Comment Trail:

@ Solomonia

@ The Spine: Back from Rome

@ The Spine: Satanization of Israel

@ The New Centrist: About the NIF kerfuffle

@ Bob's: ditto

Tainted NGO

Like we didn't know...

Last year we had this scandal involving Human rights Watch. And this one, too.

Now another famous NGO emerges as ethically tainted, with this story:

This morning the Sunday Times published an article about Amnesty International’s association with groups that support the Taliban and promote Islamic Right ideas. In that article, I was quoted as raising concerns about Amnesty’s very high profile associations with Guantanamo-detainee Moazzam Begg. I felt that Amnesty International was risking its reputation by associating itself with Begg, who heads an organization, Cageprisoners, that actively promotes Islamic Right ideas and individuals.

Within a few hours of the article being published, Amnesty had suspended me from my job.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when a great organisation must ask: if it lies to itself, can it demand the truth of others? For in defending the torture standard, one of the strongest and most embedded in international human rights law, Amnesty International has sanitized the history and politics of the ex-Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg and completely failed to recognize the nature of his organisation Cageprisoners.

I have to wonder what is it that makes these most influential of Human rights NGOs so blinkered in their choice of associations.

Conspiracies you might want to know about:

Some Canadians feel besieged after receiving a letter from an organization called "Friends of the CBC" in which the receiver is made privy to confidential information that the CBC is secretly under attack by the Conservative Government. The reason for the secret attack is that the conservative government has gotten wise to the fact that there are "nests of liberals in the CBC". The letter, apparently, did not include any details as to how exactly the secret attack upon the CBC is being waged. However, the absence of substance did not inconvenience my source from speculating, confidently, that the Conservative government will probably try to starve the CBC to death by cutting its funding and maybe forcing CBC radio to do commercials "which would completely ruin it."

Logical conclusion that flows directly from the above reported information:

The world is becoming less tolerant and the rightists are winning!

As new revelations of the conspiracy to curtail and end freedom of the media in Canada come to light, under the watchful eye of the non existent "Friends of the CBC" organization, they will be posted here.

______

Googling for verification of this conspiracy yielded only one comment made in 2006 by NDP MP Pat Martin in which he was actually scolding CBC thoughtlessness in spending the public money entrusted to it.

In the 100 year war
between Israelis and Arabs,
sometime a good moment.

H/T: dvar dea

God's excuse...

A howl of desperation from Selma, the blogger from Tehran.

In response to this.

Will it ever end?

Comment Trail:

Lots of fisticuffs on the Spine and some good discussion, notwithstanding, about Roosevelt and why the rail lines to Auschwitz were not bombed during WWII.

I wonder why any discussion about the Holocaust has to develop in this pugnacious manner.


More Spine discussion, here

Noamic Gnomes, Again..

@Bob: Graffittized Noamic gnome

And @ Oliver Kamm: Noam Chomsky's most illustrious student quoting him and opining on al-Jazeera:

“Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the U.S. policies to those of the Mafia,” Al Jazeera quoted Mr. bin Laden as saying. “They are the true terrorists and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the U.S. dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible.”

Selective Threats

Via: Islam in Europe

If you watch this very short video clip played in this link, you may hear a very short dialogue, that goes like this:

An adult voice asks the child:

"What do you do with the weapon?"

And continues by way of instructing the child:

"I want to kill the infidels [non-believers]."

And then follows up with:

"You want to kill the Jews?"

The child, finally getting hold of the gun, says excitedly:

"Weapon, weapon.."

In the BBC report that follows, you will find they quote the first part of this very short dialogue:

"What do you do with the weapon?"

He answers his own question: "I want to kill the infidels [non-believers]."

One may well wonder why the editor saw fit to quote only that part of the dialogue. Maybe space constraints?

There was hardly any evidence for such a need when the report quotes this:

Anjum Anwar MBE, who works for the church as a community dialogue development officer, said the film must not be used to implicate the rest of the Muslim world.

Most of the Muslim community do not bring up their children in that way, she said.

Perhaps the BBC editor, ever mindful of Muslim sensibilities, was worried that reproducing the full quote might tarnish the rest of the Muslim world with the suspicion that Islam preaches eliminationist antisemitism. Which would be a real slanderous accusation.

Howard Zinn is dead

Oliver Kamm eulogizes the man (comment thread the follows the post is very enlightening as to the kind of people Zinn inspired...):

"But more ominous, perhaps, than the occupation of Iraq is the occupation of the US. I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over. I wake up thinking: the US is in the grip of a president surrounded by thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water or the air, or what kind of world will be inherited by our children and grandchildren."

Whether Zinn realised this or not - and I was always inclined to the view that Zinn realised very little - this was the language of far-right conspiracists such as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber. The notion that the world's greatest democracy is not only led by an Administration you politically disagree with but is occupied by alien forces is a fantasy that incites violent protest. It was a disgraceful remark by a man whose wasted life exemplified his character as an intellectual waster.

And later adds the following:

If your heart is in the right place, so the assumption seems to be, then it doesn't matter if your scholarship is sloppy or risible. Well, it does matter, because historical truth matters for its own sake. Zinn had no conception of it. To him, an example of "admirable and painstaking research" was - seriously - a popular book claiming that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job. What a pitiful, foolish charlatan the man was.

For an alternative reading of the man, try this melancholy effusion, by ISM, which places him, ironically, alongside such abominations as Norman Finkelstein and Gilad Atzmon, Jews, BTW, the only kind of Jews that members of the ISM like and accept as legitimate.

Enough said.

Comment Trail for the week of January 31:

@The Spine: Aid for Haiti

The right to Negative Liberty

I. There has been an outpouring of support on the blogosphere for the blogger Seismic Shock who got a visit from police at the behest of one of his subjects.

It concerns the issue of liberty: the liberty to publish well-argued opinions without fearing that the local police will drop by for a "friendly chat" aimed at nudging you towards removing posts from your own blog which may have offended someone else's cherished self-image. For one thing, finding the police at you door on a Sunday morning is not exactly an image of friendliness conjured up by law-abiding conscientious citizens. For another, the preservation of another person's cherished self-image should not really be the business of our law-enforcement personnel.

I think this is a very simple principle to grasp and to agree with.

However, as the whole show was taking place in the UK, there was no crucial cause for deep concern about a travesty of justice. This is how things are in democracies, where the fundamental rights are well understood. There may occur glitches but they are noticed and corrected, more often than not. This is not the case in non-democratic regimes, where rulers by incitement alone, can cause untold damage to individuals who do not conform to the grand narrative of the regime.

II. This is why I find this recent bit of news profoundly disturbing:

"Arab university lecturer and writer is hiding underground out of fear for his life after shocking the Palestinian Authority with a book that links Jews with the Temple Mount. The Arab world has been conducting a campaign, including removal of tons of dirt containing archaeological evidence, to try to eliminate historical Jewish links with the Temple Mount.

Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, of Birzeit University in Ramallah, threw acid on the propaganda campaign that tries to convince Arabs that the First and Second Temples never existed. He wrote in a book, “The legendary Temple of Jerusalem may be the place of the Presence of the Almighty and where the High Priests served Him.”

PA officials are furious with Nusseibeh, a scion of a distinguished Arab family, who now is in hiding and cannot be contacted even by mobile phone."

I found no other source for this information.

Some of my readers may recall the great kerfuffle involving Dr. Nusseibeh about which I wrote here, here and here.

There can be no comparison between the severity of the two cases. Nusseibeh's life is in danger, not just his level of comfort. I keep hoping that the news report may have been premature in its conclusions.