Fitna: attention seeking moron got his wish again

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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As I said earlier this week, if you follow this blog you should know Wilders by now for building a career by exploiting Islamophobia and drawing attention to himself with media stunts. The most recent of which being his anti-Islam movie, Fitna, which he had threatened to release since the middle of last year, but which only released an hour ago, via Liveleak. It had to be done that way because he couldn’t find any Dutch broadcaster to show it and his own website got taken off the air by his American provider. Actually, there was one broadcaster that did want to see it, but that was a Muslim broadcaster, who wanted to show it during an evening of debate with Wilders, but this was just a little bit too scary for him…

I don’t really want to pay too much attention to his silly little film, because it is nothing but the usual warmed over Islamophobic cliches. You know the drill: the Islam is threatening your freedom, it wants to subjugate the entire world and kill all the unbelievers, it leads to terrorism (cue images of the September 11 attacks) and so on. Bo-oring.

It’s just the impact this will have that I’m worried about. Not so much the inevitable reaction of Muslim hotheads, but there’s already a climate of fear and hatred surrounding Islam in the Netherlands and this movie is deliberately throwing oil on the fire. Wilders is intelligent enough to make use of the wave of unreasoning hatred that followed the September 11 attacks and the murder of Fortuyn to make his political career, so he should be intelligent enough to know his movie is one big lie. The question is, is he cynically using this lie just to further his career, or does he wants a Reichsdag fire? What’s he going to do with all the media attention coming his way?

Battle for Basra: what might be going on

War on Iraq
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a montage of scenes for the battles in Basra

Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies thinks the battle for Basra is good news because:

So if the al-Maliki government is really having a big push on Basra with 15,000 of its own troops, then that is actually a very positive sign indeed in terms of the government’s subjective assessment of its own stability. On the other hand, this is assuming that they are actually going to win — if they don’t it’s a disaster.

But that doesn’t explain why this push is happening now. As is widely known by now though rarely acknowledged, much of the succes of The Surge ™ was due to a ceasefire between the occupiers/Iraqi government, the main nationalist Sunni groups and the Sadrist movement. During this ceasefire everybody’s number one enemy, “Al Queda in Iraq”, was attacked and almost completely destroyed but with this destruction new opportunities arouse for the SCIRI and Dawa factions in the Iraqi government to take care of their other enemies as well. Chief one of which is the Sadrist movement, led by Muqtade al-Sadr, which is neither tied to the American occupation nor Iran and hence could make a reasonable claim to being the legitamite Iraqi resistance. It’s the Fadilha faction of this movement, big in Basra, who have been the main target of this governmental offensive.

Why? Because Basra is of course the key to control of the southern Iraqi oil fields; having control of its harbour means you control oil export from it, either officially or through smuggling. That’s a big prize to aim for. Lenny thinks that behind this offensive might also be pressure from the US government on behalf of their oil industry, made more plausible by the timing of it, just after Cheney’s visit…

But it’s not just a struggle for dinar, there’s also a political motive. This is not just that SIDRI and Dawa want the Sadrist movement to be weakened in time for the coming provincial elections. There’s something else going on I think. When The Surge got started early last year, it was always known to be a bit of a desperate measure, another throw of the dice that might just stabilise Iraq long enough for the Americans to be able to withdraw a significant number of troops and scale down their involvement there without making it seem like another Vietnam. It was also clear that if that would happen, it was likely that the Maliki government and especially its SCIRI and Dawa factions, could get in serious problems afterwards. Now might this somewhat halfbaked offensive just be a cynical measure on Maliki’s part to draw the Americans and Brits back into the war?

In which case, they may have misjudged the Sadrist response and the ability of the targeted groups in Basra to defend themselves…

NUT: the union with balls

economic crisis, Unions
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That’s three times this week that the NUT, the National Union of Teachers, has impressed me with their plans. It’s not often in this time of sadly defanged unions that you read about a properly militant one, but the NUT seems to have suddenly (?) become one. First there was their threat to call strikes if the government does not give teachers an above inflation pay increase, neatly scuppering Berown’s calls for wage moderation in this time of crisis. (Ever noticed how wage increases for the little people always come at the wrong time?)

then there was their refusal to any longer let the army recruit their cannon fodder in schools:

Paul McGarr, a teacher from east London, said only when recruiting materials gave a true picture of war would he welcome them into his school.

These would have to say: “Join the Army and we will send you to carry out the imperialist occupation of other people’s countries,” Mr McGarr said.

“Join the Army and we will send you to bomb, shoot and possibly torture fellow human beings in other countries.

“Join the Army and we will send you probably poorly equipped into situations where people will try to shoot or kill you because you are occupying other people’s countries.

“Join the Army, and if you survive and come home, possibly injured or mentally damaged, you and your family will be shabbily treated.”

finally there’s Steve Sinnott, the NUT’s general secretary, calling for an end to faith schools:

The National Union of Teachers proposals represent an attempt to rival faith schools. All schools should become practising multi-faith institutions, and faith schools should be stripped of their powers to control their own admissions and select pupils according to their faith, according to proposals in the union’s annual report, backed at its conference in Manchester yesterday. The daily act of “mainly” Christian worship required of all schools by law should be liberalised to include any religion, the union says.

That’s three examples of renewed militantism and a remarkable display of common sense in one week. Must be some kind of record.

A thought experiment

Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Islamophobia
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Last Saturday there was a big anti-Wilders demonstration in Amsterdam, which unfortunately had a disappointing turnout, partially due to the weather and partially due to crap organisation and promotion; I only heard about it on sunday. Wilders, as you should know if you’ve been following this blog for any length, is the Islamophobic bigot who has built a political career on stoking fear of and hatred of Muslims, soon to climax in the public showing of his anti-islam movie. He himself denies he’s a racist, that he has anything against Muslims –here largely people of Turkish or Moroccan descent– but that he just dislikes their religion as inherently backwards and evil. As you can imagine this has made him the darling of the sort of people who dislike “Islam” enough not to want Ayaan Hirsi Ali as their spokesperson.

Wilders enjoys the support of a frightingly large part of the Dutch population, not just the kind of racist Lonsdale wearing meatheads you’d think would be suggestable to a good bit of Islamophobia but also various kinds of more respectable people, including not a fair few media people. Free newsrag De Pers (motto: “free but not cheap”) for example can always be counted on to give him or his party a friendly hearing. Not that these people are racists of course, no they’re just frightfully concerned with the problems of integration and fanatical Islamism and if Wilders might be a bit too extreme in his rhetoric, at least he’s addressing these problems.

so some anonymous genius at Saturday’s demonstration had an idea: create a pamphlet with various Wilders soundbytes, but everytime he mentions “Muslims” or Ïslam” replace it with “Jews” or Jewry” and see what happens. The result? He got arrested. Which is odd when the same remarks about Muslims had never gotten Wilders into trouble with the police, despite numerous complaints …

Rivers in Time – Peter D. Ward

books and books review, Climate change, Natural World
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Cover of Rivers in Time


Rivers in Time
Peter D. Ward
315 pages including index
published in 2000

Rivers of Time is a new edition of The End of Evolution, a book originally published in 1994, roughly around the same time as E. O. Wilson’s Diversity of Life, with which it overlaps to some point. Like that book, Rivers of Time mixes exploration of the Earth’s evolutionary past with concern for the
present, focussing on the historical three mega extinctions as well as the one currently under way. Unlike E. O. Wilson’s book however, this is not a call to arms. Ward is much more resigned to the great extinction than Wilson is.

Partially this may be because in Ward’s view, this great extinction has already happened, with the disappearance of the megafauna of Europe, North America, Australia and many parts of Asia and Africa during the last 15,000-20,000 years, coinciding with the rise of modern humanity. The extinctions still taking place now are just the aftermath of this. I’m not sure how much I agree with this, but at the very least it puts the current destruction of ecosystems in place like Brazil or Borneo into a new perspective, when you realise the same thing had already happened in Europe thousands of years ago.

Read more…