HUMANITARIAN AID AT THE POINT OF A GUN?

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 COST OF ‘FREEDOM’

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.

RADICAL OPINIONS AFTER A WEEK AWAY…

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.

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

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.

DEATH OF ‘OUR’ DICTATOR

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!

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).

BRITS NOW ‘RICHER’ THAN AMERICANS

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”.

HAPPY 2008?

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?

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...

TOP 5 CHRISTMAS MYTHS

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!")