Mick Hartley

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Last Thursday the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution proposed by Islamic countries noting its deep concern about defamation of religion (well, one religion in particular) and urged governments to take action to prohibit it. Roy W Brown, of the International and Humanist Ethical Association, responds (via):

For the past eleven years the organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing the 57 Islamic States, has been tightening its grip on the throat of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yesterday, 28 March 2008, they finally killed it.

With the support of their allies including China, Russia and Cuba (none well-known for their defence of human rights) the Islamic States succeeded in forcing through an amendment to a resolution on Freedom of Expression that has turned the entire concept on its head. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression will now be required to report on the “abuse” of this most cherished freedom by anyone who, for example, dares speak out against Sharia laws that require women to be stoned to death for adultery or young men to be hanged for being gay, or against the marriage of girls as young as nine, as in Iran.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan saw the writing on the wall three years ago when he spoke of the old Commission on Human Rights having “become too selective and too political in its work”. Piecemeal reform would not be enough. The old system needed to be swept away and replaced by something better. The Human Rights Council was supposed to be that new start, a Council whose members genuinely supported, and were prepared to defend, the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Yet since its inception in June 2006, the Human Rights Council has failed to condemn the most egregious examples of human rights abuse in the Sudan, Byelorussia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and elsewhere, whilst repeatedly condemning Israel and Israel alone.

Three years later Annan’s dream lies shattered, and the Human Rights Council stands exposed as incapable of fulfilling its central role: the promotion and protection of human rights. The Council died yesterday in Geneva, and with it the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose 60th anniversary we were actually celebrating this year.

There has been a seismic shift in the balance of power in the UN system. For over a decade the Islamic States have been flexing their muscles. Yesterday they struck. There can no longer be any pretence that the Human Rights Council can defend human rights. The moral leadership of the UN system has moved from the States who created the UN in the aftermath of the Second World War, committed to the concepts of equality, individual freedom and the rule of law, to the Islamic States, whose allegiance is to a narrow, medieval worldview defined exclusively in terms of man’s duties towards Allah, and to their fellow-travellers, the States who see their future economic and political interests as being best served by their alliances with the Islamic States. [...]

On the vote, the amendment was adopted by 27 votes to 15 against, with three abstentions.
The Sri Lankan delegate explained clearly his reasons for supporting the amendment:
“.. if we regulate certain things ‘minimally’ we may be able to prevent them from being enacted violently on the streets of our towns and cities.”

In other words: Don’t exercise your right to freedom of expression because your opponents may become violent. For the first time in the 60 year history of UN Human Rights bodies, a fundamental human right has been limited simply because of the possible violent reaction by the enemies of human rights.

The violence we have seen played out in reaction to the Danish cartoons is thus excused by the Council – it was the cartoonists whose freedom of expression needed to be regulated. And Theo van Gogh can be deemed responsible for his own death.

Militant Mettle

The North Koreans aren't happy about the recent election of a conservative government in South Korea:

North Korean Air Force fighters have approached skies near the demilitarized zone and the Northern Limit Line, the de facto border in the West Sea, on some 10 occasions since Feb. 25, when the new conservative South Korean government was inaugurated. On each occasion, South Korean fighters immediately scrambled to intercept them.

Last Friday, the North fired short-range missiles into the West Sea while fighters also flew close to the South as many as five times, creating simultaneous tension in the sea and the skies, a South Korean Defense Ministry official said. And on the ground, even after a regular mobile exercise was finished, the elite Mechanized Corps stationed in Hwanghae Province was recently spotted moving south -- an unprecedented military move. [...]

Meanwhile, in a telephone message to the South last Saturday, North Korea two-star general Kim Young-chol, the chief delegate to inter-Korean general-grade talks, demanded South Korea apologize for and withdraw what it says was a threat of a "preemptive strike" made by Gen. Kim Tae-young, the designated chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Elaborating on a plan to counter a nuclear attack from the North in his confirmation hearing, Kim said the South would identify and hit enemy locations suspected of storing nuclear weapons. The Defense Ministry denies Kim was talking of a preemptive strike. It is to decide within the next few days whether to send a reply to the North.

It's that threat of a pre-emptive strike that really gets them. Check out what the official DPRK news agency has to say:

The head of the DPRK side's delegation to the inter-Korean general-level military talks sent a notice to the chief delegate of the south side delegation on Saturday clarifying the stand of the Korean People's Army as regards the outbursts calling for "a preemptive attack" let loose by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the south Korean forces.

The head of the delegation in the notice recalled that at a confirmation hearing of the "National Assembly" on March 26 the chairman raised a hue and cry over the "nuclear threat" from the DPRK and went the lengths of calling for mounting a "preemptive attack" on its nuclear bases by use of precision guided weapons when necessary.

These outbursts are the gravest challenge ever in the history of the inter-Korean relations and a reckless provocation little short of a war declaration against the DPRK, he noted.

And, what's more:

The threat that the south Korean forces will make a "preemptive strike" at the nuclear bases of the compatriots is a manifestation of the political immaturity and military ignorance as he does not know how our nuclear weapons were manufactured and at what they are targeted. What he uttered is nothing but a servile attitude betraying the sycophancy and submission towards his master as the guy echoed his brigandish assertion in a bid to put it into practice....

As we have clarified more than once, a preemptive strike is by no means a monopoly of the one party on the Korean Peninsula where there goes on the state of neither war nor peace. Our revolutionary armed forces always keep themselves battle ready as they have followed all military moves of the south Korean forces with vigilance. They will counter any slightest move for "preemptive strikes" at their nuclear bases with more rapid and more powerful preemptive strikes of their own mode. It is the traditional method of counteraction and militant mettle peculiar to our revolutionary armed forces to return fire for fire and counter any hard-line step with the toughest measure. The Korean People's Army whose mission is to defend the socialist country under the banner of Songun will not remain an onlooker till the warmongers make a "preemptive strike". They should bear in mind that once the more powerful preemptive strike of our own mode be launched, it will not merely plunge everything into flames but reduce it to ashes.

That's telling 'em.

Against the Muslim Brotherhood

Now here's a brave critic of Islamism. Rif'at Al-Sa'id, head of the Egyptian Tagammu' party:

Rif'at Al-Sa'id: Our party strives for a civil, progressive, democratic, and liberal future, in which the rights of the citizens will be respected, a future in which the livelihood and liberties will be guaranteed, as well as better education, better housing, and better healthcare, a future in which the rights of women and of Copts will be respected. How can I possibly accept a movement that rejects the future and looks back towards the past?

Interviewer: You mean the Muslim Brotherhood?

Rif'at Al-Sa'id: Yes. They voted against the citizenship law. This is the greatest political mistake that the Muslim Brotherhood ever committed, because it brought eternal disgrace upon the movement. They reject women's rights and say that women cannot be rulers.

Interviewer: Do they mold Islam as they wish?

Rif'at Al-Sa'id: Let me tell you something: 80% of all Muslims live in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, where women are allowed to rule. What, are they sinners? Are 80% of all Muslims wrong, and only Mahdi 'Akef and his movement right? They rejected the principle of rights for Copts. This is unacceptable. My battle is not in support of or against anyone. The battle I am waging is to protect Egypt – to protect its future, its art, its literature, its music, its poetry, its women, its Copts, its freedom, and its social justice. The Muslim Brotherhood are not interested in social justice. They are just like the government.[...]

If they come to power – socially, economically, and in terms of civil liberties, they will act the same way as the government, if not worse. They came to power in Gaza. What did they do there? They spoke of democracy, but once they came to power, they took one of their opponents and threw him from the 18th floor. They stripped somebody else... What has this got to do with Islam?

Interviewer: You are referring to Hamas?

Rif'at Al-Sa'id: Yes. They stripped him, and dragged him on the ground. This is unacceptable. These crimes, which were perpetrated by Hamas, are a disgrace to their leaders in Egypt, because Hamas is merely a branch of...

Interviewer: Does Hamas have strong ties with the Muslims Brotherhood in Egypt?

Rif'at Al-Sa'id: Hamas is merely a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood is absolute – for better of for worse. Whoever violates this allegiance is "released" from the movement. Do you know what this means? They slaughter him. It's explicit in their writings.

We Are Lost Souls

Shoreditch, this morning:

Wildersness

Those who are interested in watching Geert Wilders' film Fitna (Wikipedia link) will no doubt have seen it by now. It's not difficult to find, despite Livelink removing it from their servers as a result of threats received. It's pretty much what you'd expect: footage of terrorist outrages, interspersed with clerics preaching jihad and quotes from the Koran: nothing that anyone who's inclined to give it a view won't be familiar with already. It's perhaps less offensive than many feared, though it's early days yet to judge the overall reaction of the Muslim world. Omar Bakri, interestingly, didn't find it offensive at all: "If we leave out the first images and the sound of the page being torn, it could be a film by the [Islamist] Mujahideen".

Anyway, I'm not going to include it here, or link to it. It's not that I disagree with the substance of it. It seems to me quite obvious, beyond controversy, that Islam is used to justify terrorist outrages, and that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of Islamic clerics around the world regularly exhorting their congregations to acts of violence against us kuffars, us non-believers. Whether this is intrinsic to Islam, or is, as many like to argue, a perversion of it, is not something I'm particularly well qualified to judge, but my feeling is that, yes, that's what Islam is like. These clerics aren't just making it all up, or twisting the words of the Koran or the Hadiths. That there are so many Muslims who live quiet modest lives, with no interest in imposing themselves or their values on others, is more down to the basic decency of the average person than to the teachings of their religion.

Secularism is, clearly and unequivocally, unacceptable to traditional Islam - yet secularism is the bedrock of Western culture. So yes, there's a problem - but there are Muslims who advocate secularism, and I believe that we'll see more and more of them. Nor do I think that here in Europe we're heading for some kind of Eurabia. We - particularly in Britain - were too taken in by the joys of multiculturalism to see what was happening under our noses, but now we're clearer about the dangers, and we're seeing ex-jihadis coming out and telling us their stories. We're by no means out of the woods yet, but I believe we're at least starting to head in the right direction.

Which brings us back to Geert. He's a right-wing populist: an incorrigible self-publicist, leader of the Party for Freedom, against immigration from non-Western countries, and generally, in my view, an unpleasant piece of work. It shouldn't be forgotten that he thinks the Koran should be banned in the Netherlands. As he knows, this isn't going to happen. His motives are, to say the least, dubious. Geert Wilders is presently, without a doubt, the best known Dutch politician outside Holland: a situation with which he's no doubt very happy. Which is not necessarily to say he's only in it for the publicity. He may be, but I imagine he genuinely believes that Islam will never adapt to Western culture - and Allah knows there's certainly enough evidence to support him in that belief. But there's something unpleasant about Fitna. Whatever you may think about Islam, to make a film so hostile to the beliefs of an immigrant minority, when there's a real danger of backlash by the native Dutch, is just plain nasty. He's stirring up trouble, intentionally. He's going in the wrong direction.

So that's the problem as far as I'm concerned. It's a tricky one, no doubt about it. I think he's right, in general, about Islam, but I don't think he's being fair to Muslims, and particularly to those Muslims in Holland - in Europe generally - who are happy to live in a secular society and just get on quietly with their lives. He's not helping them at all, the very people we should surely be encouraging. It'll just confirm their more confrontational co-religionists in their belief that it's an all-or-nothing, win or lose situation.

It also lends credibility to those who complain that the West just likes to insult Muslims, or those like the UN's Ban Ki-Moon who want to ban the film:

I condemn, in the strongest terms, the airing of Geert Wilders’ offensively anti-Islamic film. There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence. The right of free expression is not at stake here. I acknowledge the efforts of the Government of the Netherlands to stop the broadcast of this film, and appeal for calm to those understandably offended by it. Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility.

Next stop, a general ban on offending religion sensibilities. Thanks Geert.

The film should certainly not be banned, and Muslims should learn to take criticism like everybody else, but it's hard to deny that Wilders did set out to offend.

Can't Touch This

Chinese MC Hammer fan does the moves, while Mum pays him no mind. (Via)

A Shrunken Dense Dead Lump of Something

Just in case you didn't have enough things to worry about:

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

Very unlikely? Somehow that's not quite the reassurance we might reasonably expect, given the stakes.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

On the plus side, though, this Walter L. Wagner does seem a little cranky:

This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.

Blandiloquent

Supposedly the 100 most beautiful words in English. A few choice words there that I didn't know - esculent, niveous, petrichor (the smell of earth after a rain), potamophilous. I can't help thinking they've got some of their definitions wrong though. Colporteur - book peddlar? Surely it should be a tunesmith of a certain type. Noel Coward, for instance, was something of a colporteur. And blandiloquent, beautiful and flattering. I don't think so. A politician, perhaps, making a blandiloquent speech....

Superman and Sister

Ben Macintyre takes the opportunity of the row over the fate of Nietzsche's grave to revisit the story of Elisabeth Nietzsche, the philosopher's sister:

Before insanity struck him down in 1889, at the age of 44, Nietzsche lived in fear of being misunderstood. “Above all,” he wrote in Ecce Homo, “do not mistake me for someone else.” He was a conservative elitist, an aphorist of brilliance championing individual greatness in the midst of mediocrity. His writing is explosive and apocalyptic, dense and complex, and often shocking in its violence.

But Nietzsche was no Nazi. He vigorously opposed German nationalism, as he rejected all mass movements; he had no time for ideologues, mocked the notion of a Teutonic master race and loathed anti-Semitism in all its forms.

Elisabeth, by contrast, was an enthusiastic Fascist. An early acolyte of Richard Wagner, she and her furiously anti-Semitic husband Bernhard Förster (this newspaper described him as “the most representative Jew-baiter in all of Germany”) picked up on one of the composer's barmier ideas, and set off for Paraguay in 1886 to establish an Aryan, vegetarian republic in the middle of the jungle, which they called New Germany.

There's an excellent book about this Paraguayan adventure, as it happens, by, um, Ben Macintyre. Anyway - back to the Nazis:

Elisabeth avidly offered up her brother's writings in support of militarism and Nazi world domination. Mussolini, she declared, was “the genius who rediscovered the values of the Nietzsche spirit... Nietzsche would have regarded him as the splendid disciple”. Nietzsche, I am certain, would have regarded Mussolini as a dangerous buffoon.

Hitler's will to power sent Elisabeth into paroxysms of delight. Nietzsche's warnings against nationalism and the dangers of anti-Semitism were conveniently ignored. “The link between National Socialism and Nietzsche is the heroism in both their souls,” she declared. The Nazis eagerly embraced Nietzsche, or rather his sister's mangled version: Hitler, who probably never read a word of his writings, was photographed gazing contemplatively at a bust of the great man.

While accepting that Nietzsche was no anti-Semite, I can't help thinking that all these apologetics are a little overdone. Every time you read something about Nietzsche, it'll be accompanied by some expression of regret at the way he was appropriated by the Nazis. Fair enough no doubt, and of course he could have had no idea how his views would appear in the light of what the Nazis did, but you can't help thinking that, with the Übermensch, and his views on master and slave moralities, the question of why some of the more philosophically inclined Nazis might have seen him as a precursor was never going to be one of life's great mysteries.

From Wikipedia:

[H]e offers the will to power as an explanation of all behavior; this ties into his "perspective of life", which he regards as "beyond good and evil", denying a universal morality for all human beings. Religion and the master and slave moralities feature prominently as Nietzsche re-evaluates deeply-held humanistic beliefs, portraying even domination, appropriation and injury to the weak as not universally objectionable.

Yes, he contradicted himself; he enjoyed throwing off aphorisms ("Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual") to, as it were, épater le bourgeois; but his subsequent reputation can hardly be blamed entirely on his wretched sister.

Super Mosque

Where are the moderate Muslims? goes the cry. Well, here's one - Dr T. Hargey, Chairman of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford - writing to the Times today about the controversial plans for a super mosque next to the Olympic site in East London:

The Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford (MECO) is strongly opposed to the building of the proposed “super mosque” near the Olympic village in East London (report, March 22). This is sponsored by the ultra-orthodox Tablighi Jamaat (TJ), whose agenda is to transform the site into the headquarters for radical Wahhabi sectarianism in the UK.

More than any other radical Muslim group in the UK, TJ has sought to deepen the growing marginalisation of British Muslims by highlighting their isolation from the mainstream. TJ followers are known to support a virulent, intolerant version of Islam which supports women being fully covered and endorses medieval Saudi tribal rulings relating to apostasy, jihad, blasphemy, the oppression of women and religious exclusivity. None of the above is sanctioned in the Koran.

TJ seeks to make this £75 million mosque the magnet for religious fundamentalists and cultural supremacists within Britain's Muslim community. Rather than promoting an inclusive, pluralistic Muslim faith rooted in and relevant to 21st-century Britain, TJ wishes to promote a reactionary tendency which is gaining ground. A slick marketing campaign and the commissioning of new architects for the Abbey Mills mosque cannot conceal the potential threat it poses.

MECO therefore calls upon all forward-looking British Muslims to protest against the proposed mosque. Failure to prevent it will result in a Saudi-influenced and financed Islamic ideology that will generate greater social friction instead of community cohesion in contemporary Britain. This key battle is one which all integrated British Muslims, and the British people at large, must win.

[The link to the Times report mentioned in the letter is currently down.]