Mick Hartley

Mark Clark

No I'd never heard of him either, until I saw this (via Chrenkoff):

He is being hailed as a national hero by the Iraqi people. After almost single-handedly rebuilding the sports network in the war-ravaged nation, he has been credited with ensuring that Iraq fielded a 25-strong team for this year's Olympic Games. And the man who is at the centre of the praise was born in Scotland. Mark Clark, a 30-year-old Edinburgh lawyer, is now Iraq's team manager and even helped the country's Olympic committee draft its constitution when the International Olympic Committee lifted a suspension in February on the country taking part in world athletics events.

Maurice "Termite" Watkins, Iraq's boxing coach, and Najah Ali, the country's only boxer, said Mr Clark was a national hero. "You've got a hero in Mark Clark," said Mr Watkins, from Houston, Texas. "He has done more for sport in Iraq than anybody. We would not be here at the Olympics but for him. He is an unsung hero."

It was because of the Iraq war that Mr Clark ended up in the country. He had given up his job with Dundas & Wilson, an Edinburgh law firm to take up his posting in Iraq as a Territorial Army reserve officer. Last July, he began working with the coalition provisional authority, the temporary governing agency in Iraq. But with a degree in intellectual property and sport-related law, Mr Clark was invited to take on the role of adviser to the CPA on sport. Educated at Edinburgh Academy and Glenalmond, then at Edinburgh University, Mr Clark admitted he had had "a few hairy moments" since then. Pressed, he said he had been shot at by "small arms and rifle fire, rocket-propelled grenades. We were in the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad when it was hit. I've been mortared and RPG'd thousands of times, rocks through the windscreen – normal everyday stuff . . . I am from a military family, so they know the background."

Mr Clark added that, after the June 28 "handover" of power to the interim government of Iraq, he was faced with a problem. "I'd the choice of going back to D&W, and a legal career, or staying on. So I am now working with the National Olympic Committee of Iraq, but I'm not just restricted to elite sport and Olympic sport – it's about all 41 sports bodies in Iraq. There are now 214 sports clubs."

Mr Clark has headed a remarkable turnaround in fortunes for sport in Iraq. When the country was run by Saddam Hussein, his son Uday ran the country's NOC. Many athletes were tortured by Uday when their performance did not match his expections. Under Uday, the whole structure broke down. Mr Clark said: "When Uday took over Olympic sport, he took over a very good sports club network and used his position as a vehicle for extortion and revenue for his own purposes. There was physical torture, detention, and rape of female sports competitors."

Mr Clark said it is a "good news story" for the war-ravaged country. "It's one of the things that draws people together, no matter what their background. It's a very important tool for regenerating the country."
The Edinburgh man, whose parents now live in Stirlingshire, was responsible for overseeing democratic elections in the former Ba'ath-dominated sports culture, first step to rebuilding the Olympic committee.
"Sport in Iraq has a very important unifying role to play. When Iraq beat Portugal in the football here, we got congratulations from the president and prime minister.

"Football caused a complete ceasefire – until the celebratory firing at the end. It was the one moment in the past few weeks when things have quietened down. Iraq is football mad. If you think Glasgow is football crazy, you should see them." It is another world from his original sports background. "I was involved in setting up the Scottish Premierleague in 1997, and we did some work for the SRU and Rangers." He used to play rugby, but broke a bone in his back paragliding. Now he is looking after the largest Olympic delegation Iraq has had since 1988 and studying for a masters degree in sport development.
His experience is probably unique in sport: "I had a blank sheet of paper. We had to start from ground zero."

Worth some media coverage? Apparently not: the only time the Iraqi Olympic team made the news was when they criticised Bush. But the admirable Clark reckoned they'd been set up:

Angry at being used by US President George W. Bush in a political broadcast, Iraq Olympic officials today said their athletes had been set up.

Footballers from the war-torn nation reacted furiously when told their country was being used in a campaign ad, calling on Bush to stop using them to win votes.

"Iraq as a team does not want Mr Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," midfielder Salih Sadir told Sports Illustrated magazine.

"He can find another way to advertise himself."

However, the Iraq delegation accused journalists of deliberately provoking an angry response from their players.

"Our purpose is not to politicise the football team in any way," said Mark Clark, a consultant for the Iraqi Olympic Committee.

"It seems the story was engineered."

The flags of Iraq and Afghanistan appear in the Bush commercial ahead of the Republican convention later this month. Bush is seeking re-election in November.

A narrator says: "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations - and two fewer terrorist regimes."

Asked to comment, another Iraqi player asked: "How will (Bush) meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes."

But Clark insisted journalists were wrong to take advantage of the athletes.

"It is a little naughty," he said. "The players are not very sophisticated politically, they are a little naive. Whoever posed these questions knew that the reaction would be negative.

"It is possible something was lost in translation. It's a free, new Iraq and the players are entitled to their opinions but we are disappointed."

Egyptian Journalism

A month ago MEMRI translated an article by Dr. Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad, director of the "Jaffa Research Center" in Cairo and columnist in Al-Liwaa Al-Islami [The Islamic Banner], the Islamic journal of Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party. It was titled "The Lie about the Burning of the Jews", which tells you pretty much all you need to know, but here's a taste:

"The Zionist enterprise on the land of Palestine succeeded by means of lies and myths, from the myth of the 'Chosen People' and the 'Promised Land' to the lie about the burning of the Jews in the Nazi gas chambers during World War II. When these means were scientifically examined, it was proven that they were untrue, that their reasoning was weak, and that they cannot withstand the test of solid fact. "What interests us here is that this lie [about] the burning of the Jews in the Nazi crematoria has been disseminated throughout the world until our time in order to extort the West and make it easier for the Jews of Europe to hunt [sic] Palestine and establish a state on it, in disregard of the most basic principles of international law and the right of peoples to independent life without occupation. [This lie] was raised [also] so that [the Jews] would receive financial, technological, and economic aid from the West.

Now MEMRI report on the repercussions, after the American embassy in Cairo apparently demanded that the journal publish an apology. The editor resigned when it became clear that an apology would be forthcoming, and a few weeks later Egyptian Information Minister Mamduh Al-Beltagi published an article on the front page:

"The National Democratic Party, which is the party of the majority in Egyptian society, does not believe that suffering and human tragedies of a nation or of another people can be lies. It is impossible to downplay the Nazi atrocities and the tragedies of the Second World War that hurt the Jews and other peoples. The things that Dr. Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad wrote in the Al-Liwaa Al-Islami have nothing to do with the worldview of the [average] Egyptian nor with the ideology and policy of the National Democratic Party."

The author, Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad, is unapologetic:

"Everything that I wrote was based on scientific and historical studies written by reliable European historians. I noted in the two articles that this Holocaust against the Jews did not occur in the manner in which the Jews have presented it, and that the Palestinian people are the ones who have paid the price for this historical fabrication. [In addition] I expressed my opinion that that which is occurring today in Palestine and in Iraq is a Holocaust and I demanded the reappraisal of these ideas.

"Instead of relating to what I wrote as an opinion and a scientific research, I was surprised to find that the American Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] and The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles are waging a smear campaign against me in which they exercise terror against the Egyptian government and against the Egyptian Ambassador in Washington. The American Congress and the American Embassy in Cairo pressured the newspaper for which I write, Al-Liwaa Al-Islami, to ban me from writing anymore and even [pressured them] to dismiss the Editor-in-Chief Muhammad Al-Zarqani ... All of the above constitute a violation of my freedom of speech and my freedom to express an opinion. Since the National Council for Human Rights is the champion of our right to express an opinion, I call on you to intervene in order to put an end to the American and Israeli blackmail and to respond ... we request your intervention in order to put an end to the intellectual terror which they are exercising against us, the Egyptian intellectuals and journalists ..."

Yep, demanding an apology for the publication of a piece of crude holocaust-denial in an establishment journal is intellectual terror. Sadly, the Egyptian Journalists Association are pushing the same line:

"The author's [Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad's] articles are historical research. The author is not opposed to Judaism or to the Jews, but rather to Zionism and Nazism, the result of both of which is the occupation of the land of another people, who [then] pay the price for Western racism and its crimes. The Journalists Association denounces the all-out campaign on the part of the Jewish organizations and the criminals, and demands to respond to it and to the blackmailing of the Muslim world in the name of the Holocaust."

As is the Freedoms Committee of the [Arab] Journalists Union:

"The Committee demands of the senior Egyptian officials not to give in to the blackmail of the American Jewish lobby and to the pressures [which it applies] on the Egyptian press, and it insists on opposition to this aggression against the freedom of the press in Egypt; acquiescence to them will invite additional pressures which will be directed against our press and journalists. Additionally, the Freedoms Committee announces its support of [our] colleague Dr. Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad in his just cause of [fighting] against the political and media blackmail by the Zionist lobby in Washington and its exploitation of its contacts with the authorities and American embassies in the region."

Atefeh Rajabi

Alasdair Palmer writes about the 16-year-old Atefeh Rajabi, who was hanged in Iran for "acts incompatible with chastity" (via Dhimmi Watch):

It seems that all she did was to take off her headscarf and insist that she was the victim of an older man's advances: but even if she had stripped naked and called the judge a fat ignorant bastard, those actions would hardly merit death, even under Islamic law. Nevertheless, the judge was so outraged that he decided he would personally put the noose round the child's neck.

That disgraceful and disgusting "punishment" has excited a great deal of condemnation in Iran among the reformists. As far as I can see, it has not produced any comment here. Amnesty International issued a statement expressing outrage at the execution (the tenth of a child in Iran since 1990) - but no British newspaper or television station has reported this.

Why not? The two extremes of pro- and anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain are now united in not expecting even the most minimal ethical standards from Islamic countries such as Iran: the pros because they think that Islamic laws should not be criticised for fear of giving offence; the antis because they think all Muslims are just a bunch of irredeemable barbarians.

Those two extreme views have infected media coverage. What would be headline news if it happened in America (can you imagine the response if a 16-year-old girl was executed for having sex in Texas?) is, because it happens in an Islamic state, apparently too banal to count.

That attitude guarantees that more children will suffer Atefeh's fate. Of course, it suits our Government - which is pushing for greater trade links with our new-found ally, Iran - just fine if people think that criticism of Islamic judges is inappropriate because standards are different. But respecting Islam does not require accepting the judicial murder of 16-year-olds (or indeed anyone, of any age) for having sex. That's wrong wherever it happens. We need a Government, and a press, that says so.

Soaps (and the Lying Liars in Them)

In the light of John Humphrys' overblown opinions on the corrupting influence of soaps - too aggressive apparently - I feel I should, as someone with a passing familiarity with the genre, point out his error. The real problem with soaps is not the aggression, it's the fact that the characters spend all their time lying to each other. It's one porkie after another: they can't help themselves. "Where are you off to, Tom?" "Just off down to the butcher, Mavis." But he isn't of course, as any soap aficionado will immediately realise. He is in fact just off down the pub, or the bookies, or the travel agent, or for a walk by the canal - anywhere but the butcher. Why? Because you've then got a plot, you've got a bit of tension. At what point will Mavis discover that Tom has been lying to her? Maybe she'll quite by chance bump into Terry from the butcher's later that day (walking by the canal perhaps, after telling Tom she was just off to the supermarket). "Hello there Terry. Hope you didn't palm Tom off with some dodgy piece of scrag end this morning!" Terry looks puzzled. "I don't know what you're talking about Mavis. Haven't seen Tom all day." At which point we get a close up of Mavis as her expression flickers tantalisingly between puzzlement and anger.

Every time there's a situation where someone has to report what they've been doing, they will inevitably lie about it. Doesn't matter whether it's trivial like Tom's non-visit to the butcher, or more serious, as in the current EastEnders storyline where Dot starts feeling pain, goes to see the doctor, gets an appointment at the hospital, goes through an extensive range of tests, is told that she has cancer, is offered an operation which might save her life, decides not to have the operation; all this without bothering to tell her husband, resorting instead to an increasingly bizarre range of explanations as to why she's just popping out for an hour or two. I hate to think what effect this incessant fibbing has on impressionable young minds.

Security Council in the Dock

Julie Flint, writing in the Lebanon Daily Star, is unimpressed with the UN's record on Darfur:

The Security Council cannot claim it does not know what is happening in Darfur. Some of the best reporting, and commentary, on the calamity there has come from the UN itself. In December 2003, UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland called the situation in the province probably "the world's worst humanitarian crisis." Since then, this crisis has deepened and the Sudanese government, which first denied that it was even taking place, has now had to settle for downplaying it.

In May 2004, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said it was clear there was a "reign of terror in Darfur," characterized by "repeated attacks on civilians by government of Sudan military and its proxy militia forces, particularly the janjaweed." The UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs warned that the conflict affected over 2 million people - in their vast majority Sudanese of African rather than Arab descent.

In the past month, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions Asma Jahangir has said it is "beyond doubt" that the Sudanese government "is responsible for extrajudicial and summary executions of large numbers of people" in Darfur. Francis Deng, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's representative on internally displaced persons, has spoken of "persistent insecurity and human rights violations."

And yet the Security Council, when it finally acted on Darfur on July 30, adopted a watered-down resolution that gave the government a 30-day grace period, followed by the possibility - not even the certainty - of unspecified "further actions" if it failed to disarm and prosecute janjaweed. The resolution imposed an arms embargo on the janjaweed but ordered no embargo, or any other measures, against the government in Khartoum that supplies and supports them. Within a week, Jan Pronk, Annan's special envoy dealing with Darfur, signed a "plan of action" with the Sudanese authorities that fuzzed the 30-day deadline and gave them wriggling room.

Khartoum reacted to this with more of the same. More villages were destroyed and more refugees fled to Chad. The cat-and-mouse game with relief agencies continued: some obstacles were lifted, but others were thrown up. (One relief aircraft was denied access because it was more than 20 years old.) Sudanese officials refused to apprehend known janjaweed leaders, but arrested a number of unknowns and fired a senior government official for advocating dialogue rather than war. It did nothing to improve security outside the camps for the displaced, but in a single camp in a single day arrested, and then reportedly tortured, 50 men it accused of encouraging others to balk at returning to burned villages that are beyond the reach of relief.

To this day, Khartoum refuses to countenance a peacekeeping force to protect civilians in Darfur, insisting that this is the job of its own security forces - the very same forces supporting the janjaweed. [...]

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, after a lightening visit to Darfur, said the Khartoum government had made progress. "The last thing we want is the international community to be in conflict with the government of Sudan," he said.

Why on earth not? Could it be because Khartoum has warned, brazenly, of Iraq-style opposition to any foreign intervention to save lives in Darfur? But this is a government that seized power by force and wields it by force - one that hosted Osama bin Laden not that long ago and that spends its oil revenues on arming itself to murder its own citizens. It is also a government whose proxy militia in Darfur has "chained civilians together and set them on fire," according to the AU.

The few expedient modifications Khartoum has made to its behavior in Darfur will doubtless provide the excuse most Security Council members want to temporize yet again next Monday. If they fail to endorse a new action plan that is backed by sanctions against government officials responsible for Sudan's militia policy, they must be deemed to have failed in their "primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security."

The present impasse not only guarantees tens of thousands more deaths in the short term, but wider instability in the longer term. After Monday, the Security Council, too, must be in the dock.

Theodorakis on the Jewish Problem

In an interview with Israeli journalist Ari Shavit in Haaretz, Mikis Theodorakis clarifies for us the nature of the Jewish problem (via Allah in the House):

Question: Mr. Theodorakis, on November 4, 2003 you said in this house the words that shocked Jews and non-Jews across the world. You said that the Jewish people are at the root of evil. What did you mean?

Answer: "For me the root of evil today is the policy of President Bush. It is a fascist policy. I cannot understand how is it that the Jewish people, who have been the victims of Nazism, can support such a fascist policy. No other people in the world support those policies but Israel! This situation saddens me. I am a friend of Israel. I am a friend of the Jewish people. But the policy of Sharon and the support for the policy of Bush darkens the image of Israel. I am afraid that Sharon is going to lead the Jews - just as Hitler led the Germans - to the root of evil."

Even today, 10 months later, you don't think you made a mistake when you uttered those words?

"No, but it's important for me to emphasize that I never said that the Jews are the root of evil. I said they are at the root of evil."

So you have no regrets?

"No. And I was very much hurt by the Jewish reaction to what I said. It was not a civilized reaction. I got hundreds and hundreds of poisonous e-mails from Jews all over the world. I couldn't understand this hatred toward me. I fought against racism all my life. I was for Israel. I wrote "Mauthausen." After all that, how could I become from one day to the next an anti-Semite?"

Let me explain to you the context for this reaction. Many Jews have a renewed fear of Europe. We are afraid that there is a new kind of anti-Semitism in Europe. So when you said what you said there was a feeling of thou too, Brutus. There was a feeling that even our old friend Theodorakis turned against us.

"I don't believe there is anti-Semitism in Europe. There is a reaction against the policy of Sharon and Bush. I think it's artificial to think there is a new anti-Semitism. It's an excuse. It's a way to avoid self-criticism. Rather than ask themselves what is wrong with the policy of Israel, Jews say the Europeans are against us because of the new anti-Semitism. Because they don't love us. And even Theodorakis says we are at the root of evil. This is a sick reaction."

Why? In what way is it a sick reaction?

"Because this kind of reaction is relevant to the psychopathology of the Jewish people. They want to feel victims. They want to have this comforting feeling. We are in the right, we are again victims. Let's create another ghetto. It's a masochistic reaction." The Jews are masochists?

"There is psychological masochism in the Jewish tradition."

Is there sadism as well?

"I'm certain that when Diaspora Jews talk among themselves, they feel satisfied. They feel that now, when we are so close to the greatest power in the world, no one can do anything to us. We can do whatever we like. This is why the claim of new anti-Semitism is not only a sick reaction, it's a sly reaction as well."

In what way is it sly?

"Because it really allows the Jews to do whatever they want. Not only psychologically, but also politically, it gives the Jews an excuse. The sense of victimhood. It gives them a license to hide the truth. There is no Jewish problem in Europe today. There is no anti-Semitism."

Theodorakis is hardly a fringe figure:

In Greece itself, Theodorakis is considered a provocative public figure. His transition from left to right to left drew quite a lot of criticism. In spite of that, his name is still mentioned as a possible candidate for president. His status as the most important Greek musician is unquestioned. Even in France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, Theodorakis is a cultural figure of the first rank. Some consider him a person whose work and life embody the spirit of the contemporary European left.

Najaf

Amir Taheri in the Times provides some useful background information on the central importance of Najaf to the Shias:

“Heading for Najaf”, in the argot of Tehran, means going to die. Those who know the Iraqi city, which has dominated the headlines for weeks, would agree. For this is a city built on and around death. Its chief attraction is the tomb of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, who was assassinated near by in Kufa 1,400 years ago. Najaf also has the world’s largest graveyard with some 1.8 million tombs. For the world’s 150 million Muslim Shias, Najaf is the ideal burial place. Proximity to Ali is supposed to improve chances of avoiding Gehenna, the abode of the fallen, according to the Koran. Believers spend a lifetime’s savings to have their corpses transported to Najaf for burial close to Ali’s mausoleum. Five generations of my family are buried there thanks to a tradition that began in the 17th century.

Death is at the centre of life here. Tens of thousands of grave-diggers, undertakers, masters of funeral ceremonies, tomb watchers, givers of prayers for the dead, intercessors, Koran reciters, mediums for communication with the departed, and so on make up the bulk of the workforce.

While Najaf’s chief import is corpses, its major export is mullahs. The city hosts the most eminent of Shia seminaries which, at the height of its theological boom in the 1950s, boasted 124 madrassahs with 40,000 trainee mullahs. All the grand ayatollahs of the past 150 years either studied or taught there. [...]

Najaf’s local and national importance is complemented by a regional dimension. Once the city regains its place as the centre of Shia scholarship it could pose a threat to the mullahs who have ruled Iran since 1979. The brand of Shia Islam offered in Najaf today, especially by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is in sharp contrast to that peddled by the Khomeinist mullahs of Tehran.

While Khomeinism preaches direct rule by the mullahs, Ayatollah al-Sistani’s traditional Shia Islam distinguishes between political and religious spaces. His prestige reached a new height this week when he succeeded in preventing a full-scale battle in Najaf. His intervention showed that the cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr was nothing but a maverick with a few hundred gunmen and little popular support. It also exposed the weakness of Iyad Allawi’s American-backed interim government. [...]

Ayatollah al-Sistani succeeded by deploying people’s power, something he hopes to do in January’s election when he is expected to endorse a list of “pious candidates”. The emergence of Iraq as a moderate Shia power in which the clergy act only as “consultants” for politicians could become the biggest challenge that Tehran’s Khomeinists have faced.

This is why it is hard to believe that we have heard the last of the troubles in Najaf. The mullahs of Tehran are determined to shape the new Iraq in the way that they, and not the Americans, want. The Americans, for their part, are equally determined not to allow the emergence of a Khomeinist regime in Baghdad. Hojatoleslam al-Sadr remains one wild card among the many that Tehran still holds in Iraq. On Thursday he escaped arrest thanks to Ayatollah al-Sistani. But he may well come back to make more trouble. Iraq, and Najaf, are not out of the woods yet.

M.S.B.P.

Via Butterflies and Wheels, an interesting article on Munchausen's Syndrome By Proxy, by Margaret Talbot.

For a syndrome to be a worthwhile explanatory tool, it should be able to group a number of disparate behaviours as reliably occurring together, but as Talbot points out this is far from being the case with M.S.B.P.. It's difficult therefore to see what use there is in defining such a syndrome other than the professional advancement of those providing the definitions. This is not, after all, a mental illness as normally understood. No one's suggesting that there's some physiological abnormality in the mothers (it's always mothers) who are accused of M.S.B.P.. There are no research projects being undertaken to see if M.S.B.P. has a genetic component. It would not be presented in court as a mitigating factor in a case where a mother was accused of killing her child on the grounds that the poor woman couldn't help herself being an M.S.B.P. sufferer and all. On the contrary, it would be more likely to figure in the case for the prosecution: "she's got all the classic signs - over-protective, neurotic, too demanding of doctors and nurses - so it's more than likely that she's got M.S.B.P. and so more than likely that she killed the child."

All we're left with is the fact that it's been known to happen that some parents may fake or exarcebate their children's illnesses, just as some people have been known to fake their own illnesses, presumably to attract sympathy and attention. Doctors and social workers should no doubt be aware of this extremely remote possibility, but this is the way people are. Similarly it's just as well for all emergency services to be aware that many 999 calls will be fakes, and it's just as well for householders to be aware that not all callers at the front door are well-intentioned. That's life. As Talbot shows, all attempts by experts to define a profile of an M.S.B.P. mother are totally wide of the mark and can lead to outrageous injustices, because you're dealing here with morality, not a medical syndrome. Nor can it be much comfort to parents to know that, should their child become ill and they show too much concern, or turn up at the hospital with pages of print-outs from the Internet, their doctors will be taking note: "classic case of M.S.B.P. - I recommend social services have a look."

Despite her criticisms, Talbot is surely too protective towards M.S.B.P.. She's been discussing the worrying trend for doctors and social workers to look for tell-tale signs of over-protectiveness on the part of parents towards their children:

None of this is to say that M.S.B.P. is a figment of the medical profession’s imagination. In England, where three mothers accused or convicted of infanticide on the basis of testimony by Roy Meadow have had their cases overturned in the past five years, there has been an outsized backlash against the diagnosis. Articles in the British press railed against Meadow’s rule of thumb that a second crib death in a family was suspicious, and a third was murder, unless proven otherwise. (In the overturned convictions, the British appeals court suggested that genetic factors might explain the incidence of multiple infant deaths in some families.) The British government has ordered reviews of hundreds of cases in which parents were accused of killing their children. Many of these cases involve accusations of M.S.B.P., and if even one of them is found to have been false it will be troubling. But recent press accounts in Britain casually refer to M.S.B.P. as a “discredited” diagnosis—as though the issue weren’t whether people had been falsely accused but whether the syndrome itself was real. Those who need reminding that it is might look to the case of Maxine Robinson, one of the first cases to be reviewed. At a hearing in April, Robinson confessed that she had killed three of her children.

The larger question, then, is whether M.S.B.P. is best thought of as a disorder or simply as a criminal act. People who rob banks aren’t usually called victims of “bank robber’s syndrome,” after all, and parents who beat their children are simply called child abusers. And nobody assumes that these wrongdoers are all driven by the same set of motives—let alone by a discrete mental illness.

If M.S.B.P. is to be thought of as a criminal act rather than a disorder, and if there are no common patterns to the behaviours involved, then it's entirely reasonable to regard the syndrome as discredited. Citing the case of Maxine Robinson in defence is surely a little too glib. Even if she did kill her children (and how reliable is her confession in the circumstances?) there's no evidence that this fits into an observable pattern of women like her mass-murdering their offspring. And the article makes no mention of Professor Southall's more recent problems, accusing Sally Clark's husband of murdering their children solely on the basis of seeing him on TV, and, protected by an armour-plated conviction in his own diagnostic skills and the reality of M.S.B.P., showing absolutely no remorse. As one of the contributors at the BMJ comments:

This issue is [...] that there are increasing concerns of professionals in medicine, social work, the law, researchers, academics, and parents falsely accused of child abuse, that the child protection system is deeply flawed, erratic, and dysfunctional and the child protection system is `per se’, causing severe and long-lasting harm to many thousands of children every year. On the other hand, many children are suffering harm and death because of failures to intervene appropriately and responsibly.

A major contribution to this dysfunctionalism of the child protection system is the unscientific theories espoused by a small number of paediatricians and the dogmatic, inappropriate, irresponsible, misleading presentation of their opinions and suppositions to Courts and the abuse of their professional positions, as stated by Courts and the GMC.

Russian Art

Last summer during the course of a four-day trip to St Petersburg we made the requisite visit to the Hermitage, one of the World's Great Art Galleries. After an hour standing happily in line with our fellow tourists we were in, and keen to get at all that great art. We had some ideas about what we wanted to see, so we made our way through the endless corridors, past the French landscapists of the 18th Century, the Renaissance Masters, the Dutch Interiors, the Expressionists, the Impressionists....

What is it about these big art galleries that makes them so tiring? In a little over an hour exhaustion was setting in. Somehow the expectation of transcendence in the face of some of the greatest works of art that European man has produced was never quite realised. You're looking at ...what?...a Cezanne, say. You've seen it before of course, or at least other similar works by Cezanne: in books, posters, postcards. You've seen artists influenced by Cezanne; you've seen artists influenced by artists influenced by Cezanne. You've seen artists trying to escape the influence of Cezanne, and artists reacting against the influence of Cezanne. So why is this moment special? Is it because this is, you know, the original: the very canvas painted by Cezanne. Those are the actual brush strokes made by the actual Cezanne all those years ago! But this is not a useful strategy, especially in the age of mechanical reproduction (cue digression on Benjamin, which I'll, ahem, postpone for the moment). So - you banish all preconceptions, empty your mind, pretend you're seeing this for the first time ever with the eyes, as it were, of a child. Just experience the beauty!

Whatever degree of success you may meet with this approach (and I'll say, for me, it's limited), one thing's for sure: it's completely exhausting. Within an hour blood-sugar levels are dangerously low: lactic acid is building up to critical levels in the muscles. Those fellow viewers, beforehand others like yourself with whom you may even have exchanged a smile; how tiresome they are now with their smug expressions of rapt enjoyment, the way they crane forward to see - ah yes! - just how the master has rendered that horse's hoof, how they insinuate themselves in front of you as you're trying to read the title, or look at the picture from a distance, how they whisper stupid comments to their companions ("I love the way he's done the folds of that dress!").

So...off we went out of the Hermitage. Freedom, fresh air! Soon revived, we decided to head for the Museum of Russian Art. Much fewer people, free tables in the cafe...
We skipped fairly quickly through the icons. But after that...wonderful! I don't recall ever having enjoyed a trip to an art gallery more. The significant point was, we didn't know what to expect and had never seen, or in most cases even heard of, the artists.

Or at least that was my theory at the time. Now though I've had a chance to see many of the same works again at the National's wonderful "Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy" exhibition, and it strikes me that it was not so much the novelty of the art which appealed, but the fact that it provides superb examples of a type of art, and a way of seeing art, that just doesn't exist any more.

Since Impressionism started to focus on what something looks like, as opposed to what it really is, the connection to what's actually out there has been replaced by style, by the artist's vision, by what's inside them. The story of the great modernists of the 20th century is all about individual geniuses, each with their own style, their own vision. We can recognise straightaway a Braque from a Utrillo, a Klee from a Kandinsky, a Pollock from a Rothko.

It's difficult now to even talk about the great landscape painters of the 19th century like these little-known Russians because we don't know how to describe what they were doing. They wanted to show the extraordinary beauty of nature: not just how it looked, but how it was. They were trying to show the essence of it, the soul, to extract the beauty from the everyday with their skill. But we don't talk about soul or essence anymore because we don't know what they mean. The artists themselves, though perhaps individually as ambitious as modern artists, were self-effacing in their art, trying to be transparent, pointing to something else. Instead nowadays art is all about ego. We go to a modern exhibition to be impressed by an individual's artistic talent, their particular vision. The only place they're trying to point us to is an appreciation of their own genius. The whole way that art is presented to us now is as a succession of individuals whose life stories are treasured as exemplifying some sort of struggle of genius against conformity. An idea of art as attempting to convey the beauty of nature would be seen as hopelessly naive.

The exhibition catalogue is a sad affair, since the quality of reproduction just isn't good enough. I did come away with one good reproduction, "Rye" by Ivan Shishkin, which is wonderful. The trees in the field of rye are placed with a random precision that a Zen master would be proud of. It's clear though, after you've been looking awhile, that the trees (elms?) are enormous, and are painted that scale to add to the astonishing sense of the immensity of the landscape that you get. [Indeed if there's a theme to the exhibition that's it: the immensity of the Russian landscape. There's one small painting, called "The Steppe" which at a distance is just bottom half green, top half white, but closer up is amazing in the way it suggests vast distances.] But I doubt that Shishkin wanted the observer to notice that detail: he wanted to convey immensity and that's one of the devices he used. The painting is so successful, for me, because, to put it plainly, it takes you there at the same time as being beautiful.

Maybe that's why in general I prefer photography nowadays. Someone like Cartier-Bresson (BBC2 tonight) understood, and personified, that idea of self-effacement that I find so attractive in these Russian landscape artists.

The National exhibition closes on the 12th of September, so hurry. It's a small exhibition, but how could anyone with poetry in their souls not want to see a painting with a title like "Moonlit Night on the Dnieper"?

Intelligent Grappling

After Intelligent Design, there's a new threat to scientific orthodoxy (via Panda's Thumb):

A Georgia group calling itself Teachers for Equal Time has asked that stickers be placed in all new physics textbooks which note that mutual attraction and relativity are not the only theories available to explain gravity and should not be taken as fact.

Teachers for Equal Time hopes that the addition of the warning stickers will pave the way for the teaching of its alternative theory, Intelligent Grappling, the theory that certain intelligent and conscious agents "push" things together.

Dr Elf M. Sternberg, the originator of the theory of Intelligent Grappling, or "IG" as some call it, and president of Teachers for Equal Time, announced the group's plans to seek legislation requiring the stickers at a Cobb County school board meeting.

"Mutual attraction has had a monopoly on the truth for too long," said Dr. Sternberg, "it is time we let children see all of the theories."

Dr Sternberg founded Teachers for Equal Time soon after getting his PhD from the Alabama School of Divine Motion.

Most mainstream scientists have concluded current theories of gravity are sufficiently capable of explaining such things as the motion of planets and why things fall.

Dr Sternberg denies this conclusion and claims the popular theory of gravity "doesn't explain why objects fall, it just describes what they do."

"There are theories by atheists and secular humanists that try to explain gravity," explains Dr Sternberg, "but they all lead to crazy conclusions no human being has ever seen, like black holes and the so-called "Big Bang". Intelligent Grappling only deals with the visible world."

Daniel Mason, a Georgia science teacher, is critical of Intelligent Grappling Theory and claims "IG theory isn't at all scientific. It appears to just be a thin veneer for the idea that 'little angels' push things around. This is a religious idea, not a scientific one, and as such has no place in science class."

"I'm not saying they're little angels," says Dr Sternberg, "Intelligent Grappling only says that conscious agents are the cause of all apparent 'gravitic' phenomenon. There's no religion involved."