Radical Opinions

HUMANITARIAN AID AT THE POINT OF A GUN?

2008-05-20T11:13:00.002+01:00

It is now almost three weeks since the disastrous passage of Cyclone Nargis across Burma on 2nd May and yet the military junta in power in that Asian country continues to deny free access to Western aid workers and aid flights.

As hundreds of thousands remain homeless and hungry, and millions teeter on the verge of disease and infection, there is now a growing call here in the West to intervene militarily in Burma, against the wishes of the ruling generals, and deliver aid parcels to the suffering Burmese at the point of a gun.

I have never been a fan of 'Humanitarian intervention', especially since it was used by dictators like Hitler to justify the conquest of the Sudetenland – and by our own Tony Blair to justify the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. I also find the idea of using military force – bombs, bullets, etc – to feed the victims of a natural disaster rather distasteful, not to mention counter-productive. Is being stuck in the middle of a shooting war between well-intentioned US marines and nationalistic Burmese soldiers really what the suffering victims of Nargis need right now?

It is of course the easy, popular and macho option to advocate military action in Burma, and it does makes it look like you ‘care’ – that’s why the foreign ministers of Britain and France have been at the forefront of such hawkish calls. I, however, was pleased to see the former poster-boy for ‘humanitarian interventionism’, David Rieff, cogently articulate the argument against such ill-thought-out aggression in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend:

“At first glance, the arguments…may seem like common-sense humanism. How could it be morally acceptable to subordinate the rights of people in need to the prerogatives of national sovereignty? In a globalized world in which people, goods and money all move increasingly freely, why should a national border -- that relic of the increasingly unimportant state system -- stand in the way of people dedicated to doing good for their fellow human beings? Why should the world stand by and allow an abusive government to continue to be derelict in its duties toward its own people?

“Surely, to oppose this sort of humanitarian entitlement is a failure of empathy and perhaps even an act of moral cowardice.

“This has been the master narrative of the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. It has dominated the speeches of officials and most of the media coverage, which has been imbued with an almost pornographic catastrophism in which aid agencies and journalists seem to be trying to outdo each other in the apocalyptic quality of their predictions. First, the U.S. charge d'affaires in Yangon, Myanmar's capital, without having left the city, told reporters that though only 22,000 people had been confirmed dead, she thought the toll could rise as high as 100,000. A few days later, Oxfam was out with its estimate of 1.5 million people being at risk from water-borne diseases -- without ever explaining how it arrived at such an extraordinarily alarming estimate.

“In reality, no one yet knows what the death toll from the cyclone is, let alone how resilient the survivors will be. One thing is known, however, and that is that in crisis after crisis, from the refugee emergency in eastern Zaire after the Rwandan genocide, through the Kosovo crisis, to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the 2004 South Asian tsunami, many of the leading aid agencies, Oxfam prominent among them, have predicted far more casualties than there would later turn out to have been.

“In part, this is because relief work is, in a sense, a business, and humanitarian charities are competing with every other sort of philanthropic cause for the charitable dollar and euro, and thus have to exaggerate to be noticed. It is also because coping with disasters for a living simply makes the worst-case scenario always seem the most credible one, and, honorably enough, relief workers feel they must always be prepared for the worst.

“But whatever the motivations, it is really no longer possible to take the relief community's apocalyptic claims seriously. It has wrongly cried wolf too many times.

“We should be skeptical of the aid agencies' claims that, without their intervention, an earthquake or cyclone will be followed by an additional disaster of equal scope because of disease and hunger. The fact is that populations in disaster zones tend to be much more resilient than foreign aid groups often make them out to be. And though the claim that only they can prevent a second catastrophe is unprovable, it serves the agencies' institutional interests -- such interventions are, after all, the reason they exist in the first place.

“Unwelcome as the thought may be, reasonable-sounding suggestions made in the name of global solidarity and humanitarian compassion can sometimes be nothing of the sort. Aid is one thing. But aid at the point of a gun is taking the humanitarian enterprise to a place it should never go. And the fact that the calls for humanitarian war were ringing out within days of Cyclone Nargis is emblematic of how the interventionist impulse, no matter how well-intended, is extremely dangerous.

“The ease with which the rhetoric of rescue slips into the rhetoric of war is why invoking R2P should never be accepted simply as an effort to inject some humanity into an inhumane situation (the possibility of getting the facts wrong is another reason; that too has happened in the past). Yes, the impulse of the interveners may be entirely based on humanitarian and human rights concerns. But lest we forget, the motivations of 19th century European colonialism were also presented by supporters as being grounded in humanitarian concern. And this was not just hypocrisy. We must not be so politically correct as to deny the humanitarian dimension of imperialism. But we must also not be so historically deaf, dumb and blind as to convince ourselves that it was its principal dimension.

“Lastly, it is critically important to pay attention to just who is talking about military intervention on humanitarian grounds. Well, among others, it's the foreign ministers of the two great 19th century colonial empires. And where exactly do they want to intervene -- sorry, where do they want to live up to their responsibility to protect? Mostly in the very countries they used to rule.

“When a British or French minister proposes a U.N. resolution calling for a military intervention to make sure aid is properly delivered in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, then, and only then, can we be sure we have put the specter of imperialism dressed up as humanitarianism behind us. In the meantime, buyer beware.”

Rieff identifies the central flaw in the principle of ‘humanitarian interventionism’ – it only applies in a one-way direction, from North to South, from West to East. To have any real merit, the likes of France and Britain need to accept that India and China et al have a reciprocal right to intervene in our backyard, next time one of us faces a hurricane or similar natural disaster. (In fact, the United States rejected humanitarian aid from the likes of Cuba and Venezuala in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005). It’s not a step the governments of the West are likely to take any time soon.

THE MODERATION OF HAMAS

2008-05-18T14:05:00.002+01:00

It has long been argued on the pro-Israeli, neoconservative right that liberal newspapers like the Guardian (in the UK) and the New York Times (in the USA) should not make space on their comment or op-ed pages for spokesmen from Hamas. Hamas, we are told again and again, is a terrorist organisation committed to the destruction of the state of Israel and staffed by Holocaust-denying Islamic extremists.

Of course, the whole reason that Israel’s apologists in the West so vociferously oppose giving a voice to members (or even supporters) of Hamas is to prevent the public in Britain, in America, across Europe, etc, from hearing the actual views of Hamas, rather than those caricatured (or falsely ascribed to them) in the right-wing press – as the actual views of Hamas suggest there is a great deal of room for compromise, dialogue and negotiation.

In fact, despite the opposition of Bush, Blair, Olmert et al, polls show a majority of the Israeli public support the idea of negotiating with Hamas. And Hamas too – contrary to popular opinion – has accepted the reality of the state of Israel (without formally ‘recognizing’ the Jewish state), is in favour of negotiating with the Israel government and has also thrown its weight behind a de facto ‘two-state’ solution based on a long-term truce between Israelis and the Palestinians. See here, here and here (if you don’t believe me).

And this week, Hamas – again, through the much-maligned op-ed pages of the Guardian – has taken its first public step to shake off its anti-Semitic image and its long history of association with Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists. Think I’m exaggerating? Well, how else can we respond to Monday’s Guardian article by Bassem Naeem, the minister of health and information in the Hamas-led Palestinian administration in Gaza, entitled ‘Hamas condemns the Holocaust’. Naeem takes on this traditionally taboo subject for Islamists head on:

“….it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.

“…The plight of our people is not the product of a religious conflict between us and the Jews in Palestine or anywhere else: the aims and positions of today's Hamas have been repeatedly spelled out by its leadership, for example in Hamas's 2006 programme for government. The conflict is of a purely political nature: it is between a people who have come under occupation and an oppressive occupying power.”

This, for me, is a clear sign of Hamas moderating its image, its message, its approach. It is time for Israel and its Western sponsors (the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union) to respond in kind and to recognize that there can be no negotiated, peaceful, just settlement with the Palestinian people which excludes the political party which the Palestinians overwhelmingly elected to power in 2006 – Hamas.

PROPAGANDA FROM THE FRONT LINE….

2008-05-16T01:33:00.003+01:00

"Girl of 8 used as 'suicide' bomber". That’s the headline which screamed out at me from the front page of London’s Metro freesheet on the Tube yesterday morning. I felt sick to my stomach, unable to digest this latest barbarity allegedly perpetrated by fellow members of my faith. Here is how the Metro reported the story in its first three paragraphs:

“Militants strapped explosives to a young girl and used her to blow up an army checkpoint in Iraq yesterday.

“They detonated the device by remote control as the child, thought to be as young as eight, walked towards a group of soldiers.

“The girl and an army captain were killed in the blast which also injured up to seven other soldiers."

Simple and straightforward, right? Wrong. Five short paragraphs later, in the same article, a revelation:

“The Americans called it a 'suicide' attack and put the number of injured at seven. Later, they gave the age of the girl as between 16 and 18.”

So, let me get this straight. The Metro claims in its banner headline and at the start of its front-page lead story that a girl 8 has been used by those nasty evil terrorists in Iraq to kill and maim Iraqi soldiers. The article says she is ‘thought to be as young as eight’. Thought to? Thought to by whom? Because later in the same article, American officials give the age of the girl as being between 16 and 18. Can British journalism get any lazier, shoddier or more bizarre? I mean, if you’re going to lie about a ‘fact’ in your story (the age of a suicide bomber), it would probably be best not to reveal that your lying by undermining your own central ‘fact’ later in the same piece. Then agan, the article’s author was probably hoping that commuters making their way to work on a busy morning probably wouldn’t read beyond the headline and the opening paragraphs.

But it wasn’t just the Metro that went with the headline-grabbing claim of an ‘8-year-old suicide bomber’. So too did the Telegraph, the Mirror, the Daily Mail and the rest. The Telegraph tried to have it both ways:

“It was reported that the girl was as young as eight. Neither the US or the Iraqi army could confirm this.”

If neither the US nor Iraqi troops could confirm an age of 8, then who “reported” that the “girl was as young as eight”. It’s a sly journalistic trick: confidently state something that you know to be potentially untrue, and then, in the very next breath, caveat it in order to cover your ass.

Of course, it’s not the first time, in the fog of Iraq’s bloody war, that false information has been peddled by journalists and/or occupying coalition forces. In its coverage of the alleged ‘8-year-old suicide bomber’, the Daily Mail reported this morning that,

“In February, Iraqi insurgents used two women with Downs Syndrome as human bombs in a blast that killed 99 people in Baghdad.”

Other reports made similar references to the infamous ‘Downs Syndrome bombers’, despite the fact that this story has been thoroughly debunked and disproved by, among others, the Independent’s award-winning Iraq correspondent Patrick Cockburn:

"More often, the lies have been small, designed to make a propaganda point for a day even if they are exposed as untrue a few weeks later. One example of this to shows in detail how propaganda distorts day-to-day reporting in Iraq, but, if the propagandist knows his job, is very difficult to disprove.

"On 1 February this year, two suicide bombers, said to be female, blew themselves up in two pet markets in predominantly Shia areas of Baghdad, al Ghazil and al-Jadida, and killed 99 people. Iraqi government officials immediately said the bombers had the chromosonal disorder Down's syndrome, which they could tell this from looking at the severed heads of the bombers. Sadly, horrific bombings in Iraq are so common that they no longer generate much media interest abroad. It was the Down's syndrome angle which made the story front-page news. It showed al-Qa'ida in Iraq was even more inhumanly evil than one had supposed (if that were possible) and it meant, so Iraqi officials said, that al-Qa'ida was running out of volunteers.

"The Times splashed on it under the headline, "Down's syndrome bombers kill 91". The story stated firmly that "explosives strapped to two women with Down's syndrome were detonated by remote control in crowded pet markets". Other papers, including The Independent, felt the story had a highly suspicious smell to it. How much could really be told about the mental condition of a woman from a human head shattered by a powerful bomb? Reliable eyewitnesses in suicide bombings are difficult to find because anybody standing close to the bomber is likely to be dead or in hospital.

"The US military later supported the Iraqi claim that the bombers had Down's syndrome. On 10 February, they arrested Dr Sahi Aboub, the acting director of the al Rashad mental hospital in east Baghdad, alleging that he had provided mental patients for use by al-Qa'ida. The Iraqi Interior Ministry started rounding up beggars and mentally disturbed people on the grounds that they might be potential bombers.

"But on 21 February, an American military spokes-man said there was no evidence the bombers had Down's. Adel Mohsin, a senior official at the Health Ministry in Baghdad, poured scorn on the idea that Dr Aboub could have done business with the Sunni fanatics of al-Qa'ida because he was a Shia and had only been in the job a few weeks."

Tragically, despite the Americans now admitting that there is no evidence that the bombers had Down’s syndrome, despite Iraqi officials acknowledging a link between Dr Aboub and Al Qaida to be improbable and unlikely, the doctor remains in prison, as do dozens of mentally disturbed beggars.

This is the power – and the disastrous and depressing consequences – of the propaganda that we are being fed by ‘reporters’ (stenographers?) from the front line of the conflict in Iraq. Next time I pick up the Metro and see a similar story to this morning’s rubbish, about ‘child suicide-bombers’ and ‘8-year-old killers’, I’ll remind myself that all it tells me is how screwed Iraq and its people are, how little progress is being made there and how little are media tells us. To quote, once more, the peerless Patrick Cockburn,

“…it is all too clear that al-Qa'ida is not running out of suicide bombers. But it is pieces of propaganda such as this small example, often swallowed hole by the media and a thousand times repeated, which cumulatively mask the terrible reality of Iraq.”

SHARIA LAW IN ISRAEL (!)

2008-05-12T19:13:00.004+01:00

In the wake of the recent brouhaha over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks about the compatibility of Islamic Sharia law with English civil law, politicians and pundits alike united to decry and condemn any such move towards allowing the spread of so-called ‘sharia courts’. This is what the Culture Secretary Andy Burnham MP had to say on the issue on BBC1’s Question Time:

“You cannot run two systems of law alongside each other. That would be a recipe for chaos."

Chaos? Really? I was reminded of his remarks when I came across this fascinating article in the Jewish Chronicle, which points out that Israel (Israel!) has managed to accommodate the sharia – especially in the form of Muslim family law – into its own legal code for the past six decades. The Chronicle notes,

“Not only is sharia law officially recognised by the justice system in Israel in everything regarding the personal status of Muslims, but the judges of the sharia courts are officially appointed by a joint ministerial-parliamentary committee and their salaries paid for by the state. Ironically, this arrangement originates from the days when Britain was the Mandate power in Palestine.

“Most matters of personal status, especially marriage and divorce, are ruled in Israel by religious courts. For three religious groups, Jews, Muslims and Druze, there are official, state-appointed courts, who rule on these matters. For Christians, there are private ecclesiastical courts whose rulings are recognised de facto by the civil authorities.

“The system began with an Act during the British Mandate, under which all recognised religious groups were allowed to deal with matters such as marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption in their own courts. After 1948, the system was continued but only in matters of personal status. By law, the sharia courts have exactly the same status as the rabbinical courts.”

I find it most amusing that the inclusion of state-sanctioned sharia courts for Muslim citizens of secular, democratic Israel – as with the application of Islamic 'personal law' for Muslim citizens in secular, democratic India – is a legacy of the great British Empire which had no qualms about “two systems of law” running “alongside each other” (to quote Andy Burnham). Yet, now, more than sixty years since the demise of that Empire, and in spite of an even larger concentration of Muslims living here in Britain, we are told that there is no space, no place, no possibility, of sharia law being incorporated, included or accommodated into our own ‘secular’ English legal system.

Islamophobia anybody?

FULL SPEED TO THE WHITE HOUSE? YEAH, RIGHT!

2008-05-08T13:15:00.002+01:00

Will Hillary Clinton have (FINALLY! FINALLY!) dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination by the time I finish typing and publishing this blog? The signs look good, with Sky News currently reporting that the party’s former presidential nominee George McGovern has urged the former First Lady to pull out and the Clinton camp admitting that their candidate has had to lend herself (!) $6.4 million over the past month simply in order to stay in the race.

Let’s face the facts: she had to win Indiana by a big margin if she was to have any chance of convincing super-delegates that she is the more ‘electable’ candidate. She failed, and failed miserably. Obama cut her earlier twenty-point lead to just two percent, despite all his troubles over his controversial pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Meanwhile over in North Carolina, where Hillary had acknowledged she had to either win or narrow the gap, the junior senator from Illinois managed to give the junior senator from New York a massive 14 percentage point whipping – 56% to 42%.

Yet the Hillary-Bill campaining combo (Billary?) have so far refused to give up and seem to be campaigning in a self-deluded, heads-in-the-sand, parallel universe. Despite being behind in the delegate count, behind in the popular vote and behind in the number of states won, this is what Senator Clinton had to say at her ‘victory’ rally in the Indiana state capital, Indianapolis, last night:

"Well, tonight we've come from behind. We've broken the tie, and thanks to you, it's full speed on to the White House.”

Full speed? Yeah, right! Maybe if her definition of full speed is 5 miles an hour. She is down and out but she doesn’t want to admit it to herself – and nor do her equally delusional friends and family members. As pointed out by Guardian America’s Michael Tomasky yesterday morning:

“She - and Bill, and Chelsea, and most of the people around them - surely can't believe that she's about to lose the Democratic nomination. There was supposed to be no question about her winning it. There's reason to think they won't stop until the door is closed and triple-locked and boarded and sealed shut around the edges with rubber cement.”

Hillary’s supporters cling to the idea that she is the ‘electable’ candidate by repeatedly pointing out that their candidate wins more white, working-class votes than Obama does. They keep asking the question: ‘Why is it that Obama can’t win the white vote?’ Of course, the reality is that he has won plenty of white votes in plenty of white states (Iowa anybody?) and so I personally would turn the question on its head: ‘Why is it that Hillary can’t win the black vote?’ After all, come the general election in November, the Democrats won’t be expected to win the white, working-class vote (just ask John Kerry and Al Gore!) but, on the other hand, they simply can’t win – and never have won! – without the all-important black vote. But Hillary (with Bill’s help) has alienated black Democrats on a hitherto unprecedented level – and do I need to ask what the effect would be on black Democratic voters if a white candidate, behind in elected delegates and behind in the popular vote, effectively stole the nomination from a black front-runner by twisting the arms of unelected (and largely white) ‘super delegates’?

In fact, the party’s most senior black Congressman had this ominous warning for the Clintons, and the Democratic Party high command, only a week ago:

“We’ll be playing with fire if we interfere with the voters’ choice,” James Clyburn, the party’s chief whip in the House of Representatives, told The Sunday Times. “African-Americans will feel cheated.”

That’s the understatement of the century.

WAR WITH IRAN – BACK ON THE AGENDA?

2008-05-01T19:31:00.006+01:00

So, is the United States planning military action against Iran before the current White House incumbent vacates the Oval Office in less than nine months time? I have long believed that President George W. Bush would not leave office without taking some form of military action against Iran – either directly or indirectly (via the Israelis). Yet, in recent months, I had convinced myself that war with Iran was now off the agenda, especially in the wake of the US intelligence community’s official assessment that Iran halted its alleged nuclear weapons programme five years ago.

Was I wrong to relax? Does the Bush administration really want to provoke a third world war in the Middle East? Check out what top officials were saying on Wednesday alone (!)

CIA

"It is my opinion, it is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to highest level of that government, to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq".

This was the bold claim of CIA Director Michael Haydon, speaking at Kansas University, in what AP’s John Milburn actually described as “the boldest pronouncement of Iranian involvement by a U.S. official to date”. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the Bush administration’s best prospects of engineering a war with Iran, and getting the US public on side, is to pretend that any military action against Tehran is in response to alleged Iranian ‘attacks’ on Coalition forces inside of Iraq. Once again, a la Iraq, we sadly see the top officials at the CIA willing to endorse such blatant propaganda.

PENTAGON

“There is indication that the Iranian support of the Taliban has continued. Again, we don't believe it to be at the same level of which they have provided fighters and weapons into Iraq. But there is some clear evidence that it has occurred."

This was the surprising claim of the chief of operations for senior U.S. military staff, Lieutenant General Carter Ham. Ham wants us to believe that not only are the perfidious Persians responsible for American deaths in Iraq but in Afghanistan too. Two for the price of one! Of course, the thought of Shia-fundamentalist Iran providing support for the Sunni-fundamentalist, Shia-hating, Iranian-diplomat-killing Taliban is so ridiculous and impossible that only a Pentagon official would dare express it, let alone think it in the first place.

STATE DEPARTMENT

“It will come as no surprise to hear that Iran remained the most significant state sponsor of terrorism.”

This was the not-so-surprising claim of Dell Dailey, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, speaking at the launch of the Bush administration’s annual report on terrorism trends. But what else would you expect him to say? Wouldn’t you expect him to focus on a fantastical Iranian terror ‘menace’ rather than allow journalists to focus on the State Department report acknowledgement that suicide bombings around the world are up 50%, casualties from terrorist attacks are up 9% and injuries are up 15%? So much for the much-lauded, so-called ‘War on Terror’….

Oh, and on a side note, while U.S. officials were talking up the Iranian ‘threat’, so too were the Israelis. And on Wednesday too! On a conveniently-timed visit to the United States, Israel’s Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz (a former defence minister and chief of the general staff) said Iran could possess nuclear bomb technology by the end of 2008, citing an updated Israeli intelligence assessment (and contradicting both U.S. intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Authority).

So Wednesday really was, for American and Israeli officials, ‘Get Iran Day’.

"WHAT A BLACK DAY, THEY KILLED MY FAMILY."

2008-04-29T18:35:00.006+01:00

It never ceases to amaze (or disgust) me how Western journalists can continue to refer to a ‘peace process’ in the Middle East, while the Israelis simultaneously continue to butcher Palestinians in their hundreds. According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, the Palestinian death toll this year is worse, so far, than the previous three bloody years of the conflict. It said 312 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in 2008, including 197 unarmed civilians of whom 44 were children and another 14 were women.

Tragically, the latest killing includes both a woman and several children – shortly after 8am yesterday, a Palestinian mother and her four children were killed by an Israeli military attack as they sat around their breakfast table in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. Two other children and 10 others who were nearby were also injured.

Here is the peerless Donald Macintyre reporting on this brutal incident in the Independent:

“The Israeli military said it had been targeting nearby gunmen and suggested the deaths had been caused when explosives it said were being carried by two militants blew up. The children were about to eat breakfast when they were killed.

“The deaths of the children, and the wounding of two older siblings, overshadowed efforts by Egypt to broker a ceasefire between Israel and the armed factions in Gaza. At least one militant and another unidentified man were killed by Israeli forces during the incursion.

“Palestinian medics identified the dead children as sisters Rudina and Hana Abu Meatak, aged six and three; and their brothers, Saleh, four, and Mousad, 15 months. Their mother, Miyasar, who was in her late 30s, died later of wounds she sustained. Seven rockets were later fired into Israel, three claimed by Hamas in response to the deaths of the family.

“The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said that, according to its preliminary investigation, around 20 armoured vehicles moved over a kilometre into northern Gaza at around 6am, and that at around 8.15am Israeli aircraft had fired a missile at a group of militants. The missile landed 10 metres away from the Meatak home, seriously injuring a militant, it said.

“Less than a minute later, the PCHR said, two further missiles were launched at the same area, landing at the door of the same house and killing another militant. The centre said that shrapnel from the missiles destroyed the door and sprayed around the house, killing the children outright.

“…The children's father, Ahmad Abu Meatak, told Associated Press that he was on his way to a nearby market when his home was hit. "What a black day. They killed my family," he said, sobbing outside the local hospital where the bodies were taken.”

Donald Macintyre, incidentally, is a (British) Middle East correspondent who deserves praise and support for his rigorously honest and compassionate (not to mention brave and courageous) reporting from the Occupied Territories. In recent weeks, he has interviewed Israeli soldiers who have confessed to him the torture, beatings and abductions that they have inflicted on the residents of the occupied Palestinian town of Hebron in recent years (a story which remarkably appeared on the front page of the Independent, entitled 'Our reign of terror, by the Israeli army').

In fact, Macintyre – a former political commentator and domestic journalist who has transformed into an insightful Middle East reporter and foreign correspondent par excellence – has form in this area: it was nearly three years ago that he first reported on the former Israeli soldiers who have admitted to joining the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) simply out of a desire “to kill Arabs”. When I read such accounts, such confessions of brutality and abuse, my mind often harks back to a former (Jewish) colleague of mine who, despite being liberal and left-wing and ‘pro-peace’, used to be in continual denial about the IDF’s long history of killing, maiming and torturing Palestinian civilians. He once proclaimed to me: “I refuse to believe that a single Israeli soldier has ever deliberately killed or harmed a Palestinian civilian.” It’s both ironic and depressing that, thanks to the journalism of Donald Macintyre and others, we now know that Israeli soldiers themselves disagree with such a naïve and partisan statement.

By the way, on a related issue, the Guardian reports that warmonger-turned-peace-envoy Tony Blair yesterday presented to the Israeli government a list of checkpoints that he wanted lifted in the West Bank. There are currently 500 Israeli barriers in the West Bank, stifling trade, chocking the Palestinian economy, preventing mothers in labour from reaching hospital, blocking kids from getting to school, etc. Guess how many the Israelis decided to move after their meeting with the all-powerful Blair?

One.

US ELECTIONS UPDATE

2008-04-25T21:01:00.002+01:00

I haven’t had a chance to blog this week. It’s time for the weekend now but let me cast a critical eye back over the previous four days of US presidential politics. As you’ll all have noticed by now, Senator Hillary Clinton remains in the Democratic race after winning the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday. She and her acolytes have been spinning her victory against Senator Barack Obama as ‘against all odds’ and as a victory for the ‘underdog’ and the mainstream media seems to be buying her crap. This blog, however, has no qualms about reminding the army of Beltway pundits and pontificators that opinion polls actually had Hillary in a 20-point lead over Obama only ten days before the primary – a lead she had built up since January. So it was Obama who was actually the underdog in this particular race and it was Obama who deserves credit, and plaudits, for halving Hillary’s initial lead on Tuesday to just 10 per cent (and that too after his rather unfortunate and offensive gaffe about "bitter" working-class people "clinging to guns or religion" in Pennsylvania.)

Now, as regular readers of this blog may have guessed by now, I am an Obama supporter. He is the best of a bad bunch. The other two remaining members of the ‘bad bunch’ – Senators McCain and Clinton – are pro-war hawks who say ludicrous things. Consider the evidence of this week alone:

Hillary Clinton

On ABC’s “Good Morning America” breakfast-news show, Clinton warned Tehran on Tuesday that if she were president, the United States could "totally obliterate" Iran in retaliation for a nuclear strike against Israel:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran.

"In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Not only is this a nonsensical statement – does she really want to be known as the ‘Genocide Candidate’? – but it is also deeply hypocritical. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, has long been castigated and condemned for his alleged desire to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. Why should the US president now harbour an equally bizarre and immoral desire to wipe Iran off the map?

But, most troubling of all, is the fact that such a hawkish question was even asked in the first place. Can you imagine a politician in any other country in the world being asked such a question by a journalist on a breakfast show or answering in such a nakedly populist and hawkish manner? And on what grounds does a journalist even ask a presidential candidate about a hypothetical Iranian ‘nuclear’ threat to Israel when American’s own intelligence agencies have publicly and categorically confirmed that Iran has no nuclear weapons nor even a nuclear weapons programme (as I have blogged about here)? The mainstream media is pathetic, ignorant and biased – which is one of the many reasons behind me setting up this blog.

John McCain

On ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday, April 20, McCain called one-time (and distant) Obama friend William Ayers “an unrepentant terrorist” (trying to smear Obama in a ‘guilt by association’ accusation). What was McCain’s evidence? McCain said that Ayers “was engaged in bombings which could have or did kill innocent people…” So McCain is saying that someone who engages in bombings which could have killed or did kill innocent people is a terrorist.

Now consider what McCain did. McCain flew a bomber, an A-4E Skyhawk, over North Vietnam. I don’t know whether he actually dropped his bombs before being shot down and taken prisoner by the Vietcong. But certainly he was engaged in actions that, if he had succeeded, could have killed innocent people – and was part of a war effort which did kill millions of innocent people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Which makes McCain, in his own words, a terrorist.

By the way, while the US press continues to devote acres of print to the presidential primaries, it ignores the rather shocking case of the FBI arresting retired US military engineer Ben-Ami Kadish on charges of spying for Israel (!) Imagine that! America’s best buddy in the world, it’s closest ally, the biggest recipient of US aid, continues to spy on it even now, more than twenty years on from the infamous Jonathan Pollard case. There’ll be more on the spying case here on the Radical Opinions blog next week. Stay tuned!

9-11, NETANYAHU AND AHMADINEJAD

2008-04-18T18:47:00.002+01:00

With apologists for the United States having spent several years now accusing Muslims, Arabs, doves, liberals and lefties of either (a) having been indifferent to the suffering perpetrated by terrorists on September 11th 2001 or (b) cynically using it to advance their anti-war or anti-American political agendas, may I point readers of this blog in the direction of the pro-war, pro-American Israeli politician (and former prime minister) Benjamin Netanyahu's rather tactless yet revealing remarks at Bar Ilan University this week?

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

Israel is benefiting from 9-11? Imagine if you or I had said such a thing. There would be instant accusations of anti-Semitism. Imagine if another world leader had spoken about the ‘benefits’ of 9-11. There would be nothing but uproar in Washington DC and on Fox News and talk radio. But, as I have repeatedly pointed out in previous posts, there is one rule for the Israelis and one rule for everybody else.

Nevertheless, cynical and callous Benjamin’s remarks may have been, but the fact is that the chairman of the Likud party happens to be 100 per cent correct in his analysis: the 9-11 attacks – and the subsequent so-called ‘War on Terror’ – have indeed benefited Israel strategically and tactically, while strengthening pro-Israeli, anti-Arab sentiments amongst the American public at large.

However, on the other hand, the comments regarding 9-11 made this week by Netanyahu’s Persian bete noire, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, have been anything but accurate or correct.

Now, I have no time for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yes, alright, he was indeed mistranslated regarding his views on the existence and/or destruction of the State of Israel. But his views on the Holocaust are well-documented not to mention odious and ahistorical, and his decision to host a conference of Holocaust deniers in Tehran was both offensive and embarrassing. I consider him to be a bumbling ‘village idiot’, out of his depth, who has taken the art of ‘misspeaking’ to a new level. I mean, which sane and sensible leader stands in the front of the world’s media and denies there are homosexuals in their country, when images of the execution of homosexuals in that same country are publicly, widely and openly available? (I also can’t stand the fact that Mahmoud, like his self-centred and sanctimonious White House counterpart, wrongly and arrogantly assumes God is personally intervening to protect and guide him.)

Now, in his latest mis-pronouncement, the Iranian president has declared his support for the 'truthers' – the wide array of misguided, close-minded, obsessive 9-11 conspiracy theorists (who tragically tend to draw so much support and sympathy from the world’s conspiracy-obsessed Muslims). Speaking in the holy city of Qom, Ahmadinejad declared:

"Four or five years ago, a suspicious event occurred in New York. A building collapsed and they said that 3,000 people had been killed but never published their names.

"Under this pretext, they [the U.S.] attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and since then, a million people have been killed only in Iraq."

Yes, the United States did use 9-11 as a ‘pretext’ to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. And, yes, as I have blogged here before, studies suggest up to a million people may indeed have been killed as a result of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. But for Mahmoud to claim that a building (i.e. the World Trade Centre) simply ‘collapsed’ is an utterly false and misleading statement. The Twin Towers did not ‘collapse’, as a result of a natural disaster, or a bomb, or a controlled explosion or demolition. All of these ridiculous conspiracy theories have been repeatedly debunked and disproved by credible, independent experts from scientific and engineering backgrounds.

As for the names of the 9-11 victims not having been published, I am sorry to say that the Iranian prez is both a liar and a fool. A liar because here, here and here is the full list of all the dead and a fool because – a la his ‘homosexuals don’t exist in Iran’ comments – he must have known that his ludicrous claim could be instantly and demonstrably disproved as soon he made it. So why did he make it? I despair!

It is time, I believe, for supporters of Iran to disassociate from the 9-11 conspiracy theories promulgated by the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and it is time for supporters of Israel to disassociate themselves from the 9-11 cynicism and opportunism articulated by the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s that simple.

THE ARROGANCE OF ISRAEL

2008-04-17T14:01:00.003+01:00

So, let me get this right: the United States of America funds Israel to the tune of $7 million a day, or around $500 per Israeli per year. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America's entire foreign aid budget. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion. (See this Congressional report for all of the astonishing details of unparalleled US financial largesse towards the Jewish state.)

Yet, this week, when a former President of the United States – who happens to be the man who negotiated Israel’s peace deal with its largest Arab neighbour, and who also happens to be a Nobel Peace Laureate to boot – visits the State of Israel at the start of a Middle East tour, he is denied a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, as well as the country’s foreign and defence ministers, and the Israeli security services even have the temerity to decline the requests for help and assistance from the US Secret Service agents guarding him. (Has anyone actually reminded the Shin Bet that everything they possess – from their guns and grenades, to their suits and sunglasses – is paid for, in full, by the United States?)

Is this the height of arrogance?

Yes.

But why the snub? Why the rudeness and arrogance expressed towards a former occupant of the traditionally pro-Israeli Oval Office – behaviour described by one American source as ‘unprecedented’? Because this former president happens to be none other than Jimmy Carter, author of the 2006 best-selling book, ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’, in which he describes,

“…the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine, to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, this is more oppressive than what black people lived under in South Africa during apartheid.”

Judging by the official Israeli reaction to his visit now, two years on, I guess what they say is true. The truth hurts...

DO PALESTINIANS DESERVE LESS THAN TIBETANS?

2008-04-15T19:02:00.004+01:00

Following on from yesterday, Haaretz also has a piece by its senior writer, and noted anti-occupation columnist, Gideon Levy, in which he makes a rather obvious yet under-reported point: why is it that the Tibetans are feted as freedom fighters by the West, lionised and eulogised, and China is condemned for its barbaric, repressive and colonial activities in Tibet, when the Palestinians are offered no such support or solidarity and Israel’s own China-like crimes of repression and occupation are ignored and overlooked?

The usual (depressing) two words: double standards.

From the Haaretz article:

“Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet….No small number of…good Israelis have recently joined the wave of global protest that broke out over the Olympics, set to take place in Beijing this summer. It is easy; it engenders no controversy - who would not be in favor of liberating Tibet? But that is not the fight that Israeli human rights supporters should be waging.

“To fight for Tibet, Israel needs no courage, because there is no price to pay. On the contrary, this is part of a fashionable global trend, almost as much as the fight against global warming or the poaching of sea lions.

“These fights are just, and must be undertaken. But in Israel they are deluxe fights, which are unthinkable. When one comes to the fight with hands that are collectively, and sometimes individually, so unclean, it is impossible to protest a Chinese occupation.

“Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation. Citizens of a country that is entirely tainted by the occupation - a national, ongoing project that involves all sectors of the population to some extent, directly or indirectly - cannot wash their hands and fight another occupation, when a half-hour from their homes, horrors no less terrible are taking place for which they have much greater responsibility.

“The world has fallen in love with Tibet. How easy it is to do so….

“The Palestinians are not as nice as the Tibetans in the eyes of the world. But the Palestinian people deserve exactly the same rights as the occupied Tibetan people, even if their leaders are less enchanting, they have no scarlet robes and their fight is more violent. There is absolutely no connection between rights and the means of protest, and from that perspective, there is no difference between a Tibetan and a Palestinian - they both deserve the exact same freedom."

Hear, hear!

USE A PALESTINIAN CAR MECHANIC, GO TO PRISON

2008-04-14T20:04:00.002+01:00

As reported a few days ago by the liberal Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, the Israeli Knesset has passed a law imposing a penalty of three years imprisonment on Israeli car-owners who take their vehicles to mechanics in the West Bank.

Does anyone detect the unmistakeable whiff of state-sponsored racism?

After all, the Israeli defence establishment – and its hardline apologists here in the West – justify each of the Jewish state’s ongoing crimes against freedom, democracy and the rule of law on the grounds of ‘national security’ – but what on earth is the security argument for banning the use of Palestinian mechanics by Israeli car-owners? Do Israeli cars have a track record of spontaneously combusting upon being touched by an Arab?

WHAT ON EARTH ARE BRITISH TROOPS ACTUALLY DOING IN IRAQ?

2008-04-11T15:53:00.002+01:00

The headline in the Times this morning caught my attention: “Iraq snubs Britain and calls US into Basra battle.”

The article outlines how the Iraqi government of Nuri al Maliki, in its recent disastrous and bloody offensive against the Shia militias of Moqtada al Sadr, bypassed the British troops (still) stationed around the city of Basra and instead chose to rely for support on US military forces called in from Baghdad.

From the Times:

“About 550 US troops, including some from the 82nd Airborne Division, were sent from Baghdad to Basra to join up with 150 American soldiers already serving with Iraqi forces in the southern city.

“The Ministry of Defence made much of the fact that British troops, based at Basra airport outside the city, were not requested in the early stages of the operation. British officials claimed that the Basra offensive was proof that Iraqi troops could cope on their own.

“The Times has learnt, however, that when Britain’s most senior officer in Basra, Brigadier Julian Free, commander of 4 Mechanised Brigade, flew into the city to find out what was going on, Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, who was orchestrating the attacks on militia strongholds, declined to see him.”

So the question is, in the wake of such a humiliating gesture from our own puppet government in that occupied nation, why on earth are 5,000-plus British troops still in Iraq, cowering behind the walls of Basra airport and sitting on their backsides? Why have they not been withdrawn and brought home - as per the wishes of the majority of the British public? And do we need any further proof of the fact that British troops have been fighting and dying in vain in the south of Iraq, serving no particular strategic purpose other than to perpetuate the myth that the United States is part of a ‘Coalition’ that is occupying Iraq?

TOP US GENERAL IN IRAQ CONTRADICTS THE WAR HAWKS

2008-04-09T20:55:00.002+01:00

This week, 'America's General' David H. Petraeus - he who ludicrously claimed, back in 2004 (!), that there were signs of "tangible progress" and "optimism" in Iraq – returned to Capitol Hill to once again brief Senators and Congressmen on the security situation in Iraq in the wake of the recent US military 'surge'.

Surprisingly, under pointed questioning from Senator Evan Bayh (Democrat, Indiana), General Petraeus painted a much more sombre and restrained picture of Iraq than many of his Republican cheerleaders:

"It's why I've repeatedly noted that we haven't turned any corners, we haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator. And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible."

Contrast that with, say, the words of a certain senator from Arizona currently running for President, speaking on the same morning:

"But today it is possible to talk with real hope and optimism about the future of Iraq and the outcome of our efforts there. For while the job of bringing security to Iraq is not finished, as the recent fighting in Basra and elsewhere vividly demonstrated, we're no longer staring into the abyss of defeat and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success."

Notice the difference?

IS ISRAEL THE WORLD’S MOST HYPOCRITICAL NATION? YOU DECIDE….

2008-04-07T19:33:00.004+01:00

Which country is the most hypocritical on earth?

I am often torn when considering the answer to this question. Is it the United States, which blusters on and on about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ abroad while continuing to defend and even justify Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, rendition, the Patriot Act and warrantless phone tapping? Or which condemns elections in Palestine and Iran while simultaneously cosying up to dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia?

Or is it Saudi Arabia, which spends millions and millions of petro-dollars funding the spread of radical Islam across the world – building mosques and madressas and distributing books and pamphlets, from Bangladesh to Birmingham – yet forbids its residents from publicly practising any other religion apart from Islam and which remains the only country in the Arabian peninsula without a single church, synagogue or temple?

Is China the world’s most hypocritical country, with a totalitarian and dictatorial political system controlled by self-proclaimed communists on the one hand, but with those same communist rulers depending on a free-market, capitalist economic system to generate wealth and prosperity on the other?

Or it is my own home country, Britain, where the Archbishop of Canterbury was roundly condemned by all sections and segments of society, only a few weeks ago, for daring to even suggest that Britain’s Muslims be allowed to use religious courts to settle (some of) their legal disputes, despite the fact that Britain’s Jews have been allowed to do exactly the same for several decades now?

I happen to believe that the world’s most hypocritical nation is Israel. Why? Because for several years, the Israelis have been accusing Iran of being an ‘existential’ threat to the Jewish state, of developing a secret nuclear weapons programme and of disrupting the so-called ‘peace process’ by funding terrorist groups. The hawks in Tel Aviv have long harboured ambitions of launching a bombing campaign against Tehran and Israel’s neoconservative supporters in Washington D.C. are at the forefront of the anti-Iranian propaganda campaign inside the United States. Yet, only a week ago, the Swiss newspaper Sonntag revealed that Israel, supposedly observing a complete and utter boycott of all things Persian, has been buying Iranian oil for decades.

According to the Swiss report,

"Israel imports Iranian oil on a large scale even though contacts with Iran and purchasing of its products are officially boycotted by Israel. Israel gets around the boycott by having the oil delivered via Europe. A reliable Israeli energy newsletter, EnergiaNews…

"EnergiaNews got the information about the Iran trade from sources with ties to the management of Israeli Oil Refineries Ltd ... According to EnergiaNews the Iranian oil is liked in Israel because its quality is better than other crude oils.”

Can any country act any more hypocritically than this? You claim to hate a particular nation in your neighbourhood, you accuse it of being a state sponsor of terrorism and an existential threat to your own nation and people, you compare its president to Adolf Hitler and urge your allies in the West to sanction and even perhaps bomb it and – yet – all the while you continue to (secretly) buy oil from that country (!!) Is there any better definition of hypocrisy? I think not.

So, dear readers, that’s my view. What’s yours? Which do you think is the world’s most hypocritical nation, and why?

THIS BLOG IS BACK!

2008-04-07T19:32:00.001+01:00

After another self-imposed and unavoidable blogging hiatus (apologies!!!), ‘Radical Opinions’ returns this week and it will be as explosive, controversial and contrary as ever. Rigorously radical yet rigorously factual.

I hope regular visitors to this blog will keep on coming and persuading their friends and colleagues to come here and post comments, start discussions and spread the word.

FIVE YEARS ON, ARE THINGS REALLY LOOKING UP FOR IRAQIS?

2008-03-19T11:41:00.003Z

Five years on from an invasion which has perhaps caused the deaths of over a million Iraqis, including over fifty people in a suicide bombing in Kerbala on Monday, it’s party time in Baghdad and Basra! At least, that’s what much of our mainstream media would have us believe throughout this week. Here’s a sample of headlines from across the West:

All of this joy and elation and seemingly heady ‘optimism’ is based on a poll of Iraqis carried out by the BBC, ABC and a variety of international broadcasters.

My biggest problem with such polls inside of Iraq is with the people they necessarily (and conveniently) have to exclude. For example, the Iraqi refugees – two million of whom have fled to neighbouring Syria, Jordan, Iran et al. They have tended to vote with their feet, as it were, by fleeing and refusing to return (despite all the triumphal rhetoric from American and Iraqi politicians, in the wake of the US military ‘surge’). They, not surprisingly, tend to be more pessimistic, more negative and more bitter about their lives, their futures, the future of Iraq, etc, than the Iraqis polled inside of Iraq. Yet they – the refugees – represent nearly ten per cent of that nation’s population.

Then there are the dead. Who speaks for them? It’s all very well sending pollsters into the streets of Baghdad, Mosul, Najaf, etc, to find out what Iraqis think of the security situation these days but what would the dead tell those pollsters if they had the chance? What would the million or so Iraqis who have been killed in the five years of sectarian violence and military occupation – according to a study by Opinion Business Research – have to say for themselves, were they given the chance? The silent and often forgotten dead of Iraq represent a mind-boggling and heart-breaking one in twenty-five of that country’s population.

Of course there are other problems with this BBC poll, that has unsurprisingly been trumpeted by the political and media classes alike. I find it’s always sensible in times like this to check the original, raw data of such heavily-spun, heavily-politicized opinion polls. Thankfully, the BBC has actually provided us with a detailed breakdown of the full questions and answers, by percentage, here.

The poll does indeed reveal that, for the first time, a majority of Iraqis do believe their lives are ‘very’ or ‘quite’ good. Yet does this actually translate into ‘optimism’ about the future? Here are some of the facts from the full data of the poll which the headline-writers and media pundits here in the West chose to ignore and overlook:

A majority of Iraqis continue to believe that life will not improve at all in the coming year.
A majority of Iraqis refuse to believe that their children’s lives will be better than their own.
A majority of Iraqis believe that, for Iraq as a whole, things are either ‘quite’ or ‘very’ bad.
A majority of Iraqis believe that life in Iraq, as a whole, will not have improved at all in a year’s time.
Exactly half of all Iraqis believe the US-led invasion was ‘wrong’ and only a fifth support the war unconditionally, describing it as ‘absolutely right’.
70% of Iraqis describe the availability of jobs as ‘bad’ and a whopping 88% of them describe the supply of electricity as ‘bad’ too.
Only a third of Iraqis believe the security situation in Iraq as a whole has improved over the past twelve months.

So, in conclusion, a much more depressing read than much of the mainstream media would have us believe. Life in Iraq is perhaps better in some, but not all, ways compared to a year ago. But, judging even by this poll, life in general there is still brutal, nasty, insecure and unstable.

GO HOME AND DIE, OR STAY AND STARVE

2008-03-14T10:29:00.003Z

Go home and die, or stay here and starve: that’s essentially the message which the British government is now sending to Iraqi refugees.

From yesterday’s Guardian:

“More than 1,400 rejected Iraqi asylum seekers are to be told they must go home or face destitution in Britain as the government considers Iraq safe enough to return them, according to leaked Home Office correspondence seen by the Guardian.

“The Iraqis involved are to be told that unless they sign up for a voluntary return programme to Iraq within three weeks, they face being made homeless and losing state support. They will also be asked to sign a waiver agreeing the government will take no responsibility for what happens to them or their families once they return to Iraqi territory.”

The Guardian goes on to point out that this decision – from the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, via her callous and indifferent bureaucratic underlings at the new Borders and Immigration Agency (BIA) – comes after more than 78 people have been killed in incidents across Iraq since last Sunday.

Iraq is not – I repeat, not! – a safe country in any shape or form. Violence continues to plague the north, south and centre of the nation. Over the past week, there have been shootings, car bombings and suicide bombings in all corners of that country – Baghdad, Basra, Diyala, Hadita, Mosul, Tikrit, Samarra, Kirkuk. This blog has, on previous occasions, drawn attention to the 650,000-plus death toll there, as well as the recent post-surge spike in civilian deaths. And if, by now, you still don’t trust ‘Radical Opinions’ or ‘The Radical’ (i.e. me!), then simply turn your attention to the Foreign Office website, where Iraq is listed s one of the countries that the British government officially advises its citizens to avoid all travel to several parts of. Here is the stark statement from the FCO summary on travel to Iraq:

“The security situation in Iraq remains highly dangerous with a continuing high threat of terrorism throughout Iraq, violence and kidnapping…”

So we have an absurd and amoral situation in which the Home Office is forcing Iraqi asylum-seekers to go back to Iraq, which it claims is now safe, while the Foreign Office warns us that Iraq is unsafe and should be avoided. I am not sure what is worse: the mendacity of Home Office bureaucrats who choose to ignore the Foreign Office travel advice when it comes to making decisions on whether or not a country (in this case, Iraq) is safe, or a British government as a whole which seems to worry deeply about the lives of its own citizens while abroad, but chooses to forcibly send foreign refugees (Iraqis) back home to their own deaths. And, if you think I am exaggerating here, simply ask the family of Solyman Rashed. After spending fifteen months, penniless and impoverished in a UK detention centre, he agreed in 2006 to ‘voluntarily return’ to northern Iraq, which is supposedly ‘safer’ than the rest of Iraq.

He was killed just two weeks after he arrived back, in a car-bomb attack in the city of Kirkuk.

Is this what a Labour government was really elected to do?

(Incidentally, and on a side note, it would be worth tuning into Channel 4 this Sunday evening at 7pm, as the channel’s current-affairs strand, ‘Dispatches’, is devoted to 'Iraq's Lost Generation' and the plight of that country’s penniless, homeless and maimed refugees, who now number over 2 million).

THE COST OF ‘FREEDOM’

2008-03-11T10:18:00.002Z

According to a recent report from a committee of MPs (the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, for those of you parliamentary anoraks who are interested!), the cost to the British taxpayer of our invasions, occupations and ongoing bombing-and-maiming operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has nearly doubled in the past year to more than 3 billion pounds.

On the other side of the pond, former World Bank chief economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to cost the United States approximately $12 billion a month – tripled the rate of their earliest years – in what he has termed (conservatively) in his new book as 'The Three Trillion Dollar War'.

Can you even begin to conceptualise three trillion US dollars? Can you picture in your mind how many suitcases would be required to carry 3 billion UK pounds? As one commentator in the New York Times recently noted, the human mind isn’t well equipped to make sense of a figure like a trillion (or even a billion):

“We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion – they all start to sound the same.”

So, let’s put it this way. What could the United States spend $3 trillion on, instead of the carnage and chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, for a fraction of that amount, it could literally end global poverty, hunger and malnutrition. It could put a roof over the head of every homeless person on the face of the earth, and put food and water on the table of every starving human being in every corner of the globe. The World Bank estimates that the cost of meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals would be an additional annual $40-70 billion between now and 2015, i.e. $500 billion max! That would still leave $2.5 trillion in change (!) – i.e. not simply to build schools and hospitals in every town and village in America but in every town and village in the world. (I feel like Richard Pryor right now, in the classic ‘80s movie 'Brewster's Millions').

Even the UK’s own relatively paltry 3 billion pounds in war spending over the past twelve months could have been better spent halving child poverty across Britain – that’s how much it would cost to lift a million and a half children out of poverty in this country.

So you see: we could have spent our taxes on helping to feed and clothe poor kids here in Britain but instead we chose to spend it on killing kids thousands of miles away; the United States too could have spent its tax revenues on ending poverty, malnutrition and hunger across the globe but instead chose to bring greater poverty, malnutrition and hunger to the long-suffering people of Iraq.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE?

2008-03-08T12:55:00.004Z

As the world's media convulses over the latest Arab-inflicted massacre against the poor, innocent people of Israel, spare a thought for poor Amira Abu Aser, buried in Gaza on Wednesday after being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house she and her family had been visiting. She spent only twenty days on this earth.

Was she firing rockets into Israel? Did she deserve to die? Is her death not an act of 'terrorism'?

WHO CARES ABOUT THE PALESTINIANS?

2008-03-07T00:02:00.006Z

The bloodshed in the so-called 'Holy Land' continues, with the typical Middle East 'cycle of violence' spiralling further and further out of control. Earlier today, after hundreds of Palestinian deaths at the hands of the occupying Israeli machine, the predictable 'terrorist' response arrived - in Jerusalem, an Arab gunman infiltrated a Jewish seminary school in Jerusalem and shot dead eight people, wounding at least nine others.

The attack has dominated news headlines - of course, the deaths of Israeli civilians (like the deaths of American and British civilians) always trumps over the deaths of dark-skinned Arab Muslims. So, here is a small reminder of the suffering on the 'other', often ignored, side of the Mid East ledger of pain and suffering, from Monday's Guardian front page:

"First came an explosion in the street outside. Then the sound of a single rifle bullet slicing through the sky in a sharp crack and into the apartment directly above the home of Raed Abu Saif, the same apartment into which his young daughter Safa had just gone. It was Saturday afternoon, about 4pm.
Abu Saif hurried upstairs and found, lying on the floor of the front room, Safa, aged 12.
There was a hole in her chest where the bullet had entered and a hole in her back where it had exited. It took her three hours to die.

Outside in the district of Zimmo Square, at the eastern edge of Jabalia in the Gaza Strip, there was by now a heavy Israeli military presence, with tanks and troops and the sound of fighting raging. It was too dangerous for ambulances to reach the apartment and too dangerous for Abu Saif to head out on foot with his daughter.
Instead, he fetched bandages, closed the wounds as best he could and held her in his arms as she bled.

"She said she was in pain, that she couldn't breathe," he said. "A few minutes before she died she told me to stop squeezing the wound,
she couldn't breathe. I was just touching her hair. Then I saw her eyes roll up. I felt her heart. It was not beating."

Read the full, heart-breaking piece from Rory McCarthy here.

And check out Donald Macintyre's excellent and deeply sensitive coverage in the Independent here.

And if your heart can bear the overwhelming sorrow and grief, read here about the latest report from Amnesty International on how the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip has actually now reached its lowest point in forty years, i.e. since Israel first occupied the Palestinian territories in 1967.

God save the Palestinians - after all, no one else will.

RADICAL OPINIONS AFTER A WEEK AWAY…

2008-03-04T14:50:00.006Z

After a regrettable and difficult week away from world affairs and away from this blog of mine, I am now officially back and back with a vengeance. (Incidentally, my thanks to the blogger Legal Alien who, in the meantime, left an insightful and passionate comment in response to my earlier posting on Barack Obama).

So, what has been going on in this dark, dank and dismal world we all so passively and effortlessly inhabit over the past few days? Here are the radical opinions – on the major geopolitical events to have rocked the globe over the past week – that the mainstream media have been denying you, but which this particular blog was set up to provide and purvey:

1) Prince Harry’s war in Afghanistan

Thanks to Matt Drudge, we discovered that the third in line to the British throne, Harry Windsor, second son of Diana, has been fighting in Afghanistan against the Taliban over the past two months. Some say he is a war hero, while our Prime Minister says we owe him a debt of gratitude – but why? Is a spoiled, ex-Etonian, rich, royal brat who volunteers to fly half way around the world in order to help sustain the invasion and occupation of a poor, defenceless country, populated by brown-skinned Muslim inhabitants (none of whom, by the way, had anything whatsoever to do with the 9-11 attacks!), and to continue fighting a pointless and seemingly endless counter-insurgency war against history’s most stubborn and determined insurgents, really deserving of hero status and deserving of our gratitude?

The media have shown us the usual grainy, black-and-white cockpit videos of ‘coalition’ bombs – ordered and directed by Prince Harry – destroying their ‘terrorist’ targets? But what about the collateral damage? How much innocent Afghan blood does our young prince have on his royal hands? The fact is that US-led and NATO-led ‘coalition’ forces in Afghanistan, including ‘our boys’ from Britain (and including Harry!), have actually killed more civilians there than Taliban insurgents or Al Qaeda terrorists – and continue to do so. Yet our media remain silent on this key point and prefer instead to uncritically idolize Harry and his warmongering ilk.

2) Ongoing violence in Iraq

Despite claims from hawks in the United States that the ‘surge’ in the number of American troops occupying Iraq has led to a verifiable and indisputable decline in the number of civilian casualties in Baghdad and the country’s various other hot spots, the number of Iraqis killed actually rose (!) by 33 percent from January to February, according to official figures released on Saturday. The combined figures obtained by AFP from the interior, defence and health ministries showed that the total number of Iraqis killed in February was 721, including 636 civilians, compared with 541 dead in January. How many of our newspapers chose to report this horrific yet significant statistic on their front pages? Or with banner headlines on the inside pages? Typically, and depressingly, none at all. Zero.

3) Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians

The cat is now out of the bag: Israel’s deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai admitted on Friday what those of us on the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian left have long believed, i.e. that the Jewish state is bent upon destroying the Palestinian people and is engaged in a genocidal occupation. Vilnai told Israeli army radio,

“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

“Shoah” is of course the Hebrew word normally reserved by Israelis for referring only to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews during World War II.

Of course, Israel is not gassing the Palestinians en masse, nor is it massacring the residents of Gaza (or the West Bank) on Nazi-like levels. Yet, according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the definition of genocide includes acts,

“….committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Is there any better or more apt description for an occupying state which chooses to respond to the deaths of two or three of its citizens in rocket attacks over the space of a few months by killing over a hundred of its enemies in the space of a few days, including a six-month-old baby and four boys playing football? Is this a proportionate act of self-defence or a genocidal act of aggression? I have no doubt that it is the latter.

So, the question is: who can reverse – or at least stem – these negative, depressing and bloody geopolitical trends? Will it perhaps be the next President of the United States of America? Tomorrow, I’ll be blogging on the US presidential elections and the Texas and Ohio primaries which conventional wisdom suggests Senator Hillary Clinton must win in order to stay in the race….

Your comments are welcome (in fact, requested! demanded!) on any and all of the above issues. And, please, please, keep checking back to this blog for the latest radical opinions on the latest world events.

A WEEK OFF

2008-02-25T17:55:00.000Z

Regular visitors to this blog (are there any?) may have noticed a slight lull in the number of postings here by me, the self-proclaimed 'Radical', in recent weeks. To be honest, February has been a bit of a mad month for me and I have slightly taken my eye off the (blogging) ball. In exactly seven days, I'll be back to blogging on an almost daily basis - exposing the myriad of lies and exaggerations and half-truths peddled by the Laptop Bombardiers and the Armchair Islamophobes.

As I said, the number of blogs that I have posted has slowed down but (thankfully! weirdly?) the hits continue to rise. Having started this blog in early December after a long period of personal and professional frustration with the right-wing, war-mongering, terrorism-fuelling, Muslim-demonizing trajectory of our political classes and the unthinking, uncritical, incurious and - frankly - xenophobic coverage of the world by our 'mainstream' media, I am pleased to see the hit counter (below, scroll down to the bottom) approaching a whopping two thousand.

So, thank you. And I will be back. Shortly. In a week. Watch this space.

(In the meantime, check out the excellent www.antiwar.com)

TIME FOR MUSLIMS TO SAY: 'NOT IN MY NAME'

2008-02-21T18:18:00.008Z

Muslims often - rightly - accuse the media and the security services of Islamophobia, of hyping the terrorism threat, of distorting intelligence and fabricating evidence, of demonizing ordinary Muslims. In fact, this blog of mine has done so several times, based on solid facts, since its inception in December.

Yet we must remember that there are unquestionaly and undeniably several 'bad apples' (for want of a softer euphemism!) in the Muslim community - men (and women) who do actually (wrongly) believe Islam condones and even sanctifies violence and bloodshed; who do view jihad (mistakenly) as a primarily military, rather than a spiritual, struggle; who do in fact hate the West not simply for its foreign policy but because it is the West; it is non-Muslim, secular and liberal.

One such fanatical Muslim bigot is British-born, Birmingham-based Parviz Khan, who was sentenced to life in prison this week after pleading guilty to a plot to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier serving in the British army. The security services had bugged his home in Alum Rock and the transcripts of the surveillance intercepts make for a chilling and rather disturbing read:

"The MI5 bugging device at Parviz Khan's Birmingham home recorded attempts to indoctrinate Khan's five-year-old son in the ethos of al-Qaida inspired violence.

In one passage co-defendant Hamid Elasmar asks the boy: "How do you cut their neck?"
Khan then prompts the youngster, saying: "How do you cut them with a knife? Show me."
Then Khan is heard saying: "Like this. Good."

Khan was also recorded asking his son: "Who do you love?" "I love sheikh Osama Bin Laden," the child replies. Khan asks his son if he loves anyone else. The boy names extreme Muslim cleric Abu Hamza and Islamic militant sheikh Abdullah Rehman.

Then Khan asks the youngster: "Who do you kill?" The child replies: "America kill." Asked who else, the boy responds "Bush I kill" and "Blair kill." Prompted by his father, the five-year-old says he also wants to kill "kuffar" (a derogatory term for a non- Muslim), "Hindu," and "sharabi" (drunks).

Khan was also recorded discussing his desire that his three-year-old daughter should eventually marry a terrorist. "Inshallah [God willing], she'll marry into them and give birth to them," he told Zahoor Iqbal, a long-time friend. The trial jury was told that Khan then called his daughter towards him and asked her: "What will you cook for the men in the mountains?"

This is not 'jihad'. This is not even simply 'terrorism'. This is child abuse - plain and simple. How any self-proclaimed, so-called 'Muslim' can justify filling their innocent children's heads with such bile, hatred and violence, I simply do not know!

On February 14th 2003, I marched in London with millions of anti-war Muslims, protesting against the impending invasion of Iraq and carrying banners proclaiming 'Not In My Name'. At times like this, when I see the miserable, humourless, hate-filled mug shot of 'Muslims' like Parviz Khan staring out from the TV screen, I have to say to him and to his ilk: 'Not In My Name'. You do not represent my Islam, my Quran or my Prophet. You are a disgrace, a shame, an embarrassment and I disassociate myself and my beliefs from you and yours.

HAIL TO THE TORTURER-IN-CHIEF!

2008-02-16T10:21:00.006Z

Outgoing US President George W. Bush gave a rare interview this week to a non-American, non-deferential, non-fawning interviewer, the BBC’s Matt Frei.

The main focus of the interview was (predictably, depressingly) the President’s preference for torturing his way to victory in the so-called ‘War on Terror’. These are some of the main (outrageous) points which the BBC interview highlighted:

Bush believes that the London bombings – among other things – justifies the American use of torture (sorry, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’!)
Bush believes America still supports human rights and occupies the international moral high ground (!!)
Bush will veto any attempt by the Senate to ban waterboarding
Bush does not consider waterboarding to be a form of torture

Yet, as the Guardian noted, on the very same day, one of the Bush administration’s very own Justice Department officials – Steven Bradbury, head of the Office of Legal Counsel – pointed out in congressional testimony,

“Let me be clear, though: There has been no determination by the justice department that the use of waterboarding, under any circumstances, would be lawful under current law.”

Outside of the delusional corridors of the White House and the right-wing thinktanks of the neocrazy neocons, there are few sane souls who would dispute that waterboarding is indeed wholly, totally, undeniably, unquestionaly, indisputably and self-evidently an immoral, inhumane and brutal act of torture.

Former POW, Iraq war supporter and Republican Party presidential-candidate-to-be, Senator John McCain, is opposed to waterboarding, which he considers to be torture. Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage – who happens to have been second-in-command at Bush’s State Department during the invasion of Iraq, and also happens to be a former US naval commando – also has a dim view of waterboarding:

“Of course water-boarding is torture. I can't believe we're even debating it. We shouldn't be doing that kind of stuff."

What precisely is “that kind of stuff”? Former US military psychologist Bruce Lefever, who underwent a diluted form of ‘waterboarding’ during his training, said it was “terrifying”, and that “you're strapped to an inclined gurney and you're in four-point restraint, your head is almost immobilized, and they pour water between your nose and your mouth, so if you're likely to breathe, you're going to get a lot of water. You go into an oxygen panic." It is not waterboarding – it is, put simply, water torture.

You can watch a mocked-up, diluted version of a waterboarding below, courtesy of MSNBC:

The reality is that waterboarding has long been a weapon not simply of Mr Bush’s heroic and hallowed counter-terrorism operatives, but of torturers and tyrants throughout history. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge were amongst the 20th century’s most infamous practioners of waterboarding, as you can see below in a photo of one of the actual ‘waterboards’ used by the torturers of the Khymer Rouge.

And, most damning of all, the United States itself prosecuted Japanese officers in the wake of World War II, for waterboarding American prisoners of war – including an officer named Yukio Asano. As Senator Edward Kennedy has pointed out:

“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II.”

How ironic! The US president declares in 2005, “We don’t do torture”, and then admits to, and defends, the use of waterboarding against terror suspects; while almost half a century earlier, the US government prosecuted Japanese officers for carrying out the very same practice against Americans. Hypocrisy? Double standards? Short-sightedness? All of the above. And all in the name of justifying, defending, and apologizing for torture, carried out by the supposed leader of the ‘free’ world, the United States of America. Waterboarding joins Abu Ghraib, Guatanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition in the long list of ignominious (and unAmerican!) legacies left to America, and to the world, by George Bush and his pathetic and immoral ‘War on Terror’.

TOP FIVE REASONS WHY ONLY OBAMA CAN BEAT MCCAIN

2008-02-13T19:05:00.008Z

Sitting here watching the election race on this side of the ‘pond’, I am delighted and genuinely bemused to see that my preferred presidential candidate – the lesser of all the various evils – Senator Barack Obama is on a roll, having won five primaries on the trot and now having captured more states and amassed more delegates than former front runner and former first lady, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

With the Republicans on the verge of crowning Senator John McCain as their candidate, it is time for undecided Democrats and wavering independents to think long and hard about who the best candidate would be to deal with the specific threat from McCain – who has cross-party appeal, an affable and likeable personality, a ‘maverick’ reputation and a distinguished military background as a former prisoner of war.

Nonetheless, according to the most recent Associated Press poll, Barack Obama (unlike Hillary Clinton) would narrowly defeat John McCain if they were matched today in the presidential election. This doesn’t really surprise me, as I believe that there are five overwhelming and undeniable reasons why Obama is the only man (sorry, person) who can beat McCain, come November:

1. IRAQ

The issue of Iraq remains bitterly divisive in modern America and is unlikely to go away any time soon. It was a major factor in the Republicans' defeat in the November 2006 mid-term elections and – despite the supposed success of the General David Petraeus’ recent troop ‘surge’ in Baghdad – polls continue to suggest a majority of Americans view Iraq as a top concern and want US troops home as soon as possible.
Here’s how New York Times columnist Frank Rich reported the story in January:

"The continued political import of Iraq could be found in three different polls in the past six weeks -- Pew, ABC News-Washington Post and Wall Street Journal-NBC News . .. the percentage of Americans who believe that the war is going well has risen strikingly in tandem with the diminution of violence -- from 30 percent in February to 48 percent in November, for instance, in the Pew survey. Even so, these same polls show no change at all in the public's verdict on this misadventure or in President Bush's dismal overall approval rating. By the same margins as before (sometimes even slightly larger), a majority of Americans favor withdrawal no matter what happened during the 'surge.' In another poll (Gallup), a majority still call the war a mistake, a finding that has varied little since February 2006."

On the same day, The Times concluded: "Concern over the war in Iraq, despite recent advances in security there, also remains on the minds of independent voters and has contributed to a shift toward Democrats..."

Obama, unliked Clinton, opposed the Iraq war from the very beginning, calling it a "dumb" war. His anti-war stance is in tune with the majority of Americans. McCain, on the other hand, has been a passionate and ardent supporter of the Iraq misadventure and now bizarrely agitates for war against Iran too. In a recent town-hall meeting, he confessed to being perfectly okay with American troops staying in Iraq for another hundred years (!) Obama has already begun referring, cleverly and accurately, to the ‘Bush-McCain Republicans’, tying the Arizona Senator to the unpopular president and his even more unpopular war. Let’s hope for more of this in the run-up to November…

2. RHETORIC

Whatever you think of Obama, it is impossible to deny his verbal virtuosity. Ever since his barn-storming, eye-catching, heart-lifting speech to the Democratic Convention in July 2004, Obama has drawn crowds wherever he has gone, inspiring and motivating the masses with lofty and soaring rhetoric. McCain, on the other hand, sends people to sleep with his stump speeches (unless, of course, he is singing songs about bombing Iran). Blogger Democrashield makes an interesting comparison, in this regard, between the Republican frontrunner in 2008 and the losing Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, in 2004:

“Kerry was seen as a passionateless and boring speaker, more suited to long-winded tirades in the Senate than rousing speeches on the stump; similarly, McCain is also a passionateless speaker who fails to rouse crowds of even his most ardent supporters.”

And the Guardian’s Michael Tomasky has this rather astute observation:

“Tonight's memorable moment as a television-watching experience came when CNN switched from Obama's victory speech to John McCain's. McCain started his speech before Obama finished his - a little tacky, but not a capital crime. Well, as Keith Olbermann dryly noted on MSNBC, someone needs to remind McCain that in the future he'd better speak before Obama. The Illinois Democrat was leading 18,000 attendees to fever pitch in his speech when CNN cut away. McCain, by contrast, was talking to what could have been mistaken for a bingo game in a church parish hall. The contrast was striking, and not lost on anyone imagining the two of them on a stage together at some point this fall.”

3. AGE

Senator Barack Obama is 46 years old. He will be a healthy and youthful 47 come November. Senator John McCain is 71 years old. He will be 72 come November - making him the oldest first-term president ever in the United States.

Now, of course, this quarter-century age gap could be used by McCain to remind voters of his greater experience, maturity and wisdom; on the other hand, the trend across democratic countries in the West is to pick younger politicians as party and as national leaders (from Blair to Sarkozy, from Cameron to Clegg). In a poll conducted for the New York Times and CBS television last year, just over half of Americans said the best age for a US president was the 50s. Fewer than one percent said a president in their 70s would be best.

For me, fundamentally, Obama’s relative youth fits in with his popular message of change, hope and the future. McCain’s age serves to remind voters that he was a candidate before (in 2000), that he served in a distant and unpopular former war (Vietnam) and that he could die of a heart attack (or simply ‘old age’) while sitting in the Oval Office (making his choice of vice-presidential running-mate even more crucial and relevant). Ultimately, it is difficult for someone in the eight decade of their life, with a recent history of skin cancer, and a head of white hair, to make the case for change and renewal and a fresh start – especially in a self-professed ‘young’ country like the United States!

4. INDEPENDENTS

In a close election, which November ‘08 is likely to be, the votes of independents could be crucial, if not decisive.

John McCain’s entire campaign rests – and has always rested – on his appeal to independents, his big-tent approach to politics, whereby he wins over as many (if not more) independents, waverers and even Democrats as he does Republicans. On the Democrat side, only Obama has proved that he can reach out to independents in a big way. In yesterday’s Virginia primary, two-thirds of the independents who cast their ballots in the Democratic race went for Obama over Clinton. (In fact, Obama has won more independents than Clinton in every single primary so far.)

Meanwhile, as The Nation reported, also in Virginia:

“…in the single most stunning number of the night, McCain actually lost among independents who cast their ballots in the Republican primary. His margin of victory came not from independents, but from Republicans--a terrible omen for his "electability." Huckabee also beat McCain in those bastions of independent (but also, of course, megachurch) voting, the suburbs, while Obama was pulling 60 percent of suburbanites on the other side. The other prime indicators of how independents might vote in November looked equally good for Obama and lousy for McCain: While Obama won big with under-45 voters, who are the most likely to register independent, McCain lost big among the youngest voters (under 30) while taking 47 percent of the 30-44 age group. To add just one more bit of sour news for McCain, fewer independents voted in the Republican primary in Virginia this year -- 76 percent of the voters were card-carrying GOPers, as opposed to just 63 percent in 2000.”

5. PARTY UNITY

Obama, if/when he wins the nomination, can rely on Democrats rallying around ‘their’ candidate. Only die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool partisan Clintonites – and they are, actually, few in number – will continue to question his credentials and his leadership. The rest of the Democratic Party is likely to fall in line behind him – in fact, exit polls in yesterday’s important Virginia primary showed the Illinois Senator making inroads into Hillary Clinton’s supposedly ‘core’ constituencies; the parts of the Democratic Party that those not named ‘Clinton’ had previously found difficult to reach.

As US pollster John Zogby writes:

“In addition to his momentum of victories, he has made significant inroads into constituencies that were the core of his opponent's support.
“Thus, in Virginia and Maryland, exit polls revealed that he tied with Senator Clinton among white voters, and actually defeated her among women, lower-income voters, rural voters, those over 65 years of age, Catholics, and Hispanics.”

McCain, however, is struggling to win over his party’s conservative Christian base. Despite being within spitting distance of his party’s nomination, he still seems wholly unable to win over evangelicals (not to mention influential, right-wing, talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham), with rival candidate (and former pastor) Mike Huckabee still winning the occasional state (e.g. Kansas, Louisiana), and with self-professed conservative Republicans voting 51 percent for Huckabee and 35 percent for McCain in yesterday’s Virginia primary, and ‘evangelical’ Republicans splitting 61 per cent to 28 per cent in favour of Huckabee. Conservatives don’t trust McCain on the economy (he voted against the Bush tax cuts), nor on immigration (he supported President Bush’s unpopular ‘amnesty’ proposals), while evangelicals question his commitment to Christian fundamentalism and his flip-flopping on key ‘moral’ issues like abortion and homosexuality. Time magazine calls it his ‘two front battle’ – but does McCain really have the time, energy or resources to be fighting on two fronts come November, and would a Democratic nominee like Senator Clinton (who would, presumably, have her own two or even three front battle with the youth, black and anti-war wings of her own party) be the best person to capitalize on McCain’s obvious internal problem?

So, in conclusion, I do hope it is Senator Barack Obama who wins the Democratic nomination – not simply because he is the best of a bad bunch but because he is the only candidate with a real chance of beating the worst of the current bunch, Senator John “bomb, bomb, bomb” McCain. As I have said, I have serious worries about the Arizona senator, who despite his maverick image and media love-in, remains the hawk in hawk's clothing. If Obama wins the nomination, and carries on inspiring friends and foes alike, then I believe he can win the election in November, with a campaign narrative contrasting his positives with McCain’s negatives: youth versus age, the future versus the past, inspiration and hope versus tough-talk and fear-mongering. Good luck Barry!

ONE LAW FOR THE JEWS, NO LAW FOR THE MUSLIMS

2008-02-11T18:33:00.000Z

I have been deliberating over the weekend as to whether or not to blog on the subject of Sharia law, and the predictable (and predictably nauseating) 'row' generated in our tolerant, thoughtful and reasoned media(!)

The fact of the matter is this: the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of this country’s most serious and interesting thinkers, did not ‘call’ for Sharia law and nor did he advocate a parallel and separate legal code outside of British law for religious minorities like the Muslim community. Given the hysterical reaction to his comments, I am convinced that 99.9 per cent of his critics in the press have not even bothered to read his lengthy, nuanced and erudite speech in full. You can read it here. I urge you to do so, before passing (mindless, uninformed) judgement a la the press pack.

One point, however, I would like to make is this (and forgive the perhaps superficially – yet unintended – anti-Semitic undertones): what about the Jews? I know, I know. Every time something ‘bad’ happens to Muslims, or Islam gets a bad press, we Muslims like to blame the poor ol’ Jews and look for a Jewish cause or a Jewish excuse. In this particular case, I have no intention of blaming them or castigating them but simply drawing attention to the typical double standards of our media pundits, commentators and pontificators. After all, the papers have been full of articles decrying the Archbishop’s comments, on the seemingly reasonable grounds that there should be one British law, which should apply to one and all, in an equal manner – no exceptions, therefore, for those hand-chopping, adulterer-flogging backward Muslims! Yet there has been hardly any mention in this whole debate of the (Yiddish) elephant in the room. What about the Beth Din, the orthodox Jewish rabbinical courts that are in daily use across Britain, and have been for centuries? Why no mention of them in this whole Islamophobic furore?

One rare report that touched on this issue appeared on the BBC website on Thursday:

“British Jews, particularly the orthodox, will frequently turn to their own religious courts, the Beth Din, to resolve civil disputes, covering issues as diverse as business and divorce.
"There's no compulsion", the registrar of the London Beth Din, David Frei, said. "We can't drag people in off the streets."

"Both sides in a dispute must be Jewish, obviously, and must have agreed to have their case heard by the Beth Din. Once that has happened, its eventual decision is binding.”

There is no compulsion but the decision is binding, under English law, which recognizes civil arbitration. So there you have it: if Sharia courts are introduced, it will be the end of the world as we know it, homosexuals will be thrown off the top of Big Ben and adulterers will be stoned in Trafalgar Square, and the Muslims will be free to govern and judge themselves according to their own medieval and backward laws. That’s the current media narrative. The only problem is that Muslims are not calling for the Islamic penal code (if such a thing even exists in a singular, unanimous and agreed-upon form) to be introduced into British law, and nor did the Archbishop even refer to this aspect of the Sharia. Muslims – and I refer here to some Muslims; not all Muslims – are simply, as I understand it, calling for the Islamic equivalent of the Beth Din. If it is good enough for the children of Isaac, why not for the children of Ishmael?

(And there is no point arguing, as 'Mad Mel' Phillips and the rest of the right-wing bloggers and commentators have, that “Jewish participation in Beth Din religious tribunals is entirely voluntary” because so too is Muslim participation in the Sharia courts that already exist in this country. In fact, film-maker Ayesha Khan, writing in the Guardian, correctly points out that many Muslim women in Britain are already “committed to using the sharia system, whether or not it had any recognition in national law” and we must “take seriously their religious and cultural preferences and practices”.)

ISLAMOPHOBIA: THE SUNDAY TIMES

2008-02-07T20:03:00.000Z

I am not sure how many of you saw this ridiculous headline in the Sunday Times last week:

“Family of teen Muslim invited men to rape her”

The story concerns a poor 15-year-old Pakistani girl who was forced by her mother-in-law into a life of prostitution. Subjected to an arranged marriage, she came to Britain thinking she would be wed to a healthy and handsome young man. Instead, the family who received here in the UK made her marry an unemployed and seriously retarded 40-year-old man, with an IQ of a 5-year-old. According to the paper, the family then "invited" local men to rape her.

To cut a long story short, a horrible and heinous crime has taken place. Horrible and disgusting things are going on within parts of the immigrant Pakistani community. But, my question is this: what on earth has this got to do with Islam or Muslims? Why refer to “teen Muslim” in the headline? What has the girl’s faith or that family’s faith got to do with anything? Islam neither sanctions forced marriages nor marriages conducted under false pretences, and it forcefully condemns, prohibits and punishes rape – especially child-rape!

So, I ask again – why the ‘Muslim’ headline? It is not a Muslim story. But the Islamophobic propagandists who seem to dominate the print media these days have to turn every Asian story, every Pakistani story, every immigration story, every multiculturalism story and, of course, every terrorism story into a ‘Muslim’ story or an ‘Islam’ story. It is no wonder that a recent study commissioned by London Mayor Ken Livingstone found “that in one typical week in 2006, over 90 per cent of the media articles that referred to Islam and Muslims were negative. The overall picture presented by the media was that Islam is profoundly different from and a threat to the west.”

Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the Sunday Times reporter who wrote the article is a man named Abul Taher. Despite his Muslim-sounding name, he has form in this area (of Islamophobia). In fact, blogger Karima Hamdan has compiled a selection of recent anti-Muslim gems penned by Abul Taher.

In addition, tucked away in the fifth paragraph of the article, we see the real source of this ‘story’:

“The case is highlighted in a report by the Centre for Social Cohesion, which has found that policemen, councillors and taxi drivers are turning a blind eye or even conniving in enforcing the Asian community's strict "moral code" on young women.”

Ah, the good ol’ Centre for Social Cohesion! I have already blogged here about this notoriously neoconservative, right-wing and anti-Muslim ‘thinktank’ and the obnoxious, imbalanced and Islamophobic views of its spotty young director, Douglas Murray.

It is a tragedy that the once-great Sunday Times newspaper chooses to now inflame community relations and stoke anti-Muslim prejudice by peddling sensationalist stories with ludicrous headlines from Islam-obsessed journos like Abul Taher and Islam-obsessed thinktanks like the Centre for Social Cohesion.

I urge you all to protest to the Sunday Times over this inflammatory, unnecessary and undeniable anti-Muslim and Islamophobic headline and ask them to change it on their website forthwith.

BEWARE MCCAIN: THE HAWK IN HAWK'S CLOTHING

2008-02-04T14:21:00.000Z

Super Tuesday is almost upon us. While the Democratic race is likely to carry on until the summer, with Obama breathing down Clinton's bony neck until the bitter end (and, fingers crossed, triumphing against all odds!), Tuesday's tsunami of nationwide Republican primaries could easily see Senator John McCain wrap up the GOP's presidential nomination.

Since McCain's victory in Florida over his quiffed millionaire chief rival Mitt Romney, the pundits have anointed him as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee and the Democrats have begun asking which of their two candidates (the pro-war white woman or the anti-war black man) is best placed to beat the maverick Republican senator from Arizona.

McCain, as usual, has benefited from an uncritical and unthinking wave of positive, flattering and semi-adulatory press coverage (including an endorsement from the supposedly liberal New York Times). He is often described, bizarrely, as a "moderate" and a "liberal". In fact, one newspaper described McCain and his two newest best friends in the GOP - Governor Arnold Schwarznegger of California and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani - as the three "liberal Republican amigos":

Yet, the only liberal or moderate criteria which these three subscribe to relate to social issues - they are all pro-homosexuality and pro-abortion. Is that how we now define liberalism? How we now define moderation? Whether or not you vote for gay marriage? Whether or not you support the killing of foetuses? Forget issues of war and peace, forget econonomic issues; it's all about trendy and amoral 'social liberalism'.

The fact is, as Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo has outlined in great detail, John McCain is more pro-war than even George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. He was perhaps the only Republican in Congress to attack the then US Defense Secretary -and bloviating warmonger-in-chief - Donald Rumsfeld from the right. He ludicrously believes the US military 'surge' in Iraq is working - despite swathes of evidence to the contrary. He thinks American Muslims should stay out of politics and are unsuited for high office. And his solution to the 'problem' of Iran's nuclear programme is - wait for it - to BOMB! Don't believe me? Watch him sing - yes, sing - his solution to a crowd of cheering (and presumably bloodthirsty) Republican supporters:

As for his new best friend - and, God forbid, potential vice-presidential running-mate - Rudy Giuliani, his views on the need to bomb the Middle East into submission and declare World War III against Islamists (or does he really mean Islam?) are well-known and well-documented. In fact, the man who, according to Senator Joe Biden only has three words in his vocabulary ('a noun, a verb, and 9-11"), came close to describing all Muslims as a "perverted people" in one of his campaign ads. Again, don't believe me? Watch for yourself how naked appeals to redneck Islamophobia and knee-jerk militarism have become the defining characteristics for Republicans who are supposed to be 'liberals' and 'moderates':

In fact, Middle East scholar and blogger Professor Juan Cole has an excellent piece in Salon this week, entitled 'Blowback from the GOP's holy war'. Cole points out:

"Why might all this rhetoric targeting Muslims be unwise? For one thing, allowing the Christian conservative base to set an agenda that demonizes Muslims contains the danger of turning off more moderate segments of the GOP and American voters at large. McCain's comment on the importance of a president's being Christian appeared to have backfired on him in precisely that way.

"Moreover, Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans are swing voters in key states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida. While they tended to vote for George W. Bush in 2000, by 2004 these groups overwhelmingly supported John Kerry, and the heavy-handed and bigoted rhetoric of the Republican candidates may drive them away from the GOP altogether."

Here's hoping - and here's hoping that US Muslims, combined with US lefties, liberals and independents who see through the McCain-Giuliani-Arnie 'liberal/moderate' charade, elect a Democrat to the White House in November.

BEING PRO-WAR MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY ‘SORRY’

2008-01-30T11:42:00.000Z

Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president, US Deputy Defense Secretary and Iraq war architect, has been appointed to head a high-level advisory panel to the State Department on arms control and disarmament.

Is this some sort of bad joke?

I have blogged before on how out of touch with reality the Bush administration is but to task the man who helped launch a fraudulent war against Iraq to disarm it of non-existent weapons of mass destruction with the job of giving ‘high-level’ advice on how to now disarm the rest of the world’s weapons of mass destruction is a new and improved form of madness and illogic. (To quote arms-control specialist Joseph Cirincione: “The advice given by Paul Wolfowitz over the past six years ranks among the worst provided by any defense official in history. I have no idea why anyone would want more.”

It also reminds us of how the chief architects and supporters of the Iraq war, on both sides of the Atlantic, have basically carried on with their lives and their careers, continuing to prosper and polemicize while refusing to offer even the mildest or gentlest of apologies.

Wolfowitz left the Pentagon in 2005 under the cloud of Iraq, yet managed to land the prestigious post of World Bank President. He then left the World Bank in 2007 under another cloud (this time related to his authorisation of a large compensation package for his girlfriend) and yet now he is invited to offer official advice on defence policy to the very same US administration he left behind in ignominy.

Has he since apologized for all the grandiose (and inaccurate) claims he made in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? Not in the slightest. Yet he is the man who argued, before the war, “Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction, and he cannot be trusted. The risk is simply too great that he will use them or provide them to a terror network.” He is the man who testified, before the war, “We're dealing with a country [Iraq] that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” He is the man who said, before the war “Some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.” He is the man who predicted, before the war, that it was “reasonably certain that they [the Iraqis] will greet us as liberators.” Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Then there is Wolfowitz’s close pal and neoconservative ally, William Kristol, the editor of the Murdoch-owned, Bush-supporting Weekly Standard. Kristol penned this prophesy (!) on the eve of the war, in 2003:

“…the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime. It will produce whatever effects it will produce on neighboring countries and on the broader war on terror. We would note now that even the threat of war against Saddam seems to be encouraging stirrings toward political reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a measure of cooperation in the war against al Qaeda from other governments in the region. It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain. History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.”

Is it even possible to be more wrong? Every word is fraudulent, inaccurate and diametrically opposed to the truth.

Was Kristol sacked from his post as editor of the Weekly Standard, in the wake of Iraq? Of course not. Has Fox News sacked him as one of their leading on-air political pundits? Nope. On the contrary, the supposedly liberal and left-of-centre New York Times recently hired him as a new ‘star’ columnist. So much for accountability. So much for an apology.

On this side of the Atlantic, all of the overpaid, overrated columnists and correspondents in the press who hyped the threat from Iraq and pushed us towards war in 2003 are still in their jobs, still pontificating on the Middle East and on issues of war and peace. None – bar the Independent’s Johann Hari and the Observer’s David Rose – has offered an apology for their role in propelling us into an illegal, bloody and disastrous invasion and occupation.

And then there’s our former Prime Minister. Like Bush in 2004, Blair too was maddeningly re-elected in 2005 despite the carnage in Iraq and the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction. He left office without being defeated in an election or deposed by his party, and now blissfully and arrogantly wanders the killing fields he helped create in the Middle East as an alleged 'peace envoy'. Oh, and don’t forget: while Iraq burns and its children grow increasingly malnourished, Mr Blair gives $500,000 speeches and accepts $1 million-a-year consultancies from international banks.

As I said, being pro-war means never having to say ‘sorry’. It means never having to worry about your job, your career, or your self-respect. There is no accountability. There are no consequences. And these people, basically, have no shame.

DEATH OF ‘OUR’ DICTATOR

2008-01-28T18:06:00.000Z

I had planned to blog today on the death of the former Indonesian president, General Suharto, one of the twentieth century’s most brutal and bloodthirsty dictators.

He also happened to be a close friend of the West, supported and sustained by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, as he presided over the violent deaths of up to a million Indonesians, the invasion, occupation and rape of East Timor, and the embezzlement of up to $30 billion of government funds.

But in an article in today’s Guardian, aptly entitled 'Our Model Dictator', the veteran war correspondent (and East Timor specialist) John Pilger sums up the bloodthirsty nature of the late tyrant’s reign, and his ‘special’ relationship with the West, far better than I could:

“To understand the significance of Suharto is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer - "our" is used here advisedly. "One of our very best and most valuable friends," Thatcher called him. For three decades the south-east Asian department of the Foreign Office worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto's gestapo, known as Kopassus, who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler & Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica "riot control" vehicles.”

Go read the full piece here.

Incidentally, note how ‘soft’ much of the coverage of Suharto’s death has been – compared to, say, the death of another brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, a little over a year ago. Can you imagine Saddam’s rule simply being described, rather casually, as “tough”? That’s how an Associated Press article described Suharto’s tyranny in this morning’s Washington Post. I guess, as they say:

"He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard!"

NUCLEAR HYPOCRISY – AND IMMORALITY!

2008-01-25T10:59:00.000Z

The Guardian reported this week on a “radical manifesto for a new NATO” authored by the former armed forces chiefs from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands, in which these wizened and greying generals insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" for the Atlantic Alliance since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".

There has been instant criticism of the report, and its "first use fallacy", with experts in this field pointing out the obvious practical flaws in the generals’ thesis. For example, Professor Robert Hinde, chair of the British Pugwashe Group, draws attention to the inherent contradictions in the strategic recommendations contained in the report:

“The five retired military commanders suggest that a Nato policy involving readiness to make pre-emptive strikes is necessary to counter political fanatics and international terrorism, because of the mass migrations that could be triggered by climate change, and because of the weakening of nation states and the UN. But a nuclear strike is unlikely to deter a political fanatic and would be ineffective against terrorists. No one could possibly think of deterring refugees with a nuclear weapon, and such a policy could only weaken the UN further. We must choose between a world ruled by threat, or one ruled by law and mutual understanding. Most of us would prefer the latter. The first step towards it must be to take all nuclear weapons off alert and a commitment to no first use.”

Dr Ian Davis, from the British American Security Information Council, reminds readers why the heavyweight credentials of the authors (each is a former chief of the armed forces in his respective country of origin) should not necessarily overwhelm or distract us:

“Their view that "nuclear weapons - and with them the option of first use - are indispensable, since there is simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world" is certainly not shared by four veteran US cold warriors - former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former secretary of defence William Perry, and former Senate armed services committee chairman Sam Nunn - who are leading the call for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. All three Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed this vision as well as the progressive steps needed to realise it.”

(To his list I would also add former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, of Vietnam-era infamy.)

Yet I have yet to hear or read, in all the comment and analysis and opinion in the mainstream media about these nuclear proposals, anyone point out how undeniably counter-productive and hypocritical the chief recommendation of this new report is. After all, the generals write:

“The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."

What? You mean to tell me that five experienced, educated, intelligent, sane soldiers are suggesting that the only way to ‘prevent’ the use of a weapon of mass destruction is the ‘first use’ of another weapon of mass destruction (i.e. a nuclear weapon)? How on earth can anyone justify such a statement, such a proposal? On grounds of morality or logic? To prevent using WMDs, we should use WMDs (!) It’s like saying: “To prevent a murder taking place, we must first murder someone.” It is a ridiculous and offensive view, and an insult to logic and common sense.

Yet it is a view that goes to the heart of our foreign and defence policies here in the West. ‘We’, the enlightened, advanced, mature democracies of the West are allowed to kill, maim, loot, plunder, invade and occupy all in the name of preventing others (at some indeterminate point in the near or perhaps distant future) from killing, maiming, looting, plundering, invading and occupying. Thus actions by nations are not defined as moral or immoral, right or wrong, in and of themselves – they are judged on the basis of who is doing them. Thus, the use of WMDs is BAD but then becomes GOOD if we are the ones stockpiling, deploying and (ultimately) using those WMDs, be they nukes (in Hiroshima/Nagasaki or even chemical weapons (in Vietnam and, more recently, Fallujah).

So, ‘our’ nukes, our WMDs, good. ‘Their’ nukes, their WMDs, bad. And our nukes should be used to stop them from using their nukes. Brilliant. Great. What a way to run the world….

SIDEBAR: Guess who one of the co-writers of this war-mongering, nuke-endorsing NATO report is? The rather obnoxious and spotty neocon pundit Douglas Murray, whose nasty and belligerent views I wrote about in a recent post and whose qualifications to write on international defence policy and nuclear deterrence theory are rather unclear (and perhaps non-existent).

935 LIES ABOUT IRAQ

2008-01-23T22:12:00.000Z

Despite being picked up on by the New York Times and USA Today, this study from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity in Washington D.C. has so far been ignored by the mainstream media on this side of the Atlantic. Its findings are, however, shocking.

As the Associated Press report points out:

“The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

“…Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell's 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.”

There is now an ‘Iraq/WMD fatigue’ in the British press, encouraged by supporters of the war who want us all to forget about the lies, half-truths, distortions and exaggerations that they peddled in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion. Its now time to ‘move on’, they claim.

Of course, moving on is a means of saving their reputations and their massively inflated salaries. Remember David Aaronovitch of the Times? He proudly proclaimed in the immediate aftermath of the illegal invasion,

"If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere. They probably are."

Remember those words, David? Have you had a chance to look back on the 935 lies you believed and then gullibly passed on to your readers?

EXPOSING THE RIGHT-WING 'THINKTANKS'

2008-01-22T20:05:00.000Z

In their book, 'Banana Republicans', US authors (and public relations experts) Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber outline, among other things, the systematic and successful way in which right-wing, corporate-funded thinktanks - claiming to be neutral and nonpartisan - have hijacked the US political, media and intellectual agendas in recent years.

It is a book crying out for a UK equivalent - given the growing proliferation of similar 'nonpartisan' (but glaringly and undeniably right-wing and conservative) thinktanks on this side of the pond.

The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Policy Exchange, Civitas, Reform and the Adam Smith Institute publish right-wing screeds and propaganda, in the guise of 'academic' papers and pamphlets, on a weekly basis. A gullible 24-hour news media here in the United Kingdom invites their spokespersons to offer regular comment on the issues of the day, without revealing their right-wing, free-market, anti-immigration links to their viewers.

None of these thinktanks offer any specialist expertise on a subject - say, the Middle East - in as rigorous, neutral and peer-reviewed manner as a university department or professional academic might. Yet they are easier to get hold of and far more media-savvy than your average professor or lecturer and so they are taken seriously and given acres of media coverage, despite the fraudulent and politicized nature of much of their 'research'. One only has to watch the BBC's flagship programme Newsnight tear apart Policy Exchange's widely-reported and widely-acclaimed report on extremism within Britains mosques (my own posting on the subject is here).

Yet the supposedly liberal and left-wing BBC Newsnight last week chose to carry a typically sensationalist, over-the-top and over-hyped report from reporter Richard Watson - on alleged government funding of 'radical' Muslim organisations - which relied on an investigation by the Centre for Social Cohesion. It left viewers with no proper information as to what this rather Orwellian-sounding institution stands for, or who its staff are.

The Centre for Social Cohesion was founded last year by the right-wing thinktank Civitas. Its website claims it is trying to "help bring Britain's ethnic and religious communities closer together while strengthening British traditions of openness, tolerance and democracy."

However, the political views and agendas of its staff and advisory council suggest it will have the exact opposite effect - fanning, instead, political intolerance, racial and religious hatred and right-wing authoritarianism.

Its director is the twenty-something Douglas Murray, self-proclaimed British neocon and author of "Neoconservatism: Why We Need It. Murray appears frequently on programmes like the BBC's Question Time to mock and ridicule British Muslim organizations - all of which, he seems to believe, are filled with closet Islamists and jihadists. In an article in the Sunday Times, he described himself as a writer "most critical of Islam's current manifestation in the West".

And one only has to take a look at the members of the Centre's Advisory Council to realise how toxic and deep-seated its blatantly anti-Islam, anti-immigration agenda is. There's the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr George Carey who has defended both the Pope's comments linking Islam and violence and Samuel Huntington's controversial 'Clash of Civilisations' thesis. There's the editor of Prospect magazine, David Goodhart, who was effectively described as a racist by the then head of the Commision for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, after arguing for the left to get to grips with immigration by abandoning multiculturalism. There's the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, whose recent claims about there being so-called 'no-go areas' in Britain for non-Muslims, and whose history of inflammatory remarks via vis Islam, I have already blogged about here. And then there's Dr Denis MacEoin, the now infamous author of the "fabricated" Policy Exchange report on British mosque bookshops, and a man who says,

"I do not hold a brief for Islam. On the contrary, I have very negative feelings about it…"

Judging from its director and its advisory council, it is no wonder then that the Centre for Social Cohesion is replete with so much anti-Muslim, anti-Islam material - reports, debates, pamphlets, articles - as well as attacks on multiculturalism and immigration.

Does the BBC's flagship news-and-current-affairs programme really want to rely on such a partisan and polemical thinktank for its key stories on British Islam and the terror threat? And if so, shouldn't reporter Richard Watson have explained to his viewers where the CSC bods are coming from, before interviewing them so uncritically? Whatever happened to Reithian impartiality?

As the Guardian's Seumas Milne wisely comments,

"The constant regurgitation by the media of Muslim-baiting "research" by hard right think tanks…not only misleads the public about one of the most sensitive issues of our time - it is also clearly driven by a neoconservative political agenda, which seeks to convince people that jihadist terror attacks in Britain and elsewhere are driven not by outrage at western violence in the Muslim world but by opposition to western freedom."

ISRAELI PROPAGANDA

2008-01-20T17:50:00.000Z

The arch-Zionist and Israel apologist, Melanie Phillips – known affectionately as ‘Mad Mel’ to her critics – devoted two or her blogs this week to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Both were filled with a farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and racial stereotypes.

For example, in defending Israel’s illegal and bloody raid into the Gaza Strip this week, Mad Mel claims: “Today it [Israel] killed at least 18 people in Gaza, almost all of them Hamas terrorists.”

“Almost all”? Note the use of her weasel words. “Almost all” simply and bluntly means not all. It means some of those who were killed were not terrorists. They were innocents. And for them, Melanie Phillips has no words, no sympathy, no care, no compassion. They are, to quote historian Mark Curtis, “unpeople”.

It pains me to say this, and not simply about Zionist propagandists like Phillips but about pretty much most of my fellow citizens here in the West, but there does seem to be an unconscious racism which perhaps subconsciously masks our entire approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israelis – blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, often Western-educated if not Western-born – look like us, talk like us, live in towns like ours, shop in stores like ours, and so we readily and understandably identify with their pain and suffering. But the Palestinians? What would endear to us a people who combine dark skins, headscarves, tribal backgrounds and the Islamic faith? Why should we care about their lives, their futures, their children?

Why? Because they feel pain like we do. They are human beings like us. They deserve to live their lives in safety and security, as we do.

Take Asad Taafish, a retired, 65-year-old businessman, who was killed this week by a bullet from an Israeli sniper as he walked through the family's farmland close to the boundary with the Jewish state.

Take Abd Salam, an 18-year-old student who was killed this week by Israeli fire as he was leaving his school after taking one of his final-year exams.

Do their deaths not feature on the Melanie Phillips moral radar? Will she shed any tears for them? Of course not. For her, all that matters is that “almost all” of the dead are “Hamas terrorists."

Phillips is part of a group of ultra-right-wing, pro-Israeli, Zionist hawks who believe the Jewish state can do no wrong and the only deaths that matter are Jewish deaths.

She writes, perhaps ironically, in one of her postings that "the aggressor is still continuing to murder its victims and to incite others to do so.” I could not pen a better description for the Israelis if I tried.

Oh, and for those of you want to see with your own eyes the blatant and callous violence that the Israeli occupying forces choose to inflict on all those who stand up to them, including pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters and fellow Israeli citizens, check out this video:

IRAQ, DEATH AND DESTRUCTION

2008-01-18T19:46:00.000Z

The New York Times, on Sunday, carried a front-page story that has since provoked a statistical row both in the pro-war blogosphere and in the various right-wing outlets of the Murdoch media empire (Fox News, the New York Post). Entitled ‘Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles’, the Times reported on a deadly and disturbing new angle to the fallout from the disastrous Iraq conflict: Americans who fall victim to returning soldiers who commit violent acts apparently linked to the lingering effects of war.

From the report:

“The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

“Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.

“About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.”

Should we really be surprised? That soldiers who return from killing fields abroad should find it so easy to kill again, even upon returning home? To quote columnist Robert Jamieson from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “when you ask people to go to war, you can fully expect that a fraction will be incapable of turning off the killing switch”.

The controversy over the New York Times investigation centres on its numbers. Right-wing bloggers have taken their lead from (retired) Colonel Ralph Peters in the New York Post who claims the Times is “smearing soldiers” and argues that, compared to the non-military civilian population, returning US troops are “five times less likely to commit a murder” than their peers. Peters may be right, in a strictly numerical sense, but he misses the wider point. The New York Times claims nowhere in the article that returning or retired US combat troops are more likely to commit murder or manslaughter than their non-military counterparts in the wider population – it simply highlights the increasing numbers of US military personnel who are engaging in such violent and criminal acts.

In fact...

“…The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower."

Do the New York Post and its right-wing allies really believe that an almost 90% increase in the number of homicides carried out by military veterans is not worthy of being front-page news? Or should not be the subject of a legitimate journalistic investigation?

The fundamental fact remains that the New York Times piece drew much-needed (and belated) attention to the post-traumatic stress suffered by young, impressionable and often ill-educated and gung-ho American GIs who have been sent out to fight a foreign war of conquest on a false prospectus by those in Washington D.C. (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) who hypocritically spent their entire lives avoiding military service and who often found novel and intriguing excuses for opting out of their own generation’s war, in Vietnam (Dick Cheney: “I had other priorities in the 60s than military service”).

Also overlooked by the rest of the media is how many of these psychic scars, which continue to blight the hundreds of thousands of US military personnel who have returned home from tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, are the result of being wracked by guilt for having killed innocent Iraqis or innocent Afghans. The Times tells the tragic and shocking story of one such individual, 27-year old soldier Seth Strasburg:

"In 2004, Sergeant Strasburg’s section was engaged in a mission to counter a proliferation of improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, on the road west of Mosul. One night, posted in an old junked bus, he watched the road for hours until an Iraqi man, armed and out after curfew, appeared and circled a field, kicking the dirt as if he were searching for something. Finally, the man bent down, straining to pick up a large white flour sack, which he then dragged toward the road.

“In my mind at the time, he had this I.E.D. hidden out there during the day and he was going to set it in place,” Mr. Strasburg said. “We radioed it in. They said, ‘Whatever, use your discretion.’ So I popped him.”

With others on his reconnaissance team, Mr. Strasburg helped zip the man into a body bag, taking a few minutes to study the face that he now cannot forget. When they went to search the flour sack, they found nothing but gravel.

“I reported the kill to the battalion,” Mr. Strasburg said. “They said, you know: ‘Good shot. It’s legal. Whatever. Don’t worry about it.’ After that, it was never mentioned. But, you know, I had some issues with it later.”

“Some” issues? Strasburg returned home from Iraq in 2005, irritable and prickly, with the death on his conscience, and ended up shooting and killing 21-year student Thomas Varney after a minor altercation outside a party in his hometown of Arnold, Nebraska. He is currently serving a prison term of 22 to 36 years for his crime. But, in the simplistic and amoral (immoral?) eyes of his superiors back in Iraq: “Whatever. Don’t worry about it”.

Personally, I would like the United States Department of Defense to issue questionnaires to every soldier returning from Iraq, with the very first question being: “Did you kill an innocent Iraqi? Someone who turned out not to be an insurgent or a terrorist or a Baathist or a criminal or an Iraqi soldier?” Then I would like the DoD to release the results of that questionnaire. I dare them.

SIDEBAR: At least soldiers on the ground can see the innocents they accidentally (or even intentionally) shoot and kill – at checkpoints, in drive-bys, during home raids, etc. But what about US pilots in Iraq? Do they have any clue how many casualties they are causing? It’s much easier to inflict death and destruction from far up in the skies, far from the scene of the crime. In fact, a week ago, the Pentagon admitted to having unleashed one of the biggest air strikes of the war so far, dropping an astonishing 40,000 pounds (!) of bombs on buildings and roads on the southern outskirts of Baghdad in the space of just ten minutes. A military spokesman claimed the bombs “flattened…safe havens for Al Qaida in Iraq”. And how many civilian casualties? We simply don’t know and perhaps may never know. But, rest assured, our pilots and our troops are not the same as terrorists. In the words of author William Blum, “A terrorist is someone who has a bomb, but doesn't have an air force”.

PENTAGON PROPAGANDA

2008-01-16T19:06:00.000Z

So, we now know that Iranian boats were not threatening to attack the United States Navy in the Straits of Hormuz on January 6th and even the Pentagon’s propagandists have acknowledged that “the threat could have come from anyone on shore with a radio”. Perhaps, hilariously, the radio threat came from the so-called 'Filipino Monkey', who (I kid you not!) has a 25-year history of shouting anonymous threats and obscenities, over the airwaves, at US sailors.

Regardless, the most important and perhaps underreported aspect of this rather disturbing story is the role played by Bush administration officials in Washington D.C., in deliberately hyping the ‘Iranian threat’ and making (unfounded) accusations against Tehran. Gareth Porter, of IPS, concludes his detailed analysis of the Pentagon’s propaganda in recent days, with this insight:

“The decision to treat the Jan. 6 incident as evidence of an Iranian threat reveals a chasm between the interests of political officials in Washington and Navy officials in the Gulf. Asked whether the Navy's reporting of the episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Cmdr. Robertson of 5th Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, "There is a different perspective over there."

As the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins points out today, in a typically cogent and well-argued column, the current US propaganda campaign against Iran serves only one purpose – to (counter-productively) strengthen the hand of America’s Persian ‘bogeyman’, President Ahmadinejad. Jenkins writes:

“Only one man can rescue the embattled Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, from his growing domestic unpopularity. That man is George Bush. Ahmadinejad faces elections in March and an increasingly disaffected clergy, but he feeds on Bush's antagonism. This week Bush has duly oliged. He has raced round the Middle East drumming up support for his Iranian foe.

“Bush has denounced Ahmadinejad at every turn. He has offered to sanction him, embargo him, isolate him, even bomb him. He has portrayed him as a monster of evil and "leading sponsor of terror". He has showered the Saudis and the Gulf states with $20bn of weapons to confront him "before it is too late". When Ahmadinejad thanked "divine intervention" for making him president in 2005, he should also have thanked God for having first selected Bush. To have Washington as your enemy in these parts is to have every man your friend.”

KEEP WATCHING IRAN IN 2008

2008-01-14T18:01:00.000Z

Michael Hirsch of Newsweek writes on the magazine’s website that George W. Bush, America’s great ‘thinker-president’ (to quote Tariq Ali), has now fully rejected his own intelligence community’s National Intelligence Estimate on nuclear-weapon-free Iran while on a visit to, of all places, nuclear-weapon-armed Israel. Dubya now sees his own ‘intelligence’ as greater and deeper than the collected and considered ‘high-confidence’ judgements of the (hundreds of) spies, scientists, analysts and researchers who make up the multi-billion-dollar U.S. intelligence community.

As the Newsweek piece reveals:

“In public, President Bush has been careful to reassure Israel and other allies that he still sees Iran, as a threat, while not disavowing his administration's recent National Intelligence Estimate. That NIE, made public Dec. 3, embarrassed the administration by concluding that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003, which seemed to undermine years of bellicose rhetoric from Bush and other senior officials about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. "He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity.

“Bush's behind-the-scenes assurances may help to quiet a rising chorus of voices inside Israel's defense community that are calling for unilateral military action against Iran. Olmert, asked by NEWSWEEK after Bush's departure on Friday whether he felt reassured, replied: "I am very happy." A source close to the Israeli leader said Bush first briefed Olmert about the intelligence estimate a week before it was published, during talks in Washington that preceded the Annapolis peace conference in November. According to the source, who also refused to be named discussing the issue, Bush told Olmert he was uncomfortable with the findings and seemed almost apologetic.”

The NIE’s conclusions “don’t reflect his own views” because Bush’s views are always based on fantasy and prejudice, rather than on facts and figures. I mean, when was the last time Bush read a book on Iran? Or a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (from cover to cover)? Or even a newspaper report on Iran’s nuclear activities? Why should we take seriously the “views” of a leader who pays so little attention to facts, figures, numbers, details, policies, reports, etc, and who prefers to go with his gut over his (miniscule) brain?

As the veteran Bush-watcher Jacob Weisberg writes in his excellent and perhaps definitive article – "How Bush Chose Stupidity?" – the current president takes great pride in his anti-intellectualism:

“A fourth and final quality of Bush's mind is that it does not think. The president can't tolerate debate about issues. Offered an option, he makes up his mind quickly and never reconsiders. At an elementary school, a child once asked him whether it was hard to make decisions as president. "Most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you." By leaping to conclusions based on what he "believes," Bush avoids contemplating even the most obvious basic contradictions: between his policy of tax cuts and reducing the deficit; between his call for a humble foreign policy based on alliances and his unilateral assertion of American power; between his support for in-vitro fertilization (which destroys embryos) and his opposition to fetal stem-cell research (because it destroys embryos).”

So, Bush “believes” Iran is a threat, no matter what the evidence (or lack of) suggests. Just as he ‘believed’ Iraq had WMDs, and he ‘believed’ Saddam had a relationship with al Qaeda.

(On a side note, am I the only one who finds the media’s silence, as well as President Bush’s silence, on Israel’s real nukes versus Iran’s phantom nukes truly disgusting, dishonest and depressing?)

Keep watching Iran in 2008 (this blog will be). Dubya still has a year left in office and a year is a long time in international relations.

THE MAYOR AND THE MUSLIMS

2008-01-10T19:05:00.000Z

Having spent the last post discussing the US presidential elections, let me turn my attention closer to home for a brief moment. Although Gordon Brown’s political cowardice has meant that the British public won’t get to vote in a general election for another year or two, Londoners will have the opportunity this May to elect a new mayor for the capital city. The current (Labour) incumbent is the former maverick-turned-moderate Ken Livingstone – or 'Red Ken' as his right-wing opponents dubbed him in the 1980s – who faces perhaps his toughest challenge yet from the present Tory mayoral candidate, Boris Johnson, who curiously happens to be one of the most popular MPs and journalists in Britain, despite his various gaffes, misstatements and general buffoonery.

Livingstone, however, seems to continue to enjoy the unwavering support of the majority of London’s large-ish Muslim community. The Guardian last week published a statement on its blog site, Comment is Free, signed by a raft of Muslim leaders, writers, academics and activists and headlined: "Give Ken A Third Term. Describing Livingstone as an “outstanding mayor”, the signatories – who include the likes Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain and Anas al Tikriti of the Muslim Association of Britain – draw attention to the Mayor’s progressive positions on foreign (and specifically Middle East) affairs:

“His stands and policies have constantly championed justice in the Middle East and around the world, freedom for the Palestinians and withdrawal of occupying troops from Iraq; a rare trait of modern-day public figures.”

There is no doubt that this statement is both true and accurate, and a tribute to Ken’s anti-war, pro-peace, political progressivism – and much-needed Islamophilia.

But I can’t help but sympathize with those commenters on the Guardian blog who wonder what on earth Ken’s Middle East views have to do with a municipal election and why London’s Muslims are so concerned by them. A blogger called McLefty, for example, asks:

“What this has to do with Londoners I do not know, but it shows that British Muslims are pre-occupied with events that have nothing to do whatsoever with most of their daily lives (the vast majority of Muslims in this country not Palestinian, Iraqi or from the Middle East).”

Be honest: does it – or should it – really matter to you what the Mayor of London thinks about Iraq or Palestine or any other foreign conflict or controversy? Isn’t it more important that the buses run on time? Or that our taxes are spent properly? Or London’s homeless have a place to sleep at night? Or, for example, that the city’s police force is not Islamophobic or racist or - dare I say it – trigger-happy?

Let’s not forget, after all, that the Metropolitan Police has, in recent years, shot and killed an ethnic-minority man on the Tube and then subsequently claimed (falsely) that he was a terrorist and then shot and wounded an ethnic-minority man inside his own home and then subsequently claimed (again, falsely) that he was a terrorist. (In the former – de Menezes – case, a court even found the Met guilty of violating health and safety laws and endangering the lives of Londoners.)

Yet, interestingly, I notice that the ‘great and the good’ of the British Muslim community who (presumably) queued up to sign this encomium to Red Ken conveniently failed to take note of the fact that Ken Livingstone supported the Metropolitan Police in every instance and has been one of the few public figures to vocally and vociferously lend his backing to the hapless, incompetent and dishonest Met police chief, Sir Ian Blair. What do the Muslim letter-writers have to say about this? An issue that touches all of their – and our – everyday lives, as Londoners (and as Muslims)? Nothing. Not a word.

Shame.

OBAMA v CLINTON, ROUND 2

2008-01-09T17:47:00.000Z

He lost.

The robot won.

Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama in the second round of the Democratic primaries, winning New Hampshire by a narrow three percent of the vote.

I am depressed. Disheartened. Above all, surprised – nay, shocked! The momentum seemed to be with Obama, the pundits seemed to be with Obama, the polls showed a massive lead for Obama – but still Obama lost.

So, should we all avoid making political predictions from now on? The FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman writes on his blog this morning:

“To be fair to the pundits and the pollsters, it wasn’t just journalists who were confidently predicting an Obama victory. Even people in the Hillary camp were talking about trying to keep margin of their defeat in New Hampshire down to below double digits.”

So what helped Hillary to her surprise victory? I would point to two obvious incidents earlier in the week.

In the first, her husband and (popular) former president took a (rhetorical) hammer and tongs to Obama’s (antiwar) record on Iraq, pointing out the latter’s inconsistent voting and seemingly hawkish comments since arriving in the Senate in 2004. Speaking at a campaign event at Dartmouth College, an indignant, finger-pointing Bill Clinton said in response to a pro-Obama question from a student:

"That is the central argument for his campaign. 'It doesn't matter that I started running for president less a year after I got to the Senate from the Illinois State Senate. I am a great speaker and a charismatic figure and I'm the only one who had the judgment to oppose this war from the beginning. Always, always, always.' "

"…it is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, numerating the years, and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say, that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war and you took that speech you're now running on off your website in 2004 and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since?' Give me a break.

"This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen...Just because of the sanitizing coverage that's in the media, doesn't mean the facts aren't out there.”

Despite my soft spot for Barack, I cannot help but sympathize with Bubba’s rant. Obama’s campaign has been given a certain ‘fairytale’ hue by a rather uncritical press corps (and his position on Iraq has certainty not been as fervently or consistently antiwar and anti-occupation as, perhaps, that of Dennis Kucinich or, on the Republican side, Ron Paul. But is the ‘fairy tale’ now over, or do voters simply respond badly to anyone (be it Clinton or Obama) that the media tends to put up on a pedestal and then crown king (or queen)? As one reader of Andrew Sullivan’s excellent blog puts it:

“I think Obama won Iowa because voters resented Hillary's coronation.

“I think Hillary won New Hampshire because voters resented Obama's coronation.”

The other incident that cannot be overlooked is Hillary’s emotional moment. She was asked by a woman in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, "How do you do it?" The woman wanted to know how Hillary, despite all her stress, remains "so wonderful"?

Hillary answered, fighting back tears, "I couldn't do it if I just didn't passionately believe it was the right thing to do." The New York Times noted that her eyes were "visibly wet." Later Hillary told the Times she became all choked up because "it was just so touching when this woman said: well, what about you. I just don't think about that. I just think about what I can do for other people. I have spent a lifetime trying to help others. I’m very other-directed."

Despite being mocked by right-wingers (and some Obama supporters) for her unexpected show of emotion, the fact is that Hillary’s ‘crying’ (or ‘choking’, or ‘wet eyes’, or semi-crying, or whatever you want to call it) humanized her. The political automaton for, a moment, became a real human person; a woman with whom other women could empathize, sympathize and identify. (Consequently, and retrospectively, it is therefore unsurprising that a "surge" of women voters in New Hampshire, turning out in record numbers, helped propel Hillary to victory there).

However, the Clintons’ antics aside, is there a third, perhaps darker, factor at work in this campaign? I am referring here to the notoriously infamous 'Bradley effect'. The Guardian explains it here:

“The phenomenon was named after Tom Bradley, the long time mayor of Los Angeles, and describes the difference between what members of the public will say in relation to a black candidate when asked by pollsters and the change in their behaviour when they actually vote.

“Bradley, who is black, ran as the Democratic candidate for governor in 1982, but, after polls showed he was consistently in the lead, he was a surprise loser.

“It was suggested that voters may have told pollsters they supported the black candidate, because they were embarrassed to admit they were racist, but that when it came to voting in private they supported his white opponent, precisely because he was not black.”

Having won Iowa (95% white), and having led in the polls since Iowa, sadly, tragically, depressingly, the black Senator from Ilinois failed to win New Hampshire (96% white). But let’s see what happens on the January 26th in South Carolina (50% black). Here’s hoping…

Incidentally, the (Bill) Clinton ‘rant’ video is here:

The (Hillary) Clinton 'crying' video is here

IS IRAN STILL GOING TO GET BOMBED? – update

2008-01-07T17:16:00.000Z

I hate to say 'I told you so', especially about an occurrence that I continue to pray will not happen, but the possibility of a war between the United States and Iran in 2008 remains perilously high.

In only my second posting on this blog, in December, I wrote: “So the military option is still on the table, says Bush, and – forget the nukes! - it will be used in response to provocations by the Iranians, say his neocon supporters.”

And what’s been reported today? From CNN:

“The U.S. military reported Monday on a "significant" confrontation involving five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats that "harassed and provoked" three U.S. naval ships in international waters over the weekend.

“U.S. military officials said the incident occurred early Sunday morning in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping channel leading in and out of the Persian Gulf.

“The five Iranian ships made "threatening" moves -- in one case coming within 200 yards of a U.S. ship, the U.S. officials said.

“In one radio transmission, the Iranians told the U.S. Navy: "I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes," the U.S. military officials told CNN.

“When the U.S. ships heard that radio transmission, they took up their gun positions and officers were "in the process" of giving the order to fire when the Iranians abruptly turned away, the U.S. officials said.”

Phew! A close call. But how many more close calls can the region survive? As I said in the earlier post, God help us all if World War III breaks out between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

BRITS NOW ‘RICHER’ THAN AMERICANS

2008-01-07T17:08:00.000Z

Despite all the doom and gloom about falling British house prices, the global credit crunch and a looming UK recession, a new report from a bunch of pointy-headed economists at Oxford claims we are now – for the first time in over a hundred years! – better off than our American cousins.

From the Daily Telegraph:

“Analysts at the respected Oxford Economics consultancy say that increasing incomes, free healthcare and longer holidays make the average Briton better-off than his or her US counterpart.

“They predict that gross domestic product (GDP) per head in the UK, an indicator of average incomes, will be £23,500 in 2008, compared with £23,250 in America, reflecting the strength of the pound against the dollar and the steady growth of the British economy.

“Adrian Cooper, managing director of Oxford Economics, said: "The past 15 years have seen a dramatic change in the UK's economic performance and its position in the world economy.

"No longer are we the 'sick man of Europe'. Indeed, our calculations suggest that UK living standards are now a match for those of the US.

"The UK has been catching up steadily with living standards in the US since 2001, so it is a well-established trend rather than simply the result of currency fluctuations."

As the Observer so aptly put it: “…at least we’ve got one up on the Yanks”.

CHRISTIAN ISLAMOPHOBIA

2008-01-06T22:45:00.000Z

So, Islamic extremists have created "no-go" areas across Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter . That's according to the 'Right Reverend' Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester and the Church of England's only Asian bishop.

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph - the paper which once gave column inches to a writer who described Muslims as "dogs" with "black hearts" - Nazir-Ali claims:

"…there has been a worldwide resurgence of the ideology of Islamic extremism. One of the results of this has been to further alienate the young from the nation in which they were growing up and also to turn already
separate communities into "no-go" areas where adherence to this ideology has become a mark of acceptability.

"Those of a different faith or race may find it difficult to live or work there because of hostility to them. In many ways, this is but the other side of the coin to far-Right intimidation. Attempts have been made to impose an "Islamic" character on certain areas, for example, by insisting on artificial amplification for the Adhan, the call to prayer."

The bishop here chooses not to explore the (political) causes behind the rise of "Islamic extremism", and its associated "ideology", but instead prefers to make extravagant and sensationalist claims without any substance or source. For example, can he name a single city, town, suburb or neighbourhood in England where Muslims have physically prevented non-Muslims from entering, living or working (especially on the grounds of faith)? If so, he conveniently chooses not to mention a single real-life example in his article.

He then outrageously makes a comparison between the criminals, thugs and racists who make up the British National Party and Muslims who want to have the Adhan played on loudspeakers from their mosques on Fridays. How on earth can he justify such a ridiculous analogy? It honestly makes me wonder whether he is a closet supporter of British fascism - otherwise I find it difficult to understand how such an educated man can downplay the far-Right's 'intimidation' (which consists of actual violence, beatings, arson attacks, etc) and equate it with the (admittedly) segregationist yet non-violent tendences of some (note: some, not all!) segments of the British Muslim community.

As for his focus on the Adhan, and its "amplification", I find it deeply hypocritical for a Christian bishop, of all people, to make such a criticism. As an undergraduate at Oxford University, I spent three years being woken up every Sunday morning by the sound of cathedral bells ringing away, one after another, week after week. Why on earth should Christians get this 'right' and not Muslims? In a multi-faith nation, where freedom of speech is a right protected for one and all, either both communities have the right to make religious 'noises' in public (and ruin my sleep!), or they both should be denied it - in fact, this is precisely the point made by the arch-secularist Lib Dem MP for Oxford, Dr Evan Davis, in an interview on Sky News this evening.

What depresses me more than the obvious double standards, however, is the Bishop's woeful ignorance and prejudice. For someone who is of Islamic descent himself (his father having converted from Islam to Christianity), and who was born in a Muslim country (the 'Islamic Republic of Pakistan'), Nazir-Ali shows little understanding of the nuances and complexities of the Islamic faith or the varied views of ordinary Muslims, especially British Muslims. According to his Wikipedia entry, the learned bishop is the author of not one but three books on Islam (two of them unsurprisingly published since 9-11 and the start of the so-called 'War on Terror'), and yet these books - and articles like today's rant in the Sunday Telegraph - suggest someone who is not interested in writing about Islam in some objective, dispassionate and scholarly sense, nor interested in Islam as a prelude to inter-faith dialogue, but someone who has a transparently one-sided, critical and negative agenda; perhaps the result of a traumatic Christian childhood in Pakistan or an ex-Muslim father with a chip on his shoulder. Who knows?

And, despite the attention given to the piece by the various rolling-news channels and all the Sunday papers, none of this vitriol and bombast from the bishop is anything new or novel. Michael Nazir-Ali has a long history of attacks on Islam, Muslims and multiculturalism. In November 2007, he accused Muslims of having a "victim mentality". In August 2006, he accused Muslims of having been "perverted" by multiculturalism. In March 2006, he accused Muslims of not having respect for Christians or Christianity.

He even wandered, purposely and uninvited, into the row over the face veil, denouncing British Muslim women who freely choose to wear a niqab or a burqa. His boss, on the other hand - the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams - showed commendable senstivitiy and balance at the time, and warned the secularists and atheists to lay off both the cross and veil. (Full disclosure: I personally am not a supporter of the veil but I am a supporter of the right of Muslim women, if they so choose, to wear the veil for whatever reason).

For me, then, the Bishop of Rochester thus fits into the category of 'right-wing Christian Islamophobe' - a category inhabited by millions of US evangelical Christians who believe Islam is the religion of Devil, the Prophet of Islam is a paedophile and that the War on Terror is - or should be - a war on Muslims.

It saddens me that in an era of declining religiosity in the West - especially in Britan - some Christians should see fellow monotheists (i.e. Muslims) as a threat, or as enemies, rather than as natural allies and co-believers. So I can only hope and pray that Nazir-Ali's less evangelical, less belligerent and more moderate co-religionists on this side of the Atlantic (led by the wise and humane Archbishop of Canterbury) will disown the Bishop of Rochester's constant Muslim-bashing and naked Islamophobia and instead encourage an alliance of Christians and Muslims against their real and common enemy - the "aggressive secularists and illiberal atheists" (to quote the Right Reverend John Sentamu, Archbishop of York).

HUSSEIN FOR PRESIDENT!

2008-01-04T19:15:00.000Z

So Barack Hussein Obama has won the Iowa caucus – the first step on a journey that could, potentially, possibly, tantalisingly, take this half-Kenyan, half-Kansan, black, forty-something, junior Democratic senator from Illinois, of Hawaiian birth, Muslim descent and Indonesian upbringing, with only three years experience in Congress, right through the front door of the White House come November.

Obama won – and won by a clear margin (of 8%), leaving the former front-runner and favourite (and pro-war political automaton) Hillary Rodham Clinton struggling in third place. (Incidentally, the only thing that delighted me more than Obama’s victory and Hillary’s poor showing was the fact that, on the Republican side in Iowa, the nasty former New York mayor – and, also, his party’s former front-runner – Rudy Giuliani came an embarrassing sixth (!) with a miniscule 3.5% of the vote, having been outpolled 2-1 by the only anti-war Republican in the field, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas).

Despite my normally cynical and pessimistic view of US domestic politics and politicians, and despite Obama’s shameful U-turn on Israel in recent years (he used to be a vocal critic but now the wannabe president, coincidentally, happens to have become a strong supporter of Israeli belligerence and intransigence), I cannot help but like him. He seems truly genuine, palpably decent and refreshingly normal and down-to-earth. Above all, after seven years of divisions and splits in American politics (and culture), with Red State vs Blue State, liberals versus conservatives, the secular versus the religious, he seems to be the only candidate capable of uniting the United States and rising above the partisan fray. (Preliminary indications from Iowa suggest Obama’s victory was heavily dependent on independents and Republican switchers, and his continuing electoral success will depend on them too).

As liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias acknowledges:

“I think the manner of Barack Obama's win is pretty impressive. I can't be the only one who was a bit inclined toward a cynical roll of the eyes at the idea of winning on the back of unprecedented turnout, mobilizing new voters, brining in young people, etc. That sounds like the kind of thing that people say they're going to do but never deliver on. But he did deliver. That's impressive.”

Yglesias also points readers in the direction of a December 1995 profile of Obama in the Chicago Reader newspaper which suggests the candidate’s social conscience has not at all been exaggerated or faked in recent months but in fact has deep roots in Obama’s political and personal past.

Fundamentally, however, the key reason why all sane, reasonable, decent, antiwar progressives should support Obama as a realistic, though not perfect, presidential candidate is his unstinting opposition to the Iraq war. Unlike his two chief rivals, Senator Clinton and former Senator John Edwards, Senator Obama opposed the Iraq misadventure from the very beginning. Here is Barack speaking in October 2002, five months before Bush and his cronies launched their illegal and unilateral invasion:

“I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

There is also – let’s not beat around the bush - the issue of his skin colour. Obama is not simply a black man who is so comfortable with his colour that – unlike, say, Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton – he has not chosen to run on a ‘black’ or ‘race’ platform but has instead managed to seemingly transcend racial politics and win over more white Republican voters than Clinton or Edwards; he also happens to be a man whose skin colour, ethnic origins, foreign upbringing, Muslim ties and religious moderation make him the perfect person to lead the United States in the era of the so-called ‘War on Terror’.

Why? As right-wing conservative blogger (and Sunday Times columnist) Andrew Sullivan, an unexpected yet fervent Obama supporter, perceptively and eloquently argues:

“What does he [Obama] offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

“Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.”

Winning Iowa does not, however, mean that Obama now has the Democratic presidential nomination (let alone the presidency itself) all sewn up. Far from it. Thankfully, the 330,000-odd Iowan crowd of largely ethanol farmers, pensioners and grassroots political activists who turned out to caucus in that tiny Midwestern state do not necessarily always determine the fate of the US presidential elections as some pundits and journalists might wrongly have us believe. In 1988 [15], for example, Congressman Richard Gephardt won in Iowa but failed to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for president - instead, third-placed candidate Michael Dukakis went on to win the rest of the Democratic primaries (before sadly succumbing in the general election to George Bush Snr).

As the BBC points out:

“Very often it is not so much about winning in Iowa but doing better or at least as well as expected. Democrat Howard Dean was leading his party's polls in 2004 but after his third place in Iowa his campaign stuttered and never recovered. But an Iowa victory, while important, is no guarantee of national success. The 1992 winner for the Democrats was Tom Harkin. Trailing way behind him was Bill Clinton, who went on to capture the presidency.”

Mrs Clinton will presumably be hoping this morning that she can repeat her husband’s comeback in the coming days and weeks, beginning in New Hampshire on Tuesday. I personally hope she won’t and doubt she will. My money is on Obama and, if I had a vote, it’d be for Obama.

Who do you want?

HAPPY 2008?

2008-01-02T12:03:00.000Z

Happy New Year. 2008 has begun. This blog is now officially in its second month – and, technically, second year (!)

Since I first posted on the 5th of December, 2007, this blog has had (at the time of writing) 841 ‘hits’ (see the hit counter at the bottom of this blog), or visitors to the blog, which works out to around 32 hits a day, or around one person visiting the blog every single hour of every single day. There are now fourteen postings - giving this blog an average of a new posting (by yours truly, ‘The Radical’) every 44 hours. I will try and keep the frequency up, but I do need you all to keep stopping by, to read, to comment, to engage, etc, and to spread the word to your friends, relatives, colleagues, etc. (You can also subscribe to RSS feeds, updating you on new postings published on this blog, via the link at the top of the page).

Why did I start writing this blog, and why do I continue? I do so in order to try and break out from the narrow and stultifying parameters of debate imposed by our elected politicians and the mainstream media on the issues that dominate our lives – be they political, economic, social or moral – and in order to try and provoke debate and discussion with radical and different opinions on those key issues.

The global transition from 2007 to 2008 has been pretty bleak. The killing of innocent Palestinian civilians by the IDF continues; so too does the violence and chaos in Iraq; rising levels of malnutrition plague Darfur in Sudan; Kenya seems to be descending into civil war; and violence has returned to the former Yugoslav province of Kosovo.

Thus, 2008 seems set to continue in a similar bloody vein to 2007. Progressives will continue to be depressed. This blog is therefore an attempt to make a (tiny) difference, by expanding our understanding of this horribly unjust, unequal, war-torn, dying planet and, hopefully, encouraging us all to take action to (perhaps naively) try and make this world a better place.

Happy New Year (!)

WHO IS 2007'S ''PERSON OF THE YEAR?

2007-12-30T14:26:00.000Z

It's that time of the year again, i.e. New Year's. 2008 is upon us and some people like to use this period as an opportunity to look forward to the next twelve months (resolutions, plans, etc) while others prefer to take a moment to look back on the ups and downs of the previous year.

Time magazine has been handing out it's annual 'Person of the Year' award in late December for seventy years now, since first conferring it upon American aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1927. This year, the big journalistic brains at Time decided 2007's main man to be Russian president Vladimir Putin - a truly corrupt, authoritarian and odious individual who has also been recently revealed to be Europe's richest man.

I haven't quite understood the logic of giving the title to a man who is on his way out (of office, if not power) and who has had very little discernible impact on global affairs (as opposed to Russian and regional affairs) over the past twelve months.

So, who do you, the readers of this blog, think is 2007's 'Person of the Year'?

Justin Raimondo of the excellent Antiwar.com nominates Thomas Fingar - the US government analyst in overall charge of drafting the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's (lack of) nuclear weapons and who may have single-handedly prevented the United States from going to war with Iran in the coming months. (I myself have written about the NIE here and here).

Fingar is a fine choice for person of the Year. My own choice, however, would have to be the CEO of Al Qaeda, Mr. Osama Bin Laden. Not because I have any affection or admiration for his particular brand of nasty, narrow-minded Islam and vicious, violent militancy but because of the fact remains that he remains free, at large, uncaptured and alive, as the world's finest armed forces and intelligence agencies focus much of the planet's resources and attention on prosecuting a pointless 'War on Terror' which has failed to disrupt, deter or destroy him or his network of terrorists. Instead he is busy issuing videos from whichever cave or pass in Afghanistan (or Pakistan) that he happens to be hiding out in, mocking the West for our "burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes".

So, 2007's Person of the Year, for me, is Bin Laden. And, frustratingly, it'll have to be him every year until this ridiculous so-called 'War on Terror' ends.

Do you agree? Disagree? Do you have a better candidate? Go to the comments section of this blog (below) and get in your nominations now, before we enter 2008...

R.I.P. BENAZIR, R.I.P. PAKISTAN

2007-12-28T14:17:00.000Z

So, Pakistan's various militant factions made good on their numerous threats and managed to assassinate former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto in a typically audacious Al-Qaeda-style-bomb-and-bullet combo killing, with random civilian casualties thrown in for good measure.

While Bhutto herself was no "martyr" for her country - despite her party spokesman's protestations to the contrary - and used her two stints in power to enrich herself, support the Taliban and even perhaps murder her own brother, her assassination is nonetheless a truly cowardly and despicable act carried out by cold-blooded killers whose understanding of Islamic law and morality once again seems non-existent.

Her death will also have massive repercussions for Pakistan and its political future. As the veteran Pakistani journalist (and Taliban-watcher) Ahmed Rashid points out in the Washington Post today:

"The assassination of Benazir Bhutto has left a huge political vacuum at the heart of this nuclear-armed state, which appears to be slipping into an abyss of violence and Islamic extremism. The question of what happens next is almost impossible to answer, especially at a moment when Bhutto herself seemed to be the only answer.

"...Bhutto's death leaves the largest possible vacuum at the core of Pakistan's shaky and blood-stained political system."

Read the full piece here.

Today's bloodshed only reinforces my own long-held (and, admittedly, Indian-tinged) conviction that Pakistan (like Israel) should never have been created in the first place. And, although such views have traditionally been heretical amongst Pakistanis, and even amongst Brits of Pakistani origin, it is truly a sign of the times that this view is now spreading amongst the expat and second-generation communities - as writer Sarfaraz Manzoor pointed out in the Guardian back in August:

"Without Jinnah, there would not be a Pakistan, but comparing how India and Pakistan have fared during the past 60 years also made me wonder whether partition had perhaps been a mistake. The human cost of dividing India and Pakistan was huge, with the greatest migration in history and one million people killed in the months leading up to partition.

"Sixty years on and today's India is sexy, forward-looking and economically powerful; Pakistan, on the other hand, remains trapped by the contradictions which led to its creation and in the grip of the mullahs and the military.

"....In his novel Shame, Salman Rushdie described Pakistan as a "place insufficiently imagined"; when one considers its troubled history, perhaps it is not heretical to confess some sadness that it was ever imagined at all."

P.S. On a side note, while the world obsesses over the Benazir assassination and its fallout, repercussions, consequences, etc, the Washington Post also has a (rather underreported) scoop from its defence analyst William Arkin, concerning the impending deployment of US troops inside of Pakistan, in 2008:

"Beginning early next year, U.S. Special Forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan, as part of an effort to train and support indigenous counter-insurgency forces and clandestine counterterrorism units, according to defense officials involved with the planning.

"These Pakistan-centric operations will mark a shift for the U.S. military and for U.S. Pakistan relations. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the U.S. used Pakistani bases to stage movements into Afghanistan. Yet once the U.S. deposed the Taliban government and established its main operating base at Bagram, north of Kabul, U.S. forces left Pakistan almost entirely. Since then, Pakistan has restricted U.S. involvement in cross-border military operations as well as paramilitary operations on its soil.

"But the Pentagon has been frustrated by the inability of Pakistani national forces to control the borders or the frontier area. And Pakistan's political instability has heightened U.S. concern about Islamic extremists there."

So, not content with invading Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, the United States now wants to provide yet another recruiting sergeant for the fanatics of Al Qaeda and the rest of its militant ilk by setting up shop, militarily, inside another unstable and radicalised Muslim nation - this time, Pakistan. You couldn't make this up.

TOP 5 CHRISTMAS MYTHS

2007-12-23T14:01:00.000Z

Christmas is upon us and, remarkably, the leader of Britain’s established (Protestant) church, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, has decided this year to debunk some of the myths surrounding the ‘Nativity Story’ (in an interview with BBC Five Live’s Simon Mayo). So, in the spirit of Christmas and in the spirit of historical debate and theological discussion, as well as for the sheer intellectual fun of it, I thought I’d do a list of my own ‘top five’ Christmas myths.

Myth #1: “All Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25th.”

Actually, they don’t. It is true to say that in most places around the world Christmas Day is celebrated on December 25th (and thus Christmas Eve is the preceding day, December 24th). However, the Armenian Apostolic Church observes Christmas on January 6th. Eastern Orthodox Churches that still use the Julian Calendar celebrate Christmas on the Julian version of December 25th, which is January 7th (!) on the more widely used Gregorian calendar, because the two calendars are now 13 days apart. So December 25th; January 6th; January 7th. They are all ‘Christmas days’!

Myth #2: “Jesus was born on December 25th.”

December 25th existed as a religious holiday for the pagans prior to being appropriated by the early Christians as the ‘birthday’ for Jesus Christ. The date December 25th was particularly important in the cult of Mithras, a popular pagan god in the early Roman Empire. The Christian writer Robert Myers, in his book ‘Celebrations’ (a history of holidays), admits:

"Prior to the celebration of Christmas, December 25th in the Roman world was the Natalis Solis Invicti, the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun. This feast, which took place just after the winter solstice of the Julian calendar, was in honor of the Sun God, Mithras, originally a Persian deity whose cult penetrated the Roman world in the first century B.C. ... Besides the Mithraic influence, other pagan forces were at work. From the seventeenth of December until the twenty-third, Romans celebrated the ancient feast of the Saturnalia. ... It was commemorative of the Golden Age of Saturn, the god of sowing and husbandry."

In order to make Christianity more palatable and appealing to the heathens and pagans in the Roman Empire, the church leaders simply took Saturnalia, adopted it into Christianity, and then eventually many of the associated pagan symbols, forms, customs, and traditions were reinterpreted (i.e., "Christianized") in ways acceptable to Christian faith and practice. (In fact, in 375 A.D., the Church of Rome under Pope Julius I merely announced that the birth date of Christ had been "discovered" to be December 25th, and was accepted as such by the "faithful." The festival of Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithras could now be celebrated as the birthday of Christ!)

Myth #3: “Jesus was born in Bethlehem”

The idea that Jesus was born in Bethlehem is preposterous, illogical and ahistorical. Why? First and foremost, what husband would take a nine-month pregnant woman on a ninety-mile trek from Nazareth to Bethlehem – which took around a week in those days! - at a time when only heads of households were obligated to register for a census and when the census would have been stretched out over a period of weeks or even months? And even if, for some strange reason, he did, why did he not take better precautions for the birth? Why not take Mary to her relative Elizabeth’s home just a few miles away from Bethlehem for the birth of her baby?

The fact is that there was no need for Joseph and Mary to even travel to Bethlehem – not only because the censuses carried out by the Romans did not expect people to return to towns occupied by their ancestors thousands of years earlier (42 generations separated Joseph from his forefather David) but for the plain and simple historical fact that there was no universal census at the time of Jesus' birth. As has long pointed out by historians, the only census conducted by the Romans during that era was conducted in A.D. 6-7, which was twelve or more years after the birth of Jesus in around 5 or 6 B.C.

In addition, Jesus never refers to himself in the Gospels as a “Bethlehemite” or to his birthplace as Bethlehem. Instead, he is referred to in the Gospels only as “Jesus the Nazarene” or even Jesus “of Galilee”. And, interestingly, neither the Gospel of Mark nor the Gospel of John makes any reference to Bethlehem, and even ‘St’ Paul – who could be described as the real founder of Christianity - is silent on the subject throughout his epistles and other Biblical writings. In fact, outside the (isolated) Gospels of Luke and Matthew there is no evidence whatsoever to support the contention that Bethlehem was the birthplace of Jesus. According to the Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox:

“Luke’s story is historically impossible and internally incoherent…Luke’s errors and contradictions are easily explained. Early Christian tradition did not remember, or perhaps ever know, exactly where and when Jesus had been born. People were much more interested in his death and consequences. After the crucifixion and the belief in the resurrection, people wondered all the more deeply about Jesus’ birthplace. Bethlehem, home of King David, was a natural choice for the new messiah. There was even a prophecy in support of the claim which the ‘little town’ has maintained so profitably to this day…a higher truth was served by an impossible fiction.”

Myth #4: “Three Wise Men attended the birth of Jesus.”

This is one of those myths that has been pushed down all our throats since we were performing in nativity plays back in primary school – i.e. that there were three wise kings, bearing gifts, travelling on camels to visit the infant Jesus as he lay in the manger. Yet the Gospel of Matthew (2:1) tells us: "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem…" That is the extent of it – no more, no less. There is no mention, for example, of “three” wise men, or even of “kings”, and no mention of “camels”. Also, the Bible (in Matthew, 2:11) states: "After coming into the house they saw the Child with Mary His mother; and they fell to the ground and worshiped Him.” Note: this verse refers to a child in a house, rather than a baby in a manger – so the visit of the wise men did not even occur during the birth of Jesus but was, in fact, a post-birth event; a post-Christmas event.

As the Archbishop of Canterbury himself admits in his recent radio interview, "Matthew's Gospel doesn't tell us there were three of them, doesn't tell us they were kings, doesn't tell us where they came from. It says they are astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire, that's all we're really told."

So perhaps school nativity plays can now start casting more than three kids to play the (semi-mythical) “wise men”?

Myth #5: “Christmas trees are Christian.”

The most annoying question I’m asked by Christians during this period is: “So, are you not celebrating Christmas? Not even a tree?” No, I reply, not even a tree! In fact, of all the associated holiday paraphernalia, the ‘tree’ has the least relevance, the least connection, to Christmas and Christianity.

The tradition of cutting down and decorating evergreen trees is a pagan tradition, borrowed from the pagans by Christian leaders in Germany around four hundred years ago. In fact, in the Old Testament, God goes out of His way to condemn the pagans for this particular custom and warns the believers not to ape them:

"Thus saith the Lord: Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not." (Jeremiah 10: 2-4)

So, folks, those are my ‘top five’ Christmas myths. Do you have any you want to add? If so, then head for the comments section of this blog. Oh, and here’s one last holiday factoid (if not a ‘myth’) to leave you with: eating a turkey lunch on Christmas day is not actually an integral, authentic or historic part of the Christmas tradition. As Luke Honey writes on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog:

“Up until the 1890’s, most English families if they were lucky, ate goose; turkey was a luxury only enjoyed by the few. The Anglo-American Christmas, as we know and love it today, is really a Victorian invention: influenced by the sentiment of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, Prince Albert’s cosy family celebrations at Windsor; and in the last century, the schmaltz of Hollywood movies such as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Merry Christmas! (Or perhaps: "Bah, humbug!")

HELP! THE TERRORISTS ARE COMING! (OR ARE THEY?)

2007-12-20T19:55:00.000Z

Four days till Christmas, and the US government’s national threat level is already at Yellow (i.e. “Elevated”) while the threat level for all domestic and international flights is Orange (i.e. “High). Here in the UK, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, has warned that the threat of terrorist attacks in public places, including from radioactive dirty bombs (!), is “growing” and has asked the public “to remain vigilant over the Christmas period”.

In the press, New Labour lackeys and laptop bombardiers like Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian and David Aaronovitch in the Times have railed this week in their columns against those who would dare suggest that “terrorism isn't that big a threat”. But – rhetorical sweeps, emotive language and instinctive reactions aside – how big is the terrorist threat to all of us ordinary folks, minding our own business, on the streets of London and Birmingham (or, for that matter, on the streets of New York and Los Angeles)?

Here are some facts and figures – often so overlooked and/or misunderstood by our political and journalistic classes who tend to avoid facts and figures, especially those which don’t fit into their pre-conceived view of the world – courtesy of the very brilliant American academic, John Mueller, Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University and author of the excellent book, ‘Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them’:

“Those adept at hyperbole like to proclaim that we live in "the age of terror." However…the number of people worldwide who die as a result of international terrorism by this definition is generally a few hundred a year. In fact, until 2001 far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning. Moreover, except for 2001, virtually none of these terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Indeed, outside of 2001, fewer people have died in America from international terrorism than have drowned in toilets.

“Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, however, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism over the period is not a great deal more than the number killed by lightning--or by accident-causing deer or by severe allergic reactions to peanuts over the same period. In almost all years the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States--some 300-400.

“Americans worry intensely about "another 9/11," but if one of these were to occur every three months for the next five years, the chance of being killed in one of them is two one-hundredths of one percent: the posited attacks would kill 60,000 which is about .02 percent of 300,000,000. This would be, of course, an extended and major tragedy, but an individual's chances of being killed, while no longer microscopic, would still remain small even under this extreme scenario.

“Another assessment comes from astronomer Alan Harris. Using State Department figures, he assumes a worldwide death rate from international terrorism of 1000 per year--that is, he assumes in his estimate that there would be another 9/11 somewhere in the world every several years. Over an 80 year period under those conditions some 80,000 deaths would occur which would mean that the lifetime probability that a resident of the globe will die at the hands of international terrorists is about one in 75,000 (6 billion divided by 80,000). This, he points out, is about the same likelihood that one would die over the same interval from the impact on the earth of an especially ill-directed asteroid or comet. If there are no repeats of 9/11, the lifetime probability of being killed by an international terrorist becomes about one in 120,000.”

To summarize Mueller: more people drown in bathtubs than are killed by international terrorists, and we are more likely to be killed by an asteroid, Hollywood-style a la Armageddon or Deep Impact, than we are to die at the hands of Osama and co.

Over to you, David and Tim…

ISLAMOPHOBIA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

2007-12-20T19:47:00.000Z

The Guardian’s resident-far-left columnist (and associate editor) Seumas Milne has an(other) excellent article in today’s Guardian, this time focusing his ire on the “neocon attack dogs” at hard-right thinktanks like Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion who seem to take perverse pleasure in fanning the flames of anti-Muslim, anti-Islam hatred here in the UK and whose agenda seeks to (mis)inform people that “jihadist terror attacks in Britain are fuelled not by outrage at western violence and support for tyranny in the Muslim world, but by hatred of western culture and freedoms”. (I have written about Policy Exchange’s fraudulent and fabricated research here.)

Milne has devoted numerous columns in recent months to drawing attention to the casual and often crude Islamophobia that has gripped much of our journalistic and political luminaries, on both sides of the Atlantic – a subject I plan to expand upon myself, here on this blog, in the not-too-distant future – and the right-wing, anti-immigrant, fear-mongering, war-mongering political agenda which underlies much of it.

Here is Milne, at the start of today's column:

“Last Saturday, Ahmed Hassan, a 17-year-old Muslim student, was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack by a gang of white youths at Dewsbury railway station in west Yorkshire. Two have now been charged with his murder, and police say they are investigating whether there was a racial or religious motivation. In the Muslim communities in Dewsbury and neighbouring Batley, where Hassan lived, there's little doubt about it. In the run-up to today's Eid festival, Hassan's family issued a statement saying they hoped their loss would help "unite the community and all faiths.

“But divisions run deep in the area. The far-right British National party, which has increasingly turned its racist venom against Muslims in recent years, won over 5,000 votes in Dewsbury in the last general election, its highest tally in the country. Its leader, Nick Griffin, has argued that his party must capitalise on the "growing wave of public hostility to Islam currently being whipped up by the mass media". It's not hard to see why he sees an opportunity. Since the July 2005 bombings in London, there has been a stream of sensationalised and poisonous stories about Britain's Muslims.

“This media onslaught - often based on research by apparently reliable thinktanks - has clearly fed anti-Muslim prejudice. Combined with hyped terror-plot reports, the point has now been reached where Britons are found in polls to be more suspicious of Muslims than are Americans or citizens of any other major European state. For many Muslims, that heightens a sense of intimidation and alienation. For a minority, it translates into Islamophobic violence on the streets: Asian people are now twice as likely to be stabbed to death as a decade ago, and four out of five convictions for religiously aggravated offences last year involved attacks on Muslims."

Bravo Seumas! Keep it up!

CHEERLEADERS FOR INTERNMENT

2007-12-19T19:06:00.000Z

The government has announced plans to extend the period that terrorism suspects can be held without charge from 28 days to 42 days – the equivalent of a six-week prison sentence for someone only suspected (not convicted, not even charged) of planning or committing an act of terrorism. If passed, such a law would be the latest in a long, dark and dismal line of relentless New Labour attacks on our once-cherished civil liberties.

The move has been met with opposition from the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, criticism from the press and – thankfully – scepticism from the British public. So now, right on cue, the government’s media acolytes have been given the nod to start defending the indefensible, employing rhetorical red herrings and scare-crow arguments.

First out of the starting blocks was Blair biographer (hagiographer?) and New Labour cheerleader, John Rentoul in the Independent, who described the controversial 42-day proposal as “perfectly sensible” and drew attention to comments by Lord Carlile, the ‘independent’ reviewer of the government’s anti-terrorism legislation, decrying the use of the word “internment” to describe the 42-day upper limit.

Then, yesterday, New Labour apologist David Aaronovitch chose to devote his entire column in the Times to debunking the claim by human-rights group Liberty that Britain had, in effect, “the most draconian detention laws in the Western world”. Spain and Italy, claims Aaronovitch, are far worse.

Yet, conveniently, neither Aaronovitch nor Rentoul bother to address the substance of the arguments put forward by opponents of the 42-day proposal. For example, what about the sheer arbitrariness of the number 42? Why 42? Not 52? Or 38? Or 49? As columnist Seamas Milne has written in the Guardian:

“What started a generation ago as a two-day limit on detention without charge, as exists for American citizens in the US, was fixed at seven days in 2000; ratcheted up to 14 in 2003; raised again to 28 in 2006; and is now heading for two months of effective internment. The arbitrariness of this ratcheting-up is obvious: in spite of the fact that we're talking about the country's most basic civil liberties, it has clearly been a matter of think of a number and double it.”

And, since the pre-charge detention period was outrageously increased to 28 over a year ago, have the police had to hold any terror suspect for longer than 28 days? Have any of their investigations been undermined by the current 28-day upper limit? The answer, as the Home Office itself concedes, is no.

What do Aaronovitch and Rentoul have to say about all of this? Nothing. Not even 28 words.

In fact, while lazily focusing their rhetorical guns on the ‘usual suspects’ at campaigning organizations like Liberty, they choose to ignore substantive and widespread opposition to the proposed 42-day detention limit from the more credible likes of Sir Ken MacDonald QC, Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS); Jonathan Evans, the head of the Security Service (MI5); the Home Affairs Select Committee; Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General; and – belatedly – Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary.

Who should we trust on this? MI5 and the CPS, or Aaronovitch and Rentoul?

WHERE IS GOD IN TIMES OF SUFFERING?

2007-12-17T15:18:00.000Z

Over the weekend, my wife and I were confronted with some shocking news. My sister-in-law’s aunt and her three daughters were tragically killed in a car accident in Carmel, Indiana. Her uncle, out of town on a business trip, returned home on Sunday to find his entire family dead. Gone. Wiped out. In one, single, dark night.

Here is MSNBC, reporting on the story:

“Witnesses say the van crashed into a pond at the Lincolnshire subdivision at 141st Street and Towne Road around 9:30 pm, trapping a woman and her three daughters inside. Police say the driver, 47-year-old Batul Abbus, called 911 to report they were half-submerged and needed help.

“Carmel Police say help arrived within six minutes, and divers went into the water and removed the victims from the car. They were transported to the hospital where all four, including Abbas' children, 18-year-old Shazreh, 14-year-old Shaail, and 8-year-old Azmeh, eventually died from their injuries. The family was just minutes from home when the accident occurred.”

Not only were they just minutes from their home in Carmel – where they had only recently moved – but they had been out visiting, and comforting, a family friend whose brother had died. Poignant and deeply ironic details like these simply add to the overall and overwhelming sense of tragedy, despair and distress – the kind of heart-breaking human tragedy that we always assume happens only to ‘others’, ‘on the news’, or in fictional TV dramas or movies. For it to happen so close to home is mind-boggling and heart-numbing. I cannot quite begin to understand how my brother-in-law is coping with the sudden loss of three cousins he grew up with – if indeed he is able to cope at all. And I cannot even imagine what it must be like for a man to return home to find the four people at the centre of his world – his wife, and his three young daughters – to have departed from his world, from his life, leaving him all alone. To grieve. To mourn. To try and ‘move on’, if such a thing is at all even possible. My heart breaks and, as I ask God to have mercy on their souls and to strengthen the resolve of the grieving husband and father, I cannot help but also turn to God and ask the inevitable and perhaps unanswerable ‘question of questions’ (to quote the Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks): “Why did this happen? Why did you let this happen? Why did you not prevent this from happening?” Indeed, a cousin of mine emails to add:

“I know we are supposed to always believe that Allah knows best…but, seriously, at this moment, I really wish I could have a one on one [with Him].”

It’s a classic (and recurring) problem within the theology of all religions, but especially the monotheistic, Abrahamic faiths: how can the existence of evil, pain and suffering be reconciled with a God who is supposed to be all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful? How can Islam (or for that matter Christianity or Judaism) explain, if at all, the deaths of innocent families in totally random, seemingly meaningless and entirely preventable ‘accidents’, such as the car crash in Indiana?

As someone who has always believed in God, has spent years trying to spread the ‘word’ of God and has debated publicly and privately with atheists and agnostics over the existence of God, this particular theological problem has always struck me as the biggest single obstacle in the path from non-belief to belief and the single biggest reason I have ever had – and I say this, in a public forum, with regret and reluctance - for doubting, on occasion, my own belief in (or, at least, my own understanding of) God.

Of course, religious scholars, and religious texts, do offer some explanations for human tragedies and for the suffering and death that we all are confronted with throughout our lives. For example, in Islam, our entire existence on earth is seen as part of one big test, an exam set by the divine examiner, Allah; and dying and death are simply viewed as components of this existential examination. Our patience, our forbearance and, above all, our faith is tested by our reaction to personal tragedies and to immediate suffering. For example, the Quran declares in a famous trio of verses (or ‘ayaat’):

“Be sure we shall test you with something of fear and hunger, some loss in goods or lives or the fruits (of your toil), but give glad tidings to those who patiently persevere, who say, when afflicted with calamity: "To Allah We belong, and to Him is our return". They are those on whom (descend) blessings from Allah, and Mercy, and they are the ones that receive guidance.” (Quran, Surah 2, Verses 155-157)

In other chapters (or ‘surahs’), the Quran makes it clear that it is our patience (or ‘sabr’) that is being tested, strengthened and exhibited in cases of personal tragedy and it is our God-give yet human quality of patience which will enable us to overcome our suffering and pain and find hope and guidance in the long run:

“O you who believe! Persevere in patience and constancy; vie in such perseverance; strengthen each other; and fear Allah; [so] that you may prosper.” (Surah 3, Verse 200)

“And be steadfast in patience; for verily Allah will not suffer the reward of the righteous to perish.” (Surah 11, Verse 115)

Islam, like Christianity, also teaches that suffering – in the form of, say, a personal tragedy – can be deeply, if painfully, instructive for the individual, reminding each of us that life is not easy, and good (and bad) times do come and go, but nonetheless we have to hold on to what we know to be true and genuine: Allah and the mercy of Allah. The Quran points out,

“So, verily, with every difficulty, there is relief. Verily, with every difficulty there is relief.” (Surah 94, Verses 5-6)

Yet these stock answers – and the associated self-confident assertions of scholars, preachers and clerics regarding God’s role (or lack of) in our personal tragedies – only go so far. As the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, pointed out in the wake of the Asian tsunami, “every single random, accidental death is something that should upset a faith bound up with comfort and ready answers.” He went on to rather astutely note, “If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense, would we feel happier or safer or more confident in God?”

In fact, despite having spent years proudly proclaiming to atheists and agnostics (as well as Christians and Jews) that my Islamic faith is built on reason and logic and science, I have in recent months come to accept and acknowledge that perhaps there is no rational and all-embracing ‘explanation’ for the existence of evil and suffering in a world created and sustained by a just, merciful and compassionate God. And, despite my own rationalist proclivities, I cannot now help but sympathize with the argument advanced by Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood, who has perhaps done more than any other Muslim writer to honestly and frankly confront issues of evil, suffering and death in Islam:

“It is not wrong to ask questions. Human beings are creatures with minds and rational faculties. If God had wanted automatons with no minds, He would have created us that way. It is all right for us to ask for the reasons; but we cannot demand an answer. Sometimes we get an answer, if God deems it necessary for us to know. At other times we simply have to accept that although there is an answer, God has not given it, and since His dealings with us are always loving and for our ultimate good, we can leave the matter there. This is where faith comes in.

“How does Islam affect Muslims? A life free from guilt? Possibly, if they try hard. A life free from the fear of death? Possibly, if they have enough faith. A life that can be lived differently from that of non-believers? True, with God’s help. A life free from sorrow, problems and difficulties? Sadly, no.

“Being a Muslim does not protect anyone from the reality of suffering. Belief is not some kind of spiritual inoculation which will provide immunity from all that is difficult and painful. We love Allah—but doesn’t He care when we suffer? In times of crisis, it is so easy to feel that He is far away and cannot hear our cries-but this is not so. He is closer than our own neck vein; or, as the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) touchingly put it, closer than the neck of our own camel. His love will never desert us or let us down, even in our darkest hour.”

This is almost exactly where my own intellectual and theological journey has brought me to, in recent months. I accept Allah is, in some sense, present in every action, every event, every tragedy (as well as every euphoria), yet I also now accept, reluctantly and belatedly, that nowhere does Allah say that I will go through life without experiencing tragedies, without experiencing disasters, without experiencing suffering and pain and hardship. Yet at the same time, I also acknowledge that I will always have my hope, my patience, my faith to fall back on and I continue to accept and to believe that Allah will never forsake me, and never stop guiding and supporting me in every step, especially in times of adversity and when the outcome – as in Indiana - seems unbearably and irredeemably bleak.

I hope that such an approach, such an outlook, may help us begin to cope in tragic times like this, and may help us continue to maintain our faith in Allah. I hope we never give up faith in Him, no matter how much pain we may be in, no matter how confused or depressed we may become.

So, I welcome especially your comments on this particular post. Your views and your insights – and, above all, your prayers. May Allah have mercy on the souls of Batul Abbas, Shazreh Abbas, Shaail Abbas and Azmeh Abbas and may Allah strengthen the patience, forbearance and faith of Hadi Abbas.

"Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un."

"To Allah we belong, and to Him is our return.” (Surah 2, Verse 156)

BBC EXPOSES “FABRICATED” MOSQUE REPORT

2007-12-13T23:00:00.000Z

In October, the right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange published a report into the selling of “extremist literature” – including books allegedly glorifying terorism and hatred of Jews – on the premises of Britain’s leading mosques. The thinktank, which pretends to be “committed to an evidence-based approach to policy development," described its controversial report in grandiose terms as "the most comprehensive academic survey of its kind ever produced in the UK ... based on a year-long investigation by several teams of specialist researchers."

Predictably, given the Islam-obsessed, jihad-focused media environment we all now inhabit, the report dominated the headlines upon its release. “Lessons in hate found at leading mosque”, declared the front page of the Times. “Hate literature easily found at UK mosques,” proclaimed the front page of the Telegraph.

This week, however, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, accused Policy Exchange of "fabricating" its survey of mosque bookshops after an in-depth investigation of the evidence by its correspondent Richard Watson. Newsnight's editor, Peter Barron, takes up the story on his blog:

"Policy Exchange had given us the receipts to corroborate their claim that a quarter of the 100 mosques their researchers had visited were selling hate literature.

"On the planned day of broadcast our reporter Richard Watson came to me and said he had a problem. He had put the claim and shown a receipt to one of the mosques mentioned in the report - The Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre in London. They had immediately denied selling the book and said the receipt was not theirs.

"We decided to look at the rest of the receipts and quickly identified five of the 25 which looked suspicious. They appeared to have been created on a home computer, rather than printed professionally as you would expect. The printed names and addresses of some of the mosques contained simple errors and two of the receipts purportedly from different mosques appeared to have been written by the same hand. I spoke to Policy Exchange to try to clear up these discrepancies but in the end I decided not to run the report."

The actual Newsnight report which aired this week on Wednesday night – and which can be seen via Barron's blog – includes expert testimony from a forensic scientist disputing the authenticity of the receipts provided by Policy Exchange. (It is also worth watching the heated exchange afterwards between the Beeb’s rottweiler, Jeremy Paxman, and the red-faced Policy Exchange research director, Dean Godson).

The Newsnight investigation is a rare tribute to the power of public-service current-affairs broadcasting at its best and, dare I say it, the BBC at its very best. I was cheering in front of the television screen. (Let us hope and pray that Newsnight’s budget remains unaffected by BBC budget cuts).

One final point: aside from the Muslim Council of Britain’s Sir Iqbal Sacranie, few have been willing to question Policy Exchange’s undeniably Islamophobic motivations. Its director, former Times journalist Anthony Browne, has claimed in the past that “Islam really does want to conquer the world”. And not a single newspaper or broadcaster, in its coverage of the original Policy Exchange report in October, mentioned this rather pertinent quote from the ‘academic’ chosen by Policy Exchange to write their report, Dr Denis MacEoin:

“I do not hold a brief for Islam. On the contrary, I have very negative feelings about it…”

So, fraudulent evidence and Islamophobic authors. Is it any wonder why British Muslims are so disillusioned, and so disillusioned with the media in particular?

THE CENTRAL MYTH OF ‘JOURNALISM’

2007-12-12T16:08:00.000Z

We journalists like to arrogantly pretend that ours is an exclusive profession, with a special set of skills and a unique commitment to truthseeking and muckraking. In a recent interview, however, Rolling Stone magazine's roving political reporter Matt Taibbi bluntly and graphically skewers this central myth that underpins so much of the media-generated universe:

“If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days.”

Three days? Some people seem to have ‘learned’ it in less.

Taibbi has (hilarious) form on this subject. In 2004, he also happened to write this devastatingly true statement:

“I've been around journalists my entire life, since I was a little kid, and I haven't met more than five in three-plus decades who wouldn't literally shit from shame before daring to say that their job had anything to do with truth or informing the public. Everyone in the commercial media…knows what his real job is: feeding the monkey. We are professional space-fillers, frivolously tossing content-pebbles in an ever-widening canyon of demand, cranking out one silly pack-mule after another for toothpaste and sneaker ads to ride on straight into the brains of the stupefied public.”

HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE WE KILLING IN IRAQ?

2007-12-11T16:15:00.000Z

Of the many moral outrages associated with the unprovoked, illegal and unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq, perhaps the most egregious and unforgivable is our continuing failure to take responsibility for the ongoing carnage and loss of lives there. From the very outset of the conflict, Anglo-American commanders on the ground paid little attention to the so-called ‘collateral damage’ inflicted on the Iraqi civilian populace by their invading forces. The infamous declaration by US general Tommy Franks – "We don't do body counts" – set the cold-blooded tone for things to come.

In fact, earlier this year, an internal army investigation by Major General Eldon Bargewell – commissioned in the wake of the notorious Haditha massacre - was scathing in its criticisms of the US Marine Corps in Iraq and, in particular, the deliberate indifference by Marines to the massive loss of innocent Iraqi lives resulting from their trigger-happy actions. From the Washington Post's report:

"All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics," Bargewell wrote. He condemned that approach because it could desensitize Marines to the welfare of noncombatants. "Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes."

It is this casual indifference to the spilling of innocent blood, this view of civilian deaths as routine and natural, this primacy on the value of American lives over Iraqi lives – all testified to by a senior US general – which reminds those of us who opposed the war that we were right to do so and are right to continue to oppose the subsequent and ongoing occupation. One such anti-war protestor, who has managed to both become a moral beacon as well as sharp thorn in the side of our warmongering government, is Brian Haw, who has (literally) been camped outside of Parliament for over six years now, single-handedly manning his 24-hour vigil there in opposition to the militaristic foreign policies of our elected politicians.

On Sunday, however, so-called ‘liberal hawk’ (and ex-left-winger) Nick Cohen, chose to use his Observer column to excoriate, defame and patronize Haw, while deliberately distorting the situation vis a vis killings in Iraq. Cohen claims:

“Like so many others, Haw can't ask who is killing whom in Iraq. There are no slogans expressing his disgust at the death squads of the Baathists and Iranian-backed Shia militias, nor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq…The best justification for Haw's morality is that if British and American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot guarantee order, they are indirectly responsible for atrocities committed by their opponents."

Notice here the key planks in Cohen’s non-argument. 1) Blame everyone else. He spits out the names of the usual suspects – Baathists, militias, Al Qaeda, etc – without recognizing the rather obvious and straightforward point that the fact that terrorists, insurgents and criminals are nowadays responsible for the bulk of the bloodshed in Iraq does not mean that we (the British, the Americans, the ‘allies’) are not also responsible for some share in that same bloodshed. After all, their killing of innocents do not preclude our own killing of innocents. 2) Assume only indirect responsibility. Cohen is willing to accept only that the occupying troops should be doing more to stem the violence (of others), rather than acknowledge our pro-active role in spreading violence, and his solution is for US and UK troops to inflict even more violence in the name of ‘counter-insurgency’, although he pretends that our violence has no consequences for the innocents of Iraq, no ‘collateral damage’ to apologize or be ashamed for.

As the massacres in Haditha and elsewhere reveal, however, the reality on the ground is a far cry from the distorted, deceptive and dishonest vision of Iraq promulgated by liberal hawks like Cohen.

Of course, Cohen is only the latest in a long line of pro-war liberal pundits (think Aaronovitch, think Hitchens, think Hari) who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the fact that civilian deaths in Iraq are not simply the ‘indirect’ responsibility of the ‘benign’ occupying forces (i.e. the Americans and the Brits) but, in hundreds, nay thousands, nay hundreds of thousands of cases, the direct moral responsibility of the marauding militaries of the United States and United Kingdom.

Take the report from the leading epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, published late last year in the renowned British medical journal the Lancet. It estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. According to the study, of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes. Crucially, out of those violent deaths, Iraqi households attributed 31 percent of the deaths to coalition forces – i.e. American and British troops, our troops, the ‘liberators’ of Iraq, have the blood of around 186,000 innocent Iraqi civilians on their hands.

There is simply no avoiding this fact. You can try and question the credibility of this report. You can try. But you’ll fail. One of the first to do so was George W. Bush, who said at the time: "Six-hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at is just... it's not credible." Of course, it is difficult to take lessons in credibility, science or statistics from a man who is virtually illiterate and innumerate and who has publicly described the inhabitants of Athens as "Grecians". It is especially difficult in light of the fact that the epidemiologists at John Hopkins University are amongst the finest in the world and their study was peer-reviewed before being published in the world-renowned Lancet to the widespread acclaim and approval of their academic colleagues – Professor Ronald Waldman, for example, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have." And despite the British government’s own pathetic public attempts to cast doubt on the report’s findings, the Ministry of Defence’s own chief scientific advisor said in an internal memo that the survey's methods were "close to best practice" and the study was "robust".

So that’s 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq, for which we are indirectly responsible. And 186,000 for which we are directly responsible. Yet, tragically, depressingly, we, the great British public, the great American public, the inhabitants of the self-proclaimed free world remain – like those Marines castigated for Haditha by General Bargewell in April – almost totally indifferent to and unmoved by the death and destruction that we have inflicted on the poor people of that castrated and defenceless nation.

Madeleine Bunting wrote in the Guardian in November:

“Can we claim innocence of the chaotic violence of Iraq now normalised into the background of our lives? …We’re numbed to the atrocities; except for some stalwarts, the initial anti-war activism has been crowded out by other responsibilities. Life goes on, even if in Baghdad it frequently doesn’t."

We are indeed numbed. Apathetic even. Uncaring and seemingly blind to the suffering we have caused. The responsibility for 186,000 deaths lies squarely at our own doorstep. Imagine: the equivalent of the entire population of Portsmouth or Luton wiped out by members of the US and UK armed forces in Iraq in less than four years. Should that not bother us? Should that not shame us? Perhaps. Or perhaps it is understandably difficult to envisage and fathom – after all, in the notorious words of Joseph Stalin “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

So let us consider an individual incident. Not a faceless statistic, but the real story of real deaths. The latest edition of the New York Review of Books includes an essay by the brilliant Michael Massing, in which he casts a light on a whole host of new books that he hopes will "impress on Americans the terrible human costs of the invasion". Massing quotes from one such book – House to House: An Epic Memoir of War – at the start of his essay, in which the author, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, a gung-ho supporter of the war, casually recounts how in 2004, while his platoon was on just its second patrol in Iraq,

“…a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.”

Shocked? You should be. It’s not for no reason that the fiercely independent US journalist, Dahr Jamail, has written that “if the people of the United States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended”. Of course, it has become the ideologically-charged job of pro-war, pro-government flacks like Nick Cohen in the Observer to prevent us from getting to grips with the truth of this “real story”; of death, destruction and destitution on a countrywide scale. In fact, how people like him sleep at night, I’ll never know.

Ironically, Cohen concludes Sunday’s article with this gem of a line: “I don't think the moral blindness of the intelligentsia can last much longer. Obviously, some who have lost their bearings after Iraq will never find them again and stagger around bellowing for the rest of their days…”

Thanks Nick - I couldn’t possibly have written a better description of you and your liberal, hawkish friends myself.

ISRAEL: 'MILITARY CONFRONTATION WITH IRAN IS INEVITABLE'

2007-12-08T16:06:00.000Z

One final point worth considering on Iran and the prospects for war: the Israel factor. Since the US government's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iranian nuclear ambitions (or lack of) was published on Monday, Israel - also known as America's 51st state - has been at the forefront of the campaign to discredit the NIE's seemingly dove-ish conclusions.

Speaking shortly after the NIE came out, Israeli defence minister (and former prime minister) Ehud Barak said he believed US intelligence had got it wrong and that his intelligence reports suggested Tehran is still trying to develop a nuclear weapon:

"It's apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a time. But in our opinion, since then it has apparently continued that program. There are differences in the assessments of different organizations in the world about this, and only time will tell who is right....We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the earth, even if it is from our greatest friend.''

The new Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, went further than Barak in an interview on Thursday with the Daily Telegraph's uber-hawk Con Coughlin: "It should be made clear that if Iran does not co-operate then military confrontation is inevitable. It is either co-operation or confrontation."

And Friday's Guardian has this report: "Israel considering strike on Iran despite US intelligence report."

(Plus, Iran expert Trita Parsi, writing for antiwar.com, claims: "Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh referred to the report as a lie at a recent breakfast in New York, and Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer reportedly "doesn't buy" its findings.")

The Israelis have always refused to believe the Iranian civil nuclear programme is anything other than a covert military programme that poses a so-called 'existential threat' to the Jewish state. They have spent years issuing dire and bellicose warnings, claiming again and again that Iran is just a few years away from the bomb - yet, as Israel's own former deputy national security adviser Shlomo Brom once noted, rather sarcastically: "Remember, the Iranians are always five to seven years from the bomb. Time passes, but they're always five to seven years from the bomb."

The reality is that the Israeli defence establishment has long harboured a desire to carry out a re-run - against Iran - of the country's unilateral (and infamous) air strikes on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. And as the Guardian report points out, "they may have been been heartened by the lack of international censure over its bombing raid in northern Syria in September, which may or may not have targeted a Syrian nuclear installation." (It never ceases to amaze me how the Middle East's only nuclear weapons state - Israel - can arrogate to itself the right to attack those of its neighbours who have no nuclear weapons on the pretext that it is protecting the region from nuclear weapons. We truly inhabit an upside-down, back-to-front, black-is-white-and-white-is-black gepolitical universe - one in which double standards seem to be the only standards.)

It is not only hawks in Israel who long for Osirak the Sequel. The neoconservative hawks within the Bush administration in Washington are equally keen for Israel to flex its muscles against Iran, to strike the first blow and to provoke a military conflict in the region which the American can then join (or claim to be 'dragged into'). In September, Washington insider Steve Clemons reported the following development:

"One member of Cheney's national security staff, David Wurmser, worried out loud that Cheney felt that his wing was "losing the policy argument on Iran" inside the administration -- and that they might need to "end run" the president with scenarios that may narrow his choices. The option that Wurmser allegedly discussed was nudging Israel to launch a low-yield cruise missile strike against the Natanz nuclear reactor in Iran, thus "hopefully" prompting a military reaction by Tehran against U.S. forces in Iraq and the Gulf."

"Hopefully"? It never ceases to amaze me how supposedly educated, intelligent, worldly and rational strategic thinkers, at the highest levels of their governments, in self-proclaimed democracies like Israel and the United States, can continue to agitate for an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, which will undoubtedly make Iraq look "like a leisurely stroll in the park on a balmy Sunday afternoon."

IS IRAN STILL GOING TO GET BOMBED?

2007-12-06T22:31:00.000Z

One point I failed to consider fully in my first post on this week’s publication of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is how its publication affects the prospects for military action. Much of the commentariat, both on the left and the right, seem certain now, as Slate’s foreign affairs specialist Fred Kaplan puts it, "If there was ever a possibility that President George W. Bush would drop bombs on Iran, the chances have now shrunk to nearly zero." Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan's conclusion upon reading the NIE is equally optimistic: “I do think it removes all likelihood of this administration launching a new war in the next year.” Adrian Hamilton's latest column in the Independent is entitled: “Forget any idea of a military strike on Iran”. And Ray Takeyh, author of the recent book ‘Hidden Iran’ and a self-proclaimed expert on the region at the influential Council of Foreign Relations in New York, says that the report “essentially removes the possibility of a military confrontation between the United States and Iran over the nuclear issue…the military option at this point is not on the table.”

Really Ray?

The miserable record of the past seven years suggests that President Bush and his acolytes have never let anything as insignificant as facts or figures get in the way of their policies and prejudices. As one senior Bush aide told the New York Times Magazine in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

It is only in this context – of an irrational and arrogant administration which prefers fantasy over reality, and ill-conceived and unilateral actions over reasoned deliberation and empirical evidence – that we can truly understand how and why it is that George Bush is able to stand up, in front of the White House press corps, on the day after the NIE is released (the very same NIE which declares Iran has (i) no nuclear weapons, (ii) no nuclear weapons programme and (iii) no foreseeable plans to launch a nuclear weapons programme) and proclaim, “I still feel strongly that Iran is a danger…I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace. My opinion hasn't changed.” What?!?! (I am reminded here of comedian Stephen Colbert's hilarious and sarcastic denunciation of Bush, standing only a few feet away from the President and the First Lady at the White House Press Corespondents Dinner last year: “The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.”)

So, Bush feels no differently about Iran. Nor do the media’s most influential neoconservatives (Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, Norman Podhoretz). In fact, one of their number, the Washington Post’s Robert Kagan, gave the game away this week:

“The Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran during its remaining time in office, or credibly threaten to do so, unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action. A military strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities was always fraught with risk. For the Bush administration, that option is gone.”

Notice the crucial part of this statement – no, not the “option is gone” part or the “fraught with risk” part. Notice the key caveat: “The Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran…unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action.”

So the military option is still on the table, says Bush, and – forget the nukes! - it will be used in response to provocations by the Iranians, say his neocon supporters. It all makes perfect sense. But, what if the Iranians refuse to play ball and ‘provoke’ the Americans, either in Iraq or Lebanon or elsewhere? Simple – the Americans will then do the provoking.

In fact, earlier this year, in February, a former Bush administration official actually suggested that the US government is using the backdrop of sectarian violence in Iraq to deliberately provoke a military conflict with the Iranians. Speaking on CNN, Hillary Mann, the former director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council, warned that the hawks in the Pentagon were “trying to push a provocative, accidental conflict”. She added that the administration hopes to goad the Iranians into an overreaction so that it would then have the justification to carry out “limited strikes” against nuclear infrastructure and Revolutionary Guards buildings inside of Iran.

In the same month, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and one of Washington’s leading foreign policy ‘grandees’, went even further than Mann. Most stunning and shocking was his description of what he called a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” It would, he suggested, involve “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

As Barry Grey – one of the few journalists present on Capitol Hill to actually record and report Brzezinski’s damning comments – points out, “this was an unmistakable warning to the US Congress, replete with quotation marks to discount the “defensive” nature of such military action, that the Bush administration is seeking a pretext for an attack on Iran. Although he did not explicitly say so, Brzezinski came close to suggesting that the White House was capable of manufacturing a provocation—including a possible terrorist attack within the US—to provide the casus belli for war.”

It is a view shared by (among others) long-time neocon watchers, Jim Lobe of the IPS news agency and Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com, as well as the award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who wrote in the New Yorker only two months ago:

“This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.”

“Counterterrorism”? Hallelujah! God bless 9/11. Everything ultimately comes back to the good old ‘War on Terror’. So, even if Iran has no nukes, and the American intelligence admits they have no nukes, the American government still has a backdoor route (excuse? ruse? pretext?) to launching an attack on the Iranians. If they do, God help us all – because even George W. Bush himself has described a potential conflict with Iran as "World War III."

NAMING AND SHAMING THE IRAN HAWKS

2007-12-05T19:27:00.000Z

For several months now, I have been planning to start blogging. One of my early ideas was to devote the entire focus of this blog (all the postings, all the links, even the name!) to the growing crisis in the West’s relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the seeming build-up to a catastrophic Anglo-American war with the Iranians. Until this week, I was one of those who firmly and devoutly believed that Messrs Bush and Cheney would not vacate the White House in January 2008 without first taking some form of military action against the regime in Tehran. Yet on Monday, unexpectedly, like millions around the globe, I breathed a sigh of relief as the United States government released a new National Intelligence Estimate (or NIE) on Iran. Reflecting the assessments made by sixteen different US spy agencies – chief amongst them, the CIA – it bluntly concluded: "We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." It went on to say, "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005." It further said, "Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs." With this announcement, the dynamics of US-Iranian relations, post-war Iraq and the entire Middle Eastern region shifted dramatically. For one thing, the probability of a unilateral strike against Iranian nuclear targets has drastically reduced. A number of commentators are now certain that, as Slate's Fred Kaplan puts it, "If there was ever a possibility that President George W. Bush would drop bombs on Iran, the chances have now shrunk to nearly zero."

So, what has the press fallout from this unexpected NIE report been? In the United States, media critics have begun offering up all sorts of reminders of the near-fatal claims by many in the press relating to alleged Iranian nukes – chief among them, Salon's Glenn Greenwald and Editor and Publisher's Greg Mitchell. But where have similar acts of reminding and accounting appeared in our own British press? Can we now expect an apology, or even a retraction, from the ‘Iran hawks’ who have come to dominate so many of the news and comment pages of our national papers? (Don’t hold your breath!)

Take the so-called ‘paper of record’, the Times. How have its writers covered the Iranian story over the past few years? Chief Foreign Commentator Bronwen Maddox declared, “Time is on Iran’s side as it hurtles towards nuclear weapons barrier.” Assistant Editor Gerard Baker described Iran’s “pursuit of an epoch-altering Bomb.” Blairite columnist and pro-war pundit David Aaronovitch decided Iran “is probably developing a nuclear weapon capacity.”

But the highly-paid stars of the Times are not alone in their misjudgements and misreporting on Iran. Writing in the Daily Mail, columnist Melanie Phillips, or ‘Mad Mel’ as she is lovingly known by her critics, accused Tehran of “racing to develop nuclear weapons with which it threatens to wipe Israel off the map and with which it would hold us to ransom.” Writing in the Sun, the then political editor Trevor Kavanagh proclaimed “nothing - apart from unimaginable military action - can stop the mullahs acquiring nuclear power and then nuclear weapons.” Even the so-called ‘liberal press’ succumbed to the nuclear falsehoods and untruths. The normally reasonable Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian, asked: “Now the mad mullahs of Iran will soon have nuclear bombs, are we all doomed?” Her fellow Guardian columnist - and Iraq war critic - Sir Max Hastings concluded “Iran is doing its utmost to build nuclear weapons.” The Independent’s young war-hawk-in-chief, Johann Hari, spoke of “Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons.”

Yet the Glenn Greenwald award for “serial fabricators, fear-mongerers and hysterics” has to go to bloviators at the Telegraph. At the height of the Israeli assault on Lebanon, in the summer of 2006, executive foreign editor Con Coughlin – the man who previously peddled innumerable false claims about Iraq’s WMDs, which included linking Saddam’s regime to Al Qaeda – penned a column entitled: "Meanwhile, Iran gets on with its bomb". The paper’s ‘media don’, Professor Niall Ferguson, described President Ahmadinejad’s decision to “accelerate Iran's nuclear weapons programme.” The then diplomatic editor, Anton La Guardia, decided there were “good reasons to fear that the mullahs, behind the guise of a civil nuclear power programme, are secretly trying to build an atomic bomb.” The paper’s pro-war, pro-Bush Canadian columnist Mark Steyn described the (European) view that Iran was three or four years away from having deliverable nuclear weapons as “laughably optimistic.” (No surprise then that some bloggers have now invented the word, "Steynwalling" - defined as a “failure to respond to repeated demonstrations of error”).

The list of misjudgements, errors, inaccuracies, exaggerations, falsehoods, untruths and, basically, lies is – sadly, depressingly, frustratingly – endless.

Yet the purpose of accumulating these quotes, and poring over the past columns and contributions of Fleet Street’s finest, is not simply to mock, point and belittle (amusing and worthwhile as that may be) but to highlight the repeated failure by our media elites, our pundit classes, our own self-proclaimed 'Serious Foreign Policy Geniuses', to convey an accurate, truthful and balanced view of the alleged ‘threat’ from Iran’s nuclear programme. Over the past four years, too many in the media, on both sides of the Atlantic, seem to have failed to learn the lessons of the Iraqi WMD intelligence failure – and the concurrent propaganda efforts by the US and UK governments – and instead have been repeating it vis a vis Iran. It is tragic and deeply depressing that the British public should have to rely on the various and secretive intelligence agencies of the United States government for the truth about Iran and its (lack of) nuclear weapons, rather than our own well-paid and well-read journalists, correspondents and columnists; the so-called ‘Fourth Estate’, which has become "the agency of power, not people". Perhaps this week’s (rare) burst of honesty from America’s spooks will help mark the start of a new chapter in our media’s coverage of Iran. We can only hope.