Mick Hartley

Escaping Darfur

The discovery of two bodies in the hold of a cargo ship in Ayr last week prompts this tale in The Scotsman of escape from Darfur:

It is not known what horrors the two men must have endured, or expectations they must have had, to force them into that airtight prison. But they are not alone: the European Councils for Refugees and Exiles estimates that 3,000 to 25,000 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean from Africa between January and July 2006.

Abdo Yahya Abdullah, a Darfuri now seeking asylum in Gloucester, is one of those who survived. His own subsea hell – a dark hold stacked with bottles and boxes where he cowered for many days – is imprinted on his consciousness and his dreams.

The man who had brought him aboard – from a speedboat that left Port Sudan, Darfur, in the middle of the night – would deliver food and water and allow Abdullah to follow him silently along corridors to a toilet, then back to the hold.

"I was in the ship for 16 or 17 days, I don't know exactly," said Abdullah. "I didn't know where I was going. I was afraid, but I didn't know what to do. I had just had enough. I chose it as better than to die. I thought I could go for a bit and then maybe come back."  [...]

After more than a fortnight in the small storage area, he was transferred to another boat and put inside a lorry with some food and a bottle to use as a toilet, and told to stay until it stopped.

"Someone came and opened the covers of the lorry and when he saw me, he started shouting," Abdullah said. "I couldn't understand the language. I walked out. It was very early in the morning, it was dark. I was walking about for about five hours. I didn't know which country I was in.

"When the sun came out, I could see people. I tried to talk to them, but I didn't understand what they were saying. Frantically, I started running after black people, I thought I could find someone who could speak my language."

Eventually, at a bus station, he found an Arabic speaker, who told him he was in Birmingham, England, and gave him £5 and directions to a police station. It was September 2004 – about a month since his journey had begun.

Predictably enough, Abdullah's asylum request was turned down by the Home Office. With the help of the Aegis Trust he's now appealing that decision:

Two years after reaching England, Abdullah met a man from home. He learned that his younger brother had been shot and his mother was mentally ill and unable to care for his son, who had been adopted.

Unable to work or sleep, he takes a sleeping tablet every day and is haunted by dreams – some of a lost but happy life with his family, others of being shot or tortured. Yet although now trapped in a different hell to the one escaped he, at least, is not one of the forgotten who did not make it.

Dalrymple on Addiction

Theodore Dalrymple returns to one of his pet themes: drug addiction as a moral rather than a medical issue.

It is unusual for politicians to face up to the obvious, but the Scottish Executive seems for once to have done so: it has recognised what has long stared it in the face, namely that dishing out methadone to drug addicts is not the answer to their problems or to the problems that they cause society. A different approach is needed.

Perhaps in 100 years historians will wonder why so many of the governing elite, from senior doctors to Cabinet ministers, persisted for so long in the belief that doling out methadone was the answer. The explanation, I think, will be that they wilfully misunderstood the nature of the problem.  [...]

The fundamental error that the Scottish Executive has now admitted is in having regarded addiction to heroin as a technical medical problem, to be solved by technical medical means. But that old approach amounts to a surrender to blackmail: give me what I want or I will continue to behave badly and to hold you responsible for the ill-effects of my own behaviour.

Suppose we gave money to burglars to induce them to stop burgling. No doubt most of them would stop for a length of time depending upon how much we gave them. But this does not mean that money is the treatment of the dreadful disease of burglary, or because we prevented certain individuals from continuing to burgle it means that we had reduced the disease of burglary in society as a whole. Rather, we would have encouraged its spread.

This is precisely the logic that has been applied to drug addiction. Just how precisely is evident from the Government's recent declared policy that clinics should now give drug addicts money or other rewards for not taking drugs (as least as proved by drug-free urine samples, something experienced drug addicts have long learnt to provide). This is the first time in the history of medicine, so far as I know, that bribery has been considered a medical treatment.

It's a nice line, but rather counter to his argument: if they're prepared to offer bribes to persuade drug users to quit, then clearly they're not seeing the problem as a medical one. The analogy with burglary makes the point clear. It may not be the smartest way to deal with the problem, but at least they're following the Dalrymple logic and treating drug use as a habit susceptible to moral decision-making rather than a helpless compulsion.

Addiction to heroin is a medical problem only to a minor extent, which is why predominantly medical means will never solve the problem. Most of Britain's 300,000 addicts are drawn from broken families, have a poor education, are without much hope for (or for that matter fear of) the future and have no cultural life, intellectual interests or religious belief. Delusory euphoria - the paradise at three pence a bottle that De Quincey described in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater - is the best that they think that they can hope for in life. This is not a medical problem. Where addiction is concerned, it is time to throw physic to the dogs.

A different approach from methadone may well be needed - wasn't this one of William Burroughs' favourite topics all those years ago? - but it's hard to see the criminalisation of heroin as a great success story. So do we just tell users to pull themselves together?

Dignity and Ice Cream

The President's Council on Bioethics recently issued a report, Human Dignity and Bioethics, which uses the notion of human dignity as a way of putting limits on biomedical research. In a long essay, which is worth reading in full, Steven Pinker takes the whole thing apart:

How did the United States, the world's scientific powerhouse, reach a point at which it grapples with the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century biomedicine using Bible stories, Catholic doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegory? Part of the answer lies with the outsize influence of [Leon] Kass, the Council's founding director..., who came to prominence in the 1970s with his moralistic condemnation of in vitro fertilization, then popularly known as "test-tube babies." As soon as the procedure became feasible, the country swiftly left Kass behind, and, for most people today, it is an ethical no-brainer. That did not stop Kass from subsequently assailing a broad swath of other medical practices as ethically troubling, including organ transplants, autopsies, contraception, antidepressants, even the dissection of cadavers.

Kass frequently makes his case using appeals to "human dignity" (and related expressions like "fundamental aspects of human existence" and "the central core of our humanity"). In an essay with the revealing title "L'Chaim and Its Limits, " Kass voiced his frustration that the rabbis he spoke with just couldn't see what was so terrible about technologies that would extend life, health, and fertility. "The desire to prolong youthfulness," he wrote in reply, is "an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity." The years that would be added to other people's lives, he judged, were not worth living: "Would professional tennis players really enjoy playing 25 percent more games of tennis?" And, as empirical evidence that "mortality makes life matter," he notes that the Greek gods lived "shallow and frivolous lives"--an example of his disconcerting habit of treating fiction as fact. (Kass cites Brave New World five times in his Dignity essay.)

Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a "mortal danger," he writes, in the notion "that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it." He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

And, in 2001, this man, whose pro-death, anti-freedom views put him well outside the American mainstream, became the President's adviser on bioethics--a position from which he convinced the president to outlaw federally funded research that used new stem-cell lines. In his speech announcing the stem-cell policy, Bush invited Kass to form the Council. Kass packed it with conservative scholars and pundits, advocates of religious (particularly Catholic) principles in the public sphere, and writers with a paper trail of skittishness toward biomedical advances, together with a smattering of scientists (mostly with a reputation for being religious or politically conservative). After several members opposed Kass on embryonic stem-cell research, on therapeutic cloning (which Kass was in favor of criminalizing), and on the distortions of science that kept finding their way into Council reports, Kass fired two of them (biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and philosopher William May) and replaced them with Christian-affiliated scholars.

The ice-cream comments, as Pinker could perhaps have made clearer, are not from the Council on Bioethics report, but from a 1999 book The Hungry Soul. Still...

Africando

Vocalist Amadou Balake from Burkina Faso joins up with some of New York's finest salsa musicians:

Africando was a project of Senegalese producer Ibrahim Sylla, combining West African vocalists with NY instrumentalists. So far they've managed eight CDs, starting in 1993. Latin music has always been popular in West Africa, inspiring, most notably, the Congolese rumba that developed into soukous. No surprise really, considering the African roots of Latin music, but it's still extraordinary just how well the Africando project worked - and how popular it was.

Here, with gratuitous dancers, is perhaps their most famous tune, Yay Boy: La Bamba, from the early days: and - a Trinidadian touch - a version of that old calypso Shame and Scandal in the Family.

A Country or a Cause?

Amir Taheri on the failure of each and every attempt to establish a dialogue with Tehran:

The reason is that Iran is gripped by a typical crisis of identity that afflicts most nations that pass through a revolutionary experience. The Islamic Republic does not know how to behave: as a nation-state, or as the embodiment of a revolution with universal messianic pretensions. Is it a country or a cause?  [...]

The problem that the world, including the U.S., has today is not with Iran as a nation-state but with the Islamic Republic as a revolutionary cause bent on world conquest under the guidance of the "Hidden Imam." The following statement by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the "Supreme leader" of the Islamic Republic – who Mr. Obama admits has ultimate power in Iran -- exposes the futility of the very talks Mr. Obama proposes: "You have nothing to say to us. We object. We do not agree to a relationship with you! We are not prepared to establish relations with powerful world devourers like you! The Iranian nation has no need of the United States, nor is the Iranian nation afraid of the United States. We . . . do not accept your behavior, your oppression and intervention in various parts of the world."

So, how should one deal with a regime of this nature? The challenge for the U.S. and the world is finding a way to help Iran absorb its revolutionary experience, stop being a cause, and re-emerge as a nation-state.  [...]

As a nation, Iranians are among the few in the world that still like the U.S. As a revolution, however, Iran is the principal bastion of anti-Americanism. Last month, Tehran hosted an international conference titled "A World Without America." Indeed, since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, Iran has returned to a more acute state of revolutionary hysteria. Mr. Ahmadinejad seems to truly believe the "Hidden Imam" is coming to conquer the world for his brand of Islam. He does not appear to be interested in the kind of "carrots" that Secretary Rice was offering two years ago and Mr. Obama is hinting at today.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is talking about changing the destiny of mankind, while Mr. Obama and his foreign policy experts offer spare parts for Boeings or membership in the World Trade Organization. Perhaps Mr. Obama is unaware that one of Mr. Ahmadinejad's first acts was to freeze Tehran's efforts for securing WTO membership because he regards the outfit as "a nest of conspiracies by Zionists and Americans."

Neurobabble

Stick neuro- in front, and straightaway you're sounding serious, scientific. Look what it did for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Now there are scores of these neurologisms - neuro-marketing, neuro-law, neuro-politics - most of them based on brain scanning: the phrenology of our times. Psychiatrist Daniel Carlat gets a personal reading at the Amen Clinic in California ($3,300 a pop):

After another 15 minutes of questions and conversation, he says, "Let's look at your scans." He takes the images that he printed out this morning and puts them side by side on a large table. He points to several views of the surface of my brain. "What I see here is that activity in your prefrontal cortex is low at rest but becomes better when you concentrate, and your thalamus becomes more active, too. I think this means you have a predisposition to depression."

I nod. Scrutinizing the scans some more, he says, "You need to be busy to be happy. Your brain is cool at rest. You need stuff in your life to feel alive, together, and connected." He looks at another view, this one showing only the most active regions of my brain. "In this scan, you have increased activity in your thalamus, your two basal ganglia, and your cingulate cortex." He picks up a pen and draws a line connecting these four regions to the right lateral temporal lobe. "I call this the diamond plus.' It's a pattern of angst, and we see it in people who have had significant trauma in their lives."

He puts down his pen and turns to me. "I would love to see your brain healthier, because you'll be happier if it's healthier," he says. "It's too low in activity. I recommend a multivitamin, and to get better blood flow I would take gingko." Just before I leave, he advises me to lay off the snowboarding and play more tennis. "With the lowered activity in your cerebellum," he explains, "I'd like to see you do more coordination sports." 

....I find myself comparing my assessment meeting with Amen to experiences I've had with shrewd palm readers. Like them, Amen made vague pronouncements that could apply to anyone: "You're happier when you're busy." When he made specific statements about my moods and life events, they seemed to be based on information he obtained the old-fashioned way — by asking questions. He already knew about my family history of depression and my mother's suicide when he mentioned a "predisposition to depression" and "significant trauma." Occasionally, he was completely off the mark, like when he saw neural signs of temper problems. In fact, when my wife and I argue, my calmness is exasperating, leading her to ask, "Do you even have a pulse?"

"All right," I say to Rubin. "Let's assume that Amen really has no solid evidence that imaging can diagnose conditions. But he does seem to make some people feel better when they are in distress."

"Oh, I'll give him that," he says. "It's a fantastic placebo effect." I'm reminded of a recent study in which Yale researchers gave participants various nonsensical explanations of human behavior. Half of the time, the researchers added the phrase "Brain scans indicate" before the explanation, and then inserted the spurious finding. When this brain-speak was added, participants judged the explanations more satisfying.

Which is not to say that brain scanning doesn't have its medical uses, or isn't an interesting research tool, but it's that same old urge to jump ahead of the science and find direct links between the brain and the mind when it just ain't that simple. Or, to put it another way, it's yet another tool in the armoury of the psychotherapy industry to extract money from the gullible.

The Goals of Global Jewry

Here's Saleh Riqab, Hamas deputy minister of religious endowment, on Al-Aqsa TV, explaining how Darwin, Durkheim, Sartre, Freud, and Monica Lewinsky serve the interests of global Jewry. Freemasonry and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, unsurprisingly, also feature:

Saleh Riqab: The goal of the Zionist movement is to establish a state in Palestine, which would become a base for ruling the entire world. Its other goals are to destroy the religions it opposes, particularly Islam, to corrupt values and morality, to spread permissiveness and sex, and to generate moral decline. They have come up with many means to achieve this, such as inventing philosophical theories that destroy religion and morality. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim founded the theory of the formation of religion, which attributes it to reason – which means that religion did not originate from God. This is known as the theory of "collective thought." Jean-Paul Sartre, founder of existentialism, which is based on atheism, was a famous French Jew. The psychologist Freud, who interpreted the infant's relations with his mother as sexual, said, when he was given an award: I have never renounced my Judaism.

There are also theories that were invented by non-Jews, but they disseminate them, knowing that they are scientifically false, such as the theory of Darwin. Darwin was not Jewish, but they exploited his theory. Even though new Darwinist theories have appeared, they spread the original theory, because the concept of "survival of the fittest" serves their colonialist needs.

Interviewer: That's what the theory says.

Saleh Riqab: Yes. It serves the goals of global Jewry. In addition, they established destructive movements to fight religion and morality, to corrupt the leaders throughout the world, and to break down social relations among nations. This was led by global Freemasonry, which was founded by three prominent Jews, the first of whom was Herod. This is a long well-known story – the role of the Jews in creating the Masonic movement. The Freemason movement used various methods to bring the political, philosophical, and literary leaders worldwide to their knees. I remember the names of Arab leaders – some are dead and others are still alive – who joined the Masonic movement. They were brought down. There were even Palestinians among them. [...]

We see this clearly in the U.S. elections. Both Democrats and Republicans compete to please the state of the Jews. That's why when a Democrat comes to occupied Palestine, he puts on a religious skullcap, goes to the Western Wall, bangs his head against the wall, and says: "Your philosophy and the need to please you is now inside my head." They all compete with one another, but the Jews maintain a balance, and they always prefer the Christian Zionists. If a Democrat comes to power, like [Bill] Clinton – who served them well in Oslo and elsewhere, and almost served them in the second Camp David, but then, he made statements [they didn't like] – what did Zionism do? It sent him the Jewish Monica, with whom Clinton had sex in the American White House. Clinton left [the White House], but there are thousands of pages documenting his sexual depravity, because he had sex in the White House. I read a report that Clinton used to call Arab leaders and talk to them, while she was having sex with him.

Interviewer: My God!

Saleh Riqab: These things are documented, but the Arabs don't read them. [...]

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which are a product of the 1897 Basel Congress, discuss how the Jews should seize control of the world. In Europe, and especially in the U.S., there was a quick Jewish takeover of the major mass media, because in the West, the mass media shapes their mentality and their views. They don't read very much, they just listen.

Crumbs!

When Robert Crumb became literary editor of The Observer in 1996, the book world was all ink and paper, the smell of cigarettes, coffee, and strong drink...

So runs the Arts & Letters Daily link to this story. Robert Crumb, literary editor of the Observer? It would've been a great choice, but, sadly, they mean Robert McCrum.

Update: shame - they've corrected it already.

Democratiya 13

Alan Johnson introduces the Summer 2008 edition of Democratiya. A number of the articles look back at 1968, forty years on. There's also a review of a newly translated book from Sheikh Qarawadi, published for the first time in English and distributed here for British Muslim readers, which makes clear how the great man, and erstwhile chum of Ken Livingstone, views the Israel/Palestine question: not as a political but as an apocalyptic struggle. From the preface:

In this book, the eminent contemporary scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi gives clear answers to the reasons and removes the ambiguities to whoever seeks the truth and justice concerning the Palestinian issue. These answers acquaint Muslims with the dimensions of the issue with the Zionists who usurped this pearl of ours. The battle between them and us is not a battle of borders but a battle of existence. It is the battle that will end and the Muslims that will be victorious.

Plus an interview with Matthias Küntzel, on Islamists and anti-Semitism. Here he is on the central importance of the subjugation of women in Islamist ideology:

It's very hard to analyse Islamism without resorting to sexual psychology. I talk in my book ["Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11"] about the inability of the Muslim Brotherhood to accept 'the Other' or 'Otherness'. And this refusal always begins with the relationship between men and women. If you do not properly subjugate your wife and women you can't be an Islamist, because in that case you would be accepting the other as an equal. And this is seen as being against the Koran and the holy scriptures.

The Charter of Hamas is most interesting when it comes to the role of women. They say women are important because they are needed to raise Jihad warriors. This is supposed to be their main function. And they add that the West wants to influence Muslim women by printing journals with nasty pictures and whispering wrong ideas. So every Muslim woman who likes modernity is framed as a traitor. The Islamists' perception of the woman – their refusal to deal with otherness as something equal – is at the very core of Islamism and antisemitism.

Closing Time

Dead London pubs: with the smoking ban, more, regrettably, are on the way.

Clockwise: Bow, Shoreditch, Islington, Hackney Wick. Click to enlarge.

As far as pubs go, Paul Talling beat me to it with his Derelict London website. Three of these establishments are featured there. And the book is now out.

When it comes to shop fronts, though, I lead the way.