Mick Hartley

Abbey Creek

From the Greenway:

Canary Wharf behind the Twelvetrees gasometers.

The most ferocious Crusader campaign

Any strategy to counter the radicalisation of young Muslims is, at some point, going to have to get serious about policing social media sites - YouTube, Facebook, etc. - and cracking down on extremist preachers. The problem is, where do you draw the line? Take Mundhir Abdallah, for instance - an imam at the Al-Farouq Mosque in Copenhagen. He's already featured once on MEMRI, with a rant about the return of the Caliphate and liberating the Al-Aqsa Mosque from "the filth of the Zionists". Now here he is last week laying out the by-now familiar Muslim grievance schtick: 

It is no secret that Islam and the Muslims today are subject to the most ferocious Crusader campaign. The West today is leading an all-out war against Islam and the Muslims.  […]

[The U.S.] sponsors that criminal [Al-Assad], who perpetrates ignominious atrocities of historic proportions against humanity, and then along comes Trump, talking about fighting Islamic terrorism. What Islamic terrorism?! What Islamic terrorism?! You are talking about several desperate individuals and groups, which have taken root in the barbaric environment you yourselves created in Iraq. America created a barbaric environment. It is America that planted the seed of sectarianism and civil war, and is striving for the partitioning of Iraq. It is America that has torn Iraqi society to pieces.  […]

Here in the West - in Europe, in America, and elsewhere - the campaign against the Muslims is no less ferocious and brazen. It reveals the ugly face of the West. I am not talking about the simple people in Denmark, Britain, or America. These simple people are victims of the capitalist system. They have been ground to dust and enslaved by the capitalist system.

The capitalist system has flooded them with notions of freedom, which led them to decay, disintegration, the deification of the individual, and the tyranny of materialistic values, and have transformed them into machines. Even if a man works 10 hours a day, he cannot provide for his family. The wife also needs to go out to work, and the children are thrown into daycare. They spend much more time with the kindergarten teacher than with their mother. No warm relations develop, and the family is torn apart. The focus is on the individual at the expense of social relations. Thus, a sick person grows up and is in constant need of mental help. He grows up to become an unbalanced individual.  […]

In this country too, the Muslims are subject to incessant attacks. The media has been treating Islam in a negative way for decades, presenting Islam as a religion of terrorism, killing, crime, and violence. Their despicable media conceals the big truth - that the Muslims are the victims of the West and its colonialism. The West has been torturing them for over 200 years, committing atrocities against them.  […]

Their media conceals these atrocities, but when a troubled person - a mental wreck whose family was slaughtered by the knives of U.S. collaborator Bashar, or by the knives of sectarian U.S. collaborators in the Popular Mobilization Units... When such a slaughtered person, a mentally troubled victim of their crimes, carries out a troubled, desperate attack in France or somewhere else... That worthless attack does not tip the balance in any way. It is not an [apt] retaliation for the aggression and does not support the Islamic nation. On the contrary, it is used to [further] slaughter Islam and the Muslims. Nevertheless, the media puts a spotlight on it, presenting all the Muslims as insensitive and immoral terrorists, even though they are victims.  […]

In light of this conflict, when they come here and muzzle us, and hold us accountable for a word we uttered... They carry out atrocities, massacres, and violations in our countries, invade them left, right, and center, and support the plundering Israeli entity, which perpetrates atrocities, kills the people of Palestine, and tortures its sons and daughters... But when we utter a single word of criticism against the plundering entity of the Jews, or against the Western colonialist policy in our countries, or when we criticize their despicable culture - the culture of AIDS, drugs, homosexuality, family disintegration, and colonialist control over 90% of the country's wealth - they resort to ruthless violence through the lying despicable media...

Is this extremist? Well, I'm not sure. It's certainly unhinged, and full of hatred. But he's not advocating violence. No mention of jihad, or taking up arms against the unbelievers, or the sacred duty of the martyr.

I'd imagine his general world-view is not uncommon in certain sections of Muslim society, albeit certain of the more extreme sections. Yet this mentality is only one step away from the jihadi. This is the culture in which the violent extremist starts out - the grievance, the hatred of the West...

It's also, interestingly, not far from what many Western leftists believe. Polish it up a bit, replace "Crusader" with "Western imperialism", ignore that bit about homosexuality, and you have a screed that many a member of the "regressive left" would sign up to.

Dancing with the Arabs and praying with the Jews

His troubles at home are building up, no doubt, but - amazingly - Trump's Middle East tour seems to have been, well, something of a success. 

Lee Smith:

“I want to tell you,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said to President Donald Trump during a joint press conference Monday, “how much we appreciate the reassertion of American leadership in the Middle East.”

So how is Trump’s first foreign trip as president playing out? Suddenly, the scandal-mired President seems like a plausible world leader. He is certainly a more welcome guest in the capitols of America’s traditional allies than his predecessor, President Barack Obama. In addition to enjoying the show, viewers at home—the ones who voted for Trump last fall—likely appreciate the $110 billion arms deal Trump struck with Saudi Arabia. With another $350 billion to come over the next decade, those contracts will certainly help put assembly-line Americans back to work.

Trump’s speech before a worldwide audience about terrorism and Islam was a useful initiative that will also put some of the dozens of Muslim leaders who attended the speech on notice. Acknowledging that Jerusalem is in Israel is a break with strict Obama policy. Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Western Wall....

The Iranian regime isn’t very happy. Trump’s photo ops stole the entire foreign policy news cycle from an Iranian regime that wanted a few days of good press after its rigged presidential elections last Friday. The message that Tehran received from the presidential pomp and circumstance in Riyadh is that things are different now.

The Obama administration moved quietly behind the scenes to reorient American policy toward Iran, while it pulled the rug out from under traditional American allies. Among other things, the Obama White House leaked Israeli strikes against Hezbollah convoys, it coordinated operations with Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and it stood aside as Bashar al-Assad waged a genocidal campaign in Syria so as not to affect the prospects of the nuclear deal with Iran.

The Iranians know how much they owe the Obama administration—whether it was air support for Qassem Soleimani in Tikrit, legitimization of Iranian interests in Yemen, deterring Israel from striking their nuclear facilities, turning a blind eye as they built a highway from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut.

Now the Americans are dancing with the Arabs and praying with the Jews, and Iran is on its own again.

And Michael Totten:

Those who stressed about this beforehand weren’t wrong to worry. Thanks to the president of the United States, our relations with Mexico are worse than at any time since Pancho Villa. He screamed at Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull after he’d been in office for barely a week. He even said Canada is behaving disgracefully as recently as a month ago.

The travel ban alienated our friends and allies in Iraq back in January (can you believe that was only four months ago?), and he said plenty of unhinged things about Muslims in general and Saudi Arabia in particular when he ran for president. “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” he said last year to cheers at one of his campaign rallies, “until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”...

“Islam hates us,” he said to CNN’s Anderson Cooper a little more than a year ago, as if “Islam” is some kind of a monolith. Obviously lots of Muslims hate us, but plenty don’t, and many of them are our friends. Practically everyone with even an ounce of experience in that part of the world can attest to the fact that a huge range of opinions toward the West exists in the Middle East. It’s as obvious and basic as the fact that lunch follows breakfast. That Trump apparently didn’t know this and spoke about the entire region as if everyone is our enemy alarmed diplomats, foreign policy professionals and foreign correspondents across the entire political spectrum.

No one who can’t tell the difference between a friend and an enemy will ever win a war in the Middle East or anywhere else. I can promise you that. Trump complained endlessly that Barack Obama refused to publicly identify “radical Islamic terrorists” as our enemy. Well, we’re also not going to get anywhere if we refuse to acknowledge that Muslims from Morocco to Kurdistan and even—to a drastically lesser extent—Saudi Arabia are our allies. We especially won’t get anywhere if we treat these people so terribly that they can’t work with us anymore.

Something huge has changed in the meantime, though. Perhaps it’s partly the fact that, per Trump’s own policy, we’re now arming Kurdish Muslims to fight ISIS. The president must have realized, at some point in the recent past, that the Saudis are more vigorously opposed to the Iranian regime than we are and that they’re softening their attitude toward the Israelis. His National Security Advisor HR McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis most certainly have described the lay of the land to him by now, and he apparently listens to them more than he listens to the likes of Steve Bannon. He acknowledged in his speech that the overwhelming majority of people murdered by terrorists are Muslims—a detail that’s hard to square with the notion that every Muslim on earth is programmed as a jihadist.

Professional haters of all things Islamic like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Frank Gaffney are unteachable. You can point out to these people that Muslim-majority Albania is among the most pro-American countries in the entire world and they’ll still describe it as a jihadist menace. It’s what they do.

Donald Trump is different. He’ll never change his personality. For the rest of his days, Trump’s gonna Trump. He is, however, capable of learning new things and reversing himself.

It’s probably safe to say at this point that the president’s earlier views were the product of staggering ignorance rather than axe-grinding ideology, and it’s easier to fill an empty vessel than to replace the contents of one that is already full.

Working man

September 1943. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "A mechanic at the Greyhound garage."

[Photo: Shorpy/Esther Bubley for the Office of War Information]

Three hooded men took turns

The Indonesian couple sentenced to a public lashing for gay sex last week have now received their punishment under sharia law. It was quite a show:

The crowd roared as two men in their early 20s - one muttering through clenched teeth - received 83 lashes each outside a mosque in the Indonesian province of Aceh for the crime of gay sex.

One of the men, who was just 20, was given a glass of water after the 40th lash. A doctor approached him after the 60th and asked him if he was still strong. He nodded.

[Photo: Jefri Tarigan]

Three hooded men took turns to flog the pair.

The audience, estimated by police to be 2500 people, gathered before the red-carpeted platform in front of Syuhada mosque in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, baying in frustration when the caning paused.

This was the first time sharia courts had imposed public flogging for sodomy under new laws introduced in 2014 as part of Aceh's Islamic criminal code, known as Qanun Jinayat....

Four heterosexual couples also received up to 30 lashes of the cane for khalwat (being in close proximity, such as secluded in a room, when not married), which is effectively kissing and hugging.

One of the women couldn't continue after nine lashes and had a break before returning to the platform, where a white triangle marked where the convicted must stand and face the crowd while being caned.

"You are strong in bed, but you pretend to be in pain when caned," someone yelled....

Men and women were separated to observe the caning, with an announcer warning the crowd that children should not be present.

"But the mothers can then tell them at home as education on the enforcing of sharia law," he said.

Red wash

Tollington Park:

Time for anger

Can't really argue with Brendan O'Neill here:

After the terror, the platitudes. And the hashtags. And the candlelit vigils. And they always have the same message: ‘Be unified. Feel love. Don’t give in to hate.’ The banalities roll off the national tongue. Vapidity abounds. A shallow fetishisation of ‘togetherness’ takes the place of any articulation of what we should be together for – and against. And so it has been after the barbarism in Manchester. In response to the deaths of more than 20 people at an Ariana Grande gig, in response to the massacre of children enjoying pop music, people effectively say: ‘All you need is love.’ The disparity between these horrors and our response to them, between what happened and what we say, is vast. This has to change....

 

Poor judgement

From the Times (£):

A contender to succeed President Zuma of South Africa as leader of the African National Congress has admitted that he asked a government employee to text him naked pictures of herself.

Jeff Radebe‚ 64, the minister for justice, sent Siyasanga Mbambani, 29, a photographer, a text asking her to send him an image of her genitals during a series of messages.

Mr Radebe put it down to “poor judgment”...

Well yes, you could say that.

I don't know. Made me laugh.

At the Hill

More pictures of flowers and blue skies and stuff. What else can you do? 

Yesterday at the Hill, Hampstead:

And this, by the pond:

I often see dragonflies there - normally those thin brightly coloured little things that hover then dart off, then hover, then dart off again. No point trying to photograph them unless you're carrying all the equipment, with a massive lens and tripod and all the rest. But here was this (relatively) huge thing. Body like a moth. Came home, googled "fat dragonfly" and there it was - a broad-bodied chaser. 

 

Their first live concert

It just keeps getting worse, doesn't it? Teenagers this time. Young teenagers. No doubt many will have gone only after long arguments with parents. C'mon mum, dad! Pleeeeze. It's Ariana Grande!!! For many it'll have been their first concert. Everyone remembers their first live concert - the joy, the atmosphere, the crowd, the noise, everybody happy, everybody having a good time....

Security will have been tight. The most plausible scenario I've heard is that the bomber entered the foyer when the doors were being opened at the end, ready for the mass exit.