Mick Hartley

The Kinship of Common Values

Jeff Jacoby looks at America's increasing support for israel, as Europe in general - and the LRB in particular - head off into Zionist conspiracy land:

A Gallup poll released last month puts American support for Israel at near-record levels. When asked for their views on the Middle East, 59 percent of Americans say they sympathize with the Israelis, while just 15 percent favor the Palestinians. Pro-Israel sentiment rises with increased knowledge -- 66 percent of those who follow international affairs ''very closely" support Israel, compared with 52 percent of those who don't pay close attention to foreign news. [...]

In short, solidarity with Israel is an abiding feature of American public opinion. Because the American people are pro-Israel, the American government is pro-Israel. And because Americans so strongly support Israel in its conflict with the Arabs, American policy in the Middle East is committed to Israel's defense.

Only someone far outside the American mainstream, then, would insist that ''Israel's past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians." Or that US policy is engineered through a Zionist ''stranglehold on Congress." Or that ''neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel," leaving only one possible explanation: ''the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby."

Those aren't the words of American neo-Nazi David Duke -- though Duke has ringingly endorsed them. They aren't the words of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the granddaddy of Islamist radicalism -- though a top Brotherhood official praises them. They aren't the words of the PLO -- though the PLO is actively distributing them.

The source of those words, and many more like them, is a bitter anti-Israel screed masquerading as academic scholarship. Co-authored by Stephen Walt, academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, ''The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" was released last week as a ''working paper" on the Kennedy School website. But so slipshod is the paper's research and so extreme its bias that within days the Harvard and Kennedy School logos were stripped from the title page. ''It clearly does not meet the academic standards of a Kennedy School research paper," said Marvin Kalb, one of the school's best-known scholars. [...]

If the truth be told, it isn't hard to understand why America's ardent support for Israel might strike some people as odd, or even suspicious. In so much of the world -- Europe, the Middle East, the UN General Assembly -- Israel is despised. Even if Americans don't share the anti-Semitism that is rife in other lands, wouldn't it be more practical for them to stop taking Israel's side? After all, there are 500 million Arabs in the world, and they control one-third of the world's oil supply. Why should Americans alienate them by continuing to support Israel, a country with no oil and just 6 million people?

As a matter of plain economic common sense, the United States has every reason to turn against the Jewish state. What accounts for its refusal to do so? If it isn't an ''Israel Lobby" pulling hidden strings, what on earth can it be?

Something more powerful than economics: the kinship of common values.

Homo Erectus Link

Another piece in the puzzle of human evolution may now be filled in (via):

Scientists in northeastern Ethiopia said Saturday that they have discovered the skull of a small human ancestor that could be a missing link between the extinct Homo erectus and modern man.

The hominid cranium — found in two pieces and believed to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old — "comes from a very significant period and is very close to the appearance of the anatomically modern human," said Sileshi Semaw, director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia.

Archaeologists found the early human cranium five weeks ago at Gawis in Ethiopia's northeastern Afar region, Sileshi said.

Several stone tools and fossilized animals including two types of pigs, zebras, elephants, antelopes, cats, and rodents were also found at the site.

Sileshi, an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist based at Indiana University, said most fossil hominids are found in pieces but the near-complete skull — a rare find — provided a wealth of information.

"The Gawis cranium provides us with the opportunity to look at the face of one of our ancestors," the archaeology project said in a statement.

Homo erectus, which many believe was an ancestor of modern Homo sapiens, is thought to have died out 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

The cranium dates to a time about which little is known — the transition from African Homo erectus to modern humans. The fossil record from Africa for this period is sparse and most of the specimens poorly dated, project archaeologists said.

The Arab League

Well, it's progress of a sort:

The U.N. Security Council voted on Friday to speed planning for a new U.N. peacekeeping force to be sent to Sudan's western Darfur region later this year to relieve underfinanced African Union troops.

A resolution adopted unanimously by the 15-nation council gave Secretary-General Kofi Annan until April 24 to prepare "a range of options for a United Nations operation in Darfur."

But U.N. officials and council diplomats acknowledged they could not send in U.N. troops or even an assessment mission to help in the planning without the approval of the government of Sudan, and they encouraged Khartoum to cooperate in an eventual transition.

So it all depends on cooperation from the regime in Khartoum: the regime that is in effect responsible for the genocide in the first place...

Meanwhile Arab leaders will be meeting in Khartoum next week at the Arab League summit (via Sudan Watch):

Sudan, which has spared no expense to prepare its capital to host Arab leaders at a summit next week, is expected to be rewarded with the presidency of the Arab League and support on issues such as Darfur. [...]

The Arab League has taken a supportive stance of Sudan on the issue, saying U.N. troops can only be deployed with the consent of the government.

And what will feature as the main concern of the Arab politicians in Khartoum - apart from voicing their support for the Sudanese government - while a genocide of black Africans by Arabs is slowly reaching its conclusion elsewhere in the country? You can probably guess:

Sudanese Foreign Minister Dr. Lam Akol Ajawin addressed the meeting, briefing participants on the summit's agenda, describing issues to be discussed as urgent and critical that need summit resolutions to back it up through joint Arab action to meet the aspirations of the Arab Nation. Supporting the Palestinian cause will always be one of our key concerns until the extorted Arab rights are restored and lands in Palestine, Golan Heights and South Lebanon are liberated from the Israeli occupation, he said. The Sudanese Minister renewably stressed on the Arab nation's adherence to the Arab Peace Initiative as an adequate solution towards achieving just, comprehensive and sustainable peace in the region. He also appealed for international community to exert pressure on Israel to abide by UN resolutions, cease building settlements and the separation wall, respect the Palestinian People's choices and not to intervene in their internal affairs......

Free Expression, Except...

Ah well - so much for the March for Free Expression:

At the outset, we said that displays of the Danish cartoons would be welcome on Saturday. No, let me rephrase that: At the outset, I, Peter Risdon, said the cartoons would be welcome. I am going to take full responsibility for this. I now think that was a mistake.

In practice, Muslims who wholeheartedly endorse our statement of principle, as quoted below by Peter Tatchell in his superb essay, who abhor the threats made against Danish cartoonists and believe people should have the right to publish things they themselves find offensive or abhorrent would be UNABLE to come to our rally on Saturday, because to be surrounded by these cartoons, now, in the present context when the BNP are using them as a rallying point, would be intolerable.

So I now appeal to people not to bring the cartoons on T-shirts or placards.

So, free expression, as long as Muslims aren't offended. But I thought that was what the march was meant to be against...

Purifying the Masses

An insight into Kim Jong-Il's people's paradise:

North Korea has no people with physical disabilities because they are killed almost as soon as they are born, a physician who defected from the communist state said on Wednesday.

Ri Kwang-chol, who fled to the South last year, told a forum of rights activists that the practice of killing newborns was widespread but denied he himself took part in it.

"There are no people with physical defects in North Korea," Ri told members of the New Right Union, which groups local activists and North Korean refugees.

He said babies born with physical disabilities were killed in infancy in hospitals or in homes and were quickly buried.

The practice is encouraged by the state, Ri said, as a way of purifying the masses and eliminating people who might be considered "different."

(Thanks Dom)

Greatest Tools

Forbes magazine have put together a list of the 20 most important tools of all time (via Metafilter).

There's one massive gap there. They don't list arguably the greatest tool ever: the computer. How weird. In response to this guy, who wants to nominate writing, they define tools as "handheld objects that could be physically manipulated to complete a task". Reasonable enough, but as they include a lathe in their top 20, it can't be the bulk of a pc that rules it out. Anyway, what about laptops?

You can vote for the most important tool you use at work: the list includes e-mail, software, and the Web. But those aren't tools. e-mail's an application that your computer, your tool, allows you to use; the Web is, well, whatever it is - a resource? - and software's what enables you to use your computer in so many different ways (the various blades, as it were of your pc Swiss Army knife), but the basic tool in all this, surely, is what's sitting on (or under) your desk: your computer. Why don't they see that?

Show Us the Shekels, Richard

Galloway debates Richard Perle on Abu Dhabi TV (clip 1080):

George Galloway: Now even amongst the crazed Zionist Crusader fundamentalists who got us into this war, Richard Perle is an extremist. In fact, most of the neo-con Zionists who talked Bush into this war have now begun to admit that this has been a terrible catastrophic mistake. Unfortunately, it is not their blood, which has been shed. It has been the blood of entirely innocent people, whose lives have been destroyed.

So nobody serious, outside the lunatic asylum of Richard Perle's circle, any longer believes that the invasion of an Arab Muslim country by hundreds of thousands of Crusading soldiers has done anything to make the world a more peaceful place.

And that's why Bush, in November, will pay a very high political price, and Mr. Blair will be out within a few weeks. I assure you, anyone who studies the politics in London knows that Mr. Blair is in his last days in Downing Street. And when they come to write his obituary - the word Iraq will be engraved at its heart. [...]

In Iran, 17 million people voted for the President, Ahmadinejad, and ten million voted for his opponent Rafsanjani. Those 27 million are determined to exercise their right to nuclear power. The response of Bush and Perle is to threaten them with invasion.

These are the people who murdered Salvador Allende, the elected president of Chile. These are the people who have overthrown elected governments all over the world, and he come on your program to prattle about democracy. These people don't want democracy, they want slave governments. If it's a slave dictatorship - that's fine. If it's a slave elected government - that's also fine. The only thing that matters is that the government is a slave government. That's why they will never invade Egypt. They will never invade Saudi Arabia. They only invade countries or threaten to invade countries, who stand against them and who refuse to be slaves to them. That's why they hated Iraq, that's why they hate Iran, that's why they hate Syria.

Of all the faults of all the three regimes in these three countries - they were never slaves to the United States, and that's why they were attacked. [...]

Richard Perle: Let me just say, having listened to George Galloway, that I am not going to insult the intelligence or waste the time of an audience that has tuned to this channel in the hope that they will hear an interesting discussion, by responding to his ad hominem and scurrilous personal attacks. This is what he's good at. It's a talent from the gutter, and I'm not going to engage in this.

George Galloway: Show us the shekels.

Richard Perle: I'm not going to engage in it.

George Galloway: Show us the shekels, Richard.

Richard Perle: Needless to say... what he's had to say deserves no serious comment, and so I'm not going to make any comment about his personal attacks.

But I do find ironic his comment on the absence of democracy in the Muslim world, when the only Arab country to have voted in a free election in living memory is the Iraq that was liberated by the United States, the United Kingdom, and a number of other countries acting in this coalition.

Denbigh School Appeal

Well good:

A school which was told it unlawfully excluded a Muslim pupil for wearing a traditional gown has won its appeal at the House of Lords.

The Court of Appeal had said Denbigh High School had denied Shabina Begum the right to manifest her religion in refusing to allow her to wear a jilbab.

But in a unanimous ruling, judges at the House of Lords overturned that.

They said the school had "taken immense pains to devise a uniform policy which respected Muslim beliefs".

It had done so "in an inclusive, unthreatening and uncompetitive way".

They said: "The rules laid down were as far from being mindless as uniform rules could ever be."

They added: "It appeared the rules were acceptable to mainstream Muslim opinion."

Shabina Begum had chosen a school which "went to unusual lengths to inform parents of its uniform policy."

They ruled there was no interference with her right to manifest her religion as she had chosen a school where such a policy existed.

There were three other schools in the area which permitted the jilbab, they noted, although one was oversubscribed.

Miss Begum eventually attended another local school where she wore the jilbab.

Lord Bingham ruled that the two-year interruption of her schooling was the result of her "unwillingness to comply with a rule to which the school was entitled to adhere".

Not good news for Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Cherie Blair.

Update: Ophelia Benson points to this interesting paragraph in the judgement given by the Lords:

On 3 September 2002, the first day of the autumn term, the respondent (then aged nearly 14) went to the school with her brother and another young man. They asked to speak to the head teacher, who was not available, and they spoke to the assistant head teacher, Mr Moore. They insisted that the respondent be allowed to attend the school wearing the long garment she had on that day, which was a long coat-like garment known as a jilbab. They talked of human rights and legal proceedings. Mr Moore felt that their approach was unreasonable and he felt threatened. He decided that the respondent should wear the correct school uniform and told her to go home, change and return wearing school uniform. His previous experience in such situations, with one exception, was that pupils always complied. He did not believe he was excluding the respondent, which he had no authority to do, but did not allow her to enter the school dressed as she was, this being (it was said) the only garment which met her religious requirements because it concealed, to a greater extent than the shalwar kameeze, the contours of the female body, and was said to be appropriate for maturing girls. The respondent then left with her brother and the other young man. The young men said they were not prepared to compromise over this issue.

Rather chilling. Of course it was the young men (Shabina's brother and a mysterious "other young man" - presumably a Hizb ut-Tahrir heavy) who "were not prepared to compromise over this issue". Shabina was 13 at the time.

The UN and Denmark

Brussels Journal are quoting a special UN report, not yet officially released, on the cartoons affair. The conclusions should be no surprise to anyone familiar with that organisation, and comes just after they've published their new anti-racism poster with the lego brick:

The Danish government’s first reaction – refusing to take an official position on the nature and publication of the cartoons while referring to Freedom of Speech as well as refusing to meet with the ambassadors from the Muslim countries – is symptomatic not only of the political trivialisation of Islamophobia but also, due to its consequences, of the central role those politically responsible have for the national extent and the international consequences in the shape of demonstrations and expressions of Islamophobia.

Details here.

Self-Ministration

What happens to gurus once their followers desert them? According to this article (via Japundit) Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult whose believers unleashed toxic sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system 11 years ago on Monday, has been reduced to, um, self-ministration:

Death cult guru Shoko Asahara is merely trying to pull the wool over authorities' eyes to avoid the death sentence against him from being carried out, psychiatrists claimed in a report filed to the Tokyo High Court last month to determine whether he is mentally fit to stand trial. Friday (3/17), however, says what the swami's actually pulling is something entirely different. [...]

Media outlets across Japan quickly reported how Asahara had been deemed competent, but failed, the weekly notes, to pick up on some episodes recounted in the Nishiyama file about Asahara's behavior in his solitary confinement cell. It's these incidents, according to the weekly, that Asahara showed he was pulling more than other people's legs.

"He took off his trousers and diapers, exposed his genitalia and masturbated. He repeated the same action frequently. Whenever he acts like that, he drops his trousers, his diaper and diaper cover to his knees, finishes the act, then raises his trousers up to his waist again," Friday quotes the Nishiyama Report as saying.

The weekly goes on to note that Asahara does not restrain his self-ministrations to times when he's alone in his cell at the Tokyo Detention Center.

"In April 2005, just before the accused's lawyer entered a visiting room, the accused exposed his penis and began masturbating, continuing until he had finished while the lawyer stood before him the entire time. He has repeated this act of masturbation in the visiting room, as well as in his solitary confinement cell since being placed under observation in May. He also performed the act in front of his daughters when they came to visit him in August of the same year," the Nishiyama Report says.