normblog

Today in Falluja

The US has condemned the killing and dismembering of four American civilian contractors in Iraq... The four men were shot and burnt in their cars in Falluja, before a cheering crowd dismembered the corpses and hung two of them from a bridge... Witnesses said the contractors were passing through Falluja in two four-wheel-drive vehicles when gunmen opened fire.

An angry crowd surrounded the cars, throwing stones and setting the vehicles ablaze.

The corpses were dragged from the wreckage and television pictures showed one burnt body being kicked and stamped on, while at least two were tied to cars and driven through the streets, witnesses said.

Adults and children hacked the bodies to pieces, before lynching two of the charred remains from a bridge spanning the Euphrates River.

Dnoc-fall

I asked a couple of days ago if someone could point me towards something more precise about the Graun's drop in circulation which I'd heard about. A reader has kindly sent me this link (registration required) to a table showing a 10% fall over the last year. I don't know how significant that is, given that sales of the Telegraph, Times and Financial Times have also fallen, though by rather less. The Independent has made a big gain. The person who sent me the link suggests that its tabloid version has probably picked up readers at the Guardian's expense. The figures below show, in turn, sales for February 2004, sales for February 2003, and the percentage change:

Guardian: 352,005 / 393,367 / -10.51

Daily Telegraph: 873,380 / 912,252 / -4.26
Times: 614,610 / 635,196 / -3.24
FT: 415,534 / 427,722 / -2.85
Independent: 222,799 / 185,719 / +19.97

New anti-Semitism report

A report by the EU's European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) finds that anti-Semitism is 'on the rise in several EU countries, including Britain'. According to the Financial Times, there has been criticism of the report from some Jewish leaders:

Serge Cwajgenbaum, the [European Jewish Congress's] secretary, said the report was "full of contradictions" and had failed to address properly the issue of the identity of the perpetrators.

It was clear that in France, where about half of the EU's Jews live, young Muslims of north African origin were mainly responsible, Mr Cwajgenbaum said. "How can you fight anti-Semitism without having the courage to identify its authors?"

His criticism could revive accusations that the EU has been trying to minimise the scale of anti-Semitism in the region while questioning the view, common among European Jewish communities, that the perpetrators are mainly young Muslims.

In the Guardian today, Linda Grant writes about French Jews leaving for Israel and expressing views like these:

"France is not an anti-semitic country, there isn't a sentiment of anti-semitism, but it is now very difficult for a Jew to live in France."
.....
"When the rabbi in Paris tells us, don't go out wearing a kippa, even though I don't wear one myself, you know you can't live like this any longer. The politicians make great efforts but they can't do anything. We can't stay in Europe, there are more and more difficulties for us every day."

I recall a time when the streets of Paris were full of marchers chanting 'Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands' ('We are all German Jews') in solidarity with Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

English as spoken

This is great. (Via Alan Brain.)

Whose sons of bitches?

A week ago I highlighted a statement by John Pilger which I reproduce here a second time:

The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly from this truth.

In itself the thought Pilger expresses is - unhappily - an unremarkable one today. I have read and heard dozens of statements like this since September 11 2001. It has become a standard piece of wisdom across a wide sector of left and liberal opinion. Just for that reason, I want to take what Pilger says as the text for a brief further reflection - a reflection on the ways in which such statements excuse the acts they purport to contextualize.

Of course, this is typically denied by those who make the statements. It's not a matter, they insist, of excusing; it's merely a matter of explaining, of providing relevant background. In some cases, maybe. These things are very much a matter of balance and emphasis, and you therefore need to take each assertion of the given kind in its overall discursive setting, look at what else is being said by the person whose assertion it is, the things she stresses, the things he passes over in silence, and so forth. I know, in any case, that in too many of the instances which I've seen, the denial is not convincing; the assertions are yes-but condoning or mitigating ones.

These are some obvious pointers. First, as I argued here (see my response to the question on Michael Walzer) and have argued on this blog repeatedly, there is the patent inadequacy of the type of explanation proffered: that is, reaction to injustice. Injustice doesn't always and everywhere elicit mass murder of the innocent in response. Second, there is the shifting of the balance of blame, so common with these statements, from those directly responsible for acts of murder to others whose responsibility is either remote, doubtful or non-existent. Third, there is the selectivity with which this kind of (root causes) argument is employed.

One example. Those critics of the US and its current foreign policy who are also severely critical of Israeli policy and (let's just say) not especially sensitive to Jewish fears today about the spread of anti-Semitism - how often do you see them invoking a root cause, or background, which might generate a degree of understanding here? Speaking for myself, I haven't seen it much at all. But one would have thought there was a rather large historical 'root cause' which could be seen as pertinent in this area, contextualizing the fears of ordinary Israelis and the growing worries of Jewish people everywhere. Mention the Holocaust in this connection, though - leave alone 2000 years of persecution and Jewish suffering - and you'd be shamelessly exploiting the victims for unseemly political ends.

Those are some pointers. Here's the money. There are a few things that can be said about these perpetrators of the random murder of the innocent in the last few years - in Manahattan, in Bali, in Istanbul, in Madrid - and these are three of them. They aren't democrats even in the loosest sense, wedded as they are to a belief system that is profoundly anti-democratic. Morally, by their deeds, they show a contempt for fundamental human values, as embodied in universal codes of rights and prohibitions. Culturally, their commitments are backward-looking and anti-egalitarian, to put it mildly - reserving, for example, a less than ideal place in the world for women. All of this is integral to the deliberative moment in the crimes they commit, to what moves them to choose and act as they do. Sufficient, one might have hoped, to convince any liberal or socialist democrat which side of the political line people thus motivated should be seen to stand on. What has become common today with far too many liberals and socialists, however, is the type of Pilgerite characterization I've highlighted:

... the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination.

The terrorist murderer thereby becomes an expression - albeit, perhaps, a misguided or distorted expression - of a global struggle against oppression and injustice. It puts him on 'our' side of the line if this is what his motivation really derives from - despite those three aforesaid deliberative features, which in fact make him a deadly enemy. To adopt the modern cliché: this is the bottom line in pinpointing the monumental excuse today being made by the more deluded sections of liberalism and the left.

Play play

For more on the Alistair Beaton satire mentioned here yesterday, see Mick Hartley and two posts at The Daily Ablution.

Gillian returns

Sarah alerts us to the fact that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings will be back in the UK later this year. They're playing Glasgow, Manchester, London and Cambridge in July - as well as a lot of venues in the US, from New York to Atlanta, Cleveland to Lexington. Here's my account of their gig in Manchester last year (old site, August 31). Get yourself a ticket.

All the world seems in tune

I received the following email from a friend this morning:

All the daffodils are out [here]. There are great drifts and pools of yellow and gold under all the trees. And because the leaves aren't out yet it's the only vivid colour around, and it looks rich and strange and lovely.

Gimme a break, already. What do I know from daffodils!

Only 24 hours - and some

We're approaching the big deadline - midnight tomorrow. You know what for. For the Bob Dylan poll. But, actually, as I won't be able to finalize the results till the weekend, it gives you till the end of the week to get an entry in. So if you've been feeling guilty that you haven't done that - yes, I'm talking about you - if you've been going around thinking, 'Really, I could have put one in - I'm letting him down', if you have some favourite Bob Dylan songs but have been telling yourself you're not knowledgeable enough, or you need more time to make up your mind, or you had been going to but then you had to take your dog to the vet just on the day you'd been going to make your selection, or if you've been figuring that you've had enough of sending in entries for those damned normblog polls, or if your mother phoned and said 'Now, Gertrude, don't you think it's immature to participate in a thing like that', and you said 'Mom, my name's not Gertrude, never has been', or if a friend living just a couple of blocks down from you got his foot caught in a place where feet get caught in, or told you that Leonard Cohen is the man or Kate and Anna McGarrigle are the music, or if you support the kind of team that never does as well as you think it ought to and this has a dispiriting effect on your days, or if your nights are filled with the strangest kind of dreams in which you're always sitting down to a meal of meatballs and gravy, or running on all fours even though you're still a human (as far as you know), or having to sit another exam for which you haven't done any preparation, or if you're walking down a road not particularly going anywhere (you, that is, not the road), or if you've got plenty of other things on your mind that might serve you as an excuse - then you've still got a bit more time.

Please send me your best Bob Dylan songs, any number of them up to five. Thanks, guys, dolls, people. I knew you would.

Watch this one run

According to this report some remarks made by Philip Zelicow on September 10 2002 when he was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) have now been 'uncovered' which show that 'a prime motive for the invasion [of Iraq] just over one year ago was to eliminate a threat to Israel, a staunch U.S. ally in the Middle East':

The statements are the first to surface from a source closely linked to the Bush administration acknowledging that the war, which has so far cost the lives of nearly 600 U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis, was motivated by Washington's desire to defend the Jewish state.

Got that. Read it again. Now get this:

To date, the possibility of the United States attacking Iraq to protect Israel has been only timidly raised by some intellectuals and writers, with few public acknowledgements from sources close to the administration.

One more addition to the noxious combination already in play.