Hamas: the real level of its support

Amir Taheri corrects the impression the Hamas have majority support in the Palistinian Authority. Hamas's 74 out of 132 seats in the National Assembly should not be extrapolated into a proportion of national backing. 49 of those seats were district constituencies and most of them from Gaza.

Hamas' strong showing at the district level was largely due to its well-entrenched presence in Gaza, where voter turnout was 81 percent. As Hamas' base, Gaza has always been inhospitable territory to secular parties, including President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah. Thanks to Gaza, Hamas won almost 44 percent of the district-level votes.

At the national level, however, Hamas collected just over 36 percent of the votes. Taking the two levels together, Hamas won only 40 percent of the popular vote — which means that 60 percent of the Palestinians voted against it.

He points to other strong parlamentary showings by Islamic parties similarly based on relatively narrow popular support.

...four years ago in Turkey, [..] the Justice and Development (AK) Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan won two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly with a third of the votes. Before that, the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS) had been poised to win two-thirds of the seats in Algeria's general election in 1991, again with a third of the votes.

Conclusion? The Hamas Charter may well not be a reliable basis for a forecast on what they will try to do in power. Dose of optimism for the day.

The cartoons and appeasement

What Jyllands-Posten did was to publish something it knew would provoke Muslims (though it had no idea how much) in order to flaunt its own "liberal" credentials. That was unforgivable.

In short, both these ancient societies are struggling through a crisis of identity. And to assert that identity, marshalled round its supposed core value of tolerance, it has seemed necessary to show intolerance to others who are different. But is this anxiety really about Islam, its dislike of criticism or resistance to Enlightenment liberalism? Or is it, at root, no more than the hostility of a tightly-knit community to strangers who have arrived to share the family home? Jyllands-Posten suggests that its main concern has been for freedom and democracy. I doubt that. It has certainly damaged both of them.

This is Neal Ascherson on openDemocracy. In his view, once again, it is basically our (the Dane's, the West's) fault. Yes, he acknowledges the "manipulated outrage" in the reaction of those Muslims on the street, but applies the epithet equally to westerners who shout out about freedom of speech. And in the end (the second paragraph above is his last), it comes down to the Danes getting jumpy, and so hostile. That's the problem!

I can see some sense in the argument that you don't throw squibs onto the embers of a fire if you want a quiet night's sleep. On utilitarian grounds, it is a reasonable view. Ascherson believes that the newspaper was after a bit of fuss. I confess, I don't know. However, the point is that we are being pushed into a corner by tantrums, and that we are already having to trim our expressed opinions so as not to provoke yet another tantrum. The public sphere is impoverished. Can you imagine the BBC, or any other broadcaster daring to put on screen something even far milder than Jerry Springer, but directed at Islam. There is no way. But it's all our fault. The old appeasers' kneejerk reaction. They do ill, therefore we are bad.

The free society is its procedures

Oliver Kamm makes a fundamental distinction, one that is too often forgotten.

The defence of a free society is the defence of its procedures, not its output. Some of that output will be offensive and much will be valueless. We have a right to criticise it, and a moral obligation never, never to complain that our hurt feelings require its suppression.

(via Samizdata)

Support Denmark

This image, and others, are available from The Dissident Frogman.

Be proud, do not apologize.

Ibn Warraq in Der Spiegel.

Are we in the west going to cave into pressure from societies with a medieval mindset, or are we going to defend our most precious freedom -- freedom of expression, a freedom for which thousands of people sacrificed their lives?

... This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the sins our fathers? Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of Bombay and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the Indians their own past: it was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India; it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past glory. British Imperialism preserved where earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples.

(via norm)

Their oil, our weakness

Another very good essay by Victor Hanson Davis.

He says a lot about 'them', but more importantly, about 'us', and what we can do. He puts forward 3 fundamental policies: energy independence to drive down oil prices; no Middle East autocracy with nuclear weapons; support for democratic reform.

The most interesting parts are about our attitudes to action with regards to Islamic militancy, and about how it is our own dependence on the one resource the Middle East has that leads both to their extremism and to our pusillanimity.

Perhaps due to what might legitimately be called the lunacy principle ("these people are capable of doing anything at anytime"), the Muslim Middle East can insist on one standard of behavior for itself and quite another for others. It asks nothing of its own people and everything of everyone else's, while expecting no serious repercussions in the age of political correctness, in which affluent and leisured Westerners are frantic to avoid any disruption in their rather sheltered lives.

Rather, we should worry about the insatiable American demand that results in tight global supply for everyone, leading to high prices and petrobillions in the hands of otherwise-failed societies who use this largess for nefarious activities from buying nukes to buying off deserved censure from the West, India, and China. If the Middle East gets a pass on its terrorist behavior from the rest of the world, ultimately that exemption can be traced back to the voracious American appetite for imported oil, and its effects on everything from global petroleum prices to the appeasement of Islamic fascism.

(via Ninme)

American army, Abu Graib, war crimes

I'm a bit late on this one, but I've been away. While away, I got involved in an argument about the virtues and vices of the Pax Americana. Inevitably, Abu Graib came up. I wish I'd read this beforehand.

newsisyphus (who doesn't supply permalinks, for some reason - it's the post for the 1st of Feb) is talking about the involvement of Hugh Thompson, US Army, in the Mai Lai massacre in 1968, in which American soldiers killed over 500 Vietnamese civilians. Thompson, in the same area in a helicopter with a crew of two, saw something that didn't make sense: the corpses of Vietnamese villagers that he had previously marked to be flown out for medical treatment. New sisyphus quotes a CNN report.

"We just noticed a vast number of dead bodies: old women, old men, babies, infants that were dead or wounded", said Thompson, who was 24 at the time.
Thompson and his crew, 19-year-old gunner Larry Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta, 18, flew closer to the ground and what they saw there confirmed their fears. They watched a fellow American shoot a Vietnamese woman at point-blank range.
Thompson landed his helicopter, determined to stop the killing. Then he and his crew did something that could have cost them their own lives or military careers: they turned their guns on fellow Americans and ordered them to stop shooting.

Link to an article from usnews about Hugh Thompson.

newsisyphus continues with a personal memory.

I will never forget the day, back when I was in U.S. Navy boot camp at Great Lakes RTC, when we seamen recruits received training on orders, what they mean, how to obey them, what to do when you are given contradictory orders and, most importantly, what to do when given illegal orders. It was explained to me then that an illegal order is not a proper order at all; it imposes no duty to obey. In fact, our instructor went on, the illegal order imposes a duty of a different sort: the duty not only to refuse to follow it but to take the officer or senior enlisted person who issued the illegal order under arrest, immediately and without question. Our instructor hammered home this point, even going so far as to make it clear that rank did not matter one bit in this calculation. If an admiral came by and ordered an E-3 to open fire for no legitimate reason on a civilian fishing boat, that E-3 was to place that admiral under arrest, right then, right there.

No-one could claim that Americans live up to this, but it would be reasonable to claim that a large number of them try to. The real point is, however, that when they act as Lt Calley did at Mai Lai, there are people willing to fight and report him; there are principles applied in law against which to judge him, and there is a functioning legal system that will prosecute him. It won't always happen, but it happens enough. Not enough to say that Americans are better people than others, which would be absurd, but enough to say that the American system is better than others.

Michael Yon's photo & copyright

There's no better measure of quality than the fact that everyone wants a bite of it. Michael Yon's photo, which I reproduced here, has evidently been distributed by the army in all sorts of ways that Michael had no control over. He is seeking redress, but not having a lot of luck.
Read about it at punditreview.

Australian history and fables of the fall

Australia is one of the most PC countries on the planet, and this is nowhere more evident than in the treatment of the British settlement. It is an unmissable opportunity for lyricism and eulogy (with regard to the aborigines) and for shame and self-loathing (that's for us white pigs).
Below is an example of the former (all the more attractive in that there is no way to confirm or deny this picture, rather like Adam and Eve).

"About three days in every week would be devoted to gathering your food," he says. "Hunting, collecting - a bit less in places of plenty, a bit more in the hard country. The rest of your time would be spent socialising, or in religious observances of different kinds." There is a "rich and complicated legal system" and the "children are more deeply loved than perhaps any children on earth".
Then, into this world comes the "white invader. Their first act is to say the land is terra nullius, that no one owns the land, that it is not used ... Thus begins the Australian Civil War."

From a History textbook for Australian High Schools

Janet Albrechtsen comments

This is ideology - inculcating a sense of shame in young students about Western civilisation.
There is no mention of British colonisation contributing anything much to Australia - no mention of civilised society or the rule of law. Instead, all the talk is of dark forces reaching Australian shores: forces that are individualistic and competitive and concerned with material gain. There are sneering references to Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Charles Darwin - as examples of Europeans who believed in the "superiority" of Western civilisation, over, say the hunter-gatherer existence of local indigenous people. Reading the text is like learning about Darwin's evolutionary theory in reverse gear. Progress is rather nasty and a source of embarrassment to the authors.

The article from the Australian is here.

Cartoons of Muhammad & standing up

“There is a lot at stake. It would be very naive to think this is only about Jyllands-Posten and 12 cartoons and apologising or not apologising.
“This is about standing for fundamental values that have been the (foundation) for the development of Western democracies over several hundred years, and we are now in a situation where those values are being challenged,” he said.
“I think some of the Muslims who have reacted very strongly to these cartoons are being driven by totalitarian and authoritarian impulses, and the nature of these impulses is that if you give in once they will just put forward new requirements.”

Flemming Rose, editor of Jyllands-Posten, publishers of the cartoons of he-who-must-not-be-mocked.
See also my post on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and multi-culturalism.
The article by Andrew Browne in Timesonline.