Mick Hartley

Iran Road Accidents

Reading of the terrible accident in Iran today, in which at least 70 people were killed when a tanker crashed into some buses, I saw this statistic:

This is one of the worst ever single accidents on Iran's roads, which are notoriously dangerous, our correspondent says.

Around 22,000 people are killed every year in traffic accidents in the country.

On a monthly average, that is higher than the death rate in the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, our correspondent notes.

22,000 killed every year?

Idiot Wind

What makes the new translation of the Bible especially wonderful is its sheer ham-fistedness. And yet here's Williams the Archbishop idiotically singing its praises. This has already been well covered by Oliver Kamm, Peter Cuthbertson and Laban Tall, but I can't resist adding my own favourite:

The translation is pioneering in its accessibility, and changes the original Greek and Hebrew nomenclature into modern nicknames. St. Peter becomes "Rocky," Mary Magdalene becomes "Maggie," Aaron becomes "Ron," Andronicus becomes "Andy" and Barabbas becomes "Barry."

Are they sure this isn't a joke?

The Lessons of Soham

Ross Clark in the Times takes apart the whole witch-hunt mentality which has seen the vilification of the Chief Constable of Humberside:

The authorities in Salem, Massachussets did not have a computer database of alleged and suspected offences back in 1692, but we can imagine how useful they would have found one. It would not just have been 20 citizens executed for witchcraft; it would have been half the town. Replace the “witch” with “sex offender” and 17th-century Salem has more than a little in common with 21st-century Britain. The murder of Soham schoolgirls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells was a despicable crime, for which former caretaker Ian Huntley has properly been jailed for life. But the fallout from the Bichard report into the Soham case threatens our liberty by putting us at the mercy of rumour and false allegation.

The nub of Sir Michael Bichard’s report is this: Huntley would have been prevented from taking up his job as a caretaker at Soham and, therefore, from murdering Jessica and Holly, if the Humberside Police had only bothered to keep proper records and been prepared to share those records with potential employers. For his failure to do this, David Westwood, the Chief Constable of Humberside, has been ruined. He has been suspended by the Home Secretary and vilified by the general public.

Yet there was a good reason why Mr Westwood and his staff did not go about telling all and sundry that Huntley was a vicious sex offender. Until the conclusion of the Soham trial in December, Huntley had never been convicted of any sex offence. He had been accused of having sex with four under-age girls, of raping four women and indecently assaulting an 11-year-old girl. But in a free society, the weight of allegations does not equal guilt.

If Huntley was guilty of these earlier offences, some of which he was charged with and appeared in court over, the failure lies with the Crown Prosecution Service for failing to construct a convincing case against him. Possibly Humberside Police, too, failed in their investigations into the earlier offences. But to suggest that the force should hold and disseminate damning information on citizens merely on the basis of unproven allegations is tantamount to calling for a police state.

Oh Bugger

Memories of the last World Cup: beaten by a lusophone team coached by Scolari; England looking exhausted, not used to the heat and with too many games too close together. Yes we were unlucky, but it was our worst performance of the tournament. Still, there are memories to cherish: you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh as Beckham sent his penalty effort way over the crossbar.

Darfur

There's only bad news on Darfur (via Daniel Drezner):

NASA photos of the Darfur region of western Sudan show destruction in nearly 400 villages, and there have been reports of fighting or threatened attacks in every camp for displaced people, the U.S. aid chief said Wednesday.

Andrew Natsios, administrator of the Agency for International Development, warned that time is running out to help 2 million Sudanese in desperate need of aid in Darfur. He said his agency's estimate that 350,000 could die of disease and malnutrition over the next nine months "is conservative."

Fighting between Arab militias and African residents has killed thousands of people and forced more than 1 million to flee their homes. International rights groups say the government has backed the Arab fighters in an ethnic cleansing campaign against the African villagers.

Natsios put the blame for the crisis squarely on the Sudanese government, saying U.S. and U.N. reports from the country show clearly that the Sudanese military is directly connected to Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, that are fighting in Darfur.

Meanwhile, as Anthony at Black Triangle reports, polio is spreading up from Northern Nigeria after Islamic leaders there condemned the vaccination programme as part of a secret US plan against Africans:

The people of Darfur are stuck between religious fundamentalists deliberately murdering them with AK47s and religious fundamentalists in another country condemning them to disease.

Intellectuals

Butterflies and Wheels link to Prospect's list of the top 100 British intellectuals, from which you can vote - ooooh! - for your favourite five.

There's something deeply depressing about this. It's that whole idea of an intellectual. One thing I particularly like about British culture is something that's often taken as its major weakness: its dislike of intellectuals. Through most of the 20th century, intellectuals were almost invariably Marxists or Freudians or both. More recently they've been followers of Derrida or Lacan or Althusser or some such modern master. Intellectuals, basically, don't have a clue. Much of the history of the 20th century is the history of intellectuals getting it wrong. A nation of shopkeepers, traders, money-grubbers, as opposed to those who devote their lives to higher things like the, um, French? Fine by me. We've managed to produce some fairly decent culture on our way as we scrabbled to make ourselves rich.

So what do we need intellectuals for? I understand what journalists or philosophers or playwrights do, but what do intellectuals do? Attract acolytes? Formulate Casaubon-style theories-of-everything? Appear on TV to tell us how to live our lives, or what to think on issues of the day? Um, no thanks; I'd rather listen to my newsagent on the subject of, say, Iraq; especially as he wouldn't be speaking from the assumption that he was my moral and intellectual superior. And that whole telling truth to power thing - it's self-indulgent, it's offensive, it's dated. We no longer - if we ever did - need smart educated people to stand up for us poor stupid proles. We can think for ourselves.

I'm not particularly concerned about the list itself. It's not like I'm outraged that X or Y are missing. There are some individuals on there whose work I've enjoyed or profited from, some who I've never agreed with at all, some who I think are massively over-rated, and some I've never heard of (Adair Turner?). I imagine most people would have the same reaction. So what? Good luck to them. But our top 100 intellectuals? What a load of self-indulgent media-bollocks.

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude has featured in a couple of recent posts (here and here). All I need to add now is that scoreline: Germany 1 - Czech Republic (B team) 2.

Orientalists and Islam

MEMRI translate an article by the Kuwaiti author Ahmad Al-Baghdadi on why muslims should be grateful to Western orientalists:

"What is important during the period [of study] is that when they [Arabs studying in the West] read, the students are given an opportunity to compare the complexities of Western thought with the primitive nature of Arab and Islamic thought, as compiled by the scholars on each side. On top of this, they [the Arab and Muslim students] come to know the enormous body of scholarship by [Western] Orientalists in Islamic and [Arabic] literary studies, [which these Orientalists accomplished] by way of translation, or by exact scholarly philological editing, or by critical methodology.

"For a simple proof of this, let any serious reader take any book about Islamic civilization by an Arab Muslim author and a book by one of the Western scholars - say, 'Al-Hadara Al-Islam' [Islamic Civilization] by Grunebaum. [3] Or compare any book on the history of the Islamic state with books such as those by Wellhausen and Brockelman. [4] Even in writing about Islamic jurisprudence, they [i.e., Western scholars] are much better than the Muslim experts in Islamic jurisprudence, on both the analytical and the critical level.

"Regarding the area of my own research, I found that the book 'The Rules of Government'('Al-Ahkam Al-Sultaniyyah') by Al-Mawardi was discovered by a German Orientalist, and that libraries in the Western world contain unique Arabic and Islamic manuscripts, well-catalogued so that the researcher can easily locate the information. [These libraries also contain] many books of our heritage, which, were it not for the West and the efforts of the Orientalists, the Muslims would never know exist. Thanks to this intellectual heritage, the West was able to master the East, as it still does. [...]

"If Arab scholarly institutions had an inkling of sense, there would be serious contacts and efforts to translate [into Arabic] many of the impressive volumes in the field of Islamic and [Arabic] literature studies. Unfortunately, however, this is prevented by the religious oppression on the part of the Ministries of Awqaf [i.e., religious endowments] and religious associations and institutions that prevent the translation of many impressive scholarly studies.

"In short, we are talking to the ignoramus graduates of religious educational institutions or Arab universities that are devoid of learning - those [graduates] who cover up their ignorance by accusing Orientalism of conspiring against Islam or distorting its image. [We are telling these ignoramuses] that had it not been for the efforts of a group of Orientalists in religious, literary, and historical studies, we would never have known much of the heritage in which we take pride - and without making any effort to discover it. Nay, it has come to us readymade, on a silver platter, thanks to the efforts of those Orientalists. We don't have to look far for an example.

"Let us ask ourselves: How much effort have the Arabs expended in deciphering the Pharaonic Rosetta Stone, and how much effort have the Orientalists expended on this? Were it not for the efforts of those Orientalists who were fascinated by Pharaonic civilization, the world would never have known how to read hieroglyphics.

"The problem of the Arabs is that they suffer from a compounded ignorance - namely, they are ignorant of their own ignorance.

Nowadays of course, thanks to Edward Said's book, the term Orientalism carries all sorts of negative correlations about stereotyping and racism, so it's good to see an Islamic writer acknowledge the debt that scholarship owes to Western orientalists.

Helping Hands Korea

Interesting interview at NKZone with Tim Peters, who runs an organization to help North Korean refugees, Helping Hands Korea. He describes how things have become more difficult recently for North Korean refugees making it over the border to China, and emphasises the importance of putting human rights on the agenda for the latest round of talks:

I'm a strongbeliever that human rights issues need to be put squarely among the priority items on the agenda of the six-party talks. This idea, so prevalent in South Korea and in some quarters in the west as well, that nuclear and economic issues need to be resolved first, then we can turn to human rights, is to my mind fundamentally flawed. I believe we can learn a lot by looking at the Helsinki Accords as a model. The US was absolutely resolute in insisting that human rights issues be included in key negotiations with the Soviet Union. Brezhnev yielded, perhaps concluding that it was a minor issue. Those human rights led to Solidarity in Poland, to give but one example, and the rest was history. Moreover, human rights monitoring is a hell of a lot easier to verify than verifying dismantlement of nuclear programs. Why not use human rights access and improvements in the DPRK as a litmus test of how sincerely the North Koreans are complying with their agreements?

I can't imagine that the Bush people want to repeat the absolute idiocy of trumpeting breakthroughs as the Clinton people did in '93 and '94, only to find out later than Kim Jong-il was laughing up his sleeve and steaming full-speed ahead with his nuclear program(s). Another advantage of having human rights issues, e.g. gulag visitations, full access to food aid deliveries, is that there would be ongoing dialogue and engagement, but not only on the issues that the DPRK wants to talk about. Nothing else has worked, and I think it's worth a try. A final thought: How much longer will the beggar (NK regime) get to dictate the terms and conditions of how the benefactor(donor countries, international agencies, NGO's) give their voluntary aid? How many people put up with a homeless person dictating to them how much spare change to give, what pocket to give it from and tolerate a spit in their face for good measure?

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in reading a first-hand account of the NK gulag, and escape over the Chinese border, I would strongly recommend "Aquariums of Pyongyang".

Euro2004

Well there I was last night, thinking no, I can't spend another evening watching football can I? But I've pretty much given up on EastEnders, so I found myself watching Italy - Bulgaria playing in a half-empty ground, the rain pissing down, wondering why they chose this instead of the Sweden - Denmark game. And if that wasn't bad enough, we had to endure David Pleat's leaden observations. The pundit's a difficult role to fill since Big Ron has been moved on, but I thought Mick McCarthy was good (though to the refined upper-class sensibilities of the chaps at Private Eye, he has a "comedy" accent, which makes me think perhaps someone should tell Mick about this: if he can see off Roy Keane he should make short work of Ian Hislop), and Joe Royle was even better: in the Czech Republic - Holland match, after Heinz was brought on, "Am I allowed to say that Heinz has brought variety to the Czech game?"

A friend reckoned that football's only worth watching when there's a team you support, but I disagree. England games tend to be too tense, whereas a less stressful encounter allows you to sit back and just enjoy it. Okay, Croatia - Switxerland was 90 minutes of my life wasted, but Czech Republic - Holland, Portugal - Spain.....great stuff. And then there was last night, another great match, with Italy making the usual drama out of going out. I was sort of supporting them, and the last minutes were wonderfully tense (but, you know, with it not being England, not too tense), but it's difficult to have much sympathy for them. They should have done better. I suppose there's an element of schadenfreude (see my previous post below).

So, what are the chances on Thursday night, if we beat Portugal, of John Motson coming out with, "well, Gary, the Portuguese have a word "saudade" for a deep feeling of sadness, and you can be sure there'll be a lot of saudade in Lisbon tonight."