Civitas Blog

Iran’s President Ahmadinejad proved to be the toast of progressive students at Columbia University on his recent visit to the USA.

According to encouraging accounts in today’s newspapers of student riots in Iran against him, many progressive university students in that country would also like to toast their president too, despite their religious convictions precluding them from ever touching a drop of alcohol.

Certainly a student-led protest movement there would be a preferable and far less bloody way to effect much needed regime-change in Iran than military action. Sadly, however, it may well yet have to come to the latter option if all else fails to secure such change in the near future.

Hugo Chavez certainly knows how to shore up his socialist consensus in Venezuela for the long term: ban all schools from teaching anything else. He has already ensured that college level students won’t be able to study medicine without first pouring through Marx’s Das Kapital and some of Fidel Castro’s speeches. But his tactics for co-opting private schools into his preferred ideology could really do with some refining. After all, his aggressive stance is attracting a lot of bad press. If he had only studied New Labour tactics, he could have learnt how to bring many private schools to their knees without anyone noticing!

Yesterday saw the publication of a report on the Middle East by a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Media accounts of it have largely focussed on one of its principal recommendations. This is that the Government ‘should urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas as a way of encouraging it to meet the three Quartet principles’.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

‘The noble Lord Hannay … will understand better than most the importance of a united position around the UN principles. Our policy has not changed. We expect Hamas to adhere to the principles set by the Quartet in January 2006. These are to renounce violence, recognise Israel and accept all previous agreements and obligations, as set out in the road map. I hope that it does that and that it takes the opportunity for dialogue and progress, but a political dialogue is impossible as long as Hamas dedicates itself to violence and destruction.’

Thus remarked Baroness Royall of Blaisdon earlier this month in the House of Lords, winding up for the government there a debate on Palestine and the Occupied Territories.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Today – in fact at this very moment – the EU-ACP (African-Caribbean-Pacific) Joint Parliamentary Assembly convenes in Brussels for their biannual plenary meeting. Talking shop or not, the Assembly has acquired an increasingly prominent role, particularly given the tensions surrounding the EU’s intention to end its preferential trade arrangements with ACP countries in favour of bilateral Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). The blurb on its website states: ‘A substantial part of the work of the Joint Parliamentary Assembly is directed towards promoting human rights and democracy and the common values of humanity….in order to guarantee the right of each people to choose its own development objectives and how to attain them.’ If so, then now, given the situation in Zimbabwe, is the time to prove it.

If anyone thinks Britain would have enjoyed greater immunity from Islamist terror had it not sent forces to Iraq, they should reconsider the matter after reading a report that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on the Wednesday before Christmas (hat-tip: Dean Godson in yesterday’s Times).

Entitled ‘French counterterror forces on high alert', it reports French anti-terror chief Jean-Louis Brugiere to have revealed recently that, between June 2005 and September 2006, no fewer than 76 arrests have been made there in connection with three foiled attacks, one to bomb the Paris metro and another that targeted Orly airport.

France played no part in the overthrow of the Saddam regime. Indeed, it was vociferously opposed to the venture. Yet its stance on that issue seems to have brought it not one iota of greater security.

However well or ill things in Iraq might currently be going for the US and UK, the question remains as to whether or not Bush and Blair were justified in going to war against Saddam in 2003.

They claimed Saddam posed a threat to the west and its allies because of his WMD programmes. It had to be neutralised pre-emptively. To wait until Saddam acquired them would be a disaster because of the risks of retaliation. And to allow him to acquire them would be a disaster because of his links with organised terror groups would roisk nuclear blackmail or worse.

The rest we know as history. Troops went in, but little by way of any WMD showed up. Sceptics have since never ceased to claim the invasion to have been a disaster. All it has done is destabilise Iraq, strengthen Iran as a regional power, and radicalise Muslims at home and abroad. All in all, they claim, it was a right mess that GWB had gotten the west into.

Well, it increasingly looks like Bush and Blair were absolutely right to have gone in.

One picture is said to be worth a thousand words. So, the images shown by clicking on the first link below, first shown by a German television station last Sunday, do much to augment the information provided by clicking on the second link, to explain why Israel is so determined to do all in its power to defeat Hezbollah, and why, despite the tragic scale of the consequent collateral damage from its current assault against Hezbollah, analogies currently being drawn between Israel and the Nazis for having made it are so badly and obscenely misplaced.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=d51poygEXYU&search=mufti%20hitler

http://www.nationalreview.com/nr_comment/nr_comment071802a.asp

A curious case of combined myopia and amnesia seems to have afflicted those western commentators who currently accuse Israel of being engaged at present in unjust, because disproportionate, military activity in Lebanon and Gaza.

According to those afflcited by this malady, while Israel might well have every right to the world’s sympathy as well as to undertake limited reprisals for having suffered the recent kidnapping of three of its soldiers, the scale of death and destruction she has inflicted in response to these kidnappings, especially on the civilian population of Lebanon, is out of all proportion to the enormity of these kidnappings, and can only serve to worsen its long-term security by radicalising still more of those who have been at the receiving end of her response.

According to a report in today’s Times, the weekend before last a two-day conference took place at Istanbul’s Ceylan Intercontinental Hotel on the challenges and opportunities facing the Muslims of Europe.

Judged by the £500 per night prices that hotel charges, the fact the £300,000 conference bill was met entirely by the British tax-payer clearly suggests it was more the opportunities facing Europe’s Muslims than their challenges that the conference was designed to highlight.

Moreover, given that the organisers saw fit to invite to it the Qatar-based cleric Sheikh Yusif at-Qaradawi and his wife, with their travel and subsistence expenses being met in full by the British tax-payer and all apparently with the full knowledge and blessing of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, it seems it has been the opportunities of not only Muslims of Europe that the conference has been intent on showcasing.

Our newspapers today are dominated by reports and comment on two official reports released yesterday concerning the London suicide-bombings of last July.

On the strength of these reports, some British newspapers are seeking to impugn the savvy of the British Security services for not having made better use of the intelligence that they apparently had at their disposal at the time that could conceivably have led to their preventing the attacks had better use been made of it.

Others impugn the reports themselves as being a white-wash because they fail to hold anyone to account for the failure of the security services to nip the plot in the bud, given what they apparently had on some of the bombers.

As we all know, the vision of hind-sight is 20-20.

Equally, however, it remains true that the security services could undoubtedly have been more effective had they had at their disposal at the time more resources. They should have had. Their failure to have been supplied with them is a massive indictment of the present government.

Maybe I have a rather outdated image of what a nun gets up to, but I have to confess to being amazed as I watched Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’ last night, to see Sister Barbara Raferty of Scoil Chriost Ri in Portloise, County Carlow, overseeing a budding arms brokerage business managed by her sixth form girls. Needless to say the good sister was not pursuing a lucrative way of repairing the Church roof, but was leading an exercise to demonstrate the continued loopholes in EU control of the arms trade. The message of the programme was that three years after the EU leaders reached a common position on arms brokering, it is still shockingly easy to trade lethal weapons and instruments of torture from within the European Union. For those who are sceptical of the worth of the Union, this programme provided pause for thought.

Three years on almost to the day since the invasion of Iraq by the US and UK, and amidst daily reports of continuing insurgency and turmoil there, plus increasing belligerence on the part of Iraq’s noisy next door neighbour Iran, it is a timely moment to reflect on the merits of the invasion, and, more generally, of President Bush's recent reaffirmation of his doctrine of pre-emption that lay behind it.

There was much initial support in the US and UK for the invasion of Iraq because of the general acceptance in these two countries of their respective government's claims that Saddam posed a severe and real threat to their national security by possessing WMD and having links with Al Qaeda.

When, after the invasion, no such weapons or any hard evidence of such links were discovered among the debris, support for the invasion rapidly fell away in the US and UK and has continued to fall there, as the number of returning body-bags and of Iraqi civilian fatalities continues to mount, and as stories in the western media continue to circulate as to what a legacy of chaos the invasion of Iraq has left in its wake since Saddam’s removal.

Meanwhile, the increased power that regime change in Iraq has given Shiites in that part of the world seems to have emboldened Iran to step up its nuclear programme in what looks like a clear bid on its part to become a regional super-power in the Middle East.

So, has all the blood-shed and other costs of war been worth it, or should the West have taken Saddam at his word that he had long since disposed of any stocks of WMD he had ever accumulated and that he had never forged any links with Osama bin Laden?

And even if Saddam had accumulated such weapons or had those links with Al Qaeda, has his forcible removal from power truly made the world any safer for democracy, to coin a phrase, given how unstable and perilous the situation has become in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular since the invasion?

One of the things we all know, don’t we?, is that George Bush and Tony Blair duped their respective parliaments and electorates into waging war to remove Saddam Hussein from power on the false pretext he possessed, or was just about to, weapons of mass destruction and thereby posed a substantial and imminent threat to the security of the West and its strategic allies.

Now, both of their countries seem immured in a seemingly un-winnable war in a country these two leaders had hoped to liberate from tyranny that is fast descending into the far worse state of anarchy in an incipient civil war between various contending factions and ethnicities.

Meanwhile, the US and UK invasion of Iraq has antagonised Muslim opinion around the world, radicalising their domestic disaffected Muslim youth, as well as emboldening and enabling Iraq’s neighbour and long-standing rival, Iran, to make a power-play in the region by becoming the first Muslim country there to acquire nuclear weapons and with them to become a regional superpower in the Middle East with potentially highly detrimental consequences.

All in all, then, the war against Iraq has been a total and unnecessary unmitigated disaster.

Or has it?

Upon first learning that a UAE-owned company was intent on purchasing practically every port in America, one might initially be forgiven for supposing that at least one Arab country had begun to show promising signs of detaching itself from strict complaince with a religious code of morality and law that is seemingly less than fully compatible with basic human rights.

Sadly, closer inspection reveals the kind of port on which the company was eager to lay its hands is of the nautical, rather than alcoholic, variety. Hence, whether it should be allowed to has to fallen to the US government to decide, rather than to edicts of the prophet Mohammed.

It’s cold and rainy, with today’s newspapers full of depressing headlines.

Do you need cheering up? If so, here's a story that might manage to raise a smile:

It’s Berlin 1936 and two Jews sit together on a park bench to read their daily newspapers. One pulls out a copy of a familiar Yiddish newspaper that offers up its latest daily bulletin of woes currently besetting their people.
Much to his amazement, his companion pulls out and proceeds to immerse himself in the pages of a copy of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer.

The first Jew turns to the second in horror and asks what could possibly have possessed him to choose to read such a virulently anti-semitic newspaper. His companion patiently replies by explaining as follows:

‘Well’, he says ‘whenever I read a Yiddish newspaper, all I ever learn about are pogroms, more Arab riots in Palestine against Jewish settlers, the latest German laws dispossessing Jews and curbing their freedom. It’s all too depressing. If, however, I turn to Der Sturmer, what then do I read? That the Jews own all the banks; they control the media, dominate the arts. Frankly, that's far more uplifting.’

I was put in mind of this old story by two recent 'news' items currently doing the rounds of the Middle East media.

The rapidly escalating war of Mohammed’s turban may yet serve to establish the reverse of Karl Marx’s famous adage that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.

Despite the ferocity of the current posturing of outraged Muslims throughout the world over the continued unrepentance of a Danish newspaper for having last September published irreverent cartoons of Mohammed, the true significance of the current rumpus seems to have eluded the world’s media. This is that it presages a far worse coming conflagration.

At best, what it heralds is full-scale conventional war in the Middle East, with much spillover in Europe and America in terms of Islamist terror bombings there. At worst, we await a full-scale nuclear Armageddon.

It is reported in Wednesday’s Times that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided to put into effect a ruling of his country’s Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, of which he happens also to be head, calling for the banning of all western music from that country’s state television and radio.

‘Blocking indecent and Western music from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting is required’ the Revolutionary Council is reported as having decreed.

While much western music is certainly indecent -- one has only to think of some of West Life’s more recent feeble efforts -- one has to wonder what could lie behind the ban.

A clue might be provided by the detail in the report that Iranian television often uses as background music for its programmes songs performed by Eric Clapton.

One of these, however, is a song that, one would have thought, should have given the Iranian president cause to promote its broadcasting. It is Clapton’s masterpiece ‘Layla’, composed after he had fallen hopelessly in love with Patti Boyd, the estranged wife of Clapton’s close friend and fellow legendary guitarist, George Harrison.

To express the depths of his frustrated forbidden love, Clapton drew on the classic Middle Eastern story, dating back to the Ummayad period, about a man driven to madness by his love for a young woman, named ‘Layla’, after her father forbade her to marry him. That story later passed into Persian literature after it was turned into an epic poem by the Persian poet, Nezami.

What better symbol could there be of Islam’s growing influence in the West, one might have supposed, than the frequent broadcasting in Iran of this Clapton song?

What, then, could possibly have led Iran’s President to ban Clapton’s music from his country’s air-waves?

Deep reflection on this vital issue of the hour has enabled me to come up with two possible solutions to this conundrum.

One possibility is that the presumably less than full mastery of the English language on the part of President Ahmadinejad caused him to mishear the lyrics of another well-known song that has been immortalised by Clapton’s version of it. This is his rendition of Bob Marley's reggae classic, ‘I shot the sheriff.’

Had President Ahmadinejad misheard as an ‘a’ the ‘e’ that occurs in the last word of the song’s title, which also forms the opening line of the song’s chorus, what he would have heard Clapton to be boasting of having done is to have ‘shot the Sharif’.

The broadcasting of such a claim could never be tolerated in a country that proudly boasts as its sole think- tank one named ‘Sharif’, and which, furthermore, according to its mission statement, aspires to be ‘the most pioneer[ing] national and world-class think-tank that plays an essential role in national development and human life improvement all around the world.’

Should, however, as I suspect, that not be the correct explanation for the ban, it could surely only have been imposed because, since, in that part of the world, the term ‘Layla’ has become synonymous with 'lunatic', President Ahmadinejad was concerned, not without some cause, Clapton's song of that name might well become, in time, forever associated with his -- not only in our country, but his!

As we here too at Civitas about to assume radio-silence for the duration of the festivities, may I on its behalf extend to all visitors to the Civitas blog a hearty Season’s Greetings and hope that 2006 will prove a more peaceful year than the tumultuous one to which we are shortly to bid farewell!

George Galloway is right to attack the government for using African aid as a diversionary tactic, redirecting attention away from Afghanistan and Iraq and compensating for the public’s bad faith. But, as the BBC reports, he has been accused of self-righteous sloganeering, and his grasp of the issues is lamentably simplistic. For an altogether more sophisticated and informed analysis of what aid can and cannot achieve, the best place to look this week is The Economist. See both the leader and the special report: 'The difficulty of helping Africa'.

Christian Aid has been trying to add to our sense of guilt over the problems of Africa by publishing a report claiming that imposing free trade on African countries has cost them almost £150 billion over the last 20 years.

This sounds dreadful, as if we are deliberately trying to make a bad situation worse for some ideological objective – pure economics. But what Christian Aid turns out to mean by free trade is the dumping on African countries of EU food surpluses, which can be bought for less than African farmers can produce their crops, so the local economy is undermined.

No one would dispute that this is a foolish and pernicious process, but what does it have to do with free trade? The Common Agricultural Policy of the EU, which is responsible for these gross surpluses, is about as far from the principles of free trade as anything could be. Billions of pounds are spent paying inefficient European farmers (especially the French ones) to produce expensive crops that nobody wants. To avoid actually having to destroy this food, it is given, or ‘sold’, to Africa. Without the CAP, which consumes 40% of the entire EU budget, there would be less undermining of African farmers.

In yet another top-quality leading article in The Business Andrew Neil adds a note of realism to Gordon Brown’s crusade for poverty relief.

Peter Bauer, the great champion of poverty relief by means of free markets and free trade, once quipped that foreign aid was a system by which the poor people in rich countries subsidised the rich few in poor countries. To be sceptical about aid seems harsh to most people, but escaping from poverty does not depend on foreign aid – it is only possible where governments keep order, protect property and ensure that agreements are honoured, so that all are free to use their talents and energies as they believe best. The countries that remain poor today have governments that have not created these conditions.

‘I rejoice every time I hear of another American soldier dying! You people all deserve to die in another 9/11. You are destroying the world.’

You might expect to hear these sentiments on Al-jazeera, but certainly not from an English woman attacking a tourist on a bus. But it happened.

From my own experience, I'm often asked what part of the United States I'm from. When I reply, 'Oh, I'm Canadian,' many people quickly apologize for offending me or insulting me. I've found this puzzling--but I've also noticed when I first moved here, people warmed to me much quicker when my national identity was clearly established.

Therefore, we ask our American and British readers to please comment on this entry and share their experiences about US bashing here and abroad. As the linked article suggests, it’s well on its way to becoming more than merely fashionable.

There has been a lot of attention this week to the report of the Iraqi Survey Group, which confirmed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. However, the far more important revelation is that United Nations sanctions were being circumvented and that voting in the Security Council by France, Russia and China was distorted by secret payments made by Saddam Hussein. Andrew Neil relates the facts in this week’s The Business.