European Political News

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic in Serbia on Tuesday has provided yet another occasion for all the tired old propaganda about the Balkans wars to be taken out of the cupboard and given one last airing. In particular, the war is presented as one between a Serb aggressor and an innocent victim, the Bosnian Muslims, and the former is accused of practising genocide against the latter. Even if one accepts that crimes against humanity were committed during the Balkan wars, it should be obvious that both these claims are absurd.
 
First, the Serbs were no more the aggressors in the Bosnian civil war than Abraham Lincoln was an aggressor in the American Civil War. The Yugoslav army was in place all over Bosnia-Herzegovina because that republic was part of Yugoslavia. Bosnian Muslims (like Croats) left the army in droves and set up their own militia instead, as part of their drive for independence from Belgrade. This meant that the Yugoslav army lost its previous strongly multiethnic character and became largely Serb. It did not mean that Serb forces entered the territory of Bosnia, or even that the Serbs attacked the hapless Bosnian Muslims.
 
The accusation of aggression is intended to introduce by the back door an allegation which in fact has vanished from modern international criminal justice. Although the crime of waging an aggressive war was pronounced to be the supreme international crime at Nuremberg, it has been dropped from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia which will presumably try Karadzic once he is extradited to The Hague, and even the new International Criminal Court (also in The Hague) does not for the time being have jurisdiction over it.
 
The accusation has the effect of condemning the Bosnian Serb war effort at its very origins (in terms of ius ad bellum) independently of any condemnation for the way the war was fought (ius in bello). In fact, the Bosnian Serb war effort was no more or less legitimate than the Bosnian Muslim war effort. The Muslims wanted to secede from Yugoslavia (and were egged on to do this by the Americans and the Europeans) while the Bosnian Serbs wanted to stay in Yugoslavia. It was as simple as that.
 
In my view, it is not possible to adjudicate such matters using the criminal law since, as political questions, they transcend it. But the fact that the Muslims blatantly cheated by holding the vote on an independence referendum at 3 a.m. after the Bosnian Serb deputies in the Bosnian parliament had all been told to go home, and the fact that the Bosnian Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, remained in office throughout 1992 long after his term had expired and long after he should have handed over to a Serb, meant that the Bosnian Serbs had excellent grounds for believing that the Bosnian Muslim secession was quite simply a coup d’état.
 
In any case, once the Muslims had seized power in Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serbs sought not to conquer the whole republic but instead simply to fight for the secession of their territories from Muslim control. Of course atrocities were committed against civilians during this period, especially ethnic cleansing. But the same phenomenon is observed, I believe, and by definition, in every single war in which a new state is created, whether it is the creation of Pakistan in 1947 or the creation in 1974 of what later became the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. If the Muslims had the right unilaterally to secede from Yugoslavia, why should the Bosnian Serbs not have had the right unilaterally to secede from the new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina which had never before existed and a state, and to which the Bosnian Serbs had no loyalty whatever?
 
Second, the Bosnian Serbs are accused (and two have been convicted) of committing genocide against the Bosnian Muslims in the massacre perpetrated at Srebrenica. Let us leave aside for a moment the Serb claims that the numbers of people killed in that summer of 1995 has been artificially inflated for propaganda purposes; let us also leave aside the undoubted fact that the Bosnian Muslims were using the UN safe haven of Srebrenica as a safe haven from which to conduct constant attacks against the Serb villages surrounding the town, during which many atrocities were committed against Serb civilians. (The commander of the Muslim forces, Nasir Oric, was released by the ICTY in February.)
 
What is clear is that the Srebrenica massacre cannot possibly be described as genocide. Even the most ardent pro-Muslim propagandists agree that the victims of the massacre there were all men. The Bosnian Serbs claim that they were combatants (although that is certainly not an excuse for killing them) but the point is that an army bent on genocide would precisely not have singled out men for execution but would have killed women too. The Srebrenica massacre may well have been a crime against humanity but it is impossible to see how it can be categorised as genocide.
 
Unfortunately, there is a very clear political reason why it has been so categorised. The Muslim president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silaijdzic, said carefully on CNN the day Karadzic was captured that Karadzic’s trial was only the beginning of the process by which justice would be done in Bosnia. He said that there were hundreds of thousands of Muslims who had been ethnically cleansed by “Karadzic and Milosevic” and that their project therefore remained in force. The clear implication of what he was saying was this: if the very existence of the Bosnian Serb republic (the autonomous region within Bosnia carved out from the republic during the civil war) is found, in a court of law, to have been had as its president a man, Karadzic, who is convicted of genocide in the process of creating it, then its status would be illegitimate and it should be abolished. The Muslims continue to claim control over the whole of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while the Serbs merely want the preservation of their considerable autonomy within it.
 
In other words, far from bringing peace to the Balkans, it is quite possible that a conviction of Karadzic for genocide will reopen the Dayton settlement and egg the Muslims on to claim control over the Serb republic too. Under such circumstances, it is inevitable that the Bosnian Serbs would try to proclaim formal secession from Bosnia, just as the Kosovo Albanians did from Serbia.

This post is a straightforward list of blogs and websites posting about the legal threat made against cartoonist Dave Walker by Mark Brewer to force him to take down his reporting and comment about the SPCK bookshop chain’s takeover and management by the Society of Saint Stephen the Great (SSG). I followed the story, and my view is that Dave has been careful almost to a fault to stay the right side of the “defamation” line; I would happily repost everything here.

But this list is not primarily about taking a view of the SPCK/SSG “affair”; it is about the right to discuss it in public and not have anyone try and close down debate by having (or claiming to have) access to a bigger legal bludgeon. The list is articles I am aware of that have been posted; they are listed in the order I found them.

Cartoon: Lingamish

If you would like to be added to it, please email me at mattwardman at gmail dot com using the subject line “My Name is Dave Walker” with the complete webaddress of the article you have posted, and who you are. Or make a comment here.

There’s a new Libel threat to close down Yet another Blogger.

Of all people Dave Walker - the Artist in Residence at the Lambeth Conference - has been sent a cease and desist letter at half-a-day’s notice to take down all posts (75+) relating to the reporting of the new management of the SPCK bookshop chain SPCK bookshop chain by the Society of St Stephen the Great, which he has been covering for 2 years.

Dave has been keeping a close eye on all of this, and providing a forum for people to share news about the chain. He has been told he’ll be sued unless all SPCK posts are removed from his website.

This does not seem like a good way to do it quietly - The Lambeth Conference is crawling with Journalists looking for “different” stories.

A quote from The Financial Times, 22 July 2008

Almost a decade after a remarkable poll success that propelled Austria’s rightwing Freedom party (FPÖ) into government and shocked the rest of Europe, it appears poised again to play a key political role. […] Polls now suggest that it could hold the balance of power after snap elections called for September following the coalition government’s collapse this month.

A strong showing for the FPÖ – which polls put on 20 per cent support, almost double its showing in elections two years ago – could see Austria adopt a more hostile tone towards the rest of the European Union.

Heinz-Christian Strache, the FPÖ’s firebrand leader, has long favoured powerful anti-Brussels rhetoric. […] “Hostility to Europe has become a potent force in Austrian politics. Strache’s Freedom party is reaping the fruits of the major parties’ inability to convey the advantages of EU membership and eastern enlargement to voters,” said Thomas Hofer, a political analyst. […]

Both the main parties have ruled out forming a coalition with Mr Strache, who has vowed to remain in opposition. But even from outside government, Mr Strache, 39, who took over the party leadership in 2005 when Mr Haider broke away to set up a splinter party, has already managed to display influence. […] Mr Strache appears refreshing to many supporters. But his rhetoric is, if anything, even more strident than that of Mr Haider – especially on the subjects of Turkey and Muslim immigrants – and with no attempt to appeal to the centre. “Haider gathered old people nostalgic for the past. But today, the party’s supporters are mostly men in their 30s with extremely far-right views, and they are really scary,” says Peter Filzmeier, a political scientist. […]

While the two main parties rule out […] another grand coalition – the only realistic alternative if the FPÖ were excluded from the next government – [such a deal] is also unappealing for the Social Democrats and the People’s Party. Such a move, says Mr Filzmeier, would “prolong [Mr Strache’s] success, and the next time he could be number two or even number one”.

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic has predictably produced its crop of outrageous remarks from people who ought to know better but who, predictably, are incapable observing the niceties. Thus the likes of Lord Ashdown, Richard Holbrooke, David Miliband and a raft of others all speak of Karadzic as if he had already been tried and convicted. The little matter of holding a trial concerns them not.

They have already pronounced him guilty, very guilty, of the offences which are yet to be heard by the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Whilst the arrest of this man suspected of egregious crimes is welcome, not least because it brings the ending of the ICTY’s mandate that much closer, it surely is disgraceful that public figures should thus pronounce him guilty before he has even arrived at the UN Slammer at Pompstationsweg in The Hague (one of the most luxurious nicks I have ever seen the inside of in thirty years of visiting clients in prison: my first client made such good use of the gym there that he turned himself from an average sized lad into a veritable bear of a man). This is particularly so in the case of Lord Ashdown who, of all people, ought to be circumspect, not least because Bosnian Serbs will hear his words and believe that he has always had a down on them and will view his period as the world’s Viceroy through the prism of Ashdown’s own infelicitous and premature words.

It reveals much concerning the great and good of the liberal left. Can you imagine the fuss they would make if it was Fidel Castro who had been nabbed for transfer to the International Criminal Court? If they spoke at all their sentences would be liberally sprinkled with many ‘allegeds’ and reminders of the fact that one is innocent until proven guilty and that nothing has as yet been proved. But for an old-fashioned nationalist deemed by the left to be of Fascist inclination who is charged with killing Muslims, no such constraint is required. He is guilty in their eyes and the trial which is now to be held is a mere formality.

Mind you the Tribunal itself is no great model. Its full title is "The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991". It will be observed that the word ‘allegedly’ is strikingly missing from this mouthful. I can well remember the bitterness of indictees of all nationalities at this seemingly small but telling piece of presumption: they firmly believed that the Tribunal was a sham, a place for the conduct of Kangaroo Court justice and that they were to be the scapegoats for others who had either failed to deploy adequate political leadership (particularly in The West) or were much higher up the food chain than they.

Certainly the flavour of the ICTY in its early days was very much that it was engaged in a crusade to bring self-evidently guilty men to face their just desserts. In the first multi-defendant trial it held the Prosecution was highly arrogant and made it plain that they thought it would roll over us , much as an armoured division would roll over a cavalry regiment. In the event one of the four defendants was acquitted completely and the other three were acquitted of about half the charges they faced. Of the original prosecution team of four only one remained, the others having found better things to do with their lives than actually to have to fight the good fight every day.

I have no idea if Mr. Karadzic is guilty or not. We shall only know that when he has had his trial and his appeals have been exhausted. Then we can say with precision what he did and to whom. That can only be achieved after the holding of a fair trial at which he is able to challenge through counsel the assertions of those who have already pronounced him guilty. Until then the likes of Lord Ashdown ought to keep their own counsel, he not the least because he may yet be a witness at Karadzic’s trial. His impartiality and objectivity are now most certainly utterly compromised.

We have another blogosphere Libel Action. More details later.

Dave Walker, the official Lambeth Conference Cartoonist in Residence, has taken 75 posts down on his blog after being threatened with Libel Action by the new owner of SPCK - the oldest chain of Anglican Bookshops. He has been reporting the story of alleged mismanagement for two years.

Already there are a lot Industrial Tribunals from ex-employees, among other things.

A blog I picked up via Ian Whickham at Question That, which has a name every bit as good as the Harry’s Place slogan:

Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.

This is Underdogs Bite Upwards.

And relax…
Finally summer is upon us and that can only mean one thing – our MPs are off on their holidays. Gordon is off to Southwold in Suffolk while Alastair Darling is off to the Outer Hebrides – I know! What is wrong with these two? At least Dominic Grieve isn’t trying to be all […]

Nearly two centuries after Hegel, contemporary politics – especially of the Left – has not only abandoned dialectic and reason, it has regressed to mere “picture thinking.” However, the pictures the general public is presented with are only of two types: the “fascists” and the smiling face of “multiculturalism.” In this simplistic worldview, we are either in one camp or the other. There is no room for anything more complex or nuanced than this.
 
Just over a week ago, Daniel Finkelstein highlighted in his ‘Comment Central’ blog – in the online edition of The Times – an advertisement for a Researcher for BNP Assembly member Richard Barnbrook. The advert had been placed in the staunchly Left-wing, pro-multicultural Guardian newspaper by the Greater London Authority. The blog headline was, “Wanted: Neo Nazi with typing skills,” and the opening line, “Fancy a career as a neo-fascist?” The entry consisted of only a few very short lines that suggested the author’s utter amazement at the advert in question.
 
Finkelstein could have used the appearance of this advert to ask why a party that he himself denounces as “fascist,” has been elected to a seat on the London Assembly, and, moreover, to question the direction in which the country has been heading in the last decade, or why there has been so little dissent by so many opposition politicians, despite an increasingly despairing public. Indeed, this is surely the duty of newspapers and outlets for political discussion, Left or Right. It is no-one’s prerogative to hold up the journalistic equivalent of placards. Comment Central was, on this occasion, not merely intellectually below par of an institution like The Times, but it –unintentionally, unthinkingly, perhaps – justifies the harassment of individuals in the workplace, for their private or perceived opinions, and this is the point I mean to address here.
 
The BNP emerged about a decade ago, as a tiny party on the far-Right (which it acknowledges). It moderated under the headship of Nick Griffin, and claims, among other things, to have weeded out the bad apples. The party describes itself as Britain’s foremost “patriotic” party. As the Labour party came to power, also about a decade ago, it abandoned its traditional issues based on the concerns of the working class, and, instead, adopted what many people believe to be a radical multiculturalist ideology. With this, issues such as mass immigration, were made utterly unmentionable in mainstream politics. Due to its uncompromising anti-immigration stance, the BNP benefited from this, winning over Labour voters in particular (Barnbrook was once a Labour activist). Some “anti-fascist” campaigners claim, however, that the BNP is merely ‘dressed up fascism,’ or the ’acceptable face of fascism,’ etc., and points to its opposition to (radical) Islam as supposed evidence.
 
I am not a member of the BNP, and so cannot validate the claims of either side, and nor is that my purpose here. It is beyond dispute, nonetheless, that the party’s membership has changed, and that it now attracts many ordinary, non-ideological people, and has both Jewish members and one Jewish councilor. (This new face of the BNP was highlighted in The Daily Mail earlier this year, when it ran a story on one Donna Bailey – who was then running for the BNP in local council elections – describing her as, “[…] an elegant, utterly respectable, middle class mother of three.”)
 
But, there is also a flip side to the accusations of “anti-fascists,” and that is that protesting against the BNP, or, more specifically, protesting or discriminating against its members at the places of their employment, has become the entirely acceptable face of an increasingly oppressive “politically correct” ideology.
 
Last year, when the English National Ballet’s then prima ballerina Simone Clarke’s membership of the BNP was published in a Guardian newspaper exposé, “anti-fascist” protestors turned up at the ballet’s Coliseum to loudly denounce her. Clarke quit the profession not long after.
 
Richard Barnbrook has said that his work in the teaching profession “dried up” after his membership of the BNP became known.
 
In 2006, some senior members of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) called for the expulsion of Peter Phillips, and denounced him to the Guardian, after he acknowledged his membership of the BNP. (Phillips, a member of RIBA’s governing council, was then running for the position of president, and had received the backing of 60 fellow architects.)
 
Mark Walker was suspended from his job as a technology and design teacher, Arthur Redfearn was fired from his position with West Yorkshire Transport Services, and Tina Wingfield was suspended from her job as a care worker, all, allegedly, because their BNP membership became known to their employers.
 
From what I have been able to ascertain, none of those named above could reasonably described as “fascist” (at the time of protests against her, Clarke’s partner was a fellow ballet dancer, of Chinese-Cuban extraction, with whom she had had a baby). Perhaps it seems more trouble than it is worth to defend members of the BNP, who have had their careers ruined simply for belonging to a legal party. No doubt, in the US’s McCarthy era, in which members of the communist party fell prey to the same tactics, the public likewise thought it was too much trouble to get involved. But, as I have suggested, there is a broader implication to all of this. If BNP members have found themselves fired or harassed, the threat of the same has been brought to bear on politicians of other, mainstream, parties, and, by implication, on the public itself.
 
When Conservative MP Baroness Warsi sensibly attempted to encourage an open and honest debate on mass immigration, for example, she was denounced as “pandering” to the BNP. It did not matter that Baroness Warsi is of Southeast Asian roots, a founder member of Operation Black Vote, and a Muslim. By raising an issue of importance to the majority of British citizens (including non-White citizens) she had joined the leagues of the “fascists.” The invocation of “BNP” against Warsi was an implicit, though very clear, threat to her position. And, by extension, it was a threat to the livelihood of any dissenter to the prevailing, and increasingly stifling political ideology. This has not only created a climate of fear and resentment among the general public, it has helped to establish an anti-intellectual consumer politics, in which ill-conceived, unworkable ideas are presented to the public as pearls of wisdom.
 
This is a dangerous way of doing politics. Democracy, for sound reasons, is predicated on the existence of dissenting opinions, discussion, and open debate. The harassment of individuals at their employment, solely on the basis of party affiliation, private or perceived opinion can have absolutely no place in a democracy.

Yesterday (21st July) in the Independent Media Section, Claire Beale was very enthusiastic about an advert designed by Ogilvy.

In the Best in Show section of her Advertising Page, she included:

• The standard presentation of four screenshots in the printed Media Section of the paper.
• Instructions on how to find it, including details of the exact search to use on Youtube.

The article does not include a clickable link within the web page on the Independent website.

I’m taking an interest because the video has had a relatively small number of views, so it is an opportunity to examine the statistics in a bit more detail than we usually see.

Is this man rich or stressed? Politician, journalist or blogger?

Cartoon: Gaping Void

It is called “historic” by some, but really the opposite is true. Instead of being the “first tentative step towards searching for a solution to a country that is in crisis”, it is a blow to democracy.
Tsvangirai has made a massive mistake by agreeing to talk with Mugabe about a power-sharing agreement. There can be […]

This is the second in the lastest series of Blogpower Roundups, and this is my roundup of some of the current live issues around Civil Liberties. I’ve only been able to cover half of the Blogpower blogs, but I’ll do another one soon with the other half.

While there are differences between bloggers on some questions at the edge on just what comes under Civil Liberties, there’s usually a strong consensus around the right to self-expression, and that restriction of topics that we can write about or the excessive monitoring of online activity are BAD things.

Heather Yaxley has reflected on the whole theme of Defending Blogs.

Colin Campbell’s comment about extra speed cameras in South Australia prompted me to do some digging into just how many speed cameras we have now in the UK. The answer: one hell of a lot - perhaps 10,000 plus all those installed in cars and on motorcyles.

Cartoon: Gaping Void

In response to a request on the forums (currently full of - well - tumbleweed) yesterday I put together a few thoughts on why I am looking for regular or occasional writers on current affairs from a perspective informed by a religious tradition (whether one you follow, or understand, or have been formed by, or perhaps even have left behind).

Basically, I think that these are viewpoints that need to have a place in the debate, but currently do not to a sufficient degree. And that means that more extreme views (on all sides) to get more than their fair share of attention.

If you might be interested in writing here, drop me a line at mattwardman at gmail dot com, preferably with a link to something you have published before - and I’ll take a look.

A quote from FreedomWorks, 11 July 2008

The top five foreign holders of [troubled mortgage lenders] Freddie [Mac] and Fannie [Mae] long-term debt are [the governments of] China, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. In total foreign investors hold over $1.3 trillion in these agency bonds, according to the U.S. Treasury’s most recent "Report on Foreign Portfolio Holdings of U.S. Securities."

FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe commented, "The prospectus for every GSE bond clearly states that it is not backed by the United States government. That’s why investors holding agency bonds already receive a significant risk premium over Treasuries."

"A bailout at this stage would be the worst possible outcome for American taxpayers and mortgage holders, who have been paying a risk premium to these foreign investors. It would change the rules of the game retroactively and would directly subsidize the risks taken by sophisticated foreign investors."

"A bailout of GSE bondholders would be perhaps the greatest taxpayer rip-off in American history. It is bad economics and you can be sure it is terrible politics."

The Catch21 team has a casual chat with Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, on a range of topics from the current economic crisis to faith schools.

The temptation for bloggers and journalists is to feed stories and chase traffic, rather than chase truth and rest between meals.

“Welsh Culture Minister Rhodri Glyn Thomas has resigned after claims he walked in to a pub holding a lit cigar.”

George Handlery on the week that was. There is a hook at the end of the safety rope. The clash of religions: is it about culture? How to make equalitarian projects fail? Disarmament: is there a plan “B”? Fiction: North Korean food aid to South Korea. From Mugabeland to Somalia. Where good news are obligatory. Whose business is Flanders?
 
1. By the choice of the Islamists, a conflict is upon us. No one here had wanted it. This is consoling but also irrelevant. Some prefer to view the confrontation as being between religions. On the surface, this is true. Religion might be, as it is in this case, merely an expression of culture. After all, the implication of what a religious duty amounts to is a matter of interpretation. This does not reduce the weight of the issues but it does change their context from “religion” to “culture” and “tradition”.
 
2. Regardless of soothingly emphasized similarities, (monotheism, a Good Book of revelations and their acknowledged interrelationship,) there is a significant difference between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The manifold mutations of the latter  have retreated from their once extreme positions. This meant a withdrawal from the worldly into the spiritual realm. Concurrently, a pull-back from politics took place and the ambition to control daily lives was dropped. This facilitated the democratization of politics: rulers could not convincingly assert that they are acting on a mandate of heaven. Parallel to this, modern science and a society that admitted that its order is not God-imposed but the product of men, could unfold. A modern, inventive political, economic and social order and its derivate, the “good life”, emerged. Considering the current radical version that defines it, Islam seems to have developed in the opposite direction. The roots of the current conflict grew in this soil.
 
3. Sometimes, you hear that we are not to over-react as we face the Islamist challenge. Allegedly, the movement’s prospects are limited as it has no state. Hold it! In 1848, when the Communist Manifesto came out, that movement was also a ragtag, landless internationalists association.
 
4. The problem with the underdevelopment of some world regions is not that their population rejects the achievements of leading areas. All seem to want to share in the wealth of advanced societies. The barrier that separates the desire from reality is that some laggard societies refuse to apply the methods that propelled the achievers to success.
 
5. Social justice is – already because of diverging definitions – too elusive to be fully achieved. However, failure is guaranteed if it is pursued through institutionalized government policy that is administered by a specially created state agency.
 
6. Limits apply even to democratically created institutionalized power. The red line is the basic freedom of the individual. Institutions – such as the state – are created for their protection. Laws have the function of defining and defending the spheres reserved to be the private domain of individuals.
 
7. Conventional wisdom depicts agreements on nuclear disarmament as guarantees of security. Overall, this approach might, indeed, enhance the safety we love to attribute to such deals. However, in the case of some potential contracting parties, caveats are called for. Some concrete accords appear in a new light if an unpleasant question regarding the unthinkable – but not unlikely – is raised. It is: what course of action is foreseen if, after the initial implementation of the agreement, a party to it is unmasked as violating it?
 
8. South Korea keeps giving humanitarian aid to starving North Korea. Never has the communist North been asked to help the South. It was not only too destitute for that: there was, mysteriously, no humanitarian emergency. What differentiates these related but in their performance so different states? The simple answer: decades of Communism. This circumstance helped the South to escape Socialism which is the greatest man-made misfortune of all times. South Korea’s donations might be “atonement ‘ for having avoided a theory for mankind’s improvement that, also in Korea, did not fail to fail as it did everywhere else. If you think of this aid as a payment made for having avoided damage then the sum is well worth it.
 
9. Rising fuel prices have consequences. One is to confirm the Great Green Hope of Capitalism’s impending collapse. We are running out of oil, coal, and dried camel dung. The way out is to submit to their collectivism. Which would lead to worse than  “nowhere” because they reject practical solutions that go beyond making us squat again around the fire in the cave. (Alternatively, perhaps even less than that should be offered because BBQs are carcinogenic.) The real way out suggests that we have to rely on two instruments the frog-colored problem solvers reject. They are nuclear-generated electric power and drilling/exploration. This brings to mind that Green solutions are mutations of their socialist, that is “dirigistic” convictions. Those, who resist concessions to PC and have therefore not forgotten the past know that, in this case, the remedy is worse  (more North Korean) than the original ailment.
 
10. A Russian-Chinese veto in the SecCouncil (July 11) has saved Mugabe from the sanctions watered down to avoid the veto. Now that their fellow dictator is saved and “American Imperialism” defeated, we have an observation and a question. The finding: to rely on the UN to guarantee freedom and rights that your national means cannot secure is of limited benefit. The question: who will save the future victims of just-rescued Comrade Bob’s rule? While we ponder that one Peking is making the world safer for dictatorship by supporting Somalia’s strong man (July 15).
 
11. Russia can only afford an army that is half the size of the one she is currently fielding. The military resists the quality-enhancing shrinkage. There is a partial explanation. In the past, the Russian way to wage war was to throw her superior mass against a numerically limited but technologically more advanced enemy. In the wars of the past, the mass of the hey Russia stuffed into the chopper eventually clogged the machine. Realistic scenarios suggest that this strategy, the advantage of “mass” being lost, is bound to fail.
 
12. The 1989 Romanian revolution that overthrew Ceausescu was a state security coup to remove an embarrassing icon. It is a sign of success that, while the system went, its beneficiaries and its essentials could be smuggled into the future -and recently in the EU. An amusing symptom of this is that the legislature in Bucharest decided that the health of the nation demands more good news. For this reason, half of the news must be “good”. The experienced Chairman of the committee to implement the policy is no other than Ceausescu’s old “court poet”.
 
13. What makes defunct movements and their ideas attractive? The case of the neo-Nazis, of old-line as well as of “reconstructed” Communists and Guevara-fans prompt the question. Such associations offer membership in a community of brothers. An attraction of joining the bond is that it extends hope that some day all men (namely the surviving elect) will also become brothers. The ideology of such movements is irrational. This enables them to override the evidence that contradicts their tenets. Thereby failure is reduced to a past stumble as one marches on the road to destiny. The “idea” is good, although its past implementation might have been sub-optimal. In the possession of the ultimate truth, the member is part of a force that has the moral right to guide mankind to achieve bliss even without its consent. This means having the right to apply the might that once made the world tremble and also to uphold the faith till the ultimate – albeit delayed – victory. Such mobilizing concepts are attractive to the failing, the misunderstood and the insecure.
 
14. Sort this out. The idea came while reading that in Georgia the USA is, as the reception of Condi Rice had demonstrated, popular. In countries that are in trouble or suspect that they could be, America is likely to be liked. Countries that for some reason are not fully aware of their potential security problems (much of Old and surprisingly some of New Europe are examples) the US is unpopular. Partly the purpose is to convince the source of the publicly denied threat that one is OK and “flexible”. Those who presume themselves to be safe confront the States. Once, when after all, one is undeniably in trouble, the antecedents are disregarded. Therefore, one counts on being able to ask the US to become part of the solution. A hook dangles at the end of this safety-rope. The more opposing the US had, as intended, weakened her, the lesser the motivation and her ability to be of help.
 
15. Flanders has a people, a territory and a language. Therefore, if it has the will to become a nation, why does it need the permission of “Europe”? As in all comparable cases where borders drawn by outsiders and the wishes of the indigenous collide, the people should be allowed to decide.

The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, and the Custodian of Postmodern European Secularism, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, on July 16 opened the World Conference on Dialogue in Madrid.
 
The aim of the event is to promote dialogue between the world’s main religions, and, as some observers suspect, to establish a one-world religion based on Islam. More than 200 leaders of different religions [pdf], including Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Universalism, Marxism and Multiculturalism, are attending the three-day conference. Also attending are leading personalities specialized in dialogue and useful topics such as “life of human societies, international cooperation, human rights, security and peace and living peacefully together.”
 
The conference is being organized by the Muslim World League (also known as the World Islamic League) following an initiative by King Abdullah, whose country is the birthplace of Islam, a religion of peace. The Muslim World League also happens to be the principal agent for the propagation of Wahhabi Islam in Europe. In 1987, it was elected as a “Messenger of World Peace” by the United Nations.
 
Saudi officials said Spain was chosen as the site for the gathering because of its historical symbolism as a place where Muslims and those Jews and Christians who paid the dhimmi tax lived in peace under Islamic rule between the 8th and 13th centuries.
 
The event will take place against a backdrop of tensions between the Islamic world and the West due to the intolerable intolerance of the latter. They range from restrictions on the use of the veil by Muslim women in some European countries to cartoons regarded as blasphemous by Muslims and the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
 
The conference, which seeks to promote openness, consists of five closed-door round tables. They will be followed by a final communiqué to be issued on July 18.
 
The first session, titled “Dialogue and Its Religious and Civilizational Foundations,” will be chaired by the secretary-general of the Millennium World Peace Summit. The session will touch upon touchy topics such as “Dialogue in Islam” and “Dialogue in Christianity.”
 
The second session is titled “Dialogue and Its Importance in Society.” A president of the World Conference of Religions for Peace will present a paper on “Dialogue and Interaction of Cultures and Civilizations,” while the president of the Foundation for a Culture of Peace, will speak on “Dialogue and its Impact on Peaceful Coexistence.” Other lofty topics for discussion include: “Dialogue and Its Impact on International Relations” and “Dialogue in the Face of Calls for the Clash of Civilizations and End of History.”
 
The third session, titled “Common Human Values in Areas of Dialogue,” will be chaired by the secretary-general of the World Conference of Religions for Peace. Featured speakers are the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the secretary-general of the World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought in Iran; and the rector of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue at the Vatican.
 
The fourth session is titled “Evaluation and Promotion of Dialogue” and will be chaired by the secretary-general of the Jewish Congress in Latin America and the Caribbean. This session will cover topics such as “Muslim-Christian-Jewish Dialogue: Its Future & Horizons” and “Efforts of States and International Organizations in Augmenting Dialogue and Overcoming its Obstacles.”
 
The fifth session is titled “Disseminating of Culture and Co-Existence of Dialoge.” It will focus on topics such as: “Media and its Impact on Disseminating the Culture of Dialogue and Co-Existance.”
 
The final communiqué will be read out by the assistant secretary of the Muslim World League.
 
Saudi Arabia hopes the conference will prove that it is trying to: 1) shed its international image of harboring a xenophobic religious establishment; and 2) moderate clerical conservatism that even objects to women driving cars.
 
According to Reuters, the conference offers Saudi Arabia a chance to declare its “openness and willingness to cooperate with the international community […] It marks a new direction for Saudi Arabia, whose Wahhabi Islam has come in for criticism internationally” after 15 of the 19 Arabs who killed some 3,000 people in the September 11 attacks in the United States were Saudis.
 
Abdullah al-Turki, the head of the Muslim World League and conference organizer, says: “Saudi Arabia, on whose ground the global message of Islam was launched, affirms to the whole world its openness and cooperation with the world community.”
 
And then, just in case there was any doubt, al-Turki adds: “Islam requires Muslims to inform people about Islam as the final divine message that came after the previous prophets.”
 
So why is the hyper-secular and hyper-tolerant Zapatero embracing one of the most theologically intolerant strands of Islam? And why is he turning Spain into a Saudi public relations rehab center? Zapatero (like his Saudi counterparts, but for different reasons) views Judeo-Christianity as public enemy number one because it is the main impediment to the realization of his vision for a socialist multicultural utopia in which everything goes. And he hopes his pact with Islam will accelerate Spanish history.
 
Zapatero and his socialist advisors believe Muslims are the “useful idiots” of the left. And Muslims believe Zapatero and his socialist friends are the “useful idiots” of Islam. Such is the future of Spain.

Via Valleysmam:

Reports tonight point to Rhodri Glyn Thomas (Ed: Minister for Heritage in the Welsh Assembly Government) being asked to leave his post as Culture Minister.

A number of Written Ministerial statements refer to “Copies of the documents have been placed in the Vote Office and the Libraries of both Houses”.

I’m based in the Midlands - so I need to know how I can review these findings at a time when Parliament is not sitting, or even when it is in session.

I thought I would ask them to find out.

[Update 16:15: 18/7/2008. For the document I am currently interested in, I received a response to my email with a web location within 35 minutes. Most impressive, and a credit to the House of Commons Information Office.]

A brief update to my previous posting.

On the last day of the Parliamentary Session, another 46 Ministerial Written Statements were released. That makes 98 since last Thursday.

To be fair, that is less than last-year’s 117 in the last 3 days.

Some nuggets:

* Planning Inspectorate Annual Report and Accounts 2007-08.
* Equitable Life - again.
* Free Cash Machines (Low-income Areas). Provide 600 new free cash machines in poor areas. Is PO closure negating this programme?
* Food: Poultry Register
* EU: Financial Management and Fraud
* Revenue and Customs: The next stage in the reorganisation. Looks relatively innocuous.
* Review of Civil Aviation Authority
* Local Transport Bill: “measures to improve public transport and tackle road congestion.”. Hmmm - one for Councillors.
* Annual Reports: Jobcentre Plus (HC 707), the Pension Service (HC 855), the Disability and Carers Service (HC 719), and the Rent Service (HC 729).
* The annual report and accounts of the Child Support Agency will be laid before the House shortly. (Does that mean during the break? - or is that shortly as in “next October”.)

Doubtless some innocuous, but others ….

The list is here: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wms/?d=2008-07-17

A quote from The Irish Independent, 18 June 2008

Plans for the controversial visit of Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday descended into chaos last night. Senior politicians said they had never seen such "shoddy" preparations for what was being regarded as a critical meeting on the Lisbon Treaty. Such is the poor level of organisation, that the entire affair has been dubbed a "French farce". […]

There are deepening fears that the event will fail to address the concerns of the majority of Irish people who voted ‘No’ in last month’s referendum. Those fears come on the back of growing anger over what Mr Sarkozy said earlier this week, when he told party members that Ireland would have to hold a second vote.

A quote from Mirek Topolanek, Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, in a letter to The Economist, 17 July 2008

In April the [Czech] Senate submitted the [Lisbon] treaty to the constitutional court for review and the various committees of the Chamber of Deputies suspended further proceedings on the document pending the result of that review. The treaty’s ratification process has therefore been suspended in both chambers. […] I consider this approach to be entirely legitimate and responsible.

A quote from The Daily Express, 18 July 2008

Under a cloak of secrecy, the [British] Government finally ratified the Lisbon Treaty earlier this week and committed the country to a new deluge of European meddling. In a sign of the Prime Minister’s personal embarrassment over the betrayal, the historic step was only made public yesterday – 24 hours after the covert ceremony had taken place.

A quote from Tony Barber in The Financial Times, 16 July 2008

Flanders has steadily pulled away from Wallonia in prosperity over the past 50 years and the Flemish resent paying taxes to subsidise the poorer south. “The money has not helped the Walloons but turned them into welfare addicts,” declared a recent editorial in The Flemish Republic, a newsletter that supports secession.

Such opinions are hotly contested in Wallonia but economists say there is more than a grain of truth to the argument that the south is more favourable than Flanders to government intervention in the economy. Such differences of political philosophy compound the problems created by Belgium’s geographical and linguistic divisions, its electoral system and the extreme decentralisation of the state.

The pressure for a formal split comes largely from Flanders, where some polls suggest that slightly more than half the population support independence. However, some Walloon political activists favour the union of their region with France – in spite of a not entirely happy experience of French annexation and rule between 1795 and 1815.

 
A quote from Frank Vanhecke in The Flemish Republic, January 2007 [pdf]

Many in Wallonia, the French-speaking south of Belgium, believed that the fake RTBF news item in which Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north, declared its independence was true. This proves that Flemish secession has become a credible possibility. It is understandable that the Walloons panicked, because the Flemings are no longer inclined to continue subsidizing Wallonia as they have done over the past 176 years of Belgium’s existence.

Belgium has corrupted Wallonia. 40% of the Walloons “work” as civil servants, compared to only 20% of the Flemings; 20% of the Walloons are unemployed, compared to only 8% of the Flemings. However, if the Walloons refuse to remedy this situation, if they refuse to pull their act together, if they keep voting for irresponsible and corrupt Socialist politicians who promise that everything will remain as it is, they themselves are asking for the end of Belgium. The Flemings have had enough.

Everyone in Flanders – not just “nationalist extremists” as the Walloon Socialists and the Belgian establishment say – has had enough. Recent polls revealed that more than 40% of the Flemish entrepreneurs and over half the Flemish population are in favour of Flemish independence. Those Flemings who dot not aim (yet) for downright independence, want to reduce Belgium to a confederation of two almost independent states.

Every year 6.6% of Flanders’ GDP is spent on welfare in Wallonia. The money has not helped the Walloons but turned them into welfare addicts. Belgium is a case study of how socialist redistribution schemes lead to economic perversions.

Very soon the RTBF will again announce that Flanders has declared its independence. Then it will not be fiction but reality. It is time for the French-speaking Belgians to wake up. Flanders, once the most prosperous nation in Europe, is about to join the community of nation-states.

A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.
This week’s ‘must read’ item is the Theos report on the role of Christianity in Britain today, more details below. Other than that enjoy and as ever please flag anything I may have missed. Also if anyone would like to be […]

One of the few good things that can be said about Mr Mugabe is that he is creating a country of Maths geniuses, and future weightlifting champions.

Nowhere else in the world does your average 6 or 8 year old sent out on an errand to buy a loaf of bread have to deal with numbers in the millions tens of millions without parental help, carrying currency around by the bucketload.

This note is 10 million Zimbabwe dollars. As you can see from the date, it is now obsolete.

Let’s go backwards through history to explain the Mathematical Genuises and look at the price of bread - remember that this staple is price-controlled by the government.

The government has now formally ratified the EU Constitution Lisbon Treaty. In doing this, they have sidestepped the courts, and shoved two fingers in the direction of the British people.
We wanted to vote on it, and successfully stalled ratification. But the government have now gone on anyway, despite their being a hearing today on whether […]

This morning I’d like to introduce a new development on the Wardman Wire; we will be carrying political videos made by the Internet Political TV project Catch 21 Productions.

Catch21 is a production company which produces shows which aim to encourage an informed and politically active young electorate.

I thought that an appearance made by the company on the programme “Look North” made in December 2007 would be a good introduction. The people who run Catch 21 will introduce themselves before long.