Indigo Jo Blogs

Peter Wilby, in last Friday's Guardian, posted this article exploding some of the myths about World War II which are commonly used to justify the war in Iraq, particularly the last justification used after all the others have been demolished: that it was all about good democrats getting rid of an evil, fascist dictator. I found parts of it painful to read (both of my grandfathers served in that war and this country would really be a very different place if it had been lost), but there are important points in it, among them that the war was not really a moral struggle against fascism but a war "to maintain the balance of power and prevent a single state dominating the continent" and to prevent a major rival to the USA appearing in the Pacific. I am not even convinced by this myself - the very survival of the UK was under threat and Japan had serious plans for an occupation of the western USA and Canada, and (perhaps unlike France) both countries could fight, so they did, and the obviously monstrous nature of Hitler motivated people to fight in a way that a resurgent Prussian or Hapsburg-type empire might not have done. However, the fact that the losing side in that war perpetrated the Holocaust amplifies the moral superiority of the victors (and perhaps invites comparison with atrocities such as Halabja), despite the fact that fighting the war prevented serious action to arrest the Holocaust, which (or something like which) the governments of the US and UK knew was going on.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

BBC News report on abuse of soldiers

This morning, the BBC made a big fuss of a report about incidents of verbal of abuse of air force servicemen in Peterborough by people opposed to the war in Iraq. It was alleged that the culprits were Muslims, but I really took exception to the talk of "abuse from anti-war campaigners". I phoned up the BBC (020 7224 2000 in the case of the BBC London station) and, struggling to get a word in edge-ways while the woman on the other end tried to bid me goodbye and get me off the line, told them that I had been involved in anti-war campaigns myself and would never dream of abusing a soldier in the street, and that they should call these people what they are - yobs.

However, the above story contains a couple of useful comments from people who have been in the forces, who say that, contrary to the loud condemnations by senior politicians of advice not to wear uniform in public in Peterborough, actually the wearing of uniform anywhere is not a good thing in this country:

It's not like a police uniform where someone wears it to make it clear they are there to help. It's just a reminder of an authority and power we chose to overlook in this country and seeing a uniform in public reminds many of political instability around the world or in Europe's own history. For this reason there is a healthy mistrust of authority in this country and wearing a uniform can seem inflammatory and needless unless on duty as opposed to Japan for example, where uniform is very important and respected by many.

Whether or not they are responsible for the few incidents of abuse in Peterborough (none of which have been reported to the police), it's depressing but true that we Muslims have our fair share of yobs, just as the rest of society does. Many of us would not dream of abusing soldiers in the street, in or out of uniform, even if (for religious or plain personal reasons, or both) we would not think of joining the Army or other armed services, with or without the present wars.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a link to a YouTube video of Benazir Bhutto alleging that Osama bin Laden was murdered by one Omar Shaikh - presumed to be Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was implicated in the murder of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist. Was this a slip of the tongue, and if not, why did David Frost not pick her up on it? (The bit about OBL was cut out of a subsequent BBC rebroadcast of the interview; you can watch the two clips here.)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

New Statesman - Person of 2007

Anas el-Banna, the son of the Guantanamo detainee Jamil el-Banna, has won the New Statesman's Person of the Year Humanity Award for 2007 (the competition included anti-arms trade campaigner Mark Thomas, Hugo Chavez, Alan Johnston, Scott Ritter and Rachel North, a woman who was injured in the July 2005 London bombings). His father was kidnapped by the forces of the despotic, half-demented president of the Gambia, Yahya "I can cure AIDS" Jammeh (clearly an Uncle Tom despite his occasional anti-western rhetoric), handed over to the Americans who were then out to find any Muslims who had been to places they supposedly shouldn't have been, flown to their torture camp at Bagram, Afghanistan, and thence to Guantanamo Bay where he has been held ever since. There has been a campaign to get the British government to seek their release, because although they were long-term residents with family in the UK, among them British citizens, he was not a citizen himself:

Gordon Brown, for his part, will surely be grateful to have received his last letter from the young man. In all, Anas wrote five times to Downing Street, the earlier letters going to Tony Blair, and his style had developed to a point where they must have been almost unbearable to read.

"Dear Mr Brown, how are you?" they would begin, and they would end with something like: "I hope you have a good Father's Day with your children." In between, in his untidy schoolboy script, Anas would deliver a potent cocktail of entreaty, observation and reproach. The most recent contained a topical allusion: "I was very happy when I saw you on the news showing interest in Madeleine McCann who was kidnapped from her parents. I also hope that Madeleine is reunited with her family safely because I also know what it is like to have someone in your family kidnapped . . ."

And Jamil el-Banna was indeed kidnapped. He was arrested in 2002 while on a business trip to Gambia and handed over to the United States, which flew him secretly to a CIA interrogation centre in Kabul before transferring him to Guantanamo Bay. George Brent Mickum, his attorney in the US, says: "He has been through hell, mistreated and/or tortured everywhere he has been, and his weak link has always been his love for his family. I believe US officials used that against him, keeping all his letters from him for years."

Mickum says the accusations against el-Banna and the justifications for holding on to him have always been feeble. He was accused of helping transport a bomb, which was in truth nothing more than a battery charger, and of association with various individuals who have never been convicted of anything, notably his business partner Bisher al-Rawi, who has been free and back in Britain since last spring.

Reports now say that Jamil al-Banna is about to be released, insha Allah.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I just managed to watch a clip of the recent Osama bin Laden video on YouTube, and saw for myself what this blogger points out: that the video is frozen shortly before the 2-minute point, and all references to current events occur after that, including for example the comment about President al-Maliki of Iraq. The inference, some might say, is that the video is a forgery and was recorded before the invasion of Iraq, with another track dubbed over the frozen part.

This version is incomplete and apparently taken from Arabic TV, but it demonstrates the point amply. (HT: Haroon R.)

Continue reading "Doubts over OBL video" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: christopher hitchens

No, not George Bush: Christopher Hitchens, who became an idiot in 2001 (well, some would say earlier!) and an American more recently than that.

He wrote this article in yesterday's Observer, taking apart George Bush's comparison of Iraq with Vietnam. Hitchens outlines a number of differences between Iraq and Vietnam, among them the fact that the Viet Minh were on the Allied side during World War II, unlike the Baathists, that the Vietnamese were the victims of chemical warfare, not its perpetrators as were the Baathists, and that the Iraqi Communists supported the Americans, unlike (obviously) those in Vietnam. He also notes that Ho Chi Minh invoked Thomas Jefferson in his country's Declaration of Independence, "a note that has hardly been struck in Baathist or jihadist propaganda". (More: Umar Lee.)

Continue reading "A born-again American idiot" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

This just in from the BBC: the American military have managed to put backs up in Afghanistan by dropping footballs covered in various flags, including that of Saudi Arabia, which contains the shahada. Needless to say, the locals aren't happy about the idea of kids kicking that around.

The US military say they didn't realise that the balls would cause offence, but did they bother to consult with anyone to find such things out? Footballs bearing the Saudi flag have been the cause of protests in the past, including from the Saudi government. For that matter, why distribute a football bearing flags at all, rather than just a plain football? It's no use saying they didn't realise it would offend; since this was meant to be a PR exercise, they should really consult people who know about PR among Muslims before any such action.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

This afternoon, with the family car to myself as my parents have gone to Crete for a holiday, I took a ride to the coast to visit a friend of mine who owns one of my favourite London restaurants, who has now branched out and runs a fish and chip shop and restaurant by the seaside. Somehow we got to talking about the recent incident in which extremists of some kind bombed Yazidi villages near Mosul in Iraq. His attitudes disturbed me somewhat; it seems that there are still a lot of Muslims willing to condone actions like this which kill innocent people in large numbers.

Continue reading "Muslim own goal in bombing the Yazidis" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Daniel Pipes: Unleash the Iranian Opposition

This is an article by Daniel Pipes in the Jerusalem Post, plugging the so-called People's Mujahideen (or Mujahideen-e-Khalq), an organisation banned as a terrorist group in the US and the UK, but apparently not in France where its leader was able to rub shoulders with a US congressman (Bob Filner, D-CA) and the former Algerian PM Sid Ahmed Ghozali. Pipes's write-up mentions a few of the things that pleased him:

Simply put, the rogue oil state regime it opposes terrifies one half the West and tempts the other; and the MEK is itself accused of being a superannuated Marxist-Islamist terrorist cult.

These obstacles have not, however, prevented the MEK from trumpeting that Islamism is the new global threat, providing important intelligence to the West (for example, about Iran's nuclear program), terrifying the regime in Teheran, and putting on major displays of anti-regime solidarity. ...

[MeK leader Maryam] Rajavi's in-depth analysis mentioned neither the United States nor Israel, something extremely rare for a major speech about Middle Eastern politics. Nor did she even hint at conspiratorial thinking, a deeply welcome change for Iranian politics.

Finally, no other opposition group in the world can mount so impressive a display of muscle as does the MEK, with its thousands of supporters, many young, and a slate of dignitaries.

These factors, combined with the mullah's near-phobic reaction toward the MEK, suggest that the organization presents a formidable tool for intimidating Teheran.

I was put onto Pipes's article by a guest post at Harry's Place, a blog I don't link to or agree with often, but in this case they provide a number of references for why the MeK can't be trusted to deliver a "secular, democratic Iran", including one from the New York Times (not online, it seems) which describes how they force their members to divorce, deny them friendship and shield them from "corrupting" outside influences.

I find it amusing that the guest poster asks if Pipes has "lost his marbles". I think it's part of his usual agenda. After all, the MeK have not fought western forces for decades, and as long as they are only terrorising Muslim Iranians, that's OK by him.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The BBC's news programme File on 4 today ran a feature on aid to Afghanistan since the war, and reveals how difficult Afghanistan has become to live in since the fall of the Taliban. Under the Karzai régime, corruption has become rampant, with massive amounts of the people's wealth being sucked up in bribes to officials (one truck driver reported having to pay $600 in such bribes to foul-mouthed police bandits when transporting goods across the country) and roads and schools crumbling after a year or two because they were built with sub-standard materials sourced through corrupt contractors. This isn't to pine for the Taliban, of course, but it seems a lot of Afghanis are doing just that. (You can listen to it here with RealPlayer until the next programme on Tuesday, and a transcript may appear here shortly.)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Guardian Unlimited: Our press, the worst in the west, demoralises us all

Polly Toynbee (someone with whom I agree vary rarely) on the hypocritical media condemnations of the sailors who were captured by Iran. It seems that the newspapers who tore into the sailors had earlier made offers for their stories, and turned against them when they sold to someone else. She also touches on the Blair government's history of "cringing" to the press and calls for privacy legislation and a crackdown on chequebook and "kiss-and-tell" journalism.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The project | Iraq | Guardian Unlimited

This is the second part of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's exposé of how the "Coalition" managed Iraq - in this case, by filling important positions in the Coalition Provisional Authority with people loyal to the Bush administration rather than the most talented, with applicants asked who they voted for in 2000 and whether they agree with abortion or not. (In the first part, published yesterday, Chandrasekaran described the "Green Zone" in Baghdad as an island of America in Iraq where food was brought in from abroad and people acted as if the so-called Red Zone was in another world.)

Meanwhile, this article in the LA Times (free registration required; linked from Harry's Place tells the story of one Mark J Daily, a US Army officer killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in January. Apparently he was a liberal humanist who sought out Nazis on the internet and tried (sometimes successfully) to turn them round, and thought joining the Army would help free the oppressed and save people from genocide. What a waste.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: nick cohen, whats left

(A week late, but this is the first time I have had the time and energy to complete this article. Nick Cohen's book "What's Left?" is now out.)

Don't you know your left from your right? (Part 2 here)

There are two extracts from Nick Cohen's forthcoming book What's Left? published in last Sunday's Observer, in which he has a weekly column. For anyone who is not familiar with his writing, he is part of the same tendency as Paul Berman (of Dissent magazine and the author of Terror and Liberalism) and Christopher Hitchens; that is to say, he is from a left-liberal background but supports recent western military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and accuses the left generally of betraying its principles in its opposition to them. Until the early 2000s his columns had a strong pro-civil liberties stance and concern for asylum seekers; after the demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003, he denounced the Stop the War coalition of being an alliance of the "enemies of economic freedom" (the Socialist Workers) and the "enemies of sexual freedom" (the Muslim Association).

Continue reading "Nick Cohen: crude parodies and a thinly veiled agenda" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day Umar Lee posted his comments on the ignorance of provincial white Americans in response to the moronic remarks of the Congressman Virgil Goode, who wrote to his constituents in response to Keith Ellison's intention to take his oath on the Qur'an that "if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran", regardless of the fact that Ellison is not an immigrant but an African-American. This attitude from time to time makes itself felt, to me as a British citizen, in their attitudes towards their so-called closest ally. Two separate incidents serve to illustrate this.

Continue reading "Pointless alliances with ignorant Americans" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday Saddam Hussain's automatic appeal against his death sentence was rejected, and it was announced that he has to be hanged within 30 days, and that it could happen much sooner. Today, he was able to release an open letter, insisting that he would "sacrifice" himself and become "a true martyr" and calling on Iraqis to unite against "the enemies of [their] country, the invaders and the Persians". The world reaction includes a number of the usual condemnations of the death penalty, including from the British and Italian governments, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

I can't honestly see why people cannot divorce the problems with having the death penalty in their own countries, for the good reason that it tends to take away not necessarily the worst of the worst but the poorer criminals (or innocent people) who cannot afford to hire good lawyers, from the execution of a war criminal like Saddam Hussain. Saddam is not a poor black man caught with his arm round a white woman in some backwater in Mississippi, nor the learning-disabled tag-along accomplice in a robbery who did not realise that his "big buddy" had a gun and intended to use it. He's a fallen dictator with a long record of tyranny, starting pointless wars, and mass murder. I can see no reason to delay his execution other than that it may result in more details about his rule not coming out.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)