normblog

Sapping and impurifying

Anthony Holiday, a former journalist and political activist who teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape, writes in the Cape Times today, under the headline 'Patriotism of SA Jews undermined'. The occasion of his piece is the killing by the Israelis of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin:

The killing of this crippled figurehead compels us to ask - given our role in the international power stakes and the history of our liberation struggle - why we continue to tolerate the presence of an organisation that not only defends actions of this kind but is dedicated to undermining the patriotism of South Africans of Jewish descent and which, in defending its mission, instigates precisely the anti-semitism it seeks to combat.

He's talking of the South African Zionist Federation, and if I read this right he's calling for it to be outlawed, or its activities curbed. As he concludes:

Prior to the killing, we might possibly have gone on viewing the agitation of the federation with weary tolerance. That time is not now.

Holiday makes the usual move of denying that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same thing, without showing any awareness that there could - just could - sometimes be a link between the two, with the first covering for the second; and he even speaks of the 'exceptional contribution' made by South African Jewry to the life of the country. But the sinister element is his stating of a political disagreement with Zionism in the form of a call for a legal ban, defended this on the basis of Zionists being an 'unpatriotic' element:

[T]he real damage the federation does... is not in the small number of Jews it lures to Israel. It is in the assault its propaganda makes on the fragile patriotism of the white middle and wealthy classes to which most South African Jews belong... To have a foreign organisation sapping that nourishment [of patriotism - N.G.] in our very midst is nothing short of intolerable.

Roll it round your tongue a bit: foreign organization, in our very midst, sapping that nourishment. (Hat tip: South African reader Dave.)

Australian poll

Strong public support for Australian troops to remain in Iraq "until the job is done" has been revealed by the latest [Sydney Morning] Herald poll amid the first signs that Mark Latham's honeymoon with voters could be ending.

The poll, taken last weekend after the Labor leader announced he would withdraw the troops by Christmas if the ALP won the election due later this year, shows 61 per cent favour the Prime Minister's position of keeping forces in Iraq until post-war reconstruction is completed.

(Hat tip: Sophie Masson.)

Two moral zones

In today's Guardian Ann Clwyd:

"I thought I would never be able to write again after they came close to cutting off my fingers by burning, stamping or thrashing them with sticks," he wrote. "I was also caned and flayed until my feet were swollen. These rounds of hard group beating were interspersed by orders to leap and trot on the same spot I was in... they crucified me on the floor and nailed me there by stepping on my palms and arms... My thighs were ripped apart violently and they began to rape me."

The torture and execution of political opponents and the hunting down of dissident elements were to be a consistent feature of Saddam Hussein's regime for the next 20 years. And these abuses did not end with the first Gulf war in 1991. On a recent visit to southern Iraq, I saw evidence of the military campaign waged against the Marsh Arabs, which continued right up until the fall of the Ba'athists. Such a regime forfeited the right to be tolerated by liberal opinion.
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The regime cost the lives of at least 2 million people through its wars and internal oppression, and 4 million Iraqis were forced to become refugees. According to estimates from USAID, more than 270 mass graves have been found in Iraq. These alone should vindicate the war. That the world should have acted sooner, I have no doubt.

I recently visited the Palais Wilson in Geneva for a human rights conference. In the hallway was a reminder that the most translated document in the world is the UN universal declaration of human rights. The failure to intervene when genocide raged in Iraq, or in Cambodia, or in Rwanda, or in Bosnia, is shocking. The UN and its security council need to be reformed to reflect 21st-century reality...

Iraq now has a chance for a better future.

If, on the other hand, instead of moral seriousness, you want an account of the morally obtuse, try this - Michael Billington on a new song-and-dance satire on the war on terror: 'Blair... Bush's tragic poodle'; 'We're sending you a clusterbomb from Jesus'; 'Bush celebrat[ing] American global dominance by leading a star-spangled chorus of "Welcome to the new world order"'. You can see how many Guardian readers, how many of the war-we-couldn't-stoppers, and dinner-party tongue-cluckers, and right-onners-for-leaving-the-regime-in-place, will just lap it up. Billington:

But, as someone who opposed the war but has since been appalled by the left's apparent indifference to Hussein's hideous cruelties or the problem's of Iraq's struggling democrats, I am struck by how much Beaton leaves out: only one fleeting reference, for instance, to Hussein's gassing of the Kurds.

... To quote John Reid confronting Jeremy Paxman, I wish I were as certain of one thing as Mr Beaton is of everything.

Yes, they'll definitely lap it up then. Or, if you want more of the same, there's also this.

Alternatively, you can read about the ferment on the campuses of Iraq:

After years of oppression, Shia revivalism is sweeping the universities; young men and women are experimenting, for the first time in their life, with things such as freedom of religion, freedom of expression[,] sit-ins, elections and riots.

On Baghdad university campus, pictures of the martyrs are posted on the walls, young men in their early 20s, absent during the past two decades, hang around wherever you go, and there are confusing edicts from the ayatollahs, denouncing the great Satan who liberated them from the great tyrant.
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A year ago, none of the couples I spoke with would dare discuss openly their sexual life - or "it" - but with satellite dishes the taboos are falling down one by one.

Two zones.

Agony aunt

Ann Widdecombe brings a new twist (of the knife) to the concept:

> My husband left his wife and child for me eight months ago. I have two children, younger than his, from a previous relationship. Despite what I feel was a very reasonable divorce settlement, my husband still spends as much on his first child as he did before, and still gives his ex-wife additional money whenever she asks for it. It all amounts to easily as much as he spends on us, his new family. I think we should be his first priority now, especially as his ex-wife is a professional woman and has ample funds for everything she and her child might need. He wouldn't be depriving them of anything. Am I right? (Name and address withheld)

> He should have stayed with his wife as he vowed to do when he married her. You should have married and stayed with the father of your kids. Then you wouldn't be in this silly mess, where the only victims are the children. Goodnight.

Uncomfortable things

These two pieces from the last two days make some common points. Ferdinand Mount yesterday in the Sunday Times:

A six-year-old child would have seen it coming, it seems. Anyone but an arrogant klutz like George W Bush would have foreseen if not forestalled the attack on the twin towers. If the president had been serious about waging the war on terror, September 11, 2001 might have been just another cloudless autumn day in New York.

Such is the bizarre new indictment. Bush's critics on both sides of the Atlantic have been squinting down the hindsight this week. The wise-after-the-eventers have been out in force. According to Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, Bush was so obsessed with Iraq that he failed to take action against Osama Bin Laden despite repeated warnings from his intelligence experts. Condoleezza Rice appeared to think that Al-Qaeda was some sort of Middle Eastern hors d'oeuvre.

Funny, I do not recall any of those experts - or indeed any of Bush’s present critics - calling for a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan at the time, which is what it would have required to flush out the terrorists and decapitate their organisation.

The president is being denounced for not taking the kind of pre-emptive action in Afghanistan that he has been so passionately denounced for taking in Iraq. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

If Bush had abruptly ordered an invasion of Afghanistan without the cataclysmic provocation of September 11, he would have been excoriated for launching an illegal and immoral war against a desperately poor country which was still suffering from decades of conflict. As for United Nations approval, forget it.
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In Britain, Bush's harshest critics belong to a sort of Immobility Alliance. Those under its rainbow umbrella range from Tony Benn, Denis Healey and Clare Short on the left to Douglas Hurd, Chris Patten and Malcolm Rifkind among the old Tory Europhiles, supported by the flower of Britain’s commentariat.

Although there are differences of nuance and detail between them, they seem to share the view that any severe action against rogue or terrorist-sheltering states is liable to make matters worse.

Not everyone has graduated to Short's new belief that the Iraqis are actually worse off now than they were under Saddam Hussein. But in office and out of office, in the Balkans and in the Middle East, members of the Immobility Alliance usually claim that military intervention will be counterproductive and probably land us in a quagmire, and that sanctions are just as bad and may even cause greater suffering.

Instead, they recommend patient diplomacy and critical engagement to guide rogue states into more civilised ways. But this is a false alternative, since diplomatic engagement continues all the time (sometimes even when apparently interrupted by war). It is when diplomacy is getting nowhere or, worse, you find you have helped to arm a monster (as Europe did with Saddam before the Gulf wars) that other pressures have to be added.

More extraordinary still, some of the Immobilisers appear to regard even defensive precautions as useless. The latest fashion is to denounce Tony Blair and David Blunkett for being too alarmist. It is demeaning and demoralising, we are told, to spray the great British people with these hysterical warnings of Armageddon.
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Part of this querulous mood can be explained by the anti-Americanism which lingers here as in the rest of Europe like the gas from a leaky old cooker. But there is also a deeper unwillingness among the liberal intelligentsia to recognise how unprecedented, how perilous and how uncertain this struggle is. We have seen nothing like it. Our governments have made ghastly mistakes and will make many more. But anyone who thinks there is a comfortable escape route is making a bigger mistake.

Barbara Amiel today in the Telegraph (registration required):

I can't see how any American government or individual, of either party, could have prevented the development of international terrorism. The question is not whether Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush actually knew about the murderous intentions of radical Islam or whether they took what they knew seriously, but what the public mood would have let them do about it before 9/11.

Not much, I wager. What administration could, before 9/11, have sent in American boys to fight a regime in Afghanistan because it was implementing the ideas of an old man with a long white beard, sitting crossed-legged in the mountains talking about Satan America?
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Not wanting to believe uncomfortable things until it is too late is a universal tendency.

Which is perhaps why Clarke's accusations are so happily greeted. Not just in terms of partisanship but for their simplicity. If 9/11 can be reduced to being Washington's fault, the irrational hate and destruction becomes almost manageable. Change administrations, and the Islamists will go away. Such a seductive, comforting thought echoes in most political battles and elections today. The wind from the east blows gritty grains of fear and delusion into the West's eyes. One wonders apprehensively, which way the zeitgeist of this new millennium will turn. Worse, one fears the calamity that will really turn it hasn't happened yet.

Do read the rest of the Amiel for details about some who tried to 'run against the wind' before 9/11 and the reception they got. I feel it's to the point here, also, to remind people that a large segment of what is referred to now loosely as anti-war opinion not only would have opposed intervention in Afghanistan before 9/11, but did oppose intervention in Afghanistan after 9/11. Not all of it, I know. But a large segment. It strengthens the point made by Mount and Amiel. See also these two Sunday Times reports for relevant material; or - those of you without access - see here and here.

Triangular encounter

Bit by bit my real world experience expands to include more of the people I've met only in the virtual sense, through blogging. We - me and WotN - just spent a very pleasant couple of hours chatting over a meal to this guy. Anthony was on his way back home, having been to a region not far north of here to deliver a lecture. We spoke about politics and blogging (of course) and climbing and running, in amongst a mouth-wateringly varied range of topics. This just a couple of days after Jackie came by, and didn't we all talk on that occasion too - especially Jackie and WotN. I'm telling you, it's like Grand Central Station round here.

Not especially closely connected to these get-togethers (though, I suppose I could say that travel provides a link, and stations): did you know that, if you google 'Coventry station', second up at the moment is this?

Cats and blogs

Not as in cat blogging, which I don't do, but as in it's raining them (groan). The cats in this case are the cats who blog, and this weekend I spent some time just wandering around reading them. Some stops on my tour...

> According to British Spin, the problem with life is that 'it gets in the way of blogging'.

> Edward at Obsidian Wings has a hoax alert up that you ought to know about.

> Don, of Prattle, reports an episode with a spider, from which I infer that he has a technique for drying both feet before either touches the floor beyond the bath and used by no one else I know (though how would I know?) other than myself.

> Angua has the links - including this one (scroll down to March 21, 'Toronto Bloggers Meet') - for a recent blogger bash at the Drake Hotel.

> Emily Jones celebrates a political anniversary, and does so with feeling.

> Note the item 'Pride in One's Work' at Mirth, Musings, & More.

> At the water's edge on Fisherblog, the Fisher-man has a discussion about the Guardian's falling circulation and what might be done about it. It's the second time in the last few weeks I've heard of this falling circulation. Does anyone out there have any precise facts and numbers?

> Read Anthony Cox on a 'Risky world'.

> Hak Mao reports a demo in Sydney to protest about the killing of Sheikh Yassin.

Paramilitaries

This piece by Steven Vincent - a couple of weeks old, but which I hadn't come across till now - dismisses the notion of an Iraqi resistance:

[T]he truth is, there is no Iraqi "resistance." Not, at least, in the traditional manner evoked by the word: a disciplined insurgency intent on seizing control of an unpopular government. In the same sense, there are no "guerrillas" forming a national liberation front on behalf of an oppressed people. Instead, Iraq is plagued by a volatile mixture of criminal gangs, tribal gunmen, and humiliated Saddamites who, for inscrutable and often conflicting reasons, pay impoverished farmers to plant roadside bombs that kill more civilians tha[n] Coalition soldiers - and who, if the price is right, will cease their "insurgency." The country also suffers from foreign-born Islamofascists who target Iraq's Shia population in hopes of rekindling a 14-century-old sectarian war.
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Certainly Iraqis don't see the "resistance" in such a sentimental light. Public opinion of the fedayeen and Mafia-like crime lords in the Sunni Triangle ranges from anger to contempt. "Sixty percent of the Sunnis are criminal followers of Saddam Hussein," asserts Farman Hamid, director of the Office of Human Rights in Kirkuk. "They create problems in Iraq because they have no door to the future." Argues Basran shopowner Ghattan Mohammad, "This resistance' does not fight for Iraq, only for itself."

Even in prickly Baghdad, you find similar reactions. "We keep telling the Sunnis that they are not serving their people by attacking U.S. soldiers - Iraq's future lies with America," says Abdul Mashtaq, a director of the Iraqi Human Rights Organization. "We are proud to help the Americans in the Sunni Triangle," proclaims sheik Ali Nsayief, of the Baghdad Council of Confederated Tribes. "What kind of resistance' kills seven civilians for every U.S. soldier, then sabotages our electricity?" asks Samir Adil, head of the Worker's Communist Party. "Ninety-five percent of Iraqis do not believe in this 'resistance.'"
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We might then [adopt]... the more accurate word "paramilitaries." "Paramilitaries" conjures images of anonymous killers terrorizing a populace in the name of a repressive regime - pretty much what the fedayeen and jihadists are doing in Iraq.

(Hat tip: Tony Hutchison.)

Israel's war against Hamas

Alan Dershowitz argues that the killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin by the IDF was 'a moral and lawful instance of pre-emptive self-defence'.

Amir Oren writes of what may be to come in Gaza.

The Emmylou Review #6

I just googled Emmylou Harris and found that she scores about 209,000. Most of those have got nothing to do with me, and I know you'll all be saying that this is because I never continue with the Emmylou Review. To which I say: not true, here I am continuing with it; and even so, it's not going to make much of a dent in the proportions; and I'm sorry for being late - but you know how it is. Anyway, here's a useful site to kick off the latest instalment: it collects the lyrics of all the songs on Emmylou's albums.

1985 - The Ballad of Sally Rose

In my own view, this is the first album since Roses in the Snow which can be spoken of as in the same 'league' as that and some of the albums preceding it. One indication is how very difficult I found it to get the width of a cigarette paper between the half dozen best tracks even after several fresh listenings. Hence, as many as four bubbling-unders on this occasion.

Ballad of Sally Rose was written with Paul Kennerley and, like his earlier The Legend of Jesse James - on which Emmylou sings two tracks and is in company with Johnny Cash and Levon Helm among others - it is a concept album, telling the story of the eponymous singer. I can't fault it. It's Emmylou back to her best. If you only own a few of her albums, this should be one of them. Top track: Sweet Chariot. Runner-up: Bad News. Bubbling-unders: Woman Walk the Line; Timberline; Sweetheart of the Rodeo; KSOS.

1986 - Thirteen

This album has two outstanding tracks, and they get the two top spots here, obviously. The first of them is a lovely ballad, written by the same duo, then husband and wife, that wrote the songs on Ballad of Sally Rose. The second is a Cajun number which has also been done by the great D.L. Menard. Otherwise, by her standards it's good Emmylou but not in the same elevated bracket as the last. Top track: When I Was Yours. Runner-up: Lacassine Special. Bubbling-under: Mystery Train.

1987 - Angel Band

One with a difference - an entire album of close harmony bluegrass gospel. The singing is excellent, with Vince Gill doing his thang on tenor vocals; but it'll depend on whether you like the genre. Top track: Bright Morning Stars. Runner-up: When He Calls. Bubbling-under: Where Could I Go but to the Lord.

[The first five instalments are here, here, and - on the old normblog site - here (November 19), here (November 16) and here (November 2). Also relevant, though I omitted to make it part of the series, is this.]