The Murder of Anna
10/09 05:18 AM
Someone has gunned down Anna Politkovskaya in the elevator of her apartment block in Moscow – when I was researching my book on the fall of Communism, my driver and minder insisted on accompanying me even, indeed especially, in the elevator. Anna was someone other commentators met in Moscow. Born in New York as the daughter of Soviet diplomats, she was what Mrs Thatcher liked to call "one of us." Slight in build, serious, with big spectacles, she was highly intelligent, and a first-class journalist. Russian brutality in the war against the Chechens shocked her, and she was not afraid to write about it. It's no exaggeration to say that she was the foremost critic of President Putin and his megalomaniac and destructive policies.
A few years back, Galina Staravoitova was similarly shot dead in front of the house where she lived. She was a cheerful plumpish lady, a member of the Duma or Parliament, and a specialist on the many minority peoples in Russia, whose interests mattered to her. Nobody was ever arrested for the killing of Galina, and it is a safe bet that nobody will now be arrested for the murder of Anna. It gets between me and peace of mind that people I have run across can be rubbed out so easily and inconsequentially.
Who profits from such deaths if not the Kremlin ? Who can get away with killing if not the Kremlin or its agents ? Another free-spirited Russian I have come across is Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect. When the Kursk submarine was lost with all hands, he was watching out for Putin's reaction, and immediately commented, Look at the coldness in Vladimir Putin's eyes, that tells you everything about the man. Oleg defected in the mid-1980s, but he still lives under cover out of a well-founded fear that these never-identified Russian gunmen will come for him too. Over there, they still don't know what to do with free spirits except shoot them dead.
Paying for Treachery
09/28 09:28 AM
Kim Philby is a household name as a traitor, while George Blake remains virtually unknown although he did more damage and was responsible for the arrest, torture and execution of an estimated 400 men and women working against Communism and the Soviet Union. His life-story is certainly strange. Half Dutch, half Egyptian, he joined MI 6, the British intelligence service during the world war. The North Koreans captured him in the course of the Korean war, and turned him. Back in Britain, he copied almost 5,000 pages of top-level secret information, so that his Soviet controllers knew pretty much everything that was to be known. Identified and arrested in 1960, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 42 years in prison, but then in an ingenious plot surely orchestrated by the KGB he was spirited away from his London prison to Moscow. There he lives to this day, untroubled and receiving a pension from Russia for services rendered.
There is worse. In 1990 he wrote his autobiography, for which his British publishers proposed to pay him £60,000, or about $120,000 in today's values. Mrs Thatcher's government took legal action to prevent him profiting from his treason. The British courts ruled that this was only right, and the publishers paid the money to charity. Now the European Court of Human Rights, a European body that sits in Strasbourg and makes up its law as it goes along, has ruled that the Thatcher government breached Blake's human rights. Disgracefully, this court found no "causal link" between Blake's treason and the government's violation of his human rights. In the opinion of the judges, he had suffered "distress and frustration." Blake is to receive compensation to the tune of £4,690, including costs. Monetarily, the sum may not be that much, but as the historian Andrew Roberts aptly puts it in the Daily Mail, "This decision means that taxpayers are subsidising treachery."
And that is still not the worst of it. This whole travesty arises because the present Blair government incorporated lock, stock and barrel into British law the European Convention on Human Rights, a monument to political correctness at its zenith. The Strasbourg Court is thus in a position to go against British law, to trump it, dictating to British citizens who have no possible recourse or appeal in their own courts. Folly and injustice of the sort can only breed disrespect for the law, a sense that sane people must take the law into their own hands, and finally – if common-sense continues to be scorned in this way – a national uprising.
Americans, free people everywhere, be warned! Have nothing to do with international courts.
  
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09/25 09:12 AM
At the age of 84, Mrs. Elfriede Rinkel must have thought she'd got away with it. She built a trim little alibi, living in San Francisco and marrying a German Jewish husband, who has died. But the U.S. Department of Justice was catching up with her, and she has been deported back to the Germany from which she once fled. What she kept secret all these years is that she was a warder at Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. Spare a thought for the 90,000 or more who were murdered there, among them Franz Kafka's fascinating girlfriend, Milena Jesenka. One survivor was Margarete Buber-Neumann, who wrote a magnificent, indeed historic, account of her ordeal as a prisoner in both Soviet and Nazi camps.
Mrs. Rinkel may have seen these great women, but she would not have singled them out from all the others with their striped clothes and shaven heads and potential for typhoid. Her job was to patrol with dogs, for as she puts it, "You have to watch so they don't run away." Absurdly, insultingly, she goes on to claim that she knew nothing about what was going on inside the camp. So why might the women run away ? What need was there for dogs trained to attack and kill?
Back in Germany, she can have a reunion with Günter Grass who kept his SS past a secret. Such veterans of Hitler hope that the rest of us will come to feel sorry for them. But like so much else in life, justice is better late than never.
Mozart and the Pope
09/18 12:34 PM
Opera librettos are hardly the place where you might expect to pick up insight into the human condition, let alone commentary on issues of the day. And yet, and yet. In depressing times like these, I turn to Offenbach, a composer who has in him the crystal pure spirit of comedy. La Périchole is rarely performed, alas. The heroine is a street singer, and she has a wonderful aria with the refrain, "My God, how stupid people are."
As for Mozart, whose 250th anniversary is now being celebrated, we can recruit him to defend our values. In his opera Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail, a party of Westerners are in the hands of Muslim Turks. In a duet with a startlingly contemporary resonance, Osmin, one of the Turks, thinks he can do as he likes with the marvellously named Blonde, because his master, the Pasha, has given her to him as a slave. Blonde stands up to Osmin with the words, "Girls aren't goods to be given away, " and she goes on, "I'm an English woman, and for that reason nobody ever compelled me to do anything against my will." When she repels Osmin saying, "Don't you dare touch me," he replies, "Don't oblige me to use force." Finally the indomitable Blonde tells him to shove off – the libretto has a fairly coarse verb – and he shoves off, complaining that the English must be mad to allow their women to have free will.
Someone ought to present a recording of Entfuehring to the Vatican, since Pope Benedict is only taking Mozart's point about the use of force in personal relations, and enlarging it.
Making a Fool of a Fool
09/14 10:47 AM
Literary London is enjoying a belly-laugh at the expense of one A.N.Wilson, a writer of many books and even more newspaper columns. He has just published a biography of John Betjeman, in his day the Poet Laureate and one of the most popular of poets in any age. In this biography is a letter purportedly from Betjeman to the Irish and long dead writer Honor Tracy, and Wilson uses this to improvise about their affair, conjuring up alcohol-fuelled lunches and afternoons in a rented room.
Honor Tracy was a lesbian – but let that pass. The letter is a quite brilliant pastiche of Betjeman, slang and all, and it contains an implanted acrostic – the first letters of its sentences read, "A.N. Wilson is a shit." A well-wisher by the name of Eve de Harben had sent Wilson the letter about Honor Tracy, and he had failed to spot either that this name was an anagram of "ever been had" or the lethal acrostic.
The author of the hoax stands revealed as Bevis Hillier, a learned and clever fellow, author of a previous biography of Betjeman in three immense volumes. Wilson had steadily disparaged and ignored this work, creating bad blood. Detecting grudge and envy, Hillier got his own back with this exposé of Wilson's carelessness.
As a matter of fact, Wilson is prone to pratfalls. He cultivates a side-line in pro-fascist, anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli propaganda. In that spirit he trumpeted the Palestinian lie that an operation in 2002 killing some fifty terrorists in the West Bank town of Jenin was "a massacre, and cover-up for genocide." He talks about the "Zionist SS" and how Israel poisons the wells, and indeed has no right to exist. His master-stroke was to publish a tirade against Israel that had apparently been written by an Israeli overcome with horror at what his country was doing. In fact, this too was a hoax, penned by a notorious neo-Nazi by the name of Michael Hoffman. The London newspaper that had run Wilson's bloop published a grovelling apology.
Eve de Harben may be a comic turn, but it proves the point all right.
Life in Full
09/07 02:47 PM
George Faludy, a voice inside me has been saying for weeks, it's time to read his book again. Its wonderful title, My Happy Days in Hell, pretty much gives the story away. A Hungarian poet with a big reputation in his own country, in 1938 he saw the coming of the Germans and Nazism, and fled to France. When the Germans caught up with him there, he fled on to North Africa, and then to the United States where he enlisted in the American army. After the war, he returned to Hungary. Fatal mistake. A classicist quoting Greek and Latin, a linguist, a man of the world and lover of life in all its richness, he could never have been a Communist. Sure enough, they arrested him as an American agent, and he confessed that he had indeed been recruited by Captain Edgar Allen Poe and Major Walt Whitman, both of them reporting to the sinister club-footed chief Z.E. Bubbel, an anagram of Belzebub. So they sent him to the infamous concentration camps of Kistarcsa and Recsk. After the 1956 revolution he escaped again to the United States, only to return home to Hungary after the collapse of Communism.
His memoir spoke to me with the warmth and brilliance I remembered from some forty years ago when it was first published. Why not get in touch with the man in what must be his old age, and tell him so? I know a good friend and fan of his, who not long ago wrote an admiring article about him. So I sent her an email to ask how to get in touch with Faludy. She answered that at the very moment she was hearing from me, she also received the news that Faludy had just died in Budapest. One of Faludy's Hungarian friends was Arthur Koestler, someone also with a touch of genius and his own experiences of modern hell; and who firmly believed that inside voices and coincidences such as this are evidence of a reality which physics as yet is unable to bring within the bounds of science.
"beautiful and kind-hearted people"
09/03 03:39 PM
Many a time over the years I have been to the Gaza Strip. Time was when I stayed in the hotel on the square in Gaza City, and marvelled to find English plumbing. Once it was possible to explore there, to talk to people and learn from them. No longer. Now every visitor, especially a reporter from the foreign media, is in the hands of a Fatah or a Hamas official who will control what is to be seen and heard.
The kidnapping of the two Fox journalists, Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, is a serious warning to the whole press corps that the Palestinians are now determined to allow only their version of events to be published. Every reporter in the Strip will carry a memory of what happened to that pair.
Sure, they weren't beheaded, but their lives were spared only when they agreed to convert to Islam. In all probability, anyone in those dire circumstances would have behaved as they did, saving their own lives as it must have seemed. The humiliation of the Christians must have seemed to the Muslim captors more rewarding in terms of publicity than murder for the television cameras, Baghdad-style.
However, the Koran explicitly states that, "there is no compulsion in religion." What happened to Centanni and Wiig, then, is forbidden. As far as I know, not a single Muslim cleric has denounced these gun-point conversions carried out to make a political point. Christian spokesmen equally have nothing to say on the subject. The men themselves seem to have limited themselves to utterances about the Palestinians being "beautiful and kind-hearted people." This whole episode may look small, and to be speedily overlooked, but actually it illuminates a large and lurid reality.
The Show Is On
08/30 08:39 AM
Erwood is a very small village in mid-Wales, where I live. Every year, the surrounding farmers get together at the end of August for a show. They aim to win prizes for their sheep, their dogs, and horses. Immaculately turned-out children trot and canter round the ring on immaculately turned-out ponies. Everybody seems to know, or at least be able to identify, everybody else. Men and women here are living as generations before them have lived. There's a beer tent of course, and among the many stands is a bookseller. From him I bought for about ten dollars P. G.Wodehouse's Very Good, Jeeves in its prewar orange binding. Opening the book at random, I found the hero Bertie Wooster describing a girlfriend as "a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rock-bound coast." What Islamists are really up against, I thought as the sun was sending evening shadow across the Welsh hills, is a show like this, native manners, and humor.
Spying in On Injustice
08/26 12:13 PM
A German news agency has reported that Hezbollah men have executed eighteen Lebanese accused of spying for Israel. Lebanon has a judicial process, but it was not involved. Hezbollah alone directed and carried out the process of putting these eighteen to death. I have no idea if any of them were spies for Israel, but it seems most unlikely. Eighteen? All caught at work in the short time-frame of the fighting? And how come Hezbollah is allowed to take what here is laughably called the law into its own hands? My suspicion is that the eighteen merely expressed what many, even most, Lebanese think but dare not say, that Hizbollah has brought calamity down on the country, and is likely to make matters even worse in the future. But just imagine the scene – those eighteen dragged out to the firing squad with no hope of any fair hearing. And then the gunfire and the blood-stained corpses.
Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian terror group paid for by Iran, has copied this example. In a public square in the West Bank town of Jenin, five of their gunmen brought out for execution a twenty-two-year-old by the name of Bassam Malah, also accused of being an Israeli spy. Malah is said to have been an Israeli Arab from Umm al-Fahm, the largest Arab town in Israel. Again I have no idea if he was a spy, and there is presumably no means of ever knowing the truth. If he was, who knows what pressures were on him that might cause mitigating circumstances? Anyhow they shot him dead without a proper trial, effectively an act of plain murder. A crowd said to number several hundred was watching, and they shouted the Islamist war-cry of "Allahu akhbar" or God is the greatest, at the moment of execution. A photograph on the Internet shows the victim dead, face down on some sort of sheeting, hands tied behind his back. At first I felt an overwhelming shock of horror that human beings could believe that barbarity of the kind could possibly be justice. But it is hate that has made them so primitive, and they ought to be pitied for it, because they are destroying themselves.
A Kazakh Life
08/21 04:29 PM
Lately I went to a publisher's party given to launch a book with the title The Silent Steppe, by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov. Needless to say, I had never heard of him, but here was evidently the autobiography of a Muslim, and reading such books is a key to understanding the inner life of Islam, or so I believe.
Mr Shayakhmetov proved to be a striking figure, strongly built, sober in manner, with deep brown eyes in a face that gave nothing away. He is a Kazakh, and on this occasion he was surrounded by about a dozen young Kazakhs who treated him with the respect due to a tribal elder. I gathered from them that he is one of the most eminent of his people. Duly I asked him to sign my copy of his book, and he chose to do so in Russian, not Kazakh.
Now I have read this astonishing book. Such is the world today that this book will probably pass almost unnoticed, but it has lasting human and historic value. He describes what Soviet Communism did to the Kazakhs. At the end of the 1920s, they were forced to abandon their herding and nomadic way of life, and driven into agricultural collectives that completed the destruction of their identity. Shayakhmetov's father, a poor man, was nonetheless considered a kulak, arrested and died in captivity. He himself was not allowed to attend school and as a boy experienced the great and unnecessary famine of 1932 to 1934 in which millions starved to death to satisfy Stalin's whim. Yet when the time came, he gladly joined the Red Army, was at Stalingrad and badly wounded.
The book expresses regret for the passing of the traditional ways of Kazakh clans, with their sense of kinship and hospitality, yet in spite of the terrible things Shayakhmetov suffered, he has no trace of self-pity. The Kazakhs are making a go of their post-Soviet independence, and they certainly have a national spokesman of whom to be proud.
His Fiction Ends
08/14 07:54 AM
Guenther Grass, the German novelist and Nobel prize-winner, has been oh-so-very-keen to moralize all his life. Everyone must tell the truth, that is his message, and Germans especially must tell the truth because for ever their country will be associated with Auschwitz. Truth-telling for him meant criticizing the United States at every opportunity, defending the Soviet Union as far as possible, and pointing an accusing finger at fellow Germans for covering up their Hitlerite past.
To be sure, The Tin Drum — the novel that won him the Nobel Prize — always looked more like a cover-up of Nazism than a critique of it. Its line is that Hitler was an evil magician who cast a spell over helpless Germans. In simple reality, Hitler was a politician who told the Germans exactly what they wanted to hear, and they voted him into power, and then fought for him to the bitter end. Germans believed that they were making a rational choice in backing Hitler, and to ascribe the compact they made with him to magic is to apologize for it.
And now it emerges that our oh-so-moral Grass was a member of the SS, a fact that he has been carefully concealing since 1945. So much for truth-telling, and forcing his fellow Germans to confront their ugly past. His biographer, a specially disillusioned man, says that the revelation now "puts in doubt from a moral point of view anything he has ever told us." Indeed so. Grass's constant attacks on the United States and the free world, for instance, turn out to be mere repetitions and embellishments of everything his SS instructors will have taught him about the wickedness of democracy and capitalism. His name will be associated for ever with hypocrisy.
What Goes Unspoken
08/10 12:36 PM
Tens of thousands of travelers in Britain have had their vacations or business trips wrecked today by a security alert at the highest level. Acting on intelligence, the authorities have suspended flights. It seems that plans were about to come to a head to blow up nine aircraft in mid-air from Britain to the United States. The plans are also said to involve sophisticated chemistry with inflammable liquids to be mixed during flight. So far there have been 21 arrests.
I have been listening to BBC reporters interviewing this family and that who won't now be fulfilling their plans but are caught in frustration and misery at airports. But who are the people causing the chaos and arousing the fear? The home secretary has held a press conference, as grave as he is mysterious on the subject. A police spokesman warns in the same sphinx-like mode of "unimaginable consequences." BBC newsmen one and all speak of terrorists, plotters, suspects, anything except Muslim. Everyone in Britain that I have heard has been mealy mouthed. The American Michael Chertoff was alone in speculating that the operation bears signs of al-Qaeda. It will be absolutely amazing if the 21 arrested are anything other than Muslims, and until the public is brought to face reality we are all going to be losers time and again as the war on terror gathers.
Incendiary, Indeed
08/08 02:56 PM
A small incident or detail sometimes illuminates the big picture. Here is Mr. Wayne Roylance, described as Adult Selection Coordinator at the Brooklyn Public Library. A reader requested from the library a new book, Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. Mr. Roylance refused to add this book to the library on the grounds that it is "potentially incendiary," unless a review from "a trusted source" could be found, and he had apparently found none.
It happens that I reviewed this book for NR, and it irks me as a resident of Londonistan and a commentator on things Islamic for about four decades that Mr. Roylance should judge that I am not a trusted source on the matter. In fact Londonistan is a carefully researched and documented exploration of the ways that Islamists have exploited British tolerance and democratic values, undermining that tolerance and those values. To declare an interest, as we Brits like to say, I am published by Encounter Books, as is Melanie Phillips, but it is altogether objectionable that Adult Selection Coordinator proves to be a euphemism for censor. Who is Mr. Roylance to decide what is "potentially incendiary"? But he and his kind are responsible for wishing on the rest of us what Orwell was the first to call group-think, or the political correctness that now corrupts clear thinking.
Stop press. Brooklyn Public Library has in fact taken the fearsome plunge towards open-mindedness and bought a copy of Londonistan.
Appeasement Back in Style
08/06 11:27 AM
I have often wondered what it would have been like to live through the Thirties. How would I have reacted to the annual Nuremberg Party rallies, the rants against the Jews, and Hitler's foreign adventures which the democracies did nothing to oppose, the occupation of the Rhineland and Austria, Nazi support for Franco in the Spanish civil war, and the rest of it. Appeasement was then considered wise, and has only become a dirty word with hindsight. One of my heroes is Robert Byron, so passionate an anti-Nazi that in his passport he described his occupation as "warmonger." He was to be killed in 1941. My own father, a man of literary and artistic sensitivities, wrote a letter in 1938 to the New Statesman, that perennially weak-kneed leftist publication, to denounce pacifism and appeasement, and to insist on re-arming. Doing other research, I came across this letter quite by chance, and I hope I would have been so minded at that time.
Now Iran is embarked on foreign adventures in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon. It is engaged on all-out armament programs, and is evidently hard at work developing the nuclear weapon that will give it a dimension of power that Hitler did not have. The latest unpleasant revelation on that front is that some months ago a huge shipment of uranium 238 from the Congo was due to be smuggled to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, but was intercepted in Tanzania. Appeasement is again considered wise. Israel's attempt to get Iranian Hezbollah off its back is widely criticised as "disproportionate." A clamour rises for hostilities to cease even though that means entrenching Hezbollah and allowing it to dictate the future course of events. In Malaysia, President Ahmedinejad informs a gathering of heads of Muslim states that the extermination of Israel is the solution to the crisis. Apparently nobody objected or even demurred: It might have been Goebbels addressing a group of gauleiters. Propaganda videos show Hezbollah columns goose-stepping in the streets, or else on parade in black uniforms, right arms raised in the Nazi salute. At least I know now what it was like to live through the Thirties.
Some Questions in Search of an Answer
08/03 07:45 AM
1. Why did Hezbollah choose this moment to attack Israel? Perhaps to take the pressure off Iran as it defies the rest of the world over its nuclear program, and to show the tricks up its sleeve in the event of real confrontation. But it must have reasoned that Israel would respond as it has done. The effect is to deepen sectarian splits within Lebanon, as Christians, Druze, Sunnis and even — sometimes especially — fellow Shias are expected to pay for Hezbollah's strategy. Hezbollah leaders, and some of the Tehran mullahs too, are now openly and angrily threatening to settle scores after the hostilities with everyone who refused to support them in one way or another. No Lebanese force, either the national army or any militia, is in a position to oppose Hezbollah. It is beginning to look as if Hezbollah calculated that the attack on Israel will prove the pretext for a coup d'état in Lebanon.
2. How did the return to Lebanon of the miniscule area known as Shebaa Farms come to be one of the conditions of an end to the war? According to international treaties, and the ratification of the U.N., this area belongs to Syria. If Hezbollah were to succeed in effecting its transfer to Lebanon, then it would show that it had the power to redraw national boundaries in the Middle East.
3. France started its subterranean war with Hezbollah back in 1983 when a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 58 French soldiers peacekeeping in Beirut. A tit-for-tat sequence of events then began, with French reprisals — most of them bungled — and Hezbollah murders of French diplomats and civilians in France. While authorizing these attacks, Ayatollah Khomeini had the gall to denounce France as "a terrorist state." Why does France think it can do any better now? For its foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, to describe Iran as a "stabilizing influence" goes beyond mere appeasement and defies reality. No matter what the consequences, once again there is evidently no limit to French ambitions to cut a more important figure in the world than the United States.
4. "Shock and awe" bombing may look impressive but it did not work in Kosovo or Iraq, and not now in Lebanon, where it has wasted two precious weeks. Hezbollah is not fully vulnerable to techno-warfare, being dug into deep bunkers, dispersed, operating in cells, and using imagination. It is said that since trucks can be spotted from the air, they transport missiles on donkeys. Late in the day, disadvantaged by the adverse propaganda ensuing from bombing, Israel is now sending in ground forces in strength, as the U.S. had to in Iraq. In a war against terrorists of this caliber, why are staff colleges still preparing for the massive set-piece battles of the past?
"A mutation of nationalism has been created, and it's much more frightening"
08/02 10:51 AM
A piece of mine in the Australian can be read here .
On Blair, the Beeb, and Israel...
07/29 11:19 AM
Israel will defeat Hezbollah in the field, but in doing so will almost certainly lose the battle for public opinion. Defending itself against unprovoked aggression, and a daily barrage of missiles, Israel is depicted in almost all the media as something like a war criminal. The inversion of the truth comes straight out of Orwell's nightmare vision of a world unable any longer to make moral judgements.
The anti-Israeli and anti-American stance of the entire BBC comes as a shock to me, brought up as I was to respect its objectivity. That was then, this is now. BBC editorialists are one and all clear that Bush and Blair and Israel are acting indefensibly. One of the most important talk shows had four guests, all of whom ranted uninterruptedly against Israel, so much so that a columnist in the London Times described the program as "the first to have been edited by the leader of Hezbollah." BBC reporters have given up on news, preferring to editorialise in their turn, blaming the horrors of Lebanon exclusively on Israel. The appeasement of Hezbollah, and the concomitant Jew-hating, is evidence of moral collapse, and it is going to take the whole of Europe a long time to get out of it – if it ever can.
In the circumstances, it is an act of considerable moral courage for Tony Blair to stand next to President Bush in the White House, and support him in the belief that Israel is doing all of us a service by rolling back Hezbollah. He is separating himself from the Chiracs and the Prodis and the Annans, and the media are priming the public to make him pay for it. Perhaps his premiership has been – how shall we say ? – mixed, but this is his finest hour.
Lebanese television has a star in May Chidiak. Trying to kill her, the Syrians blew up her car, and she lost limbs and the use of one eye. To see her back on the screen, you would never know what she has been through. Blonde, vivacious, hiding her scars, she is modesty itself, claiming to be just a journalist. She travels in a car like the one they tried to kill her in, with the same licence plates. This indomitable woman has the courage to condemn Hezbollah on air, and to state the plain truth that it is responsible for bringing catastrophe to Lebanon. She is magnificent. And the BBC will never devote a program to her.
Watching Ahmadinejad
07/26 05:41 AM
The world will shortly be discovering whether the Iranian regime takes decisions based on a rational calculus of events and forces, or on the contrary according to messianic and apocalyptic beliefs of its own. Hezbollah is only an external arm of Iran's and the Israeli campaign in southern Lebanon is slowly but surely grinding it down. This obliges Tehran to reveal its true character.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and some of his senior officials and military, are stepping up their genocidal threats to exterminate Israel. Promises to resort to longer range and more powerful weapons to destroy Israel fill the air-waves. In language as menacing as it is vague, Ahmadinejad calls on Arabs to join in a regional war or jihad, and condemns as traitors all Muslims who hold back. Hezbollah is a presence in some twenty countries, including the United States, and all these cells are presumably capable of acts of terror.
Iranian assessment of Ahmadinejad — as far as I can judge from exiles in the West – is divided. Some think he is in fact rational, a clever calculator that war with Israel and the West is a paying proposition in the Islamic world, and his murderous bigotry is nothing but bluff and rhetoric for the benefit of the uneducated masses. But others say that he believes every word he utters, and as a faithful Shia Muslim further believes in the return of the hidden Imam and the End of Days, which he has a duty to hurry along.
At the end of June, the Western powers negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program offered a deal, failing which sanctions would follow. Tehran replied that its answer had to wait until August 22. This was playing for time, sure, but the date also has its religious significance. In the Muslim calendar, and specially venerated by the Shia, it is Lailat al-Israa, the evening when the Prophet Muhammad is supposed to have ascended to heaven to receive the five obligatory daily prayers. If really Ahmadinejad and the elite around him conflate religion and politics, and imagine themselves under holy obligation to wage war, then their decisions will be based on irrationality, and they will indeed sacrifice Lebanese, Israelis, and anyone else — including of course themselves, as might be perfectly plain about three weeks from now.
Jihad Culture
07/22 11:08 AM
The current attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah repeat an essential misperception shared by the Arabo-Iranian elites : that Israel is not a country in its own right with citizens willing to die for it. So they keep on making the same mistake of using force which brings counterforce down with interest on their own heads. Why don't they learn from experience ? Essentially this is a cultural matter. They have grown up and been educated to despise Jews; and to be resisted and even defeated by these despicable creatures is a shame not to be borne, again and again demanding to be wiped out, whatever the cost. Down the ages, Muslim authorities all agree that Jews are by nature cowardly and ignominious, and therefore their present military successes cannot be what they seem. Somebody has to be empowering them, and that somebody is the United States. Shame is this engine of these fantasies.
The Iranian leadership believes that jihad against the United States will absolve shame, and jihad begins with Israel on the grounds that it is nothing but an American tool. They are Shias, and further fortified in their jihad by expectation of the return of the hidden Imam, who is the messiah and herald of the end of days. Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, are all Sunnis, but they too believe that jihad is the right response to shame.
What we are witnessing is a convergence of jihadis, Shias and Sunnis alike. The culture is proving stronger than doctrinal differences. Al Qaeda leaders are known to be sheltering in Iran. The Alawis (heretical Shias) ruling Damascus push jihadis to join the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Zarqawi was a Sunni who denounced and murdered Shia. How old-fashioned! By the look of it, someone with a belief in the new-style jihad common to both wings of Islam must have denounced him.
Calling up ground forces, the Israelis appear to be resolved to eliminate the Hezbollah threat in southern Lebanon. This would produce another gusher of shame. President Ahmadinejad is already talking the talk : "If this volcano [of Muslim pride] erupts – and we are on the brink of eruption …and if this ocean rages, its waves will not be limited to the region."
Perhaps Iran is incapable of mounting a Shia equivalent of the Sunni coup of 9/11, but it seems obvious that a major set-back for Hezbollah would prompt them to do their worst. The Iranian leadership can call on inventive people well able to spring unpleasant surprises. They have the United States in their sights and a culture that distorts the real balance of forces.
Orwell Done Wrong
07/16 05:49 PM
George Orwell taught the world that it was as right to oppose Communism as Nazism. Both, in his immortal words, were "smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls." His influence on the age has been unique. In his lifetime, however, he often found that publishers were so politicized or so craven that they rejected his books. The exception was Fred Warburg, a member of the great banking family. His firm, Secker & Warburg, published Orwell's books, including Animal Farm and 1984. When Orwell died, he left his literary estate to his widow Sonia, and she once told me that she received royalties of half a million pounds a year. Think what Secker & Warburg must have earned — deservedly.
For many years now, Peter Davison has been the editor of a Collected Orwell, put out by Secker and Warburg. After Volume 20 he thought the series was complete. Then he discovered more material, including letters from Eileen, Orwell's first wife, and Sonia, as well as some Orwell essays he had overlooked. Most fascinating of all are lists of Communists and fellow travellers whom he knew, and on whom he commented sharply for the benefit of a counter-intelligence department. Here's a window into the Cold War.
This latest volume was published by the Timewell Press, boutique publishers not long in operation. How had this conceivably come about ? I got the Timewell telephone number and the man who answered was Andreas Campomar. He's now in the position Fred Warburg was in all those years ago, but this time because Secker & Warburg had turned the book down on grounds of cost. They've made millions out of Orwell, and they do this? It is truly insulting to a great writer, and to the public. More than that, it is evidence of the death throes of our culture.
Secker & Warburg now belongs to Random House. I hope never to buy a Random House book again, and welcome any ideas short of jihad to shame them and their smelly little money-grubbing.
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