The menace of Islamic terrorism

War on Terror
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Don’t believe the hype. Reading the recent Europol report (PDF) on terrorism within Europe in 2006 it’s easy to see socalled Islamic terrorism is as much hype as reality:

Altogether 498 attacks were carried out in the EU in 2006.The vast majority of them resulted in
limited material damage and were not intended to kill. However, the failed attack in Germany and the foiled London plot demonstrate that Islamist terrorists also aim at mass casualties.

A total of 706 individuals suspected of terrorism offences were arrested in 15 Member States in
2006. Investigations into Islamist terrorism are clearly a priority for Member States’ law enforcement as demonstrated by the number of arrested suspects reported by Member States.

[…]

Along with the failed terrorist attack that took place in Germany, Denmark and the UK each
reported one attempted terrorist attack in 2006. No further information on prevented or
disrupted Islamist terrorist attacks was made available by the Member States’ law enforcement
authorities.

The London airplane plot and the trolley bomb case of Germany targeted civilians and transportation infrastructure in Member States. The radicalisation process of the suspects in these cases is reported to have been rapid.

The weapon of choice of Islamist terrorists are Improvised Explosive Devices made with homemade explosives. The cases reported by the UK and Denmark involved the use of Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP), a highly volatile explosive the use of which requires a certain degree of
expertise.

Half of all the terrorism arrests were related to Islamist terrorism. France, Spain, Italy and the
Netherlands had the highest number of arrests of Islamist terrorist suspects. The majority of the
arrested suspects were born in Algeria,Morocco and Tunisia and had loose affiliations to North
African terrorist groups, such as the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group and the Salafist Group
for Preaching and Combat.

Yet as the report says, Islamic terrorism is much more of a priority for various countries’ security establishments than more frequent, more mundane threats are. That’s because Islamic terrorism is sexy, is the kind of menace that gets the purse strings opens, that frightens people and hence is politically useful. Focus the population on a swarthy horde of evildoers menacing it both abroad and at home and it will pay less attention to what you are doing… As always, the security state needs its enemies to justify its existence.

As Palau said, over at the other blog: “the facts are being fixed around the policy. While our leaders ramp up the paranoia and suspicion of the Moslems in our midst and present the available data to make it appear our biggest threat is from ‘outsiders’ (thus validating the ‘war on terror’ propaganda and rhetoric we’ve been subjected to since 2001) quietly the wannabe stormtroopers on the inside are regrouping.”

Tony Blair to finally step down?

UK politics
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Blair gone? Don’t believe it until you see his corpse dangling from a lamppost – or see him in the dock at Den Haag. But since he is making noises about finally resigning, might it be because he doesn’t want to be the first sitting prime minister to be indicted on corruption, for his part in the cash for honours scandal? Because surely he could count on his friends in the Metropolitian Police to tip him off once a charge is likely, yet still give him enough time to bollix up Labour’s chances in the upcoming election, to spite Gordon…

Piers Anthony and the fungus

Natural World, science fiction
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Way, way back in his career Piers Anthony was still capable of writing mildy interesting books, before he discovered just writing the same story –of adventures in a magical fairyland in which every male character is like their creator obsessed by the colour of panties– over and over again would make him much more money. Back then he wrote the only novel of his I’ve read all the way through and not regretted it afterwards, Omnivore. It had the interesting idea of having an alien planet full of fungi based lifeforms, including huge fungilike “plants”. Turns out that idea is not as crazy as it sounds at first, because it turns out a prehistoric plant species called Prototaxites was really a fungus capable of growing twenty feet high:

The enigma known as Prototaxites, which stood in branchless, tree-like trunks up to more than 20 feet tall and a yard wide, lived worldwide from roughly 420 million to 350 million years ago. The giant was the largest-known organism of its day, living in a time when wingless insects, millipedes, worms and other creepy-crawlies dominated, as backboned animals had not yet evolved out of the oceans.

“That world was a very strange place,” said researcher C. Kevin Boyce, a University of Chicago paleobotanist.

Prototaxites has generated controversy for more than a century. Originally classified as a conifer like a pine tree, scientists later argued that it was instead a lichen, various types of algae or a fungus .

“No matter what argument you put forth, people say, well, that’s crazy. That doesn’t make any sense,” Boyce said. “A 20-foot-tall fungus doesn’t make any sense. Neither does a 20-foot-tall algae make any sense, but here’s the fossil.”

Every day you can learn a little tidbit like that that makes you realise the world you live in isn’t just sttranger and more wonderful than you imagined, but it’s stranger and more wonderful than you can imagine. But not if you read any Piers Anthony novels.

Sharp on Philip K. Dick

Art & Criticism, science fiction
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Ellis Sharp describes the appeal of Philip K. Dick:

In the case of Philip K. Dick, I don’t find the prose that bad. Yes, sometimes it’s very tired and lazy. Other times it’s dazzling. And when it comes to writing fiction, style and gleaming prose isn’t everything. Think about (for example) Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry James might well seem to be the better writer, with a massively accomplished oeuvre. But I would argue that ultimately he never wrote anything as important as what Stevenson achieved in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which manages simultaneously to be a hugely accomplished piece of writing and a brilliant exploration of the contradictory nature of human identity and a very insightful account of Victorian society and its hypocrisies. And Stevenson arrived there by way of genre writing. Interesting.

Dick reminds me of Stevenson in some ways. He’s more than just a great storyteller. He’s very good on paranoia, alienation and the self under stress. I first discovered Dick’s work as a young teenager, when I read his early work Eye in the Sky. At one point the characters discover their genitals have vanished, replaced by nothing more than smooth skin. I found that very disturbing. Rather more disturbing than, say, Gregor Samsa waking up and discovering that he’s turned into a giant insect.

But Dick is also very good on ideology and social control. The world he describes in his fiction continues to resonate today. Official reality is a vast simulacrum, is it not? Wars for freedom and democracy. Celebrity gossip. Grinning royals and loyal, flag-waving subjects. Important writers and journalists.

What I require from any piece of fiction is: does the writer’s vision engage me? If so, is it true to itself as art? And is it true to the world? In the case of Philip K Dick the answer is yes, yes, yes.

It’s easy to dismiss Dick as either a talented science fiction writer, interesting but ultimately limited by his subject matter or as a kind of half-crazed creator of hallucinary nightmares, interesting for their novelty but irrelevant to anything else, but that would be missing the true strength of his writing. Dick’s ultimate concern is the nature of reality, whether there can be such a thing as a fundamental realiy underlying our lives or whether it’s all a construct, no matter how natural it may look. Being a
science fiction writer Dick went slightly farther in this than just making the usual banal observations of the artificiality of American life, by reveling in unreality and constructed realities, yet almost always with their roots in that banal artificiality of white American suburban life.

His early short fiction, collected a few years ago in five large volumes, is illuminating in this regard, in the sheer number of stories that take place in suburban surroundings where everyday features of life have taken on a nightmarish aspect. They show how his fantasies were always grounded in the concerns of the “real world”, the paranoia, insecurity, powerlessnness and claustrophobia of day to day life, no matter how absurd or grotesk they seem at first sight.

(Speaking of science fiction, I do wonder what Ellis made of last Saturday’s Dr Who episode, featuring a certain Elizabethan playwright he’s blogged about occasionally…)

The Washington Post and Monica Lewinsky

Media, Numpties, US politics
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Just before the year ended,WashingtonPost article that perfectly encapsulated the ingrained sexism, stupidity and sheer spite of the Beltway establishmenttaking on its favourite target, Monica Lewinsky:

There are moments that make you question your fundamental assumptions about the world. One of them took place a few days ago, when news emerged that Monica Lewinsky had just graduated from the London School of Economics.

She did not!!

Lewinsky, 33, is known more for her audacious coquetry than for her intellectual heft, and the notion of her earning a master of science degree in social psychology at the prestigious London university is jarring, akin to finding a rip in the time-space continuum, or discovering that Kim Jong Il is a natural blond.

Even more staggering, the same bubbly gal who once described the act of flashing her thong at the president as a “small, subtle, flirtatious gesture” has now written a lofty-sounding thesis. Its title, according to Reuters: “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third Person Effect and Pre-Trial Publicity.”

Monica! We hardly knew ye!

The rest of the article is a lameoid attempt at justifying this childish sneer by Boboing some sort of pathetic social commentary out of it. It isn’t important. What is important is the view this article gives of Lewinsky:that of a stupid, sluttly little girl who cannot possible have enough brains to attend the LSE, never mind graduating. This has of course been the view the press always had of Lewinsky, portraying her either as a simple little girl caught up in a drama too big for her, the victim of Bill Clinton the Masher, or the homewrecking slut who set out to fuck herself a president.

None of them considered that actually, to become a White House intern you must have some brains, that it’s slightly different from interning at some well meaning local business, nor was any willing to admit she was actually a young woman who wanted and got a mature sexual relationshipwith a man she admired, liked and perhaps even loved. That’s just not possible in their world. The Great Unwashed for their part did see that once the details of their affair became known, but then they’ve always been more insightful than their alleged superiors inside the Beltway…

There’s also the insane jealosy of Bill Clinton, the Man they had Snubbed, of all people “bagging” a young pretty intern, something that neverhappened to any Republicans; they always had to buy their sex. It all added to Clinton’s undeserved to them popstar image, so that’s why they trashtalked and kept on trash talking Lewinsky. Look at that picture of her in the article: not very flattering, but fitting the image of “Lewinsky the dog”, the triplebagger they want us to believe she is. Reality is, quite a few of us would not mind having such an obviously intelligent, pretty young woman attracted to us…