's time. There are some aspects of life -- death, sorrow, the nature of happiness, evil and the nature of goodness -- that each generation has to grapple with for itself. And there never seems to be a definitive solution.

The wogs can't even get that right . . .

2010-01-08T16:54:00.000-08:00

No particular point here, just the irony of this Australian police association secretary's remarks:

"Cartoons in Australia are normally done by people who are either clever or witty and this one's neither," the secretary of Victoria's Police Association, Greg Davies, told reporters."

The rest of the news item:

Indian 'racist police' cartoon angers Australia

Western Muslims and the Future of Islam

2010-01-03T21:04:00.001-08:00

Tariq Ramadan has emerged in this millenium as the foremost Muslim intellectual in the Western world, if not the World. The impact of his thought is evidenced by the number of prominent Western journalists and public intellectuals who have written about him, both in praise and in condemnation of what they perceive is his message. What exactly that is, however, has been itself a matter of some controversy - Carouline Fourest, a nationalistic French feminist, wrote an entire book on the subject, accusing Ramadan of an insidious "doublespeak", a message that was deviously designed to mean one thing to a Western audience, and another to a Muslim one.

Aside from Ramadan's own writings in such broadsheets as Le Monde, feature articles about him have been published in the American newspaper The New York Times, and the The New Republic magazine; French politicians up to then-Interior Minister (now President) Nicholas Sarkozy have debated him on French national television, an encounter which has followed him in almost every appearance he has made on French TV since.

To his detractors, Ramadan represents the Trojan horse of radical Islam, a smooth-talking representative of the jihadist conspiracy for world domination, making yet another play for the soul of Western Civilization. To his partisans, Ramadan represents a new Muslim consciousness and the possibility of a wider Muslim Renaissance. Ramadan's most recent work, Mon Intime Conviction, deals with the accusations of doublespeak that have been accruing against him.

But what do his writings actually say?

Western Muslims and the Future of Islam is Ramadan's 2004 book devoted to drawing, as he says in the introduction

the shape of European and American Islam: faithful to the principles of Islam, dressed in European and American cultures, and definitively rooted in Western societies.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Ramadan lays out what he considers to be the spiritual components of the Muslim personality. He points out that the current ways in which most Muslims view the world are outmoded, and were actually formulated by men, and not God, in response to the geopolitical realities that Muslims found themselves in following the dramatic spread of Islam and Muslim economic and military influence throughout the old world. Ramadan isn't particularly interested in answering anti-Islam calumnies in this section - what he wants to do is to convince the reader that the traditional wordviews held by Muslims are neither universally held by Muslims, nor are they a necessary consequence of the primary sources.

This section contains some interesting ideas. Firstly, Ramadan, as a Swiss-born Muslim, wants to establish that Islam is a Western religion. It is a point that seems relatively obvious, given the number of Muslims are now born and raised in Western cultures, but it is nevertheless one that appears to have escaped the majority of first-generation North American and European Muslims, who continue to see the countries in which they live and raise their children as host countries in which they are immersed in alien cultures that they strive to separate themselves from. Given that Islam is now a Western religion, argues Ramadan, it is high time that Muslims began to define for themselves what the parameters of "Western Islam" are; that is, what elements of Western culture should Muslims not only tolerate, but become active participants in, and what elements must they argue against.

In order to do this, Ramadan then defines those principles of Islam that he feels lie at the heart of the Islamic character, and that are, in his opinion, non-negotiable.

Ramadan also highlights the sad state of Muslim scholarship in Islamic theology, effectively confirming that the intellectual leaders of the Muslim world really haven't come to terms with "modernity," primarily because the societies in which they live do not fulfill Western criteria for being "modern" - a separation of church and state, capitalism, and political agency are much less pervasive in the Muslim world. Because of this, Ramadan argues, the rulings issued in the Muslim world in response to questions from Muslims in the West are logically invalid, because the response emanates from a place where the social, political, and economic conditions are sufficiently incomparable. What results, according to Ramadan, is a patchwork of compromises and accommodations of the Western reality, and not a comprehensively Western Islamic worldview.

In a highly interconnected world, argues Ramadan the old categories of "dar-al-Islam," "dar-al-Harb," and"dar-al-Ahd" (the Abode of Islam, the Abode of War, and the Abode of Treaty) are irrelevant, even potentially dangerous. Instead, he develops a new way of looking at the pluralist societies that Western Muslims live within today: "Dar-al-Shahada" - the Abode of Testimony.

Ramadan does not here mean here for Muslims to view themselves as missionaries out to convert the heathen. As he says in a later chapter:

In other words, "to invite" is first to "bear witness," as much as by one's behaviour as by the content and form of what one says, what the message of Islam is. It is not a matter of wanting to convert, because people's hearts are God's domain and secret. It is a matter of bearing witness, which is a invitation to remember and meditate. This meaning is also captured in another verse: "And thus have We willed you to be a community of the middle way, so that [with your lives] you might bear witness to the truth before mankind."

In the second part of the book, Ramadan lays out his vision as to how communities of Western Muslims should behave. For a Muslim who has lived in Canada for a long time now, most of this is unremarkable. Ramadan speaks against "Islamic schools" as a form of self-imposed ghettoization, and exhorts the believers to bring their faith into political action just on behalf of the ummah abroad - which is what often preoccupies new Muslim communities in Canada and the United States - but more importantly into social and political activism on behalf of social and economic justice, a core Islamic value. Ramadan encourages Muslims to make common cause with members of other faiths, people of various political persuasions, and even those with stridently atheist views in order to realize their shared goals of a more just society.

If there is anything controversial in the book, it must be the chapter on "Economic Resistance." Ramadan in this case assumes the position of the majority of Islamic scholars in his condemnation of all forms of interest as being "riba" (unlawful usury), but goes a step further in condemning speculation and price-fixing as also being immoral and un-Islamic. Here Ramadan is, however, forced to acknowledge the pervasiveness of these things in Western society, and effectively says, in so many pages, that while Muslims must forever strive to eliminate these things from the Earth, they have no hope of achieving this goal if they don't at least participate in the global neo-liberal economy in some limited way, necessitating at least the use of interest-bearing financial instruments.

And this epitomizes my major criticism of Ramadan's entire argument in the book. "Fine," I say, "I agree 100% with all of this. How exactly do we get there?" (I really don't agree with 100% of it, but close enough.) Ramadan is strong on justifying the ends, but weak on describing the means. Just as he seems unable to lay out practical means of avoiding the receipt and payment of interest, and just as he does not describe how to construct an economy that does not permit speculation, he also does not describe how exactly to bring about his vision of a Western Islam.

The best we have is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy - that because Tariq Ramadan, the superstar of Islamic scholarship, has said that it should be so, then ultimately enough people will work to make it so.

I am probably being too demanding - after all, I have no idea how to bring about Tariq Ramadan's world either, but I do agree that it should be brought about, which is a rare thing for me, especially given the abject stupidity that often passes for Islamic scholarship globally today.

The book, however, did also satisfy one burning question that I had about Tariq Ramadan prior to reading it: Is Ramadan a fork-tongued religious zealot, intent upon subverting Western culture into something unrecognizable under the cover of a devious doublespeak, or is his representation of himself honest and straightforward?

The answer is very clearly the latter.

Much Shorter Robert Sibley - 2 for 1

2009-12-29T14:48:00.000-08:00

Robert Sibley is chief editor of the Condescending Pretension bureau at the loony bin of the CanWest-Global media empire.

His blog's subheader reads

Behind most every contemporary political act, policy decision and social value is an idea (usually from some dead white European male, like it or not). Senior writer Robert Sibley considers ideas that shape - or misshape, as the case may be - our world.

With sentiments like that, it's unsurprising that Sibley's blog was abandoned in September. Evidently, even Citizen readers did not find his ideas to be particularly consequential.

Nevertheless, that doesn't deter him from having them:

Article: The Decade when the face of Canada changed.

Canada should keep the darkies out.

Article: The Decade of Disorder

Many political theorists agree that if Westerners don't give themselves more credit for civilizing the savage peoples of the world, the terrorists win.

Where is Harper taking us? And why is Lewis MacKenzie helping?

2009-12-28T17:42:00.000-08:00

Lewis Mackenzie is widely considered to be a Canadian military hero, having been decorated for his meritorious service in keeping the Sarajevo airport open to humanitarian aid as Serb militias shelled the city. He is a member of the Order of Canada, and is widely seen as a national icon. For those who have followed his career, however, the meritoriousness of his conduct has not always been so clear.

Ever since Richard Colvin's testimony to the Commons Committee on the mission in Afghanistan, the Konservatives have been revving their propaganda machine into full gear, summoning every minion they have in the media (and they have many) to deny, obfuscate, and deflect any query for information that might verify Colvin's main revelation: that Canadian soldiers knowingly delivered their captives into torture.

Colvin himself is not a "whistleblower" - he did not take his information to the media. He was invited to testify to the committee, and so he did. As Sc ott Taylor wrote over at Embassy Magazine:

On the other side of the playing field, the Conservatives claim there was no foul committed by them against diplomat Richard Colvin, even when the game tape clearly shows them—and their appointed cheerleaders—mercilessly putting the boots to him. It was Colvin who first began sounding the alarm bell of possible detainee abuse in Afghanistan in 2006.

Once Colvin testified before the parliamentary committee, alleging that military brass and political leadership had ignored his warnings, the gloves came off and knives were drawn. First into the fray were Defence Minister MacKay and his loyal parliamentary secretary, Laurie Hawn, who both launched attacks against Colvin's credibility. MacKay went so far as to suggest Colvin was a Taliban dupe, and Hawn attempted to undermine Colvin by saying it was easy for the diplomat to make wild allegations from the safe confines of North America.

This was a theme that was quickly seized and repeated by retired major-general Lewis Mackenzie. During an appearance on CTV, Mackenzie claimed to have heard "from a very reliable source, that [Colvin] was not permitted outside the wire in Kandahar probably once and not more than once." As such, Mackenzie opined that Colvin's research was therefore limited to second-hand sources via phone and emails. . . .
. . . As reported last week in the Ottawa Citizen, this information spread by Mackenzie and Blatchford on behalf of their DND source(s) is patently false. It was confirmed that Colvin left the base on at least six occasions to venture—at great personal risk—into the centre of Kandahar.

Mackenzie's political colours have not been much in doubt since 1997, when he first ran federally as a Progressive Conservative. They became even less in doubt when he signed on with Harper's much more right-leaning Conservatives. But his record in the Bosnian war was never spotless; as far as many of those on the Bosnian side were concerned, his negligence cost them dearly.

In the late Bosnian President's memoir, Alija Izetbegovic wrote of Mackenzie

On 13 July 1992 the State Commission for the Exchange of Prisoners submitted to UNPROFOR commander Lewis McKenzie [sic] a list of 42 camps that had by then been registered in Bosnia and Herzegovina. McKenzie publicly denied the existence of the camps, and instead of forwarding the letter giving details of the camps to the United Nations, he held on to it.

On 8 August 1992, the Sarajevo daily Oslobodenje published a list of 94 concentration camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the famous photograph taken at Omarska camp, broadcast by CNN. It was only then that the world, albeit unwillingly, began to face up to the horrific truth.

-- Inescapable Questions, Alija Izetbegovic

In a piece in 2005, however, MacKenzie attempts to shift blame for the famous 1995 Srebrenica massacre onto Bosnian Muslim soldiers, suggesting even that some of the deaths may have been attributable to "three years of intense fighting in the area." There may even be some truth to what he says, but it is interesting that he felt strongly enough about the difference between 2,000 deaths and 8,000 deaths to argue the point. When it comes to Srebrenica, MacKenzie seems happy to play the role that anti-semites have with respect to Auschwitz; because 6 million bodies were never found, the genocide must have been exaggerated.

While Mackenzie was on CTV during the 1999 Kosovo conflict as an expert commentator, he was one of the "journalists" whom Belgrade didn't expel. As CBC reporter Carol Off wrote in her book The Lion, the Fox, and the Eagle,

What the audience didn't know was that MacKenzie was in Belgrade as a guest of the Yugoslav government. According to MacKenzie, he obtained a visa for himself and the CTV crew after discussions with the embassy in Ottawa and with Yugoslavian ministers concerning what he might be able to do to help them out. . . . When the indicted war criminal (and soon to be murdered warlord) Arkan encountered MacKenzie in a hotel lobby, he greeted him warmly.

Of the numerous critics of the bombing of Yugoslavia, MacKenzie stands out as one of a select group who are not equally critical of any Western venture into the Muslim world. It is difficult to conclude from the above that MacKenzie's politics are informed by any particular prejudice, but it is hard not to consider the possibility, given the company he finds himself in.

In the light of this, it becomes less surprising that MacKenzie finds fellow-travellers in the likes of Stephen Harper, Peter MacKay, or even Jason Kenney. More than any government in Canadian history, the political agenda they have pursued is slowly transforming Canada from a country identified internationally for its values of tolerance and compassion and the country whose flag American travellers would sew to their backpacks, into a neoconservative bastion whose leaders think little about handing human beings over to a fate of certain torture.

The denials and smear have worn thin. What we must fear now is the next logical line that the Conservatives will fall back on - after obfuscation comes rationalization. The only thing worse than denying that we abetted torture is admitting it and claiming that we were justified.

God Bless You, Guillaume Morand. . .

2009-12-26T09:05:00.000-08:00

. . . regardless of what your religious beliefs are.

From AFP: Swiss businessman builds minaret in protest

BUSSIGNY, Switzerland — A Swiss businessman appalled by his fellow countrymen's decision to ban minarets has extended a chimney above his company building into a minaret in protest.
"It was scandalous that the Swiss voted for the ban. Now we have the support of all the far-right parties across Europe. This is shameful," Guillaume Morand, who owns a chain of shoe stores, told AFP.
The businessman, who is not a Muslim, explained that the he had constructed the mock minaret at his building near western Switzerland's city of Lausanne in protest, and at the same time, to "send a message of peace."
More than 57 percent of voters upset opinion polls and defied their government by approving the right wing motion to ban minarets -- the turrets or towers on mosques from which Muslims are called to prayer.
The outcome of the referendum brought by members of the hard-right Swiss People's Party (SVP) and other right wing groups was also hailed by anti-immigrant party leaders elsewhere in Europe.
Morand blamed other political parties in Switzerland for not having campaigned against the far-right motion ahead of the referendum.
"They were all against it but they did not explain the issue clearly to the country," he said, pointing out that only the SVP's controversial poster campaign was visible.
The SVP had sought support for the ban through a poster campaign depicting a burqa-clad woman against a background of a Swiss flag upon which several minarets resembling missiles are erected.
Morand said he viewed the ban was all the more "scandalous" given that Switzerland actively encourages Arabs to "visit the country and to spend their money here."
The minaret, which has been in place since Tuesday, has "generated a lot of interest," he said, adding that he will wait and see before deciding if further action was needed to push his point.

The fearmongers out there will doubtless retort "Try putting up a steeple in Saudi Arabia!" as they are wont to do. This tells us something about them, however, which is that they aspire to no greater example of religious pluralism than what is set by the ibn Saud.

Canada's Likud Government

2009-12-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

We have articulated and implemented a zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism. What does this mean? It means that we eliminated the government funding relationship with organizations like for example, the Canadian Arab Federation, whose leadership apologized for terrorism or extremism, or who promote hatred, in particular anti-Semitism.

We have ended government contact with like-minded organizations like the Canadian Islamic Congress, whose President notoriously said that all Israelis over the age of 18 are legitimate targets for assassination. We have defunded organizations, most recently like KAIROS, who are taking a leadership role in the boycott. And we’re receiving a lot of criticism for these decisions. I can’t recall how many times I’ve been sued for some of the decisions that we have taken, but we believe that we’ve done these things for the right reasons and we stand by these decisions.

-- Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, Dec. 16, 2009, text from the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee

And so it continues . . . Not content with its boycott of the Canadian Arab Federation for its criticism of the government's policies (a move that mainly hurt people looking for ESL training), or its banning of British anti-Occupation firebrand George Galloway from entering the country, Harper's government is at it again. As usual his henchman Jason Kenney is at the forefront, this time crowing to an overwhelmingly Jewish, 100% Zionist audience at having once again moved to stifle criticism of Israel using the oldest trick in the book - scream anti-Semitism.

Even one blogger for the National Post, that insolvent anti-Canadian CanWest rag, sees some inconsistencies in the Kenney's position, as the Honourable Minister attempted to straighten out his story in the Toronto Star:

I did not accuse KAIROS of being anti-Semitic. What I said was that KAIROS has taken "a leadership role in the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign (against Israel)." While I disagree with the nature of KAIROS's militant stance toward the Jewish homeland, that is not the reason their request for taxpayer funding was denied. International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda – not me – is responsible for the Canada International Development Agency. And she has been clear that a cost-sharing program with KAIROS was not approved because it did not meet CIDA's current priorities, such as increased food aid.

He didn't accuse them of anti-Semitism, he just mentioned them in the same breath as other organizations whom he had accused of the same thing.

I don't see anything wrong with an international boycott of Israeli goods - that was what ended the apartheid in South Africa, and Israel is no less dependent on international trade. Is, however, KAIROS even advocating that? A 2002 document released by the group answers the question explicitly:

The final step of the Board-mandated process is this paper, which sets out a range of options to enable the members of KAIROS to contribute, each out of their own faith tradition, to their common quest for a just peace in Israel and Palestine. The paper also contains recommendations for KAIROS actions that would support member initiatives. Finally, section 6 of the paper also makes clear that KAIROS is not advocating sanctions against Israel nor a boycott of products from Israel.
(emphasis from KAIROS)

A further reading of the document shows that KAIROS supports "Morally Responsible Investment" and not the more forthright "Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions" campaign. Their "economic advocacy" is ill-defined, but examples provided include moves from other Church groups to divest from companies providing equipment for the construction of infrastruction used by the Occupation, such as the Wall, and requiring the labelling of products made in Jewish colonies in the West Bank.

None of this, however, actually matters to Jason Kenney, or to Stephen Harper. What matters to them is that God gave the Holy Land to the Jewish people in the Bible, and the nasty infidel Muslim Arabs (and in the minds of Mssrs Harper and Kenney, there is no other kind) are standing in the way.

Wishing all my Christian friends a Merry Christmas. . .

2009-12-24T14:07:00.000-08:00

. . .and reminding them of the plight of the people of Bethlehem today:

The "Islamist" Montazeri

2009-12-22T10:10:00.000-08:00

If you pay much attention to the news, you would know that Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri passed away on Sunday. As an outspoken critic of the Khamenei regime and the dubious re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Montazeri had been getting a lot of favourable coverage from Western news outlets.

What's interesting is that no story that I have read or heard on the subject in print, online, or radio journalism has ever referred to Montazeri as an "Islamist." This is odd, given that Montazeri was himself one of the architects of the Islamic Revolution and very much one of Khomeini's fellow travellers. If Khomeini was the archetypal Islamist, then why not Montazeri?

The answer is that this week, we like Montazeri, and so he cannot, therefore, be an Islamist, no matter how religiously-motivated his political activism was.

It's all been photosynthesized back into virgin Brazilian rainforest

2009-12-20T09:26:00.000-08:00

As I've said before on this blog, two facts about the Earth's climate should be beyond doubt for any reasonable person, regardless of their scientific acumen. They are:

1) We have changed the Earth's atmosphere.
2) The Earth is getting warmer.

I don't know anyone who seriously questions 1). Being highly conservative in one's assumptions, it should still be obvious that we have burned billions and billions of metric tons of material including everything from fossil fuels to plant life since the start of the industrial age, and that not all of that could have been photosynthesized, refossilized, and liquefied back into light sweet crude over the last century or two.

Fact 2) is disputed, but only by very stupid people, who make arguments like "if the Earth is getting colder, then why's it snowing in Texas? Huh? Huh? Gotcha!"

Whether 1) is the cause of 2) is, I suppose, a place for legitimate debate. Unfortunately, that debate was tremendously muddied last week with the theft of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which has been a windfall for denialist wingnuts out there. See the previous post but one for an example.

I've gone through a small sampling of the e-mails myself, including some of the most controversial ones and while I can see why they look bad when taken out of context, that only highlights the importance of reading things in context - something that the wingnuts have a propensity not to do.

For a more thorough refutation of the denialist haymaking on this subject, I recommend the Dec 3rd editorial in Nature, the ultra-high-impact life-sciences journal.

Climatologists under pressure

. . . A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists' conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003 and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003) and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.
If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden. . . .

Reflections on an itinerant life

2009-12-13T11:45:00.000-08:00

Maybe tomorrow, I'll wanna settle down,
Until tomorrow, I'll just keep movin' on. . .

That song played during the closing credits of The Littlest Hobo, during the show's run on CTV. The premise of the show was that an unnamed dog without an owner would move from town to town, helping people, and then disappear, trotting down a forest trail or hopping aboard a rail car as the credits played, only to show up again next week in a new location for another adventure. Intelligent, fierce, and kindhearted, the Littlest Hobo's virtue hinged on his lack of connection to any place or person. The selflessness of his actions was underscored by the fact that he would never stay to appreciate the gratitude of the people he had helped.

He was a dog, but the archetype is a common one for humans - the travelling sage, the wandering warrior, the itinerant scholar. There is something romantic about being homeless by choice, about roaming around under the open sky. Such characters in history and in fiction are often presented as somehow virtuous - rarely are they presented as evil. From the historical Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, to Marvel Comics' Wolverine character, the wanderer is cast as the the protagonist, and the popular discussion of them consists largely of the extollment of his virtues.

For the past 2 months, I have been trying this lifestyle on for size - moving through five cities, staying in each just long enough to get comfortable before I leave again - and I have to say that the popular conception of it is fictional. There is no great moral virtue in it, and the knowledge one gains is morally neutral - without interpretation and reflection, without time to catch one's breath, the information remains as raw data. It does not translate into wisdom.

This is not to say that travelling can't be fun, or that the adventure of it is worthless, but it isn't a sustainable way to live. Eventually the wanderer has to settle down and find a community. Like everything else, the value of this "community" only becomes clear when you don't have it. What good is virtue if it only comes and goes in the lives of the people you meet? What exactly can you accomplish without a sustained presence?

The obvious rejoinder is: A lot - to pull someone from a burning building, for instance, doesn't require twenty years, and it certainly does make a difference in their life. It does not, however, happen on a daily basis, and if you spend your life waiting for buildings around you to burn, you might be dead before you managed to make any positive contribution. Most of us lack The Littlest Hobo's knack for stumbling over people in distress.

The itinerant life titillates the soul and stimulates the mind, but in a sedentary world I have not found it to provide much by way of spiritual nourishment over the long term, because this requires a community of people to collaborate with, contribute to, and learn from. This something that is hard to sustain "on the road," even in the electronic age.

I have enjoyed these two months immensely, and I intend to do this again someday, but at the moment I can't wait for the opportunity to stay in one place again. Tomorrow, I intend to settle down.

Shorter David Warren

2009-12-13T10:49:00.000-08:00

From the Ottawa Citizen, loony-bin of the CanWest-Global media empire.

Article: Copenhagen

Human beings have never changed the environment, and anybody who tells you otherwise is a Communist.

Shorter Swiss Referendum Analysis

2009-11-29T16:17:00.000-08:00

Referendum: "MUSLIMS = BAD"

Be frightened children! Their architecture is out to get us!

Eid Mubarak

2009-11-27T19:35:00.000-08:00

Eid Mubarak to all of my readers! Obviously it is intended for the Muslim ones, but hey, if the non-Muslims want to be wished Eid Mubarak as well, I'm open to it.

This Eid provided me with some much-needed reminders about priorities. I hope you found some benefit in it too.

Sincerely,
TPI

Much, Much, Much Shorter Hugh Fitzgerald (sentence structure preserved)

2009-11-23T19:43:00.000-08:00

Article: Instead of sending troops to Afghanistan, what should Obama do?

Obama needs to understand the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam, which were studied before 1970 by Western scholars who were experts in the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam, and thereby realize from his new knowledge of the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmopherics of Islam that we should bomb Muslim countries back into the Stone Age, no matter what.

The Lesser Evil indeed.

2009-11-21T21:24:00.001-08:00

I was going to post something about this, but a wise old man beat me to it.

If I were Stephen Harper, I would buy every Conservative MP a copy of Michael Ignatieff's navel-gazing exploration of our "new" security situation, complete with little sticky tabs to help them find good quotes to use on the floor of the House of Commons.

What makes me really sad about this story, though, aside from the suffering of the victims, is that the people who did the actual torturing were almost certainly Muslims. Petty, cruel, and venal, we are our own worst enemies.

Something to tide you over

2009-11-12T20:00:00.000-08:00

Life has temporarily interrupted my ability to post my wisdom here, but have no fears, regular service will resume before long.

As my fan base, however, is doubtlessly jonesing now for another fix of The Proud Islamist, here is something to tide you over.

The Lost Art of Reportage

Peace and blessings,
TPI

The only minority that matters

2009-10-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

A fantastic article on how rulers manipulate the politics of identity, from Dawn's India correspondent, Jawed Naqvi.

. . . a highly popular, secular and now part-time social activist who would hardly pass muster as a Muslim was protesting how he had faced difficulty in renting a house in a ‘proper’ locality of Delhi. ‘They want me to live in a ghetto, and I refuse to do that,’ he told the audience tearfully, which incidentally included a handful of the ghettoised victims of Gujarat violence.

Of course there are people, mostly prejudiced Hindus, who want to ghettoise the Muslims in India, as there are Muslim zealots who have ghettoised the Christians and Hindus in Pakistan, not to speak of the Sinhalese doing it to the Tamils in Colombo. There can be no dispute about that. The question is: have the Indian Muslims ever asked why should anyone at all live in a ghetto, including the Dalits and others who do?

Blog Referrral

2009-10-26T14:07:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine has started a new blog to chronicle his 2-week trip to Yellowknife, and asked me to post a link here.

While I think it's ridiculous to start a whole blog just to tell the world about what you found during a 2-week trip to a town that's inside your own country, it's his time he's using.

Here you go:

Yellowknife Journal

Notice to impatient drivers, or "How to Drive Islamically"

2009-10-15T19:28:00.000-07:00

To all my fanatic followers out there I must apologize for the length of the hiatus between this and the previous post. Things have been busy. Today, however, I will not be delivering any words of wisdom on geopolitics, social justice, the English language, or examples of wingnut depravity. No, today I have something a little more personal to get off my chest.

I'm a big fan of trains. They're efficient, they're quick, they're usually on time (at least the ones I take), they don't often crash, they can move in bad weather, and you can do lots of stuff while riding one. This can't be said about aeroplanes, which guzzle a tremendous amount of fuel, and are often grounded due to weather. It also can't be said of cars, which are still comparatively inefficient, more crash-prone than any other mode of transport, and don't allow the driver to read or work while travelling. In Canada, VIA Rail is a public holding, so you're buying the seat from yourself (unfortunately, the track has been privatized, so your regular fare is a tad inflated).

Anyhow, despite my love of trains, circumstances have recently dictated that I do a lot of domestic travel by car. This month I'll do over 2000km on the highway, with thousands more to come.

On every drive, a certain city has always wound up delaying me, with its 10-lane traffic jams, wherein frustrated drivers crawl along the freeway at 20kph, only to discover after half an hour that the traffic is slowly accelerating to the usual 120kph (because we're all in too much of a rush for the 100kph speed-limit), and with the cause of the blockage remaining a mystery. I have rarely seen any tow-trucks, police cars, or ambulances at the end of one of these slow-downs, so they can't all be for accidents.

But I wander from the point. During one of these little queue-ups, the tendency of most of the drivers is to accelerate to their usual travelling speed, and then hit the brakes when the car in front of them begins looming a tad too large. Even if the space that opens up is less than 50 meters, almost everyone behaves this way.

My philosophy, on the other hand, is to coast. I don't touch the accellerator if I don't think I'm going to go anywhere. So if the car ahead of me lurches forward to 70kph and then screeches to a halt 300m ahead of me, I will take my time to close the gap.

Collectively, we are not going anywhere. At 10kph, I will catch up with that car long before he is ready to embark upon another 200m journey. In fact, I will come to a stop long before I've even closed the gap, because while I am coasting along, fiddling with the radio, or opening a snack, or finding the page where I left off in [i]War and Peace[/i], a whole bunch of type-A personalities from the surrounding lanes will say to themselves "Aha! A gap! Why, that must mean that this lane is somehow travelling faster than the 3 other lanes on this highway!" and fill it in.

While this is happening, some vehicle behind me - it could be a 1979 Camaro or a Volvo 18-wheel tractor-trailer - will see what is going on, thanks to my failure to take advantage of the opportunity to move myself 200m closer to my destination at top speed, and will begin flashing his lights at me. When this, curiously, doesn't work, he begins blasting his horns, in progressively less courteous sequences.

If any of the people to whom I refer above is reading this post, please allow me to explain my behaviour:

When you accelerate, your car gains kinetic energy. This energy comes from the fuel in your tank. When you hit the brakes, you are deliberately dissipating that kinetic energy by converting it into heat. In the process, you are decreasing the life of your engine, transmission, calipers, drums, and discs, not to mention the planet Earth. Your brand new Prius isn't saving the planet if you are slamming on the brakes every 2 minutes.

In doing so, you move yourself less than a few seconds closer to your destination. Yes, you might wind up a few cars ahead of where you might have been, but when we all get back up to 120kph, that difference will wash out. Trust me - I've gently passed lots of people who revved their engines in order to cut me off during the slowdown.

So instead of exhibiting all this excess aggression on the road, to the benefit of no one but car manufacturers and oil companies, take a bit of advice from The Proud Islamist, and exercise a little patience.

Or otherwise, take the train.

The Truth About Rifqa Bary

2009-10-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

In August, I wrote here about a troubling case involving 17-year-old Rifqa Bary, an Ohio girl from a Sri Lankan Muslim family who converted to Christianity and fled to Florida, claiming refuge with a Christian pastor against what she claimed was her impending "honour killing."

As I said then, though the truth was far from clear, all of the luminaries of anti-Islam - Robert Spencer, Pamela Gellar, Frank Gaffney, Wafa Sultan, and the like - were flogging the story hard, claiming that Rifqa was in danger, and that her fanatical father was after his daughter's blood, inspired by Islam.

Outside the courthouse

Since then, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) was asked by the state's governor to investigate the girl's claims against her parents in Ohio.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joF3cCB_n_4
(embed disabled)

A little excerpt from the FDLE's investigation summary:

. . .
Ms. Bary discussed her upbringing and stated that she had been a cheerleader at New Albany High School. When asked if her father approved of her cheerleading she stated that her father had no real idea what the concept or activities involved in cheerleading were, and allowed it. She stated that she always wore sweatpants or other coverings to hide the short skirt of the cheerleading outfit from him. She stated her father had never been to an event in which she performed as a cheerleader. Furthermore, she stated the family had no photos of her cheering or team photos as would appear in a yearbook.

On August 27, 2009, Mr. Bary stated to FDLE that he knew about his daughter’s cheerleading activities. He said that she had asked her mother for permission to cheer and was denied. Ms. Bary then asked Mr. Bary for his approval and he subsequently allowed her participation.. Mr. Bary stated that he drove her to cheerleading practice occasionally during the week He said he had never seen her perform due to his work commitments.

On August 27, 2009, Rilvan Bary told FDLE that his parents seemed to be supportive of his sister’s cheerleading activities.

When FDLE and other investigators visited the Bary household on August 27, 2009, several photos of Ms. Bary dressed in her cheerleading uniform were prominently displayed in the family living room.
. . .

FDLE’s investigation has not developed any information which supports an allegation of criminal activity in the state of Florida. Furthermore, our investigation has provided no clear evidence of criminal activity in other states which may be supportive of the above allegations. FDLE is prepared to assist the state of Ohio or any other entity in furtherance of investigative matters which may pertain to their areas of jurisdiction.

In other words, the cops in Florida saw no evidence that Miss Bary had never been the victim of a threat or criminal act by her family.

This, of course, puts the Anti-Islam brigades in a tough position - either they got all hot and bothered over a truckload of teenage acting-out, or the FDLE is willfully blind to the "jihadist agenda" as it pertains to Rifqa Bary. Guess which one they picked?

Kyle over at RightWingWatch puts it beautifully:

So, in short: the FDLE report concluded that Bary was in no danger and that pretty much everything her right-wing supporters had been claiming was false, which, according to those right-wing supporters, only proves that the FDLE and others are engaged in a conspiracy to kill Bary and "replace our Constitution and the liberties it enshrines with the brutal and repressive program known as Shariah."

---------------------

If this were just another story of paranoid delusions and wingnut tomfoolery, I would be happy to leave the story there, and walk away gloating over another embarrassment for the anti-Islam brigades.

This, however, is a story about a real girl and a real family. As I wrote in my first piece on this, half of me wanted Rifqa's claims to be true, because if they were, then she had a good reason to tear her family apart, because her father would have been, as she claimed, a monster.

It is impossible to say for certain whether he was a model father, but we do know for certain now that there are an awful lot of things that Miss Bary both embellished and lied about in order to make her story more dramatic. That by itself is a terrible thing, because it means that she has torn her family apart for the sake of people who are interested primarily in using her to grind an axe against the Muslims of the world. In so doing, she has shamed and dishonoured her parents.

It is not the Christian thing to do.

May she and her family find a way to reconcile. Ameen.

Armed white man harangues tribesmen on "security"

2009-09-29T15:20:00.000-07:00

From what used to be Canada's most conservative newspaper:

Top soldier lambastes local Afghans

A trip by Canada's top soldier in Afghanistan to the model community where troops are implementing a long-term security strategy turned into a lesson on the limits of Canadian tolerance. . .

Yes, it was a beautiful Afghan day, with sunny skies all over Dand district. Since there was no insurgency going on, Canadian General Jonathan Vance decided to take advantage of the peace and quite and drive through the insurgency free town of Deh-e-Bagh, where Canadian peace troops had distributed lollipops and medical supplies in recognition of how safe Canada's presence has made all of Afghanistan.

As General Jonathan Vance was driving this morning into the village of Deh-e-Bagh in the Dand district, southwest of Kandahar city, the shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade hit one of the armoured vehicles in his convoy

But never mind one isolated incident! Canada's securifying force of trust-building and not-civilian-killing has made sure, though, that the whole region is free of bad guys. You know, the mean ones with the beards and the booming laugh that they unleash shortly after they have revealed their nefarious plans to the captive-but-secretly-armed Canadian soldiers in front of them.

And, when Gen. Vance had travelled about a kilometre past the village on the way to another community where the Canadians hope to implement the same secure-and-stay policy they have used in Deh-e-Bagh, an oncoming Canadian military vehicle was ripped by a bomb planted in the road.

"Ok," thought General Vance, "not cool. I mean one RPG is jokes, but an IED is more that my Canadian tolerance can tolerate!"

Gen. Vance called an immediate meeting, known as a shura, with Deh-E-Bagh's elders. “It's a sad and serious day,” he told the 24 Afghan men who turned out to the district centre to hear what the general had to say. “Why is it I feel that I am the only one, with my soldiers, who is taking responsibility for security?” Gen. Vance asked. “I am saddened sometimes on days when I feel I am more concerned about Dand district than you are.”

Yeah, you tell'em Jonny! I mean, don't these losers care at all that you have a mission to complete here? I guess it's hard for them to understand the responsibility that you shoulder in this situation. After all, you gotta give your boss a progress report about this place; they only live here.

And he made it clear he was unwilling to sacrifice more Canadian lives. “If we keep blowing up on the roads, I am going to stop doing development,” said Gen. Vance. “If we stop doing development in Dand, then I believe Afghanistan and Kandahar is a project that cannot be saved.”

"NOOOOOOO!" Cried the townspeople in unison! "Don't leave us! Afghanistan without a foreign occupier is like Hockey Night in Canada without Don Cherry!"

Before the general and his convoy had left the compound, the local chief of police and a security officer approached him to say they suspected a man from a neighbouring village of being complicit in the crime. His uncles are Taliban, they said, his brother was blown up trying to plant a bomb, his own toes were mysteriously blown off, and he seemed to know where explosives had been planted. He also worked occasionally with the police, which complicated matters a little.

The man was taken into custody for questioning by the Canadians. So, rather than head out to another spot where the secure-and stay approach is being implemented, the general's convoy returned to the Kandahar Air Field with the prisoner.

And after that, young Abdul-Latif would never stare at Officer Mustafa's daughter again.

How can anyone write this jingoistic crap with a straight face?

Beautiful B.C.

2009-09-24T20:21:00.000-07:00

While summer may be ending, the hearts of British Columbians are warming, full of brotherly love for their fellow human beings. Yes, British Columbians have decided that the weakest amongst them must not be allowed to perish in the cold during the winter months, and instead, have decided to give them a helping hand into a heated building and a warm bed. Other Canadian provinces should feel ashamed that they do not possess B.C.'s generosity and care for its weak and destitute.

Of course, that this sudden wave of care, consideration, and bonhomie has coincided with the Winter Olympics is pure, pure, coincidence. Vancouver is not like Beijing, or Sydney before it! The elected representatives of the good citizens of BC have no intention of sweeping the unsightly wrecks of their province's socioeconomic failures under the rug when the rich and influential of the world turn their eyes to Vancouver. They just want to lend a helping hand to those who need it.

And if "those who need it" don't want it, well then, tough. That helping hand is going to grab them by the scruffs of their grimy necks and toss them in with the rest of the human trash, so that they don't bother the respectable, hard-working - and most importantly - free-spending people who've come to visit and enjoy the spectacle.

--------------

If you missed the dripping sarcasm of the above, I recommend listening to The Current's interview with B.C. Housing Minister Rich Coleman here (forward to 14:50). I won't say if I believe he is sincere or not, but his answers to the reporter are unimpressive, to say the least.

Eid Mubarak!

2009-09-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

To all my Muslim readers!

And what's more, no Moonfighting! Although the ibn Saud continued with their literalist insistence upon actually seeing the new moon before declaring the end of the month, their chosen date coincided remarkably well with what ISNA and others said long ago - that Ramadhan this year would end this Sunday. Most, if not all, of the Muslim world will, inshallah, have celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr on the same day.

It is sad that this is an accomplishment, but it is at least progress.

And, to round out my own Ramadhan, here is an interesting video to reflect upon, considering that the decision to fast is, very obviously, a conscious choice.

And yes, in fact, I do believe that we are metaphysical beings!

Amira Hass: The one thing worse than denying the Gaza report

2009-09-19T11:03:00.001-07:00

Now that international jurist and affirmed zionist John Goldstone has suggested in his UN report that the IDF committed war crimes in Gaza, the denial machine amongst zionists worldwide has swung into overdrive.

The brilliant Israeli journalist Amira Hass explains the horror of this well in her latest piece for Ha'aretz:

. . .

Israel struck a civilian population that remains under its control, it didn't fulfill its obligation to distinguish between civilians and militants and used military force disproportionate with the tangible threat to its own civilians. Air Force drones and helicopters fired deadly missiles at civilians, many of them children; the Tank Corps and Navy shelled civilian neighborhoods with weapons not designed for precision strikes; soldiers received orders to fire on rescue crews; others fired on civilians carrying white flags; and others killed people in or near their homes. Troops used Gazans as human shields, soldiers detained civilians in abusive conditions, the army used white phosphorus shells in dense civilian areas and, on the eve of withdrawing, destroyed wide residential, industrial and agricultural areas.

There is only thing worse than denial - the admission that the IDF indeed acted as has been described, but that these actions are both normal and appropriate.

Shorter David Warren

2009-09-13T14:32:00.000-07:00

Article: Gathering Storm

Just as World War II was the result of us not finishing the job in World War I, our failure to invade every Muslim country on Earth will result in a terrible tragedy. In the meantime we are wasting time on prosecuting torturers and such-like.

------
EDIT: Interestingly, despite writing with such fervent enthusiasm for so many wars, past and ongoing, I can't recall a single one that Warren ever covered from anywhere besides his Toronto apartment. Not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not Lebanon. Such is the pattern with chickenhawks - they use their enthusiasm for wars to compensate for their failure to actually risk their necks by being anywhere near one.

The "Ultra-Secretive" Muslim Brotherhood

2009-09-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

Since I enjoy subjecting myself to large doses of online wingnuttery, I was reading an article in Human Events, the self-proclaimed "Headquarters of the Conservative Underground." In the the minds of its publishers, conservatism in the United States has been somehow driven "underground."

According to the headline by Rowan Scarborough, the "FBI Partners With Jihad Groups!" Oh noes! Which Jihad groups?

A former agent told HUMAN EVENTS the bureau is dealing with the groups that maintain an under-the-radar alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. The ultra-secretive Muslim Brotherhood, with chapters worldwide, is the glue for a network of Islamic groups.

"ultra-secretive", eh? Wow. That's between mega-secretive and terra-secretive, right? I wonder if it's possible to find traces of this shadowy organization on Ye Olde Internets.

Conveniently, they are at http://www.ikhwanweb.org . Of course, one can't expect to find any meaningful information on the Brotherhood's site. You're probably never going to find the celebrated manifesto, for instance, where members of the Brotherhood propose a "kind of grand jihad in America." It's probably all just propaganda, codewords, and side-of-nose-tapping to signal execution of plans made three years earlier in a musty room with a single swinging lightbulb somewhere near a railway track.

Let's try searching the site for the terms "grand jihad," :

Reporting The Muslim Brotherhood

In a federal courtroom in Dallas last October, the leadership of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once the nation’s largest Muslim charity, stood accused of using the charity as a Hamas fundraising front. It was the federal government’s most important terrorism fundraising case to date.

By Rod Dreher

What follows is a damning exposé of the Brotherhood's alleged role in fomenting radical interpretations of Islam in the United States, along with the same quotation from the manifesto produced above.

So not only is the Muslim Brotherhood no more "ultra-secretive" than, say, any major political party anywhere (and it is Egypt's largest opposition party, despite being banned by Mubarak's repressive regime), it also publishes withering criticism of itself on its own website. Either the Ikhwan (Arabic for brotherhood) are true believers in open debate and ideological forthrightness, or they are very careless about what they post on their website.

So why the hyperbole in the Human Events article? Simple: to make people scared. As one lone commenter added after the article:

The hypocrisy festering below the surface of this, and most articles I read on this website, astounds me. Who armed the jihad groups in the first place in the 1980s? And have you seen the photos from that same decade, of U.S. politicians shaking hands and smiling and being buddy-buddy with Saddam and other dictators (ahem, Rumsfeld, Bush I, etc.)

I'm a scientist. As such, I understand that the search for truth (if it can be found) fundamentally depends on identifying my own assumptions and biases. This website and almost everything in it fails to meet this most basic principle. You play on emotions and fear and this is irresponsible journalism at best, and anti-american and anti-humanity at worst.

- Casey, Clemson

At which point, the anti-intellectualism of the "Conservative Underground" necessitated a pile-on.

The Toronto International Film Festival . . .

2009-09-09T14:05:00.000-07:00

. . . has become an unwitting tool for zionists in Canada, as they seek to dampen the growing movement for boycott and divestment from the world's last formally colonial state.

Naomi Klein, Jewish Canadian author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine , lays it all out in a commendable article for the Globe and Mail:

We don't feel like celebrating with Israel this year:

. . .For more than a year, Israeli diplomats have been talking openly about their new strategy to counter growing global anger at Israel's defiance of international law. It's no longer enough, they argue, just to invoke Sderot every time someone raises Gaza. The task is also to change the subject to more pleasant areas: film, arts, gay rights – things that underline commonalities between Israel and places such as Paris and New York. After the Gaza attack, this strategy went into high gear. “We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theatre companies, exhibits,” Arye Mekel, deputy director-general for cultural affairs for Israel's Foreign Ministry, told The New York Times. “This way, you show Israel's prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.”

Toronto got an early taste of all this. A year ago, Amir Gissin, Israeli consul-general in Toronto, explained that a new “Brand Israel” campaign would include, according to a report in the Canadian Jewish News, “a major Israeli presence at next year's Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand.” Mr. Gissin pledged that, “I'm confident everything we plan to do will happen.” Indeed it has. . . .

Follow the money, presume guilt

2009-09-08T20:31:00.000-07:00

Until today, I had never heard of Samling Global Limited.

Then I came accross the Global Witness website, while doing some reading about the role that the global mining industry has played in the conflict in Eastern Congo.

Here is a fascinating exchange between the Corporate Communications director of Samling, and the director of Global Witness. The organization, which monitors unethical practices in resource exploitation, has accused the Malaysian lumber firm of sponsoring illegal logging in Malaysia, Guyana, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, and most recently, Liberia.

In dealing with individual human beings accused of a crime, natural justice requires the presumption of innocence. Corporations are not human beings, and in the developing world, it is often difficult to take them to court for a variety of reasons. So when they are faced with a pattern of accusations and a trail of money that supports the accusations, the only reasonable thing to do is to presume guilt.

So God bless you, Global Witness.