i digress.

oops!

Alex de Waal strays out of his area comfort zone and gets a good kicking from Una Vera.

(via.)
posted by s at 9:58 AM

posted by s at 7:04 PM

a heartbreaking story about honour killings in Jordan from last Sunday's Telegraph
posted by s at 6:31 PM

i digress.

'Alleged plotters who tried to kill Guinea's junta leader Capt Moussa Dadis Camara are being "hunted down" and arrested, the military government says.
Junta spokesman Idrissa Cherif told the BBC more than 60 people had been held over last week's assassination attempt.'
posted by s at 6:24 PM

well, that was a bit of a break.

i shall get up that Week thing shortly.
posted by s at 11:13 PM

double-checking the archive of this blog to see when i have mentioned The Week news magazine - that weekly summary sheet - there is a spring 2003 reference that is favourable. (tsk! how embarrassing.)

i can only plead the scales have since fallen from my eyes.

back in the summer i noted a couple of off things about it (bottom of this page), and the current issue also has something bad going for it.

operating - like the Californian judicial system - on a three strikes and you're out policy, it seems fair to say The Week is a load of garbage and can now be kicked to the kerb, and definitively ignored.

one could be a good liberal and say it is very off to do this wrt an organ that doesn't share my prejudices (no more, no less), but fuck that.

you will not be surprised to learn the offending piece from the current edition had content that was able to be guessed at before the piece had been read - it is, of course, the cover story 'Islam and the Swiss page 14'.

i am about to drink some coffee and eat some fruit but shall return w the details anon.
posted by s at 10:47 AM

in a press conference with his Pakistani counterpart yesterday morning Gordon Brown observed that around two thousand Pakistani civilians have been killed in terror attacks so far this year.

well, dozens more can be added to that grim tally of victims, today, in Rawalpindi.

The brazen raid by at least two attackers came as people gathered for Friday prayers in the city that adjoins Islamabad. Rawalpindi is also home to the military headquarters and is a frequent target of Taliban insurgents.

as David Adler noted the other day - in a splendid post overall, incidentally - "the Taliban and allied militants launched an all-out war against the Pakistani state. The Lal Masjid incident. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto. More recently, the assault on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. The attempted takeover of Swat and neighboring provinces. A string of ghastly suicide bombings in Peshawar and elsewhere, victimizing hundreds of innocent Muslim civilians"
posted by s at 1:38 PM

"Interesting that nobody's talking about the dedicated but understaffed Correctional Services Canada contingent in Afghanistan. Unless something has changed since I was there in January, there are only four CSC trainer/mentors in the country, one of whom is in Kabul.

You really want to improve the Afghan prison system? Surge CSC staff into the country. But be prepared for all that goes along with that: more force protection requirements; more chance of IED casualties as we run more Canadians up and down the roads between our bases/camps and Afghan prisons; more discoveries of bad stuff as we flip over more rocks at more prisons; and - this one's the kicker - less progress on everything else we're doing over there as our focus shifts to training and monitoring prison guards.

Afghanistan is broken, and has been for a long time. We're trying to help fix it. But there's SO much to do, you have to prioritize - almost a triage procedure. Is this high enough up on the list of things that need fixing? Maybe. I'd say it depends upon how much value the Afghans put in it: if it's key to winning hearts and minds, then by all means, let's switch focus. But I suspect most Afghans are neither overly surprised or concerned by brutality in their prisons. I have a feeling their concern is brutality OUTSIDE the prisons.

Interesting how nobody's talking about that, though - not juicy enough."

comment number 4, here
posted by s at 2:27 PM

BTW - profound congratulations to Geeta
posted by s at 10:56 AM

posted by s at 11:32 PM

posted by s at 11:32 PM

posted by s at 11:29 PM

posted by s at 11:16 PM

potentially very good point wrt Günter Grass at that Times 100 best books of the decade list from a poster there, they put one in, they put in Peeling the Onion, surely Crabwalk ahead of that?

?

i agree anyroad
posted by s at 10:57 PM

posted by s at 10:44 PM

the bald closing paragraph might not win them any admirers in Whitehall or Wootton Bassett, but there's forceful reading from the Security Crank about the Brits in Afghanistan here

elsewhere on the same site, thank you for

But the neo-Taliban are a pan-Islamist resistance movement: they reject tribal and ethnic distinctions so long as everyone follows their version of Islam. There’s nothing ethnic about it.
posted by s at 8:58 PM

it is almost preposterous that Oliver Kamm has to write up these things still, but on the subject of Balkans revisionism, Ed Herman and David Peterson are busy bees of longstanding industry (to extend the metaphor further, they may be busy bees, but their honey stinks).

anyway, 'Srebrenica, Trnopolje and the deniers', essential reading.
posted by s at 6:10 PM

Meryl Streep has said that she attributes some of her success to not caring about how attractive she is.

Streep is on the cover of the latest issue of Vanity Fair. It will feature the actress' photos dating back to the late 1970s.

The pictures include those taken by Brigitte Lacombe in 1979.

However, the 60-year-old says she is successful because she never really cared about her looks.

"I can't remember the last time I really worried about being appealing," the New York Post quoted her as telling Vanity Fair.

you are fucking gorgeous, to be fair, Madam.


posted by s at 11:36 AM

a partial climbdown from the clearly imperfect 'Asian' tag (or describing one's ethnic heritage as originating in a certain geographic area, for example, like British-Gujarati) to refer to Britons of south Asian heritage - though arguably far preferable to the sectarian labels of 'Muslim' *, 'Sikh', etc as that Lancaster Unity post points out - reminds me of the ugly stickers that started appearing all over my native part of southwest Manchester last year, when a particular mosque was being considered getting constructed.

actually, that's a lie, no particular mosque was being built in the immediate area AFAIK and IIRC, although an Islamic cultural community centre had recently opened up in a building that used to be a Protestant church, this was more just a general howl of rage and anti-Muslim bigotry from populist, thick cunts who needed to be given a brain by a passing brain surgeon.

anyway.

in a pub urinal one day i noticed a sticker up close for the first time properly (couldn't scratch it all off, natch), and the sticker said something like
NO MORE MOSQUES

with a cartooned figure of a man's head, the man wearing a turban..

* i can think of at least one Mancunian mate who has referred to themself as Muslim in recent years, and two Mancunian mates as Pakistani specifically, so, you know...
posted by s at 10:26 AM

in a comment at Dave Osler's place wrt the new minaret ban, i do rather fear that Andrew Coates is not seeing the wood for the trees.

that said, Coatesy has a terrific piece here, appropriately slagging off Tariq Ramadan.
posted by s at 10:10 AM

two more oD pieces of note:

'There is no honour in honour killing'

"Brutal rule by Pakistan’s security agencies in Balochistan has radicalised moderate Balochs in this largest and poorest province. Now Pakistan’s government has offered a conciliation package. But it looks as if it is too little, too late."

(there's some truly appalling stuff in this one, not to single it out in some act of twisted moral topography comparing it in a ranking manner to articles about the Taliban sorry, radical Islamists {because the Taliban deny being responsible for the Meena bazaar attack- although they did threaten it ahead of the attack} blowing up market-places or chauvinists from a chauvinistic environment killing women for no reason but, you know what i mean)
posted by s at 9:56 AM

this oD piece by Canadian writer Vanessa Alexander, which starts off about the 'nameless, genderless' women victims of the Meena Bazaar attack, could be read in conjunction with this article about a proposal to act on anti-female violence (good luck with that, of course, is the sad observation).
(second link via.)
posted by s at 9:49 AM

good Peter Bergen piece in Foreign Policy mag here (the link doesn't always work), 'The Terrorists Among Us', plenty of interesting material, some excerpted below

'(Zazi had traveled to Pakistan in late August 2008, where by his own admission he was given training on explosives from al Qaeda members in the Pakistani tribal regions along the Afghan border.) ... Similarly, Bryant Neal Vinas, a 20-something Hispanic-American convert to Islam from Queens, New York, traveled to Pakistan's tribal areas in the summer of 2008, where he attended al Qaeda training courses on explosives and handling weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades, lessons that he put to good use when he participated in a rocket attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan in September, 2008. Vinas was captured in Pakistan the same month and was turned over to the FBI. He told his interrogators that he had provided al Qaeda members details about the Long Island Rail Road commuter train system, which the terror group had some kind of at least notional plan to attack.
Surprisingly, even almost a decade after 9/11, a number of Americans bent on jihad managed to travel to al Qaeda's headquarters in the tribal regions of Pakistan. In addition to Zazi and Vinas, David Headley, an American of Pakistani descent living in Chicago -- who had legally changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006, to avoid suspicion when he traveled abroad -- also allegedly had significant dealings with terrorists based in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Sometime in 2008, Headley hatched a plan to attack the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which three years earlier had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that were deemed offensive by many Muslims. In a message to a Pakistan-based Yahoo group on Oct. 29, 2008, Headley wrote, "Call me old fashioned but I feel disposed toward violence for the offending parties." ...Following his trip to Denmark, Headley met with Ilyas Kashmiri in the Pakistani tribal regions to brief him on his findings. Kashmiri is one of the most prominent militant leaders in Pakistan and runs a terrorist organization, Harakat-ul Jihad Islami, closely tied to al Qaeda. Headley returned to Chicago in mid-June 2009 and was arrested there three months later as he was preparing to leave for Pakistan again. He told investigators that he was planning to kill Jyllands-Posten's cultural editor, Flemming Rose, who had first commissioned the cartoons, as well as the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who had drawn the one he found most offensive: The Prophet Mohammed with a bomb concealed in his turban.

Headley said that he had also cased a synagogue near the Jyllands-Posten newspaper headquarters at the direction of a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, the group that carried out the Mumbai attacks...Indian authorities are presently examining if Headley also had any role in Lashkar-e-Taiba's 2008 massacre in Mumbai. Reportedly, Indian investigators have found that Headley visited a number of the Mumbai locations that were attacked, including the Chabad Jewish Center, which was a particular target of gunmen and would help further explain why Headley had the book about Jewish prayer rituals in his luggage at the time of his arrest...According to an as yet unpublished count by New York University's Center on Law & Security, 25 American citizens or residents have been charged with traveling to an overseas training camp or war zone since 9/11: Two who trained with the Taliban, seven who trained with al Qaeda, 10 who trained with the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, four with the Somali al Qaeda affiliate, Al Shabab, and three who trained with some unspecified jihadist outfit in Pakistan. (The actual number of Americans who have traveled overseas for jihad since 9/11 is significantly more than 25, as not everyone who does so ends up being charged or convicted of a crime.) ... Perhaps two dozen Somali-Americans, motivated by a combination of nationalist pride and religious zeal, traveled to Somalia in 2007 and 2008 to fight the Ethiopian occupation. Most of them associated themselves with Al Shabab -- "the youth" in Arabic -- the insurgent group that would later proclaim itself to be an al Qaeda affiliate.

Al Shabab managed to plant al Qaeda-like ideas into the heads of even its American recruits. One of them, Shirwa Ahmed, grew up in Portland and Minneapolis. After graduating from high school in 2003, he worked pushing airline passengers in wheelchairs at the Minneapolis airport and delivered packages for a medical supplies company. FBI director Robert Mueller said that some time during this period Ahmed was "radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota." The exact mechanisms of that radicalization are still murky. But in late 2007, Ahmed traveled to Somalia. A year later, on Oct. 29, 2008, Ahmed drove a car loaded with explosives toward a government compound in Puntland, northern Somalia, blowing himself up and killing as many as 30. He was the first American suicide attacker anywhere. It's possible that 18-year-old Omar Mohamud of Seattle was the second. On Sept. 17, 2009, two stolen United Nations vehicles loaded with bombs blew up at Mogadishu airport, killing more than a dozen African Union peacekeepers. The FBI is investigating if Mohamud was one of the bombers...The chances of getting killed in Somalia were quite high for the couple of dozen or so Americans who volunteered to fight there; in addition to the two men who conducted suicide operations, six other Somali-Americans aged between 18 and 30 were killed in Somalia between 2007 and 2009, as well as Ruben Shumpert, an African-American convert to Islam from Seattle.'

Bergen's conclusions are significant

Indeed, it is my assessment that the al Qaeda organization today no longer poses a direct national security threat to the United States itself, but rather poses a second-order threat in which the worst case scenario would be an al Qaeda-trained or -inspired terrorist managing to pull off an attack on the scale of something in between the 1993 Trade Center attack, which killed six, and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which killed 168. While this, of course, would be tragic, it would not constitute a mass-casualty attack sufficiently large in scale to reorient U.S. national security policy completely as the 9/11 attacks did.

and this is important

That said, a key reason the United States escaped a serious terrorist attack has little to do with either the Bush or Obama administrations. In sharp contrast to Muslim populations in European countries like Britain -- where al Qaeda has found recruits for multiple serious terrorist plots -- the American Muslim community has largely rejected the ideological virus of militant Islam. The "American Dream" has generally worked well for Muslims in the United States, who are both better-educated and wealthier than the average American. More than a third of Muslim Americans have a graduate degree or better, compared with less than 10 percent of the population as a whole.

For European Muslims there is no analogous "British Dream," "French Dream," or, needless to say, "EU Dream." None of this is to say that the limited job opportunities and segregation that are the lot of many European Muslims are the causes of terrorism in Europe -- only that such conditions may create favorable circumstances in which al Qaeda can recruit and feed into Bin Laden's master narrative that the infidel West is at war with Muslims in some shape or form all around the world. And, in the absence of those conditions, militant Islam has never gained much of a U.S. foothold -- largely sparing the United States from the scourge of homegrown terrorism. This is fundamentally a testament to American pluralism, not any action of the American government.

An important caveat: Some of the men drawn to jihad in America in recent years looked much like their largely disadvantaged and poorly integrated European Muslim counterparts. The Afghan-American al Qaeda recruit, Najibullah Zazi, a high school dropout, earned his living as an airport shuttle bus driver; the Somali-American community in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis where some of the young men who volunteered to fight in Somalia had lived, is largely ghettoized. Family incomes there average less than $15,000 a year and the unemployment rate is 17 percent. Bryant Neal Vinas, the kid from Long Island who volunteered for a suicide mission with al Qaeda, skipped college, washed out of the U.S. Army after three weeks, and later became a truck driver, a job he quit for good in 2007. The five men in the Fort Dix cell were all illegal immigrants who supported themselves with construction or delivery jobs

(point one from Bob here should be read in conjunction w Bergen's above sentence that starts 'An important caveat:')

it's an obvious point to make but wrt usage of the term "Muslim" one must flash on this Lancaster Unity post, which makes the clear-eyed point that

The two Sikhs' hostility to Islam is strong enough for them to overlook the contempt in which the BNP ultimately holds all racial minorities. Communities in Britain with links to the Indian subcontinent have, over time, seceded from their rich shared heritage and the assertive "Asian" banner under which they fought successfully for their rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Dispersed into the sectarian religious identities of Sikh, Hindu and Muslim, they have all but forgotten how to mobilise together against the threat of an opportunistic ethnic majoritarianism that does not, ultimately, make fine distinctions among those it perceives as outsiders.

Generalising labels like "Asian" may have their drawbacks but, as Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations notes of Sunrise Radio's bizarre decision to drop "Asian" from its banner under sustained pressure from extremist groups like the World Hindu Council, the hope underlying such disaffiliation is that "racist whites could be persuaded to exclude Hindus and Sikhs from their hatred, and focus instead solely on Muslims". A 2006 Runnymede Trust survey claims that as many as 80% of Hindus and Sikhs in Britain wished to be seen as specifically distinct from Muslims. "Don't Freak, I'm a Sikh", urged T-shirts printed after the 7 July bombings.

most importantly of all, and going back to FP magazine, Stephen Walt rightly criticises what sounds like a very bad Thomas Friedman column here, warming to his theme that 'It is also striking to observe that virtually all of the Muslim deaths were the direct or indirect consequence of official U.S. government policy. By contrast, most of the Americans killed by Muslims were the victims of non-state terrorist groups such as al Qaeda or the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan'.
posted by s at 10:30 PM

great, rolling stuff from the sainted Unity at Liberal Conspiracy; thus far-

the truth about immigration: key concepts,

the truth about immigration: the migrants you don't hear about in the tabloids,

the truth about immigration: asylum, parts one and two
posted by s at 10:24 PM

Isn't that the most ridiculous piece of crap you've ever heard?
posted by s at 12:42 AM

posted by s at 12:32 AM