Parliamentary Debate -
THE SEARCH FOR A "NEW MANDELA"
Following rumours that the U.N. is not exactly falling all over itself, however accustomed they might be to doing so in times of crisis, and basically at all other times, to look favourably upon the RGiE's application to be allowed representation and have someone address the General Assembly in full uniform and with a gun on his hip, the recent parliamentary debate focussed on one crucial fact:
WE NEED OUR OWN MANDELA! A "RHODELA"!
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Of course he believed Saddam had WMDs; EVERYBODY believed that, until Bush came along and sought to do something about it. Then, because everything Bush wants to do surely must be wrong, they developed a collective case of amnesia; they even forgot this.
Bush has done absolutely nothing inconsistent with the Iraq policy formulated by Bill Clinton-- except enforce it.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
05/08/2006 10:10 Comments ||
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#5
Ihsan Bagby, a CAIR board member, has written Moslems can never be full citizens of the United States because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions and ideologies of this country as the United States is not a Moslem country.
CAIR should be disbanded with all of its executive and subscription membership deported at once.
Muslims have been keenly aware of the weakness and relative backwardness of their society for a long time now. This awareness begins, of course, with defeat in the battlefield that is where the lessons of history are most perspicuously administered but it has spread to other things, and for a long time now the debate has been going on in the Islamic world. "What did we do wrong? What is the secret of Western success and of our failure?"
Let me begin my discussion of that with a definition: gender. Gender, as you know, is a grammatical term. In Latin, there are three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral. In modern usage it has come to acquire a somewhat different connotation, meaning relations between the sexes other than the purely physical ones.
I would like to begin with two quotations from the very rich Muslim literature commenting on these changes. My first comes from 1593. This is recorded by an imperial historiographer. A new English ambassador arrived in Istanbul sent by Queen Elizabeth. The first thing the historiographer commented on was the ship on which the ambassador arrived. He writes with obvious bewilderment, "This is a ship that travels thousands of miles and carries 83 guns, besides other weapons." English ships were built for the Atlantic, and they are therefore bigger, stronger and more manoeuvrable than the Mediterranean ships of the Muslim world.
His other point is even more astonishing, and he says with palpable bewilderment, "This ambassador comes from a country which is ruled by a woman who rules her inherited realmwith complete power." He doesn't draw any inferences from that, nor did anyone else for some time to come.
Then, in 1867, a Turkish writer called Nama Kamal published an article in which he said, "The reason for backwardness is the way we treat our women, treating them only as suitable for producing children and nothing else."As far as I know, he was the first to make that point. From then onwards it becomes more and more of an issue in the Muslim world, and has continued to be to the present day. There are some who see this as the major factor in the relative backwardness of the Muslim world compared with the West. There are others on the opposite side who see this as the major factor of Western dissipation and corruption and evil.
I firmly believe that women are our best hope in dealing with the Muslim world, because they have so much to gain from modernization.
Now, there has been a fair amount of change. Let me look very rapidly at certain specific issues.
Islamic law permits polygamy and concubinage. The Qur'an is quite explicit on this. It says a man may have up to four wives and as many concubines as he wishes and can afford. Concubines are female slaves whom it is permitted to use sexually.
Polygamy and concubinage remain legal, in many Muslim countries. But some Muslim countries have actually outlawed polygamy. Some have hedged it with all kinds of restrictions, like requiring the written consent of the first wife to the acquisition of any subsequent wives, which is not impossible to get, by the way, by various means.
In many countries, although polygamy is still legal, it's no longer socially acceptable. In others it's no longer economically possible. I would say that, on the whole, polygamy is in decline, and concubinage has almost disappeared except in the Arabian Peninsula, where it still flourishes.
In other respects, women have made enormous progress in some countries, although by no means all, and that is in education. And here, one of the encouraging features of the situation is that one of the countries where women have done best is in Iraq. Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm not speaking of rights the word "rights" has no meaning at all in that kind of society I'm speaking of opportunity, of access. Women in Iraq and this goes back a long way; it started under the monarchy and continued under the various succeeding regimes had access to higher education to a degree without parallel in the Arab world, with the possible exception of Tunisia. They could go to university. They could enter the professions.
This, I feel, is a very hopeful sign for the future. Women generally do not receive the brain-deadening indoctrination that passes for education in many of these countries, because they're not thought important enough to be given it.
This does have a beneficial result, and I would say in many respects women are the greatest hope for much of the Islamic world, notably but by no means exclusively in Iraq.
I wanted to end with some quotations, if I may. This is from an Egyptian sheik who went to Paris in 1826 as chaplain to the first Egyptian student mission and wrote a fascinating book about it. Talking of the French, he said, "Men among them are the slaves of women and are subject to their commands, whether they be beautiful or not.
"One of them said," the sheik also reported, `Women among the people of the East are like household possessions, while among us they are like spoiled children.' The Europeans harbour no evil thoughts about their women, even though the transgressions of these women are very numerous. Fornication among them is a secondary rather than a major sin, especially in the case of the unmarried. The French women excel in beauty and grace and conversation and courtesy. They always display themselves in their adornments and mingle with men at places of entertainment. A ball always includes both men and women, and there are great lights and chairs on which to sit. These are mostly for the women to sit on, and no man may sit until all the women are seated. Women are always treated at these gatherings with more consideration than men."
Can you picture this man's bewilderment at this astonishing spectacle, which he saw in Paris in 1826?
Let me end with a quotation from a Turkish woman writer of the 15th century she was one of the very few. She was the daughter of a qadi and had access to education because she had an enlightened father, and she wrote a few poems, one of which I will read to you in English translation:
"Woman, they say, is deficient in sense, so they ought to pardon her every word, but one female who knows what to do is better than a thousand males who don't."
Washington propped up Musharraf because he could help catch Osama. Now the general's sinking
Peter Preston
Monday May 8, 2006
The Guardian
· Memo to C Rice, M Beckett, GW Bush, T Blair and whoever comes next
Are you sitting uncomfortably as the bad news pours in from Basra and points east? That's the trouble with "failed states". They keep on failing. Just scan the top 10 in the global basket-case championship, as nominated last week by the learned American journal Foreign Policy. Iraq is there, of course, along with Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Chad, Haiti and our old friend Afghanistan. Wait a minute, that's only nine.
The extra failed state on the list - and, at number nine, its fastest riser - is axiomatically Islamic, chronically violent, a terrorist training ground prone to stumble into wars with its neighbours, and run by an increasingly beleaguered man in uniform. And it already has the bomb - tested and ready to blast. Stop posturing over Tehran for a moment, can't you? Welcome to Pakistan.
Too alarmist? Well, the state department came fast out of the traps claiming to see success, not failure. General Musharraf is a fine, stable chap to do business with. But always listen hardest to the people out there on the ground - and writing outraged editorials for serious local papers like Dawn. How dare these US policy wonks slander us so?
Of course Pakistan is trapped in "religious nationalism" and perennial conflicts, they admit; of course 40% of its biggest province has no proper policing system; of course 27,000 square miles of tribal territory operates its own revenge code for crimes - and 850 miles of border in the south is acknowledged dacoit land. Of course more than half of Pakistan is without proper writ of the law. But this isn't new. It's old chaos as usual. How dare outsiders see failure?
And that - remember - is the case for the defence, a beating of patriotic drums. It just leaves out a few difficult things. It forgets that 2007 is election year and that visiting administration officials such as Richard Boucher "want to see Pakistan a more democratic society" - echoing your own insistence on "free, fair elections", Ms Rice. It forgets that (in the words of the American who ran the CIA's anti-al-Qaida unit) pushing the general "to do the US's dirty work against his country's national interest" could see him toppled. When America drove him to send troops into tribal no man's land, writes Michael Schueur, "it created a heaven-sent environment for Pakistan's enemies to fuel the Pashtun fire against the army".
Ask yourselves: why has Musharraf suddenly begun to try to distance himself from Big Brother Washington? Because he thinks he must. Because crass incidents - such as January's botched US air raid that killed 18 innocent villagers - back him into a desperate corner. And, perhaps, because he senses he's becoming dispensable.
Some other US thinktank findings got big play in Pakistan the other day: those Stratfor commentaries that said the general's "usefulness to the US was fast becoming negligible". Apparently Washington now "believes it does not need Musharraf at the helm to continue to prosecute its struggle against militant Islam"... and, moreover, "likely feels Musharraf is no longer able to keep domestic affairs in order".
The big question is whether any of you are thinking clearly enough - or at all. You're keen on democracy, because that's policy. But you're not always keen on its results, because that's Hamas. You've propped up Musharraf because he could help you catch Osama. But he hasn't. And now, surely, he's sinking. Just listen to those tame friends in parliament trying to re-elect him early for another five years so they can use their existing majority to let him hang on. It doesn't say much for their prospects at the polls. It's another great warning sign.
The point about Pakistan - as even Dawn admits - is "its inability to sustain a democratic functional order". That means the politicians like Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif come and go. But it also makes the army the continuing power broker: hugely influential and expensive, determined to keep its privileges and clout whatever happens. That's why the general is president now. It is also why he could be out on his ear.
Who helped invent the Taliban, for paradise's sake? Who fears India's increasing influence in Kabul and resents the way America cuddles closer to New Delhi? Whose sabres rattle loudest in Kashmir? There are no each-way bets on men in braid. There is no substitute for freedom relentlessly championed. You want the big picture seen clear, you say? Then this - in success or failure - is it.
p.preston@guardian.co.uk
Posted by: john ||
05/08/2006 19:24 ||
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Is the West winning the war on terror? The question pops up daily, followed far too often by ignorant assertions and can't. In effect, the answer is nothing less than a resounding yes.
Terror is a cancer that was never going to be eliminated with a single silver bullet. Like the ailment itself, it has to be isolated, contained, and suffocated.
In that sense, the monster is indeed gasping for oxygen. Let's take an inventory:
In the West, an impressive wall of separation has been erected against Jihadists within. The introduction of a vast infrastructure of new laws redefining freedom of speech and militancy has enabled Europe, America, and Australia to threaten Muslim communities within their borders with a near suspension of civil rights should they flirt with militancy.
In addition, any further flows of new immigrants have by and large been blocked with draconian legislation virtually rendering it impossible to obtain visas, let alone immigrate. Just stand outside an American embassy in Cairo, Islamabad, Amman, or Riyadh to see the endless lines of those who will never be able to get in.
This may be regrettable, but it has been highly effective.
Western jails are overflowing with hundreds of militant Muslims, including immigrants and naturalized citizens of Muslim origins arrested under a variety of new hate or sedition laws. Militancy among Europe's 35 million Muslims has been remarkably toned down to a whisper. A snapshot of the past year alone shows that mosques and Islamic groupings in Europe, America, and Australia have undergone major surgery.
Radical preachers have been invited to leave by fearful communities. Several have voluntarily returned to their countries of origin. The message being articulated is clear enough, as it was recently stated by the prime minister of Australia who told leaders of the Muslim communities there: Either conform to secular laws or leave.
Indeed, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavian nations, Spain, and Australia among others, have introduced laws allowing the state to strip militant Muslim subjects of their citizenship. Imams and preachers have to undergo a practical re-education.
Virtually every leader of Al Qaeda in Asia, Europe, and on the American continent is on the run, imprisoned, or dead. Osama Bin Laden and his deputies can do little more than smuggle tapes for broadcast on the Qatari satellite network, Al Jazeera. They can no longer use cell phones, faxes, or the Internet with impunity, let alone run an effective campaign of terror. One should never say never, but Western intelligence officials believe there cannot be a repeat of the September 11, 2001, attacks in America.
In the Muslim world itself, brutal autocratic governments - once content to let Jihadists be - are in the midst of a wake-up call, having become the targets. Armed terrorists are mercilessly tracked down without benefit of human or civil rights in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Muslim world. When it comes to suppression, these regimes need not take lessons.
Money spigots have been turned off. World financial institutions and banks have stopped the flow of funds to and from Islamic entities on the slightest suspicion stranding even Islamic charities. The plight of the Hamas government is a dramatic example of how tight the shutdown has become. Since its government formed in Gaza, Hamas has been unable to pay salaries to its 160,000 employees for the second month running. Arab banks refuse to rout Arab League money to Hamas too, so as not to get on the wrong side of a comprehensive Western boycott.
The only regions where terror thrives today are those of the Muslim world itself, such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. That too is regrettable, but in the end no harm is done there to the West.
In Iraq, the spreading civil war is between Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims. Similarly, in theocratic Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda's Jihadists are fighting the equally fundamentalist Saudi royal family. Oil exports and resources have been spared by and large because even the Jihadist opposition would like to have the income if it ever came to power.
True, in Iraq, the oil industry has been wrecked by insurgents, but that stands as the exception to the rule and a particular byproduct of extraordinary chaos. A civil war that has raged in Algeria between the corrupt army regime and murderous radical Jihadists since 1992, taking 110,000 lives, has yet to diminish Algerian oil and gas export by a single barrel or cubic foot.
By Andrew Klavan, Andrew Klavan's crime novels include "Don't Say a Word," "True Crime" and "Shotgun Alley." His newest book, "Damnation Street," is due out in September. He can be reached at www.AndrewKlavan.com.
The nation needs more gung-ho, patriotic war movies that celebrate our fight against Islamo-fascists.
THERE HAS NEVER been an age without war, not ever. Mass violence is a continual aspect of the human condition. Peace, like good weather, is always local and temporary and what is peace anyway but the result of past victories in war and the effective threat of future war against would-be aggressors?
We play with our children, read books, go to work and enjoy recreations only because people with guns stand ready, willing and able to kill other people with guns who would kill us if they could.
It's sweet to forget this and therefore difficult to keep it in mind. "It is hard for those who live near a Police Station to believe in the triumph of violence," as T.S. Eliot wrote. That's us we Americans, protected by a mighty military that by and large obeys the rules of our republic safe enough, and keeping much of the world safe enough, so that we find it hard to believe in what would happen if that protection failed.
But these fighters do keep us safe. And because keeping us safe is harsh, dangerous work, we should glorify them, exalt them in story and song by way of appreciation.
"United 93" the film celebrating the heroic civilian attempt to retake a hijacked plane on 9/11 opened last week. That's great. Well done and about time. But now, let's have some war movies.
We need some films celebrating the war against Islamo-fascism in Afghanistan and Iraq and in Iran as well, if and when that becomes necessary. We need films like those that were made during World War II, films such as 1943's "Sahara" and "Action in the North Atlantic," or "The Fighting Seabees" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," which were released in 1944.
Not all of these were great films, or even good ones, but their patriotic tributes to our fighting forces inspired the nation. More than that, they reminded the country what exactly it was that those forces were fighting to defend. Though many of these pictures now seem almost hilariously free with racist tirades against "sauerkrauts," and "eyeties" and "Tojo and his bug-eyed monkeys," they were also carefully constructed to display American life at its open-minded and inclusive best.
Every roll call of Hollywood's U.S. troops seems to include a Ragazzi and a Donovan, a Hellenopolis, a Novasky, and a wisecracking Roth. "Sahara" even throws in the black "Mohammedan" Tabul, a Sudanese ally. This may have been corny, but it was also more or less realistic, and it depicted the war as a conflict between our lovably mongrel melting pot and the despicable Axis ideal of racial purity.
For all their epithets and stereotypes, then, these pictures sent the distinctly American message that it's not bloodlines but national creeds that make a people, and that while even so great a creed as ours can't guarantee the decency of individuals, evil creeds surely sweep them up into destructive madness and therefore must be opposed.
Today we face an enemy in the grip of a belief system just as evil, just as destructive in its intent, as the system we fought back then. We were attacked at home in this war as we were in World War II. The outcome of the struggle is just as much in doubt. Worse, because Islamic fundamentalism supersedes nationhood, the danger it poses is more protean and diffuse. It's easier to pretend it isn't there, more tempting for the war-weary and the fatally foolish to waver and sound retreat.
In short, we need war movies now even more than in the '40s. So why aren't we getting them? One reason surely is that, in the years since World War II, our self-assurance as a nation, the self-assurance necessary for the waging of war, has been shaken, and Hollywood reflects that. The change occurred against the backdrop of postwar history, but I believe it has as much to do with our cultural values, their uses and misuses, as it does with events. The Western ethos, with its Christian roots, demands that we look to our own sins before judging the sins of others. It's amazing how quickly, after the war ended, Hollywood began to examine the ways in which Americans shared the moral failings of the Axis.
As early as 1947, we had "Crossfire," about an American GI who commits an anti-Semitic murder. In 1949, "Home of the Brave" depicted a heroic African American soldier dealing with prejudice. And by 1955, there was the classic "Bad Day at Black Rock," in which a veteran uncovers homicidal anti-Japanese bigotry when he tries to deliver a medal to the father of a Japanese American killed on the battlefields of Italy. Such self-examination and reform are part of the measure of our greatness. But there's a difference between a humble nation confessing its sins and a country of flagellants whipping themselves for every impure thought. Since the '60s, we have had, it seems, an endless string of war movies, from "Dr. Strangelove" to "Syriana," in which the United States is depicted as wildly aggressive and endlessly corrupt which, in fact, it's not; which, in fact, it never has been.
In taking our self-examining ethos to these extremes, we have lost a kind of wisdom, wisdom that acknowledges the complexity of human life but can move through it to find the simple truth again. While assessing the intricate failings of our moral history, many of us have lost sight of the simple truth that the system that shapes us is, in fact, a great one, that it has moved us inexorably to do better and that it's well worth defending against every aggressor and certainly against as shabby and vicious an aggressor as we face today.
Not only have we lost this kind of wisdom, but I think that a handful of elites really only a handful of academics, journalists and artists has raised up a golden counterfeit in its stead. With this counterfeit wisdom, they imagine themselves above the need for patriotism; they fantasize they grasp a truth beyond good and evil, and they preen themselves on a higher calling than the protection of our way of life. And all the while they forget that they imagine and fantasize and preen only by the grace of those who fight and die and stand guard to secure those freedoms that our system alone guarantees.
When war comes, as it always will, and when it is justified, as it is now, some nuances and shades of gray have to be set aside. It is time, instead, for faith and for ferocity. Our enemies have these weapons, after all. Our movies should inspire us to have them too.
#1
YOu arent going to get your war movies. If you do they will be doomsaying sagas of the fall of western civilization. The hollywood bunch has a long affinity for communism and a love affair with anti-americanism.
#3
Blackhawk Down, Tears of the Sun. Good Anti-fascist, anti-anarchist pro-American movies can obviously still be made. They don't even have to be 'pretty'. Its not even a question of commercial viability. Its never been about money, its been about power. Its more like good o'boy segregationists who obstruct the message of an entire segment of society. Those who controlled the levers of power in government yesterday are now controlling the levers of culture today, just in a different style.
I liked this line: But there's a difference between a humble nation confessing its sins and a country of flagellants whipping themselves for every impure thought. That's today's liberals in a nutshell. Still shaking, quaking, shaming and blaming like they did way back when.
OK Folks the Winter 2006 Arbitron ratings are in (on line). As a group project find your local market and let us know how Err Amerika is doing. I live in the Sacramento region and KCTC went from a high of 2.2 in the Summer 2005, then to 1.9 in the fall, and ended at 1.3 for the winter ratings. The other progressive station KSAC went was 1.7, 0.6, and 0.5 for the last three quarters. FYI Sacramento is almost as liberal as San Francisco and yes I am glad to see them sliding off into the abyss.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/08/2006 16:26 Comments ||
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#4
Hey, CS - live down in Antioch myself (work at Berkeley National Lab high above the most liberal city in America and the most leftist campus in the nation).
KSFO 560 AM was celebrating the looming demise of Err America this morning.
#5
KSFO (San Francisco) has the SAME rating as KCTC (Sacramento) in the SACRAMENTO market. FYI here are some Bay Area (Indian territory) numbers:
San Francisco KQKE-AM 1.2/1.2/1.2/1.2
Montorey CA KRXA-AM */*/0.4/*
Yessir really buring up the liberal money airwaves!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
OK Folks the 
