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Wednesday, July 02, 2008  Hope Has Not Necessarily Died This is a time when a foul murderer by the name of Samir Kuntar is being exchanged for the bodies of two Israelis kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is a time when the Iranian leadership regularly promotes genocide by boasting that Israel is about to be wiped off the face of the earth. But it is also a time when an Algerian intellectual by the name of Boualem Sansal can give an interview in the prestigious French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and reveal that hope has not necessarily died.
I had never previously heard of Boualem Sansal. He is described in the interview as a former Algerian civil servant, and author of four earlier novels, and now a fifth with the title of Le Village de l’Allemand, or The Village of the German. He says he took his subject from a real-life discovery that there was a Nazi, a former S.S. man who had more or less colonized a village in Algeria, converted to Islam and was regarded as a hero locally. “The Hitler salute,” Sansal says, “has always had its partisans in Algeria.”
For a couple of decades now, Algeria has been in the throes of a brutish and murky civil war, costing an estimated 200,000 lives, most of them simple villagers caught and massacred either by Islamists or the military regime. Al-Qaeda in North Africa is presently establishing a base there, trying to colonize the country. The more he researched his novel, Sansal tells us, the more he saw “a substantial similarity between Nazism and the political order that prevails in Algeria.” Both are one-party states, with militarization, brainwashing, the falsification of history, the exaltation of the race, the tendency to claim victimhood and to assert that there is a conspiracy against the nation. There is glorification of the leader, an omnipresent police, mass organizations, religious indoctrination. Xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism, he adds, have been elevated to the status of dogmas. We all know, he sums up, that “the line separating Nazism from Islamism is a thin one.”
September 11 was “a terrible shock to all of us.” Then he understood that Islamism was far more radical than anyone had imagined. Islamism is the matrix of terrorism, and only Muslims and their theologians can engage with it, to recover the Enlightenment that long ago was theirs. His books are banned in Algeria, he thinks of packing his bags, but decides to stay because one day the country will rediscover its way, and he would like to be there to see it happen.
Which is more impressive, the truth and clarity of this man’s vision or his courage in expressing it so openly? And who knows what a free spirit like this may achieve?
07/02 12:07 AM Monday, June 23, 2008 "U.S. Go Home" in Practice Nicolas Sarkozy is said to be the first French president in a long time who doesn’t nourish all manner of grudges and resentments against the United States. “U.S. Go Home,” used to be a very popular slogan in France, chalked up on walls here, there and everywhere. And now consider what just happened at Saint Pierre de Varengeville, in Normandy. After D-day, from September 1944 to February 1946, 20,000 American soldiers had tents in a beech forest there, and called it Camp Twenty Grand. Beech has a nice soft bark, and the soldiers used bayonets or knives to carve their own or their girlfriend’s names, and their home states. Since then, the trees have grown, and the carvings with them, into something like a living museum. The Times of London reports that the locals hit on a phrase, “The Trees of Names.”
Ah, but officials deemed that overhanging branches had to be pruned. The cost of pruning is four times the cost of felling, so they simply cut the trees down. This unusually evocative memorial is no more. Here’s “U.S. Go Home,” in practice, as at least some French people are freeing the future from these traces of the men who liberated them. The attitude conditioning this act can only be heedless or outright nasty, and in either case too ingrained for Sarkozy or anyone else to be able to change it. 06/23 09:10 AM 
Friday, June 13, 2008 Stop Press -- News Flash! The Irish have convincingly voted NO to the Lisbon Treaty. Outside Dublin Castle a vast crowd is cheering. White-faced Eurocrats cannot believe what they are hearing and seeing.
The Lisbon Treaty was supposed to mark the moment when the United States of Europe irrevocably became a political and juridical entity, with the character of an empire. In earlier stages of the empire-building process, the French and the Dutch voted NO in referendums, but the European Union and national governments chose to ignore those votes, pressing ahead as though public opinion did not exist. The 27 heads of states in Europe all signed up to the treaty in draft, and all are in the process of ratifying it, simply bulldozing it through by means of presidential decree or parliamentary measures without consulting their populations. The absence of democratic consent would have been delightfully familiar to Stalin.
All except the Irish, that is. Their constitution alone specified a referendum. As usual, the elite, big business, the media, favoured a YES vote, and took it for granted. But the Irish people did not want to lose their constitution or their sovereignty. If other countries in the EU were allowed a similar vote, they too would reject the Lisbon Treaty. In a very real sense, the Irish have spoken for the majority of Europeans.
The Irish voted NO once before on an earlier treaty, and in a moment of sheer insolence were obliged to vote again to give a YES. The mournful EU President, José Manuel Barroso of Portugal, dropped a hint that some trick of the same sort will have to happen now. The EU leaders are due to meet next week in Brussels to analyse the Irish NO, and it will be richly comic to watch them squirming. A prediction: They will find in the small print some way to avoid taking NO for an answer, no matter how undemocratic they are seen to be.
And yet these are politicians who do not hesitate to deplore Mugabe for disregarding voting and re-running it to obtain pre-determined results. 06/13 02:22 PM Thursday, June 05, 2008 When in Rome Robert Mugabe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are both attending a conference in Rome, and using it to reaffirm that they are two of the world’s most brutal and repulsive men in public office. Mugabe told listeners that his country, Zimbabwe, has “democratized land ownership,” an unusually insolent way of describing how his goons have evicted rightful owners by force, expropriated them, and in the process devastated agriculture. Zimbabwe now imports food instead of exporting it as before, and huge numbers of the poor are starving. As Mugabe was speaking, some goons were killing and intimidating the opposition as part of the process of rigging elections, while other goons were smashing the farmhouse of William and Annette Rogers, and setting fire to it. After being assaulted, whipped and shot at, Mr and Mrs Rogers finished in hospital, lucky to be alive. That’s democratization, Mugabe-style.
Ahmadinejad is as practiced at unleashing violence as Mugabe, and his equal in lying and nonsense too. This was his first visit to Western Europe, but he took the liberty of advising that it was “in the interests of the people of Europe if Israel ceased to exist.” Shamelessly, in pure fascist idiom, a few days previously he had told another audience that, “The criminal and terrorist Zionist regime has reached the end of its work and will soon disappear off the geographical scene.” Not content with that, he went on to threaten the United States, another favorite bugbear of his: “The era of decline and destruction of its satanic power has begun, the bell on the countdown of the destruction of the empire of power and wealth has begun.”
And who could have organized the conference which provided these two murderous racists with an international platform? Why, the United Nations through its Food and Agriculture Organization. What did Mugabe have to contribute to discussion about global food resources? What right had Ahmadinejad to spew his anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism here? Adding insult to injury, those attending the conference had slap-up meals in the Villa Madama, a state-owned palace decorated by Raphael, and all expenses paid. What does that do for the many in the world who are poor and underfed?
The UN has transformed itself from an organization set up to resolve the world’s injustices and quarrels into one that perpetuates them. The FAO, like UNRWA as it keeps the Palestinians in their misery, the Human Rights Committee, the U.N. peacekeepers engaged in pedophilia and racketeering (but not in resolving Darfur, Lebanon, or other horrors), and the U.N. officials getting away unpunished for creaming tens of millions of dollars in Saddam Hussein’s oil scam, all do more harm than good. The real message Mugabe and Ahmadinejad brought to Rome is that the U.N. and its various bodies have to be reformed, or else one cantankerous day they’ll be abolished in the interests of humanity. 06/05 06:57 AM Friday, May 30, 2008 Acton Item La Pietra is as grand as any house in Florence, a seventeenth-century mansion. Its last owner, Harold Acton, lived there in style, and left it in his will to New York University. For the last five years, NYU's Center on Law and Security has held a conference there on terrorism. One of the keynote speakers at the latest conference, a few days ago, was Admiral William Fallon, who recently quit U.S. Central Command. Presentations are supposed to be confidential, so I will only say that the admiral seemed in good spirits.
I don't suppose many people read Harold Acton's books now, and I think he knew that might be his fate. He was a man of his time, an aesthete of the Twenties, avant garde though not enough to be really shocking. Evelyn Waugh, a contemporary and friend, put him into his fiction as the rather camp character Anthony Blanche, and Acton never quite got over the fact that Waugh's novels were so much more recognized than his own. Between the wars he lived in China, and collected art, all of which the Maoist regime was eventually to expropriate. His very rich American mother paid for everything. Learned, amusing, catty, he was certainly mannered. His voice rose and fell like nobody else's, and a New York film producer once asked me to do a documentary to record this amazing intonation with its unique precision of speech. Alas, Acton refused.
Acton came to stay with my parents in central London towards the end of the war, when I was still small. Perhaps because he had nowhere of his own, he was there for weeks. My mother refused to go into air-raid shelters for fear of being buried alive, so at night we would all sit in the dark with the windows open as a precaution against blast. The ground shook under the Luftwaffe bombs, and the beams of searchlights criss-crossed the night skies fitfully illuminating our faces, while Acton passed the time by teaching us Chinese.
In post-war Florence, he found perfect subjects to write about in the Bourbons and the later Medicis. He entertained in that splendid house. Behind the chairs in the dining room were statues, one of them a Donatello. Stories about him were as legendary as the setting. A famous film star visited, but she was a kleptomaniac. Noticing how she was filling a capacious hand-bag with his possessions, Acton said at the end of the tour, “And now, my dear, we shall restore the missing trinkets.” Every summer, Princess Margaret invited herself to stay. Leaving, she said once, “I suppose you'll now dance and sing.” Acton replied, “Oh no, ma'am, much too tired.” An author sent him proofs of a book in which she called him a homosexual. Furious, he made her take it out as libellous, saying, “What do these impudent young women know about me?”
NYU has spent a fortune on the house and its out-buildings and especially the gardens. The place looks more majestic than ever. Moreover La Pietra offers programs, lectures, seminars, research facilities, all valuable. And yet, and yet. What not so long ago was the domain of a highly cultivated, generous, and eccentric individual has become public property, busy with worthy purpose, as it were nationalized and socialized. Melancholy lingers in the great approach lined with cypresses, the rose beds. and box hedges, the classical façade, the statues, because the kind of past that produced all this is over and done with. 05/30 05:20 PM Monday, May 19, 2008 More Mosley Max Mosley, it may be remembered from previous commentary, is the man who organized a sado-masochist orgy with five call girls in some dungeon in London. One of these five, apparently known as "Mistress Abi," tipped off a tabloid. The tabloid filmed, and duly published, what had taken place. Mosley and the five had been enacting a fantasy of being German officers and concentration camp inmates. "Mistress Abi," wore a Luftwaffe uniform, and on film is shown to be shouting orders at Mosley.
Sadism plus pornography equals Nazism. How did Mosley come to be so sick? Almost certainly because his parents were the pre-eminent British Nazis of their day, and he had grown up in their shadow. The scandal now goes further, because it turns out that "Mistress Abi" is the wife of an MI5 officer, that is to say someone engaged in surveillance of al-Qaeda terrorists, and jihadis and spies in general. Jonathan Evans, director of MI5 and therefore intelligence chief, is said to be severely embarrassed. An internal MI5 investigation is trying to establish whether the officer knew about his wife's prostitution, and was even involved in it. Meantime he has been fired.
This is a very British scandal, and it won't soon fade away. People still rehearse the saga of Christine Keeler, a high-class hooker who years ago attracted a Soviet defence attaché and at the same time the British minister in charge of defence. And maybe a better precedent is the case of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, traitors and Soviet agents who also years ago ran away to Moscow, proving that the British establishment was rotten to the core, and that those supposed to be in charge hadn't the faintest idea of what was really going on. Like Jonathan Evans and MI5 now. 05/19 12:21 PM Tuesday, May 13, 2008 French Precision The latest National Review cruise took in the Rhone, a great river rightly celebrated. There was time to reflect on the scenic glories of France, with the vineyards and castles of Burgundy, and the architecture of Lyons and Avignon where our journey stopped. Also time to recall the wonderful exactitude and attack of which the French language is capable.
Two examples came to mind, and stay there. "Cet animal est méchant, il se défend quand on l'attaque." Which being translated is, "This animal is wicked, it defends itself when you attack it." Which is all we need to take on board about Israel, as it continues to have to defend itself from wanton attack as it celebrates its sixtieth anniversary.
And then, "Je préfère les méchants aux imbeciles, car les méchants se reposent de temps en temps, les imbeciles jamais." Which being translated is, "I prefer the wicked to the imbeciles, because the wicked take a rest from time to time, but the imbeciles never." And this is all we need to take on board as advice for life. 05/13 11:47 AM Saturday, May 03, 2008 Meet Right Reverend Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, R.I.P. I had not heard of the Right Reverend Hassan Dehqani-Tafti until I read his obituary in yesterday's Daily Telegraph. Between 1961 and 1990 he had been the Anglican bishop of Iran. Who knew there was such a churchman? A large photograph revealed a fine strong face. The more I read the more extraordinary Bishop Hassan became. I learnt that many considered him as 20th-century saint. We should all remember and commemorate this man.
He had been born in 1920 in Taft, a village in the north of Iran, the child of Muslims. Educated at Stuart Memorial College (and who knew about this institution, whose name has a wonderful ring of British imperialism at its best), he converted to Christianity at the age of 18. During the Second World War, he served in the Iranian army. Afterwards he married Margaret, the daughter of Bishop William Thompson, the then Bishop of Iran. Finally he prepared himself for ordination in England, in a Cambridge college, and he was one day to take over as bishop from his father-in-law. The obituary says he established schools for boys and girls, and particularly worked to help the blind.
When Ayatollah Khomeini staged his successful coup, Bishop Hassan wrote to him to pledge support for building a just, equal and free Iranian society. But an unjust, unequal, and unfree society was in the making. Church hospitals and blind missions were immediately confiscated. Only months after the Islamist revolution, gunmen one night broke into Bishop Hassan's house, entered the bedroom and fired shots. The heroic Margaret threw herself across her husband's body, and four shots missed, while the fifth only went through her hand. Some months later, the Bishop's secretary was shot and badly wounded. Then the Bishop's son, Bahram, was shot and killed as he was returning from work. Here is the prayer Bishop Hassan wrote for his son:
O God, Bahram's blood has multiplied the fruit of the Spirit in the soil of our souls; So when his murderers stand before Thee on the day of judgement Remember the fruit of the Spirit by which they have enriched our lives, And forgive. It is not for us to forgive, but once again we too should all remember how prejudice and lack of common fellow-feeling have condemned Iranian society to commit evil.
The obituary dryly states that after this violence the bishop was persuaded that it was impossible for him to stay in Iran, and he duly spent the rest of his life in exile in England. Apparently he had a specialist knowledge of Persian mystical poetry, and was himself a poet. The day when a memorial is put up to him in Iran will also be the day that Iran proves it has rejoined the family of nations. 05/03 11:47 AM Sunday, April 27, 2008 Stalin, Sebag & Saddam You mightn’t think there is anything much to say by now about Stalin, but this proves not to be the case. A few years ago, the gifted young historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore published a biography with all sorts of revealing details harvested from the ex-Soviet archives. Then he went on to write Young Stalin, an account of the formation of this criminal psychopath. It has always been puzzling that Russians were so terrorized that they never stood up to Stalin, but this book reveals what an unusual character Stalin was from the beginning, so ruthless and so indifferent to others that he had no qualms about killing.
A paperback edition is now out, and the BBC interviewed Sebag about it. (Full disclosure: everyone who knows him calls him Sebag, including me because I am a good friend of his.) He’d learnt Russian and Georgian for his researches, and made a point of visiting every one of the fifteen or so palaces or residences that Stalin has appropriated for himself. Fifteen, and he the leader of a movement renouncing property! Five or six of these were in Abkhazia, a beautiful part of his native Georgia. Sebag made a point of visiting every single one of them. An official, he explained in the interview, told him that nobody had previously ever been so thorough. Oh yes, there was this Arab who had checked all the palaces out, and his name was Saddam Hussein. That’s another truly revealing detail. We know that Saddam revered Stalin, and tried to model himself on the master gangster, even in living conditions, as it turns out. And what a difference it would have made to so many millions of people if Stalin had not died comfortably in his bed in one of the many residences he had purloined from his subjects, but instead been hanged on a scaffold like his Arab pupil. 04/27 04:35 PM Monday, April 21, 2008 An Orwellian Union The heads of all the states in the European Union have signed up to the Lisbon Treaty. Once this treaty is finally ratified, the EU acquires a constitution and becomes a legal entity, in effect the United States of Europe. Politicians and their bureaucrats in Brussels have settled the matter behind closed doors. None of the 27 countries involved was allowed to hold an election to say whether or not their people approved of the surrender of national sovereignty that is at the core of this unprecedented political experiment. Several countries, Britain among them, had promised to hold a referendum, but all, again led by Britain, found some crafty way to cheat on their promise.
Except Ireland, which is indeed due to hold a referendum next month. Ireland has profited enormously from its membership in the EU, and presumably those who agreed to the referendum thought its result was a foregone conclusion. Bertie Ahern has been Irish prime minister since 1997, and without warning he resigned a couple of weeks ago. A tribunal has long been enquiring into the corruption that plagues Ireland, and into his financial affairs in particular. He is accused of accepting money from businessmen in return for favors. He admits receiving such funds but denies doing the favors. A secretary of his broke down in front of the tribunal when she was unable to explain depositing the sterling equivalent of about thirty thousand dollars in cash into his account. Ahern’s resignation immediately followed. "Some aspects of my finances are unusual," is how Ahern himself puts it.
We all took it for granted that Ahern had resigned so dramatically out of fear that the Irish might mistake the EU referendum as a vote of no confidence in him, and reject the Lisbon Treaty accordingly. That would scupper the whole project, which in turn might mean that Ahern could not fulfil his ambition of becoming the first president under the new dispensation.
Now we learn from leaked memos that the Irish government and Brussels are going to great lengths to suppress bad news that might encourage a No vote, and "to tone down or delay messages that might be unhelpful." In the words of one of the top fixers in Brussels, "politically sensitive" aspects of the treaty should not be discussed until it is in operation. Proposals are afoot for tax harmonization, which would greatly hurt Ireland, where business has tax incentives more alluring than elsewhere in the EU.
Robert Mugabe puts his coup into practice by lying, cheating, and sending out the goons. He really should take a leaf out of the Brussels book, which also puts its coup into practice by lying and cheating, but so secretively that nobody need notice. And it’s much more sophisticated, altogether more European, to be depositing bagfuls of cash than to go out burning down and looting farms.
My good friend Christopher Booker writes a column in the Sunday Telegraph, specializing in exposing the folly and corruption of the EU. His latest bulletin concerns a Dr Gottfried Heinrich, an Austrian, who in 2005 boarded a flight in Vienna carrying two tennis racquets. He was ordered off the plane because the EU has passed a regulation that tennis racquets are "prohibited items," while at the same time ruling that this fact was not to be published. An outraged Dr Heinrich went to the courts, to ask why he was obliged to be penalized by a ruling about which he and everybody else had never been informed. The court dug up some obscure part of some obscure document, and found against him. It is a splendid monument to the bureaucratic spirit to build an issue of the kind on tennis racquets, and Booker sees here a blend of Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. Isn’t it more in keeping with George Orwell’s 1984 to punish people for something they had no knowledge of? It’s also pure Orwell to impose major political arrangements on people without first ensuring their consent. At least Mugabe does his filthy work openly. 04/21 11:13 AM Saturday, April 12, 2008 The Future of Europe A small, brave band of commentators (commanding officer : Mark Steyn) argue that Europe has lost the will to survive, that its contribution to civilisation lies only in the past, and so the more vital and assertive Muslims are bound one day to take over the continent. The story of Abu Qatada gives credence to this dark prospect. The way that Britain has handled this man is not just incompetent, or a revelation of bureaucratic flaws, but a cautionary tale about a nation losing control of its fate.
Abu Qatada is Jordanian by birth, and now aged 44. An Islamist, he committed acts of terror in his own country, where a warrant is out for his arrest on charges of murder. In 1993 he arrived in Britain on a forged passport of the United Arab Emirates. Claiming asylum, he was soon granted refugee status. Mistake number one. Next he claimed and was granted welfare benefits amounting to $2,000 a month. Mistake number two.
Mistake number three was not to identify Abu Qatada and his role. He was Osama bin Laden’s liaison in Europe, properly described as his “ambassador.” He had proven links to all the top al Qaeda terrorists. He raised funds, he gave inflammatory sermons. After 9/11 he went on the run. Finally arrested, he has been held in a top security prison for some three years, contrary to the ancient practice of habeas corpus – mistake number four. Instead of bringing him to trial, the government was all the time trying to deport him to answer the warrant out for him in Jordan. This proved impossible. In 1998 the government incorporated into British law the European Convention of Human Rights, one article of which states that nobody can be deported to a country where torture or other degrading treatment is likely. This was mistake number five, and the biggest of all. Jordan gave guarantees that Abu Qatada would be treated lawfully. Nonetheless, in mistake number six, appeal judges sitting on the case have decided that he cannot be returned to his own country. There is now no justification for holding him in prison, and in mistake number seven, Abu Qatada will soon be free to live in Britain once more at taxpayer’s expense, a living proof of Islamist power and victory over others.
The human rights crowd, and their apostles in Brussels who impose these rights, the whole legal fraternity who gleefully enforce such measures, are playing with the lives and futures of us all. Derogation from the Human Rights Convention is the only obvious course, but the human rights crowd all say this can’t be done. To protect through the law people like Abu Qatada is to have an absurdly unrealistic view of human nature, and also in the name of doing justice to one person to commit injustice to everyone else. Abu Qatada may be surprised to be allowed the freedom to do his worst, but he cannot really be blamed for taking advantage of it. Observing the run of self-harming mistakes that the British authorities permit and encourage, other terrorists cannot be blamed either if they flock to Britain to help attack and undermine it, and all paid for by the British taxpayer into the bargain. It’s clear how we got ourselves into this suicidal position, but it is far from clear how we get out of it, or if we ever will.
04/12 03:40 PM Sunday, April 06, 2008 News of the Mosley The News of the World is one of Rupert Murdoch's many papers, and it has a mass circulation, mostly on account of the smut it likes to publish about people known or unknown. Its reporters do not hesitate to use any underhand method that might bring results, for instance false identities, hidden cameras, the payment of large fees to informers, and so on.
The latest victim of this newspaper and its techniques is one Max Mosley. Presumably as a result of a tip-off, he was filmed secretly taking part in some specially rigged-up dungeon in London in a sado-masochistic orgy with five prostitutes. This little squad were engaged in being guards and victims in a simulated Nazi concentration camp, complete with punishments and humiliation and pain. Some of the recorded conversation was in German, a language Mosley learnt during two years in Germany as a young man.
For Mosley, 67 and a married man these past forty years, the embarrassment is excruciating, privately and publicly. In the world of motor racing, he is an important person, president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, the body that governs Formula One and Grand Prix racing. A big race is due to take place soon in Bahrain, and the Crown Prince has told Mosley to stay away as his presence would be “inappropriate.” Apparently Mosley is unwilling to respond to calls for his resignation from the FIA, improbably trumpeting that he will sue the newspaper for invasion of privacy.
Salacious as the story is, its deeper interest is that Mosley is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley. In 1931 Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists. He took money from Hitler, and saw himself as the Leader of Britain once Hitler had incorporated it into the Nazi empire. In 1936 in Berlin, he married Diana Mitford, with Hitler and Goebbels as witnesses. Early in the war, when their son Max was just born, the Mosleys were imprisoned as a precaution. To the end of their lives, they were unapologetic, always Nazi sympathizers, always rabid Jew-haters who went as far as they dared in denying the Holocaust. In the course of my own researches, I met both Mosleys and saw for myself what ugly bullies they were. If I did not withdraw the book I was then writing about Unity Mitford, Diana's extreme Nazi sister, they would not be responsible for the consequences. What might that mean? my lawyer asked. Quite simply, fascist violence, some kind of accident to my car or my house.
Commentators have often noted how Nazism attracted followers by means of showy sexual elements in parades and uniforms. The notion that a Nazi concentration camp could provide any such sexual element is in keeping with the doctrine and practice of Nazism, though it has a sinister perversity all its own. But you don't have to be an expert in psychology to see that a straight line runs from the father's past fantasies to the son's enactments of them in the present.
04/06 07:00 AM Wednesday, March 26, 2008 The Collapse of a Civilization's Self-Confidence News of Britain's moral and cultural decline comes pouring in. A friend sends me a passage from the Brussels Journal, which is not as you might expect a pro-European Union hand-out but the publication of the Flemish nationalists in Belgium. Here it is:
A section entitled "British Culture" on the government's website for the U.S. states that, "Like the U.S., Britain is proud of its multicultural heritage." And an accompanying section "The History of Multicultural Britain" seems to suggest that ancient Britain was as nearly ethnically diverse as the modern country, or perhaps more so. In this supposed British history, the largest paragraph out of only nine is on the Muslim community, and the word "Muslims" appears four times while "Celts," "Angles," "Saxons," "Norse," and "Danes" appear only once. "English," "Irish," "Scottish," "Welsh," and "White" don't appear at all.
Can this be true ? my friend asked, horror-struck by the travesty of inventing a role for Muslims in fashioning the historic character of Britain, when they have immigrated only in the last generation or two. At the very same moment, the newspapers are carrying the latest attack on Britain by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury - he who recently informed us that Muslim sharia law in Britain is not only unavoidable but also desirable. (Incidentally, several Muslims responded in the media by saying that they had emigrated to Britain precisely to avoid sharia law in their countries.) This time, the Archbishop told us that we are in the grip of "selfish, controlling, greedy habits," because we are cultivating a fantasy that there will always be "enough oil, enough power, enough territory" for our desires. Our civilization, he concludes, will collapse.
Never mind that this unfortunate priest is himself in the grip of a sub-Marxist fantasy about the inevitably doomed consequences of capitalism and democracy. What is really striking is the lack of self-confidence evidently motivating him and also the bureaucrats who drafted their nonsensical version of the Muslim role in Britain. Some sense of guilt, or inadequacy, or fear, has spread through the upper reaches of the society like a dreadful epidemic. But where did it begin, and why ? It is a central mystery of our times, and will provide the theme of a Gibbonesque Decline and Fall in many volumes by some great historian of the future.
03/26 11:35 AM Thursday, March 20, 2008 Christians in the Holy Land I have just been on a visit to Israel. It was the run-up to Easter week when I reached Jerusalem. There, on the Via Dolorosa, numbers of priests, monks, and nuns and accompanying pilgrims were doing the Stations of the Cross, a penitential walk up a twisty and uneven alley. You see Catholics, Evangelicals, Greek Orthodox, Ethiopians, Armenians, in what looks like a representation of Christianity and its history of splits and dissent. And passing them, jostling, shouting, evidently proving their indifference to this religion and trying to distract, are porters, youths pushing hand-carts, merchants, salesmen, tourist guides, in a vast hubbub that militates against prayer.
Someone likely to know told me that there are in fact only 14,000 Christians in Jerusalem, including native Arabs and the international religious community. Not so long ago, there were many more. The Arab Christians are unable to resist Islamism. Muslims are taking over the Christian quarters of East Jerusalem as well as outlying Christian suburbs like Beit Jala and Beit Sahur. One day a Christian Arab cab-driver wanted to take me to Bethlehem. It wasn’t safe. An undercover Israeli squad had just shot dead the four local Islamic Jihad leaders who were in the process of calling on town notables and intimidating them. 250,000 people are supposed to have turned out at the funeral of these four – and that in a town once eighty percent Christian, but where Christians are now a disappearing minority.
Have Christians no place in the Muslim world? Islamist radicals talk about Christians as “Crusaders” as though fighting to the death the wars of the Middle Ages. In his latest outburst Osama bin Laden promises to take frightful revenge for the Danish cartoons, and he blackguards the Pope. In Algeria, Monsignor Henri Tessier, Archbishop of Algiers, says that Catholics experience a pressure that borders on persecution. Father Pierre Wellez and a doctor friend of his have just received prison sentences in Algeria for praying openly outside a prayer hall. One of the most frightening moments of my life was in Cherchell on the Algerian coast when I went to look at what I thought was a French colonial church, but in fact had been converted to a mosque. Out poured the worshippers to fling stones, and my daughter and I had to run for it. Two Austrians have been taken hostage in Tunisia supposedly to pressure their government to withhold aid to the coalition in Afghanistan. In Iraq, Paulos Rahho, the Chaldean Catholic of Mosul, has just been kidnapped, and his corpse found. In Gaza, the church and the YMCA of the miniscule Greek Orthoxox community have been burnt out. Several churches in Pakistan have been bombed with much loss of life.
Muslim fanaticism and intolerance is not going to succeed even in the medium term. Thanks to the humanity of its founder, Christianity thrives and acquires strength when it is persecuted. Everyone can tell the difference between a martyr unjustly killed for his faith, and a martyr who kills himself and others for his faith.
Meanwhile the newspapers publish photographs of Mikhail Gorbachev flanked by Franciscan friars on their way to the church of Saint Francis of Assisi. The former general secretary of the Soviet Communist party, a party dedicated to stamping out religion as “the opium of the people” in the famous sneer of Karl Marx! Gorbachev a self-declared devout Christian! What an example of Christianity’s power of regeneration, and in the end, it seems to me, that is what the imams and the mullahs and bin Ladens are really afraid of. 03/20 06:56 PM Sunday, March 09, 2008 A Nation in Danger This very week, the British have been lied to and cheated by their government in a way that is alien to our tradition, and I would previously have thought unimaginable. The matter may seem to rest on political procedures, involving technicalities that are rather complicated and of no general interest. But this really isn’t so. The nation and its future are at stake.
What happened is that the politicians who run the European Union in Brussels want a constitution to enshrine and extend their centralized powers. Such a constitution would convert the 27 member countries of the EU into a single empire, with foreign and domestic policies homogenized, and all enforceable in a single over-riding legal jurisdiction. Since whole areas of national sovereignty were to be given away, the British Labour government under Tony Blair said that the country would have a referendum on whether to accept this constitution, and the manifesto that the party published before the last election directly and clearly promised to hold one. The issue did not then come to a head because the French and the Dutch voted convincingly to reject this proposed constitution. That should have been that. However, the EU does not operate in an open and democratic way. The Brussels bureaucrats tried another tack, and have now presented their constitution in a virtually identical form, but relabelled as a treaty taking its name from Lisbon. It is just a play with words. Offered a referendum, several countries, perhaps even a majority, would vote as the French and Dutch did, and reject the confidence trick being played on them.
The British would most certainly reject this constitution, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Blair’s heir, knows it. He has therefore pretended that the Lisbon treaty is not the constitution in a disguised form, and so needs only to be voted on in the Westminster parliament where he can be sure of a majority. He has consigned his party’s promise to hold a referendum to the waste-paper basket. He also used all the traditional sticks and carrots to oblige his parliamentarians to vote to accept the treaty. 29 of them chose to defy their leader and party for the sake of upholding the promise of a referendum. All honor to them, but they were not numerous enough to save the day. Here is the extraordinary and ominous spectacle of a democratic parliament passing its powers to an undemocratic body without any legitimization from the people.
The last time anything comparable occurred was in July 1940, in the days immediately after the conquest of France by Germany. The French Assembly met in Vichy and voted itself out of existence. A handful of deputies voted against the motion, and one brave man shouted, “Long live the Republic all the same.”
What is hard to understand is the apathy of the British at the enormity of what is being foisted on them without their consent. Evidently they cannot trust a government that so lightly breaks its promises. If the past is any guide, on the shameful day when Brown whipped this treaty through Westminster, huge mobs should have been surging through the streets in protest. Perhaps the British are no longer the people they were, but I believe they are, and that they will rise up when they realise that the lying and cheating really isn’t a matter of political technicalities, but a cover for the surrender of sovereignty. This is a people that down the centuries has fought for its liberties. A historic nation state like Britain does not die easily. The EU, it seems clear to me and many that I talk to, is dooming us to future violence. 03/09 10:05 AM Monday, March 03, 2008 Soviet Reenactment The Russian election sends a shudder of foreboding and fear down the spine. President Vladimir Putin has made sure to stage this show, with the appearance of turning to the electorate while making sure that no such thing is possible. He has muzzled free speech, barred opposition candidates from standing, and fixed the actual returns. Dissenters once again risk being condemned to mental asylums or punishment camps in a revised version of Gulag. On election day, Garry Kasparov, one of the forbidden opposition leaders, carried a plastic shopping bag in central Moscow with the words on it, “I am not participating in this farce.” Riot police surrounded him to prevent onlookers from spotting that bag. There could hardly be a more perfect representation of the political illegitimacy that Putin has put in place. Such is the reality of Russia today.
More than a travesty of democracy, here is a reenactment of Communist practice, a kind of civilian version of it. In a process that was purely personal and of course invisible even to insiders, Putin picked Dmitri Medvedev to replace him as President, while he simply appoints himself Prime Minister.
Who is this Medvedev? He rose through Gazprom, the state oil and gas giant. Fawning as usual, the Western press generally calls him a “moderniser” and a “liberal” or at least more “moderate” than Putin. Practically the entire world media has shown Putin and Medvedev celebrating pulling off the election by attending a rock concert, both dressed in smart black leather gear. Modern, cool, eh? In just that mode, previous Western journalists used to discover that hard-line general secretaries of the Communist Party were devoted to children and jazz, and drank whisky too.
Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB colonel who defected to Britain in 1985, tells me that the election was pure falsification. Contacts in Russia inform him that the actual numbers of voters who turned up in the booths are significantly lower than those announced officially. The whole show is a KGB triumph. To him, Medvedev is an “empty space.” Over the next two years, nothing will change in the Putin-Medvedev relationship, he foresees, but then Medvedev is likely to try to establish the control over the armed forces and foreign policy that properly belongs to the presidency. We shall then see if anything has filled the “empty space.”
Actually today is worse than Communism, Gordievsky thinks. Communism at least had an ideology behind it. Now Putin and Medvedev are putting the power of the KGB and the state at the service of nothing but bandit capitalism. And he added the remarkable throwaway line, that Putin is short and ugly, as Stalin was, for which reason both men needed to take it out on the rest of the world.
03/03 08:21 AM Thursday, February 28, 2008 Rashid Khalidi Out of the blue, the talk shows and blogs have brought the name of Rashid Khalidi into view. He’s the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia, and a well-known propagandist of Arab nationalism. At one point towards the end of the 1970s he was director of WAFA, a Palestinian news agency serving the purposes of Yasser Arafat and the PLO. A book of his, Under Siege, in 1986 was a panegyric to the courage and endurance of the PLO as the Israeli army forced it out of Beirut, parts of which the Palestinians had occupied by force of arms, with no legitimacy at all. And now Khalidi pops up in some sort of relationship with Senator Barack Obama, as a fundraiser and supporter, possibly an advisor.
I have been covering Middle East affairs all my life. The Arab-Israeli clash looks outwardly as if reason could resolve it, but time and again reason is thwarted by Arab violence. Time and again, the Arabs seem to take the same decision to resort to force, but of course this is a clash not open to resolution by force, and so the Arabs are in each round left more desperate than before. Obviously they are as rational as everyone else, so how come they repeat the same mistake rather than draw the logical conclusion that self-injury has to stop? In 1989, I published a book The Closed Circle to address that vital question. Arabs who have read it often tell me that I say harsh things about them, but as someone who wishes them well and not as an enemy. That’s true.
As part of a book tour at the time of publication, I found myself in Chicago appearing on the Milt Rosenberg talk show. And in the studio there was a guest, lo and behold Rashid Khalidi, transformed into an academic at Chicago University. Lack of democracy, I said, was blocking Arab development. He said furiously that the Arabs were democratic in their fashion, citing Kuwait of all examples, which at that moment was just standing down its vestigial parliament. I said that Arab nationalism had only served to extend despotism. He became even angrier at that, and accused me of writing a hatchet job. Apparently I was a purveyor of essentialism. This is a doctrine, as I understand it, that ascribes fixed characteristics to people, as though they couldn’t change. You talk to me about philosophical terms, I heard myself saying, but I am talking to you about murder and war.
Rashid Khalidi comes from a very well known Palestinian family, and someone in his position commands respect in that society. He is of course safe in the United States, but the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza have to bear the consequences of what the social and intellectual elite to which he belongs are doing and saying. Nationalism of his kind, its deceptions and self-deceptions, conditions the repeated mistake of favouring war over reason. In the first place, he is letting his people down, but then the wider world has to suffer the consequences. If Senator Obama really has friends like this, he – and all of us too - had better beware.
02/28 11:47 AM Tuesday, February 19, 2008 Kosovo Kosovo is the world’s newest state, and it is likely to prove a pain in the neck. As in the case of Palestine, two quite different peoples claim it. The huge majority of the two million population are Albanian and Muslim, while one in ten, or even fewer, are Serb and Orthodox. Ethnic and religious differences like these would test the identity of any nation-state. The Serbs under the late and stupid Slobodan Milosevic made the fatal mistake of using force to incorporate into the rump of Serbia as much as possible of former Yugoslavia. Serbian nationalism proved criminal, taking the form of ethnic cleansing of the neighbouring Croats and Bosnians, massacres, destruction of historic places, and so on. President Clinton eventually did what the supine Europeans couldn’t, and stopped Serbia. Taken over by NATO, probably in defiance of international law, Kosovo became a special sort of protectorate, governed and policed by Westerners. Under this umbrella, or more accurately fig-leaf, the local Albanians have lived a different life, with crime and corruption running more or less untrammelled. As with an illegitimate and unwanted child, nobody could think what to do with this province. NATO could not be responsible forever. Understandably, the Kosovar Albanians refused to have Serbia back after the Serbs’ abominable use of force and wicked disregard of human rights. But they themselves were, and still are, also incapable of governing fairly or competently. To grant them independence may have been the least bad course, but it is risky at several levels. The Muslim world is naturally delighted to have a new member country, and one in Europe, what’s more. The United States and NATO are equally pleased to have the Kosovo problem off their hands. So there is a U.S.-Muslim entente, unusual to say the least. The Europeans are too supine to declare openly that they do not relish a Muslim state arising on the continent. But some of them, led by Spain with Romania and Slovakia and Cyprus in tow, are willing to oppose the independence of Kosovo on other grounds, namely that ethnic breakaways of the sort are existential threats to the nation state and its integrity. If Kosovars can do it, so can Basques and Catalans in Spain, Hungarians in Slovakia, Tamils in Sri Lanka – many a nation-state comes into this danger zone, and they are lining up by the dozen against Kosovo. The European Union exists to break up the nation-state, of course, so support for the new nation-state of Kosovo from the likes of Javier Solano, the EU foreign affairs boss, is particularly ironic, indeed rich to the point of absurdity. But that’s Europe for you in this age of political pygmies. No country is more threatened by ethnic and religious separatist movements than Russia. So Russia is doing what it does best, turning a dangerous weapon away from itself onto others. President Putin is encouraging Abkhazia and South Ossetia to declare independence against Georgia, and he backs Serbia in its refusal to accept what the Serbian prime minister likes to call “the sham state” of Kosovo. If really it is a sham state, where does that leave its Serb minority? Is the new Kosovo to be a state for all within it, or a state just for the Albanian ethnicity? In his present mischief-making mood, Putin has an opening here for working against stability on the widest scale, and it will be a matter of luck if he chooses not to provoke another Balkan crisis. 02/19 12:16 PM Tuesday, February 12, 2008 Conspicuous Bravery The Times of London carries on the same day the obituaries of four men, all of them highly decorated for conspicuous bravery in the Second World War. Each one deserves to be remembered for the example he set.
Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Newson of the Royal Marines was a Fleet Air Arm pilot in one serious engagement after another, taking part in 1942 in the defense of Malta. The following year, he joined an American air group with the carrier Trumpeter which saw more operational service than any other ship of her class. Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Scott worked for the legendary Special Operations Executive. Behind the German lines in Greece in 1943, he led a team of British soldiers to blow a bridge important to the German war effort. Interestingly, the Greek communists refused to help. A New Zealander, Flight Lieutenant Jack Rae flew a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, also defended Malta, shot down German aircraft over France and Germany, and in 1943 was himself shot down. He was in the camp where there was a mass break-out, an event made famous by the film The Great Escape. The Germans then shot fifty hostages, and Rae would have been among them except for the lucky fact that he was in solitary confinement as a punishment for his previous attempt to escape. Finally Flight Lieutenant Harry Humphries joined 617 Squadron, led by the heroic Guy Gibson. This most famous of the RAF's bomber squadrons was known as the Dam Busters after the exploit in destroying a dam in Germany - also commemorated in a memorable film.
Today, another example is set. A sixteen-year-old youth was caught defacing a war memorial by a lady in her sixties. She told the boy off, and cuffed him round the ear. For this, the police arrested her and she is due to appear in court on a charge of assaulting a minor. What would the men who fought and won the war have to say about that? 02/12 01:58 PM Friday, February 08, 2008 Williams: Christian or Clown? The Archbishop of Canterbury, who is a man by the name of Rowan Williams, has just told the British that the introduction of Muslim sharia law into the country is not just "unavoidable" but "desirable." Archbishops of Canterbury head the Anglican church, and it is their role to uphold the established faith. Over the centuries, some of have been odd, but all have been recognizably fulfilling their role as a Christian primate. Britain is a Christian country, and the Anglican church has spread far and wide elsewhere. As a departure from the Christianity that rests in Anglican hands, Williams' advocacy of sharia law is without precedent. More than that, it is hard to think of any statement more damaging to British identity since pacifists in 1940 advised that there should be no resistance to Hitler's panzers.
Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan, Iran, some provinces in Nigeria, have sharia law, and courageous fighters for human rights there are trying to be rid of it. The cruelties of sharia are enormous, especially for women who are treated as they would have been fifteen hundred years ago. Sharia courts survive for domestic issues in some Arab and Muslim countries, and usually conflict with the civil codes imported into those countries from abroad as essential aspects of modernisation. The existence of two systems of law is one reason why these Muslim countries fail to coalesce, and often have no rule of law at all.
Williams went further, saying, "Sharia is not intrinsically to do with any demand for Muslim dominance over non-Muslims." Wrong. That is an exact definition of what it is. Just try to imagine a sheikh or an imam in any Muslim country saying that there is a great deal to be learnt from the Christians, and Muslims ought to follow their social and religious practices, and enjoy the diversity.
Perhaps Williams is a clown, after all he likes to describe himself as a Druid, which seems to go beyond anything a satirist could invent. Lately he held a secret rite for gay and lesbian priests, something for which under sharia the whole lot, including him, would be stoned or pushed to death from a high cliff. Perhaps he is that dreadful thing, a learned idiot unable to recognise that he is disintegrating what he supposed to be representing. Apparently there is no recognized process for getting rid of an archbishop. So the noise we will all continue to hear in the background is the death rattle of the Church of England, and who knows what its collapse will bring with it. 02/08 11:54 AM |
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