Reaction after Blair's speech
From Labour One minister was so distressed, he blubbed, "We're f****** mad. What are we f****** doing?"
From the ConservativesOne Tory texted a colleague of mine during the speech to say, “Thank God he’s going.”
They are both right.
This morning, the news was that the production of Mozart's Idomeneo, which features in one scene the severed heads of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad and Poseidon, had been cancelled. Now, the launch meeting of a "dialogue forum" made up of government ministers and the usual "Muslim representatives" has "spoken out unanimously" that the performances should go ahead in November.
They certainly should. However, if they do, it is a good bet that there will be trouble in November. And the effect will be the same - anything that a super-sensitive victim mentality might find offensive to the core of its being will just be that much more difficult to do in future. It is hard to see how the circle can be broken, especially given the effect a very few people can have on so many. Those few become the voice of 'their people'; their very extremism is a surety of their sincerity and dedication; the volume generated by their actions overwhelms any other voices that 'their people' seek to make heard. For the rest of us, they become not just an isolated bunch of nutters, but the avantgarde of a mass of (you unthinkingly assume) nutters, in the same way that certain feminists erected themselves onto the platform of wimin and socialists spoke for all the working class. The Muslims who just want to get on with their lives are not allowed to do so because they are painted as, and often feel, traitors to the cause, unworthy of their faith and their co-religionists. As such, they are not able to do what liberal democracies allow more than any other system ever created: live as if politics didn't matter.
This is something that Tony Blair understands and the poor activist will never get his head round. Blair said it yesterday, When I went to Sedgefield to seek the nomination, just before the 1983 election, I was a refugee from the London-based politics of that time.
It's a sort of warning really to those for whom politics is everything, or for whom their religion is everything. They will never really understand the rest of the world and will do more harm than good precisely because they battle for a good that only a tiny number of damaged minds ever see or desire. Most people would gladly leave them to it, if only these superior souls could keep it to themselves. Of course, they can't.
I knocked on John Burton's door. He said "come in; but shut up for half an hour, we're watching the Cup Winners Cup final".
I sat in the company of the most normal people I had met in the Labour Party.
They taught me that most of politics isn't about politics, in the sense of meetings, resolutions, speeches or even Parties. It starts with people.
It's about friendship, art, culture, sport. It's about being a fully paid up member of the human race before being a fully paid up member of the Labour Party.
God, they're going to miss that man.
I don't like a lot of his policies; I don't like the growing weight of the state or the bloated public sector or his pandering to the tabloids. But Blair is a mensch. I have a weakness for people who can speak well, but an even bigger one for people who can do that and actually say something. When you hear him and compare it to those that are continually burnishing their Old Labour badges and taking the moral high ground - it's men and boys.
Fear and Loathing in The Land of the Pure by Isaac Schrödinger: An Apostate and a Blasphemer
Isaac Schrödinger is a Pakistani asking for asylum in Canada. His post begins I was born in an Ahmadi Muslim family in Pakistan. I’m a Pakistani citizen. The attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 and the reactions of Muslims to it changed my mindset. I left Islam in January of 2002.
All the best to him.
(via Samizdata)
Israeli blogger, Imshin, has rendered us a great service. She has translated a long article from the Hebrew newspaper, Maariv, in which Ben Dror Yemini has taken the trouble to do some counting. Rather unpleasant counting it is, too. The dead. The Muslim dead. Those dead at Israeli hands, and those at the hands of fellow Muslims, and of others, as well (see below).
60,000 Arabs have died in the Arab-Israel conflict since 1948 — a few thousand were Palestinian. In that same period, the lower-end estimate of Muslims killed by Muslims (in Algeria, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, etc) is 8.67 million.
Ben Dror Yemini concludes: Obviously, in recent years, the Palestinian victims have received most of the attention of the Media and the Academia. In actual fact, these make up just a small percentage of the total sum of all victims. The total sum of Palestinians killed by Israel in the territories that were conquered is several thousand. 1,378 were killed in the first Intifada, and 3,700 since the start of the second Intifada.
(via Pajamas Media)
This is less, for instance, than the Muslim victims massacred by former Syrian president, Hafez Assad in Hama in 1982. This is less than the Palestinians massacred by King Hussein in 1971. This is less than the number of those killed in one single massacre of Muslim Bosnians by the Serbs in 1991 in Srebrenica, a massacre that left 8,000 dead.
At least half a million Algerians died during the French occupation. A million Afghanis died during the Soviet occupation. Millions of Muslims and Arabs were killed and slaughtered at the hands of Muslims. But all the world knows about one Mohammed al-Dura [on which, see this].
The genocide that Israel is not committing, that is completely libelous, hides the real genocide, the silenced genocide that Arabs and Muslims are committing mainly against themselves. The libel has to stop so as to look at reality. It is in the interest of the Arabs and the Muslims. Israel pays in image. They pay in blood. If there is any morality left in the world, this should be in the interest of whoever has a remaining drop of it in him. And should it happen, it will be small news for Israel, and great news, far greater news, for Arabs and Muslims.
Niall Furguson cites President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations. I emphatically declare that today's world … longs for the perfect righteous human being and the real saviour who has been promised to all peoples and who will establish justice, peace and brotherhood on the planet. O, Almighty God … bestow upon humanity … the perfect human being promised to all by You, and make us among his followers and among those who strive for his return and his cause.
It puts the Chomsky-flourishing Chavez in a new light, doesn't it? He's the sort of maniac we can cope with; the 20th Century had a gaggle of them; there are squawking squads of them embedded in our universities. But the "real saviour" who will "establish justice, peace and brotherhood"? Please, please! Anything but salvation! Please!
Simon Schama interviewed in The Times. His own favourite story is Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard, about the attempts of an old Sicilian prince to “change in order to stay the same”. On the last page, after the prince has died, the body of his dog, Bendico, is flung from a window. For a moment, in midair, the corpse looks like the living, barking Bendico.
Here is the passage, the last paragraph of The Leopard.
“That’s what history is!” Schama cries, now passionate, not campy. “That moment when he is a barking dog again, just before he becomes dust.” In other words, the individual story is as fleeting as anything else, but infinitely more true than any timeless theory.As the carcass was dragged off, its glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproof of the things that you throw away, that you wish to be rid of. A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was tossed down into a corner that the dustman visited every day. As he sailed down from the window, he seemed for a moment to take shape again and you could have seen him dancing in the air, a quadruped with long whiskers and his right forepaw raised as if cursing. And then he too found peace in a pile of livid dust.
This is the second part of a review of The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first part is here.
Ward-Perkins asks a simple question of the archeological evidence: what was the effect of the collapse of the Roman Empire on the lives of ordinary people?
The evidence is obviously limited to those things that last. In this case, that means: pottery, roof-tiles, coins, buildings. To which he adds some other data: population density, literary ephemeria; evidence of exports and imports.
Pottery
Roman pottery had 3 important features: high quality and standardisation; huge quantities; high diffusion both geographically and socially.
The third feature is particularly important as it is germane to his entire argument. High-quality ceramics were available to even humble householders far removed from the centres of power. Ordinary people benefited from the industrialisation of the industry in the same way, if to a lesser degree, to us humble folk of today. And it is a feature that is present in the other areas of his study.
The contrast with what followed is notable. Whereas high art remained possible in a very different form and available to the rich and powerful, even the wealth at the disposal of kings could not buy them what ordinary people had had a few years earlier. The finds at Sutton Hoo showed that an East Anglian king could acquire from home and abroad luxury items of exquisite craftsmanship, but couldn't buy himself a decent jug. [I have struggled to provide an image. For obvious reasons, it is not a first choice. It is to be found in the British Museum.] This last was certainly imported since it was shaped on a wheel, a tool that had disappeared from these shores. Even so, the quality is poor, the fabric porous and the finish crude, inferior to objects found on British farms of 2 centuries previous.
The contrast is reinforced at la Graufesenque in Southern Gaul, a centre for the ceramics industry. Archeologists have uncovered the factory refuse pit, which contains the remains of 10,000 vessels, 1,000 of which are undamaged. They are all seconds, thrown away to maintain standards. There they rest with their makers' stamps, vastly superior to anything an Anglo-Saxon king could obtain for love, fear or gold. (cont)
Part 1 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Iran seems to be walking away with the palm in its fight to have the 'nuclear option.' If the summary given by Amir Taheri is even just close to the truth, it looks all but certain that Tehran's big player status is assured for a long time to come.
Main points: Chirac dropped the only condition that the 5+1 group - the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany - had demanded of Teheran as a prelude to negotiations [that Iran be asked to stop uranium enrichment as a precondition].
In any case, the Iranians have been relocating Iranian assets in places where they cannot be seized or frozen
The consequence of such preparedness may, parodoxically, be sanctions because
have been stockpiling dual-use products likely to be denied to Iranian importers when, and if, sanctions are imposed.
have already won the express support of no fewer than 116 of the 192 members of the UN for its position regarding the nuclear issue.Iran's friends on the council, especially Russia and China, might decide that it is not worthwhile to pick up a quarrel with Washington to stop sanctions that would not hurt the Islamic Republic in any case.
Another consequence may be war for if sanctions prove useless from the start, the US and its closest allies might decide that the only effective move against the Iran is military action. In other words, Teheran's success in countering possible sanctions may render a military clash inevitable.
And even this would be victory "A limited military clash would suit Ahmadinejad fine," says a former cabinet minister. "The Americans would appear, fire a few missiles, bomb a few sites and go away. Ahmadinejad would show on TV some old ladies and babies killed by the Americans, declare victory and pursue his grand plans with renewed vigor."
I would love, at this point, to set out the strategy to defeat all this. Yes, well, ...
