June 24, 2004
Problems of Blogging
Apologies for the recent technical problems which caused the site to disappear for a few days. - there really was nothing we could do about it as we don't own the webspace that we rent second hand.
Also thanks very much to everyone who emailed in with suggestions, complaints, advice and information. It was very much appreciated and special thanks to Norman Geras for his kind assistance in passing on suggestions from his readers.
At one stage it looked as though we had lost the whole thing including most of the archives which gave me rather a fright - thankfully that isn't the case.
However I am still getting mail from people saying they can't access the site. The problem seems to be affecting people who use NTL. Anyone any ideas about that one?
Anyway, cheers again and enjoy the game tonight.
The relationship between fascism and homosexuality
It's not what you think. Here's an extract from a piece I've written about this for the gay mag Attitude:
When the British National Party – our own home-grown Holocaust-denying bigots – announced it was fielding an openly gay candidate in the European elections this June, dedicated followers of fascism should not have blinked. The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was – including the gay-gassing, homo-cidal Third Reich. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay. It’s time to admit something. Fascism isn’t something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It’s a gay thing, baby, and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.
You can read the whole thing here.
Radio Free Arabia?
The BBC is to launch a 24-hour news channel broadcasting in Arabic across the UK, Europe and the Arab world which will offer competition to al-Jazeera.
June 23, 2004
Moonstruck
As we and a handful of other blogs reported last March, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church, announced at a gathering in Washington that he is the Messiah and that the spirits of Hitler and Stalin have mended their ways as a result of his teachings.
Now The Washington Post has finally caught up with the story-- to the embarrassment of some members of Congress who were on hand for Rev. Moon's historic announcements.
Adam Michnik on Iraq
In an interview last January with the US democratic socialist magazine Dissent, Adam Michnik-- a leader of the Solidarnosc movement who spent a total of six years as a political prisoner for his opposition to Poland's Communist government-- voiced his critical support for the American overthrow of the Baathist regime in Iraq.
As Michnik explained:
It's simply that life has taught me that if someone is being whipped and someone is whipping this person, I am always on the side of those who are being whipped. I've always criticized U.S. foreign policy for forgetting that the United States should defend those who need to be defended. I would object to U.S. policy if it supported Saddam Hussein, and I have always criticized the United States for supporting military regimes in Latin America.
Michnik makes many of the same points we at Harry's Place have made in supporting the Iraq war. But with one difference. He says one reason for his support is that he was able to look at Saddam Hussein's regime "through the eyes of the political prisoner in Baghdad."
(Thanks to Martha Bridegam for mentioning the interview in our comments box.)
Hitch takes on Moore
In case anyone missed it, Christopher Hitchens saw Michael Moore's new film. He, um, didn't care for it.
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.
Hitchens may be setting himself up for a libel suit. The New York Times reported:
"We want the word out," says Mr. Moore, who says he should have responded more quickly to allegations of inaccuracy in his Oscar-winning 2002 anti-gun documentary, "Bowling for Columbine." "Any attempts to libel me will be met by force," he said, not an ounce of humor in his familiar voice. "The most important thing we have is truth on our side. If they persist in telling lies, knowingly telling a lie with malice, then I'll take them to court."
The Times said Moore "has consulted with lawyers who can bring defamation suits against anyone who maligns the film or damages his reputation," and that he's established a "war room" to monitor attacks on the film.
Kind of touchy, isn't he? I still plan to see the film for myself. However it appears I'll have to clear any comments with my attorneys before posting them here.
We seem to be back
It appears that reports of our death were greatly exaggerated, but I appreciate all the nice things people said about us while we were missing. It was sort of like getting to read your own obituaries.
Thanks for your patience and concern.
June 21, 2004
Clinton on Camp David 2000
I'm sure his new book goes into much more detail, but here's Bill Clinton's take on what happened at Camp David in 2000, from an interview with The Guardian:
Clinton's version is that Israel's Ehud Barak was ready to make enormous concessions but that Arafat was not able to "make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman ... he just couldn't bring himself to say yes".
Just before Clinton left office, Arafat thanked him for all his efforts and told the president he was a great man. "'Mr Chairman,' I replied, 'I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.'"
However Clinton still thinks it's possible for Israel to make a deal with Arafat. I disagree.
June 19, 2004
Interview with Chief Rabbi Sacks
Less than two years ago Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks risked the anger of many British and Israeli Jews by harshly denouncing the policies of Israel's government toward the Palestinians.
So it's interesting to read what he had to say in a recent interview with The Telegraph.
Is the Holocaust being relativised, leading the gentile world to ignore the enduring threat to Jews posed by anti-Semitism? "It's much more serious than that," he replies. "The Holocaust is not being relativised, it is being abused. Political use is being made of words like 'genocide', 'ethnic cleansing' in contexts where they have no conceivable meaning.
"If, for instance, Israel takes defensive action against an organiser of suicide bombings, that is called 'genocide'. Now, if we have learnt two things from the Holocaust, they are, one, that bad things are preceded by demonisation - and right now Israel is being demonised - and, two, the early warning sign in a culture is when words lose their meaning.
"What is happening in certain circles, not in Britain, but around the world, is that the most vicious revenge is being taken on Jews. As somebody once said, nobody will ever forgive the Jews for the Holocaust. Today, Israel is being branded 'the new Nazis'. That sets off every conceivable warning signal in my mind. There is an anti-Zionism which goes with a profound anti-Americanism, which is fraught with danger. When civilisations clash, Jews die. That is the great danger facing Israel in the 21st century."
..."I am genuinely distressed that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is presented in the European media as a zero-sum game. So you are either pro-Israel or you are pro-Palestinian. That is an entirely fallacious way of looking at things. From peace, both sides gain. From violence, both sides lose. Therefore, it is not a zero-sum game whatsoever. Those who care about the future of the Palestinians must care about the future of Israel as well, and vice versa."
He argues that the Arab world has channelled dissent among young men into hatred for the scapegoat. "That is why I find the demonisation of Israel as tragic for Israel's neighbours as for Israel itself. . . Those who support Israel's neighbours in demonising Israel are indirectly perpetuating closed societies which deprive human beings of their rights."
On Camp David in 2000:
"I had the opportunity to discuss this with Bill Clinton. He felt that Ehud Barak had not only gone the extra mile, not only further than he thought he would; [Clinton] thought Barak had gone further than he thought he should." The Chief Rabbi, his voice filled with anguish, declares: "I weep for the selfinflicted injuries of Israel's enemies." There is a long pause; then he apologises for "getting passionate".
It will be most interesting to read what Clinton has to say about Camp David and its aftermath in his new book.
The Telegraph interview lacks any mention of Rabbi Sacks's attendance at the opening of the East London Muslim community center, which featured a speech by the viciously antisemitic Sheikh al-Sudais. In fact outside of Harry's Place, the only websites I could find which raised questions about the lack of media coverage of the Sheikh's anti-Jewish sermons are Frontpagemag.com (which credited us), Foxnews.com, and National Review Online-- all right-wing American websites.
When did objecting to anti-Jewish ravings become almost the sole province of the Right?
Sewing machines for Iraq
Here's an update on the latest candle-lighting activities of Spirit of America, the grassroots Iraqi-aid group which I plugged a few weeks ago.
It reminds us-- if in fact anyone needed the reminder-- that Abu Ghraib, as horrific as it was, is not the whole story of the US armed forces in Iraq.
...at Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi we met with the Director of Economic Development for Al Anbar Province. He is spearheading the creation of women's sewing centers in the Ramadi-Fallujah region. These centers will provide women with a chance to make money, some for the first time, and improve their lives and their families'.
Marines' Commanding General Jim Mattis is very enthusiastic about the project- both for its economic impact and because it will provide women a place to discuss women's issues (day care is provided). He has asked if we can help by providing the sewing machines. For starters we are looking for people to buy the first 50 sewing machines costing $475 each... If things go well with those, we'll do our best to provide 950 more, thus helping 1000 women.
Even if you can't afford $475, I'm sure any donation would be appreciated. A good way to channel frustration over recent events in Iraq into something positive, I think.
Saudi Islamist websites debate killing westerners
The New York Times yesterday carried an insightful summary of views posted on islamist websites relating to the capture and (at the time) impending murder of Paul Johnson.
The views are, as you might expect, not monolithic:
In one unusual Web site posting, a Saudi man who wrote that he worked with the kidnap victim and had even discussed Islam with him, tried to extend a religiously inspired, traditional tribal form of protection known in Arabic as "ijara" that would forbid killing Mr. Johnson.
"I hereby declare my protection and rescue for this man along with all his colleagues who work with us in the company, who ate with us and accepted our gifts of Islamic books which they promised to read," wrote the man, identified as Saad al-Moemen. He also described visits by Mr. Johnson to his home and said Mr. Johnson had expressed distaste for American foreign policy.
Saudi analysts said such protection was usually issued by respected tribal leaders or religious sheiks and there appear to be few such men whom the militants revere. A few clerics still tried, using open forums on the Internet, the medium of choice for the radicals.
One cleric, identified as Sheik Abu Bassir, reissued a ruling saying that anyone who came to Saudi Arabia with a valid visa should be protected. He wrote that whether foreigners come "to visit, or for tourism, or for trade, or to study, or to tutor, or for therapy, or to get married, or to hear the word of God, they should be safe and should not be terrorized, should not be assaulted." The exceptions, he wrote, are those who come as warriors or spies or to spread corruption, vice and drugs.
Register to view
Abu Basir is an interesting man (if, indeed, there is only one Abu Basir).
June 18, 2004
Liberal hand-wringing won't help the Iraqis now
I haven't said much about Iraq lately because I am so profoundly depressed by what's happening; but I received an e-mail that jolted me out of my misery last week. You can read about it here.
Paul Berman's latest
I was going to link to Paul Berman's latest piece in The New Republic, but david t beat me to it.
Berman gets to the heart of the difficulty faced by pro-war leftists during the past year:
We have learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald's axiom--about intelligence as the ability to hold in mind two contradictory thoughts at the same time--has a corollary in the field of emotion. Sometimes you also have to hold in your heart two contradictory emotions. This is difficult. To understand Saddam Hussein and the history of modern Iraq, you have to feel anger--or else you have understood nothing.
But what if, in addition to feeling anger at Saddam (and at Sadr in his shroud, and at Mussab Al Zarqawi with his knife, and at Saddam's army, which was organizing suicide terrorists even before the invasion), you have also come to feel more than a little anger at George W. Bush? What if you gaze at events in Iraq and say to yourself: Things did not have to be this way. We could have presented a human rights case to the world, instead of trying to deceive people about weapons and conspiracies--and we would have ended up with more allies, or, at least, with allies who understood the mission.
.....
Here is the challenge: to rage at Saddam and other enemies, and, at the same time, to rage in a somewhat different register at Bush, and to keep those two responses in proper proportion to one another. That can be a difficult thing to do, requiring emotional balance, maturity, and analytic clarity--a huge effort.
But Berman is far from ready to forgive the antiwar Left:
A truly large and powerful protest movement took to the streets all over the Western world only in February 2003--and this was not to denounce the terrible dictatorship, but to prevent an invasion from overthrowing the terrible dictatorship. Those were the largest mass protests in the history of the world. Some of the protesters marched in a mood of cautious practicality, fearful that overthrowing Saddam might unleash still worse horrors, or might undermine the manhunt for Al Qaeda. But there was also in those marches, and in the larger mood of the moment, an unmistakable moral fervor--an outraged feeling that invading Iraq was a criminal act.
.....
And how did the peace marchers react, afterward, to the mass graves and other discoveries? The abstract principles of "just war" and U.N. legitimacy pressed on one side of the balance and the human realities of extreme suffering pressed on the other. And the abstractions were found to be weightier.
.....
...during this last year we have learned that people who smirk at putting the words "liberal democracy" and "Iraq" into a single sentence ought to reduce their smirk by 20 percent, in proportion to Iraq's Kurdish population. We have learned that, in Kurdistan, the democratic left has turned out to be especially strong. And we have learned that, in some of the world's liberal democracies, other democratic leftists couldn't care less. "They shall not pass" was the slogan of the left in the Spanish Civil War. "Yes, they will," is the slogan of Spanish socialism today. Iraqi success, as much as Iraqi suffering, turns out to be invisible in the modern world.
Conservatives and Liberals
I've been rather bemused by Andrew Sullivan's sometimes desperate attempts to defend President Bush's shuffle towards proposing a Federal Marriage Amendment, the favoured cause du jour of US religious bigots. At the nadir of this position - and I'm afraid that I couldn't find the link so I'm paraphrasing - Sullivan actually praised the President for a speech in which he merely expressed disquiet over gay marriage, while articulating the view that something might have to be done about it. Sullivan's reasoning was that, because President Bush hadn't explicitly called for a FMA, he had somehow delivered a slap around the chops to the religious right.
Well, Sullivan's days of defending the President's position are over and he has come out clearly as a Berman liberal. On 29 February he described Bush's support for the FMA as a "deal breaker", and abandoned the futile struggle to find something good in the current Republican administration's social policy. Unshackled, Andrew Sullivan has been freed to attack the incompetence and viciousness of the Bush/Cheney approach to post-War Iraq, with its "the obvious failures, mistakes, stupidities and rigidities which have characterized the mission". The volume and frequency of his well aimed criticism has reached a high point this week, and the conservative right have finally noticed it.
The purpose of this post is not to discuss the nature of the Bush/Cheney failures, which are palpable. Rather, I'm interested in the political polarisation which leads people like Andrew Sullivan, who is evidently a liberal "fiscal conservative", to back a President who is anything but a liberal and is certainly not a fiscal conservative, and with whom, philosophically speaking, Sullivan has little in common.
Supporting the war in Iraq and lawful, proportionate and effective measures to combat terrorism shouldn't require a commentator to temper criticism of the reactionary social policies of the current Republic administration. The real shame is that, in his desire to see only good in all that Bush said or did, Andrew Sullivan allowed his steel to dull. It is therefore a relief to see Sullivan finally take the gloves off. As a result his former social conservative allies-of-convenience have turned on the charm:
There are many of us who are still sickened by the thought of the sexual activities of homosexuals as it becomes the one important aspect of their lives. I don't want to be around them and I don't want them to be around me.
''...choose you this day whom ye will serve...as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.''
As for me I am sick to death of hearing
Gay this and Gay that.....Gay gags me.
Like a dry heave. It is making me wanna puke.
The reason I stopped watching regular tv years ago was I was sick to death of haveing Gay agendas shoved at me.
It is worn out.
So Sullivan can take his Gay issues and go Gayly into the sunset. Toodle-oooo. Ta ta.
When the liberal left allies with islamists and other racists and bigots, it shouldn't be surprised by the sort of things those allies say and do. Likewise, when the liberal right makes those same alliances, responses such as these shouldn't come as much of a shock. Both sides should learn from each other's experiences and put clear blue water between themselves and the reactionaries with whom they've been chumming up over the last few years.
June 17, 2004
The guy with the sign
The Israeli blogger Imshin has been wondering about the "Smash the Jewish State" guy.
She takes it kind of personally.
June 16, 2004
Moore's film faces "do not show" campaign
A conservative website is asking people to contact movie theatre chains and urge them not to show Michael Moore's latest, "Fahrenheit 9/11," the Washington Post reports.
The site lists contacts for 20 movie chains. "Since we are the customers of the American movie theatres it is important for us to speak up loudly and tell the industry executives that we don't want this misleading and grotesque movie being shown at our local cinema. We need these executives to be overwhelmed with letters, phone calls and FAXes [and] emails."
.....
In a story yesterday on the effort to squelch the movie, the Hollywood Reporter quoted John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theatre Owners: "Any time any organization protests against a movie, they ensure that the movie will do better at the box office than it would have done otherwise. If they have any doubt about this, just ask Mel Gibson."
Which raises the question of whether this whole effort is a clever marketing trick devised by Moore's people.
Nah.
Anyway I actually intend to see the film (at the risk of putting a few more bucks into Moore's pocket) before commenting on it.
Civil War veterans' widows update
In the name of accuracy, I want to note that the widow of the Confederate veteran who died last month turns out not to have been the last surviving spouse of a Civil War soldier.
Equatorial Guinea
A followup of sorts to my previous post about the State Department's report on human trafficking:
Some commenters expressed skepticism about the report's even-handedness. After all Cuba and Venezuela-- hardly favorites of the Bush administration-- made the list of "Tier 3" countries "whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so."
However it's worth noting the listing of another Tier 3 country: oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. In this instance, at least, the State Department may be operating at cross-purposes from the White House.
Equitorial Guinea has been ruled for 24 years by a brutal thief named Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Writing two years ago at Salon.com (free day pass required), Ken Silverstein reported:
The Bush administration, lobbied by the oil industry, has quietly authorized the reopening of the American Embassy in Equatorial Guinea, which had been shut down since 1996 when the Obiang regime threatened to kill then-U.S. Ambassador John Bennett for complaining about human rights conditions.
According to Peter Beinart of The New Republic (not available online):
Obiang, who has held power for 24 years, won his last election with 97 percent of the vote, while the country's main opposition leader languished in jail. In 1998, according to the IMF, his government received $130 million in oil revenue, and Obiang simply pocketed $96 million of it. Although three of every four Equatoguineans suffer malnutrition, between 1997 and 2002, Obiang spent just over 1 percent of his budget on health, by far the lowest of the nine African countries the IMF surveyed. According to a 2002 State Department report, there is "little evidence that the country's oil wealth is being devoted to the public good."
Silverstein reported that on a visit to Washington in 2002, Obiang was honored by the the Corporate Council on Africa, which promotes trade and investment on the continent.
The council put out an investment guide to Equatorial Guinea -- paid for by six oil companies with operations there -- that claims Obiang "has taken significant measures to encourage political diversity and address human and worker rights issues."
I hope the State Department's decison to flag Equatorial Guinea signals a new approach to the Obiang regime by the Bush administration. But the administration's record is not promising. In their own way the Bushies have been as inconsistent on human rights as those on the Left who excuse and minimize Cuba's abuses while holding less "revolutionary" countries to higher standards.
