Holland's Xenophobia Alert

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has posted an interesting analysis on the OnFaith blog:

Early Warning System for Xenophobia

Learning from the Danish cartoon crisis of 2006 and the Sudanese teddy bear debacle of 2007, the Dutch are preparing to preempt a Geert Wilders-inflicted pandemic of 2008. This preemptive approach seems to be paying off; reversing what looked like an inevitable widening of rifts between the West and the Muslim World. The Netherlands now know that outbreaks of xenophobia must be treated as any other pandemic threatening a population. In preparation for the outbreak, an early warning system must be established and at onset, one must quickly quarantine the ideological disease before it spreads further. With Wilders, the need for preparedness was great.

Geert Wilders, leader of the right-wing, anti-Muslim Freedom Party, of which there are only nine members in the 150-seat Dutch lower house, had long threatened to release a film exhibiting, in his words, "the violent and fascist elements of the Muslim faith". This saber-rattling was not new. On previous occasions, Wilders equated the Qur'an with Mein Kampf and called for both books to be banned (a proposal roundly rejected by parliament). Additionally, Wilders' suggestion that the 1 million Muslims living in the Netherlands renounce aspects of their faith or leave country was also dispelled as nonsensical. This new film, however, was going to trump polemical precedent and the Muslim world was readying for the worst.

This is where the Dutch did right, by discernibly developing mechanisms to dampen down disease spread. With other European Union countries quickly diversifying religiously and ethnically, they too will no doubt trip up on similar potential points of ideological contention. Thus, this model deserves dutiful review and, ultimately, duplication. If the saying "an ounce of prevention equals a pound cure" holds true, the Danish cartoon crisis should shock anyone into an early-warning convert. The potential social, political and financial costs are simply too great to ignore. And the Dutch, as we will see below, understood that. ... (more)

Postcards from the Edge...And Hitler's Stargazer

The British National Archives at Kew come up with surprising finds of one sort or another in every monthly bulletin. The latest offers postcards and photographs from World War I, including this charming wish for "A Pleasant Christmas."

There's also an interesting collection of papers about the astrologer hired by the British government to conduct stargazing psyops against Hitler, who was a great believer in such things:

Louis de Wohl (KV 2/2821)

De Wohl was a Hungarian astrologer and author who came to the United Kingdom in 1935 and spent much of the war in official employment on propaganda work for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) and other agencies. The work was based on the assumption that Hitler was heavily influenced by his own astrologer, so that by employing their own prominent astrologer, the British could sway his thinking.

Truth and Fiction

Just came across this very sharp, very funny take on fake memoirs:
Where Am I Now When I Need Me: The True Story

Flashback: Islam's Challenge, Davos 2006

I just came across this YouTube posting from two years ago. Not much has changed:

Iranian Bling -- Why Sanctions Won't Work

Nasrin Alavi, author of We Are Iran, has been back in her homeland, and she's written a long, interesting report for New Internationalist about her experiences in a country where fortunes are being made, Rolexes are back in the shop windows, and a population that is politically helpless feels ever more apathetic. An excerpt:

I am amongst a group of young women at a bustling Tehran restaurant who are celebrating their university graduations. These girls are the sort of young people that writers (myself included) often enthuse about: the educated, burgeoning children of the Iranian Revolution, with enlightened ideals, at odds with their hardline politicians. Yet these students don’t appear to be fully conscious of the outstanding UN sanctions over Iran’s nuclear programme. ‘We’ve been too busy cramming for exams, I can’t even remember the last time I read a newspaper,’ is one typical response. Still, even if she had picked up a newspaper, she would have had to read between the lines to decipher such news. Iran’s National Security Council has for some time banned any negative reporting of outside pressure over its nuclear programme. This uninformed, passive, politically disengaged outlook is rather typical of most Iranians I have talked to in recent months, rich or poor.

Yet like most Iranians these young women openly grumble about the rules and regulations; the lack of jobs, inflation, poverty and corruption. They mock Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and unashamedly breach the strict guidelines by wearing their compulsory headscarves way back over their head to reveal as much (illicit) hair as possible. This is especially daring as Iran has endured an intensive summer crusade to banish widespread violation of the Islamic dress codes that has seen many cautioned and arrested. Shadi proudly shows off a personally compiled list of all the major shopping centres and thoroughfares in Tehran on her possible daily route where police cars and vans are positioned. Her approach is to avoid going through these areas. The salient mood here seems to be to outmanoeuvre and circumvent rather than face confrontation. ... (more)

Shutting Down the Satellites?

Al-Jazeera's Marwan Bishara appears on CNN to talk about efforts by the Arab League to rein in satellite broadcasts. Of course, Lebanon and Qatar refused to sign so ... and what expectations did we have from any of the rest?
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2008/02/29/ic.arab.media.row.bk.c.cnn

Dangerous Liaisons: Sarko and the Press

Marie Valla has a sharp rundown on the way French President Nicolas Sarkozy spins the press on the France 24 Web site, and not only because she quotes me. (It's in English as well as French -- even though Sarko keeps talking about shutting down the English television service):

Even before the dust has had a chance to settle from French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ‘get lost you cretin’ mishap at the Agricultural Fair, a new Elysée faux pas has become the talk of the French media. French Daily Le Parisien admitted on Wednesday that the President’s interview published in the paper the day before had not only been reread but also modified by the Elysée press service.

This infringement by the Sarkozy administration blurs the lines between politics and journalism. “In Moscow, they used to hide the official portraits of personalities who had fallen into disfavor. At the Elysée, they rewrite interviews given by the President,” wrote newspaper L’Humanité in its Wednesday edition.

In the interview, Sarkozy stands by Saturday’s outburst adding that “Just because you become President doesn’t mean that you suddenly become something people can wipe their feet on.” L’Elysee thought best to add the sentence “At the Fair, I should not have answered,” thereby significantly changing the tone of his initial answer. “This sounds like a press aide desperately trying to do damage control after the fact,” says Christopher Dickey, Newsweek bureau chief in Paris.

But the bigger problem is the fact that the Le Parisien editorial team - arguing that they were providing useful information to the reader - failed to mention which portions of the interview were an addition. “This is inappropriate,” says Stefan Simons, Paris correspondent for the German weekly Der Spiegel. It isn’t so much the fact that the interview was reread that’s problematic but “the way in which it was done. At Der Spiegel, heads of state are always given the possibility to read and fix their interviews before publication,” he adds....(more)

France to Sarko: "Casse-toi pauvre con!"

Premiers pas mouvementés de Sarkozy au salon de l'agriculture - Le Parisien
Changement de présidence et changement de style au Salon de l'agriculture. L'événement était très apprécié de son prédécesseur Jacques Chirac, qui s'y prélassait presque. Là, c'est quasiment au pas de charge que Nicolas Sarkozy a inauguré la plus grande ferme du monde.

A mi-parcours environ, il s'est soudain vu vertement repoussé par un visiteur du salon auquel il s'apprêtait à à accorder une poignée de main. Ambiance surchauffée et cohue, le Chef de l'Etat s'est alors emporté: "Casse-toi, casse-toi pauvre con" a-t-il lancé, avant de reprendre son parcours mouvementé. Un écart de langage qui n'est pas sans rappeler sa colère face aux pêcheurs bretons.

Mots-clés : politique salon de l'agriculture nicolas sarkozy ferme pauvre con ambiance surchauffee

Video de leparisienvideo

A rough but polite translation:

"Change of president, change of style at the Agriculture Fair. Jacques Chirac liked the event so much that he sort of settled in for a good time. Nicolas Sarkozy, on the other hand, opened the biggest farm in the world charging full speed ahead.

"About halfway through his tour he's suddenly seen brusquely dismissed by a visitor to the show to whom he'd just extended his hand. Amid the overheated crush of people, the head of state let himself get carried away: 'Get lost, get lost, you jerk,' he said before going on, a linguistic departure that's not without echoes of his anger in front of Breton fishermen."

And for those of you interested in the fine points, these are the relevant entries from the very British Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French, by René James Hérail and Edwina A. Lovatt (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984):

casser v. trans. reflex. 1 To 'toddle off', to 'run along', to go away. Il est cinq heures, il faut que jue me casse! It's five o'clock. I'll have to split! 2 Ne pas se casser: To take life easy, to worry very little about day-to-day matters.

con n.m. 1 'Cunt', 'pussy', vagina. 2 'Cunt', 'twit', imbecile. Espèce de con! You bloody idiot!...

Le Nouvel Observateur has a particularly sharp cover story about where all this fits into the astonishing plunge of Sarko's approval ratings. Its lead article: "And if this were to end badly ..."

For more about this, see the post on the Newsweek blog "Why It Matters."

Taxi to the Dark Side

This film about American torturers is artful, clear, compelling and examines the issue from all angles. This is not Michael Moore stuff. "Taxi to the Dark Side" looks at the hell suffered by torture victims, but also the emotional and psychological pain suffered by good soldiers used for evil purposes. For better or worse, it is about us, not them.

Mort Rosenblum on Waterboarding, El Submarino and The Many Friends We Have Lost to Torture

Mort Rosenblum's latest on Huffington Post:

THE DARK SIDE

Ask any reporter who knows brutal regimes: No hairs can be split over torture. Victims see no ambiguity. The memory stays fresh all their lives. More than pain, they recall smoldering contempt for their torturers.

You might have asked Baudouin Kayembe, the courageous owner of a weekly paper who helped me when I covered the Congo in the 1960s. But he died from his torture.

Over 40 years, Baudouin's intimates never forgave Mobutu Sese Seko, the man responsible, nor American authorities who kept Mobutu in power.

I saw this repeatedly in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. But nothing made the point like Argentina's "guerra sucia," its dirty war on terror.

Government goons particularly favored "el submarino." They held suspects' faces underwater until lungs nearly burst. Sometimes they waited too long.

As is usually the case with torture, it backfired. Little useful intelligence was gained. Survivors talked to anyone who would listen. Decent societies reacted. And it took Argentina decades to live it down.

Each time I interviewed victims, hearing their bitter words and watching their hands shake, I felt a flash of gratitude for the blue passport in my left pocket.

We Americans reviled torture, as individuals and as a nation. When it was exposed, we reacted. Torture was one reason we invoked for overturning Saddam Hussein.

Today, we Americans have come up with "waterboarding," which sounds like a fraternity prank. It is el submarino: cruel and, for a people that respects itself, unusual.

Obviously, we are a far cry from an Argentine military which put thousands to death in a long nightmare of official terror. But what are we prepared to accept? ... (MORE)

I have posted variations of this video about Mort all over the place. But, what the hell. I enjoy it every time I watch it.

Adios, Fidel

From Slate Magazine, (c) Ben Sargent, The Austin American Statesman

When news broke this morning that Fidel had resigned, I wrote a quick piece for the Web suggesting some lessons we might learn about Cuba and the world from the nearly 50 years spent trying to bring down his regime: "Converting Castro."

As background reading, I looked up a piece I had written from Havana in 1982, which caught the spirit of the island pretty well, I thought, and at considerable length:

Sinking Expectations Keep Castro's Revolution Afloat

By Christopher Dickey, Washington Post Foreign Service, August 31, 1982

Dateline: Havana

"We ought not to fool ourselves. We have difficulties and we are going to have difficulties in coming years and the difficulties could be even greater."
-- President Fidel Castro on the Cuban economy, July 26, 1982.

For more than two decades, Cuba's economy has been sailing in shallow waters without ever quite running aground. American analysts point to massive Soviet subsidies as Castro's salvation, but there are other less tangible factors that have helped this country and this regime to survive.

Shortly after Castro's latest prediction of economic hardship and call for sacrifice, one of hundreds he has issued in his 23-year rule, a Latin diplomat on assignment to Havana from an ardently capitalist country cited what he considered the salvation of the Cuban revolution:
"Expectations are less than in other nations. Because of that, this is a country that has great flexibility. They take what they can get, but [when] they don't have, they adapt. Today it's much easier for them to run with lower expectations because there is more happiness with smaller gains. It's a society that is based on small expectations."

As its economic troubles continue, the extent to which Cuba really has become a revolution of lowered expectations may be crucial to its future and especially to its relations with the United States. It is vital for Castro's resistance of the 20-year-old embargo, but it could also become a factor if trade with Cuba somehow were renewed.

In his July 26 speech, Castro painted a gloomy picture of Cuba's economic expectations. Despite the special relationship with the Soviet Union, which buys Cuban sugar at high prices and sells Cuba oil at well below market rates, the Cuban economy has come to depend on the West for more than 20 percent of its trade -- and for many items necessary to its further development, from food to technology. The question now is whether Cuba can afford these imports.

According to Alberto Betancourt Roa, director of West European and North American trade for the Ministry of External Commerce, Japan and Canada are Cuba's major trading partners.
Despite attempts to cultivate Western trade, to expand the variety of its exports, and even to promote some limited Western investment, primarily in the tourist industry, Cuba remains dependent on sugar sales for the vast majority of its hard-currency earnings. And sugar prices are at a record low.

Some Cuban officials interpreted Castro's bleak forecast as a means of preparing the nation early for its likely inability to make projected economic goals over the next few years.
There is a whole school of thought among Western analysts that suggests Cuban consumerism may be one of the most potent weapons Washington could use against Castro. Many Western diplomats and analysts say that by dropping the embargo, the United States could so penetrate this country's economy that Cuba would at least have to take Washington's views into account.
But there is also evidence that the time is too late for that.

Notwithstanding the exodus of Cubans to the United States through Mariel two years ago, which arose in part from the frustration of people who wanted the freedom to consume, many Cubans seem convinced that from the point of view of social justice and basic needs, their communist island offers more to them than any other Latin country offers its people.
This may be the result of reason or simply of insistent indoctrination. It never lets up. When Henry Fonda died, the Cuban television report showed the hospital where he was treated and noted as an aside that poor people in the United States could never afford such care.

It may also be true that expectations really are not low at all, but that they are hidden in the face of omnipresent and intimidating "revolutionary vigilance" that rewards the revolutionary faithful with the kind of consumer goods the nation as a whole is asked to forgo and deprives dissenters of all but the barest essentials.

Some images and opinions from 10 days on the island:

Gema Perez is a party militant who was 11 when Castro turned Cuba's revolution to communism and she cannot or will not imagine a better life for herself and her people.
Perez was born in the town of Castillo de Jagua in the same tidy frame house where she lives now, nestled among the tile-roofed picture-postcard buildings of the fishing village at the narrow entrance to the Bay of Cienfuegos. In her breezy home are two large Soviet-made television sets, a sewing machine locked in a cabinet and a refrigerator.

Dominating one wall is what looks like a piece of cheap religious art, a framed portrait of Christ. But it is not Christ, Perez hastens to point out. It is a romanticized print of revolutionary hero Camilo Cienfuegos, long-haired, bearded, his hat back on his head so its brim seems a halo.

Before the revolution, says Perez, "this town didn't have anything." Its men led rough lives at sea and earned next to nothing. There were no public utilities; even drinking water had to be collected from cisterns or brought by boat from the city of Cienfuegos. It was, said Perez, "the way one lives in a regime where there is capitalism and you are poor."

Now, for the 1,200 people who dwell in the shadow of the village's colonial fort, there is electricity, a post office, a day-care center, telephone service, a school. New apartments have been built and a technical school, where Perez's husband is a "professor of soldering," was established for both local and visiting workers who are to construct one of Cuba's first nuclear power plants about 10 miles away.

Her four brothers still go to sea for 20 days at a time, but especially since wage increases were instituted in 1980, they earn what are considerable incomes by today's standards in Cuba. Their base pay is about average, but with good catches they receive bonuses of from $400 to $1,000 each trip. "We do not consider ourselves rich," said Perez. "They are remunerated economically for their labor."

In Castillo de Jagua, Perez concluded, "life has not improved a lot -- it has improved entirely. Now there is freedom."

"You mustn't report anything that would let them identify me," a service worker in his late 20s told a journalist in downtown Havana. "State Security works very well."

The reporter had asked if it were true, as some Cuban officials contend, that there is freedom of speech at the personal level even if there is not in the state-run mass media. "Why do you think you see people standing on corners acting like worms, running down the revolution?" a functionary had asked, answering himself: "Because they know they can get away with it."

"That is not true," said the fearful, frustrated worker. In Cuba, a man's politics, apparently, are inseparable from his economic well-being. "You can't stand on a corner and denounce the revolution. You do that and they accuse you of being a counterrevolutionary, and that's a crime. People who talk like that are left without work. If you were an engineer, you're no longer an engineer. If you were a manager, no longer. You're sweeping streets."

The worker seemed to be embittered by a sense of class conflict that Cuban officials say does not exist here. His hatred was directed at what he called the "high life" led by favored party functionaries who, as he described them, live in newly built apartment complexes in East Havana, wear Italian pullovers, Lee blue jeans and smoke Winstons or Marlboros.

"The party militants, they are the socialist bourgeosie," said the man. "But you can't say that either."

He tended to blame these people for almost all the country's problems while discounting their charges that what they describe as the U.S. blockade and the CIA are responsible for Cuba's hardships.

"The blockade and the CIA, those are the revolution's reasons for everything. Always 'the hand of the CIA.' My wife is heating milk and it boils. 'Aha!' I tell her. 'The hand of the CIA,' " he said. "I was forged by this 'socialism.' But let's just say I don't have the intellectual capacity to understand it."

Eugenio Balari is the guru of Cuban consumerism.

The head of Havana's Institute of Internal Demand has a favorite Marxist credo, but not the utopian communist notion of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Rather, as it says on one of Balari's economic flash cards, "To each according to the quantity and quality of his labor."

Balari is a bit of a showman. When he offers coffee to a visitor in his air-conditioned office -- in a reconditioned mansion a block from the seafront -- the coffee is a new instant that can be bought for the equivalent of about $8 a can "outside the ration book."

Fresh coffee is rationed, and an individual's 15-day allotment only makes about three little pots, carefully brewed. But since Cubans are great coffee drinkers, that clearly is not enough. It took more than 20 years after rationing was introduced to meet the demand by creating Instacafe, but now that it is here, Balari says it should help relieve the seemingly perpetual shortage of the favorite beverage. In the universal language of marketing he says, "It has found a great deal of acceptance."

The ration book once controlled virtually all purchases here. Now it's down to 30 percent, but it still makes interesting reading as the Cuban consumer's hated little passport to survival.
A month's supplies for one person include 10 ounces of beans, one bar of soap to clean yourself and one for your clothes plus seven ounces of detergent, half a pound of cooking oil, five pounds of rice, four cigars and four pounds of sugar -- the one thing there is a lot of in Cuba, although many sweet-toothed Cubans complain there is never enough.

The ration book limits trousers and shoes to one pair a year. "You have to be very careful with your pants," a cab driver said with barely a smile. The policies Balari advocates attempt to better rationalize the ration system and make more goods available outside it.

Alongside the cups on the conference table are copies of Opina, a monthly tabloid edited by Balari that offers feature stories providing some lightweight balance to the heavy political-intellectual fare in most of the government's publications. But most important, it publishes want ads: classified offers to sell 1952 Oldsmobiles in this city that has no traffic because it is almost without cars; offers to spray-paint refrigerators in this society where workers compare the merits of General Electric appliances made 35 years ago to those made 25 years ago.

Balari's government institute also brainstormed the peasant food mar- kets and the craft markets that raised publicity last year as the first apparent steps toward loosening the tightly controlled economy.

But even though the markets still operate, they have suffered some setbacks as the Cuban Communists found that a little capitalism, like a little learning, can be a dangerous thing. The free markets around Havana generated a new class of unauthorized middlemen.

There was the problem of shoes sold in the craft market in front of Havana's cathedral, for instance. Shoes, Balari conceded, are generally a problem in Cuba. There is always a shortage. The ration book allows only that one pair. So craftsmen making decent shoes and selling them in the open market had no trouble getting high prices and making a lot of money.

This raised suspicions. There was an investigation and, sure enough, "there appeared some subtractions of leather from some state factories. From there it was easy to find who did it." Some such middlemen, Balari said, "have had to confront revolutionary justice."

Balari can martial many statistics to show how much life has improved for Cuba's people since the triumph of the revolution on Jan. 1, 1959.

His numbers are displayed on colorful cards indicating everything from a 23-year rise in life expectancy (now 73) to the number of televisions (up from 6 per 100 families to 79). Yet Balari says it is doubtful that the country will achieve the goals set in its current five-year plan. "We are entering a stage in the life of the people that is austere but decorous," he said.
Asked about the kind of austerity that had a 15-year-old pressing her face against a store window one night recently to sketch the dresses on the rack so she could try to sew them by hand at home, Balari said, "You see, she can get the cloth."

On a hot, clear afternoon recently, 18-year-old Zenen Pumariega and his half-brother Fernando were swimming off the rocks below Havana's seafront boulevard, the Malecon, a quick escape from the stifling closeness of the residential streets in the decaying older sections of the city.
Neither Zenen, a cafeteria worker and part-time student, nor Fernando, who is about to enter the Cuban Army, can think of a much better place to live than here.

There was a time when members of their family wanted to go to the United States, said Zenen. Two years ago, a sister and uncle left through Mariel. But the latest word from the sister in Miami is that "life is pretty hard," according to Zenen.

The two teen-agers were asked what they would buy if they could buy anything in the world.
"A house, a car, food, clothes," said Fernando.

But any special car, any special food or clothes?

"Nothing special," said Fernando.

"A car that would get me to work, get me to school and get me to the beach," said Zenen.
But the boys still want to know how much things cost in the United States, and how much they cost in the dollar stores at the Havana tourist hotels to which they are forbidden access.
Zenen, who just wanted basic transportation, who seemed to have no dreams of Trans-Ams, Camaros or Mercedes, had just put on Sasson jogging shoes brought to him by a relative. The price for such luxurious footwear, noted Fernando as he donned some old army boots with a hole in the toe, would be about $120 on the street in Havana.

"And how much," Zenen wanted to know, "would a bottle of Paco Rabanne cologne go for?"

Copyright 1982 The Washington Post

Italy's Agony and Ecstasy

This week's Newsweek International cover story written with Jacopo Barigazzi in Milan and Barbie Nadeau in Rome is about what went wrong with Italy, and what's still right with it.

The full text was translated into Italian by La Repubblica in its print edition on Monday, February 18, but the only extended version I could find on line (and it's not the whole thing) is at Clandestinoweb: "Caos Calmo."

I think it's pretty clear we all love Italy, for all of its faults, and sometimes because of them.

One point of irritation writing the story, however, was that none of the right-wing politicians, commentators or businessmen we approached seemed able to find the time -- over the course of a month -- to give us interviews. At the top of that list would be Gianfranco Fini, who was perfectly pleasant, but just didn't have ten minutes to spare. We also approached Giuliano Ferrara, who is a wonderfully agile thinker and writer close to Berlusconi, but, again, he just couldn't be bothered. -- C.D.


This viral video by Bruno Bozzetto has been around for a decade, but Jacopo's article about it, and the video itself, are not to be missed. Just click on the picture below, then click on "Play":



Recent articles:

The latest:

Newsweek Internatonal Cover: Agony And The Ecstasy, 17 February 2008
Italy barely functions. Yet its people are happy. What explains this? (With Jacopo Barigazzi and Barbie Nadeau)
http://www.newsweek.com/id/112727

Also see, Italy: the Viral Video, by Jacopo Barigazzi, 15 February 2008.
http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/ov/archive/2008/02/15/italy-the-viral-video.aspx

Earlier pieces:

Newsweek International Roundtable: 'A Good Anchor,' 11 February 2008
Turkey's top tycoons speak out on ties to Europe, headscarves, the military and other controversies. http://www.newsweek.com/id/109545

OnFaith: Low Motives and Higher Laws 1 February 2008
Once you can claim that a critical press is on the wrong side of God's law, after all, you can do just about anything you want to shut it down. That's not only a problem for Afghanistan or for Islam. I think that's a danger in any country where politicians claim they answer to a higher law.

Shadowland: The End-of-the-World Economic Forum 30 January 2008
In this great age of denial, Davos may seem out of touch, but the Bush administration is so much worse.

Shadowland: Of Cops and Candidates 11 January 2008
America still faces clear and present dangers. So why are the presidential debates about national security increasingly detached from reality? (There is also a video shot in New York -- "NYPD Unseen" -- linked to the article.)

Newsweek Issues 2008: The Ghost In The Machine 28 December 2007
Don't blame America. Cultural remix has been around since Roman times. It just happens a lot faster today.

Saffron and Sugar: Iran's Recipe for Disaster

Iranian blogger Nasrin Alavi has written an interesting analysis of power shifts among the elite in Tehran for OpenDemocracy.net. The most intriguing part, to my mind, is the sketch of what's gone wrong in the Iranian economy:

"...The disillusion with the United States among many Iranians has meant that the hopes and energies for change are increasingly grounded in the domestic troubles of the regime. The people's frustrations with the government's economic mismanagement are rising at a moment when an important electoral test - elections to the 290-seat majlis (parliament) on 14 March 2008 - is approaching.

In routine circumstances, the leadership of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters would at such a time seek to heighten the confrontational rhetoric against the US, mobilising nationalist sentiment against revolutionary Iran's number-one enemy. On this occasion, the tactic may be less effective, for two reasons.

First, the US's national intelligence estimate (NIE) published on 3 December 2007 controverted the White House's portrayal of the alleged Iranian nuclear peril, thus going a little way to defuse tension and undermine the portrayal by Iranian authorities (and in particular by Ahmadinejad himself) of an immediate threat from the US (see "Iran: the uses of intelligence", 6 December 2007). Second, most Iranian citizens are so hard-pressed by their daily circumstances that their concern is not with foreign policy or how their country's nuclear-energy programme is perceived, but with their economic condition and how to improve it.

This is bad news for the president. Ahmadinejad had campaigned for the presidency in June 2005 on an economic platform, and won power by tapping into the vein of popular anger against corruption and cronyism and promising to create jobs and security for Iran's poor and deprived. In the middle of his third year in office, the hopes he raised have largely dissipated: the government has introduced petrol rationing, and there has been disruption in gas supplies and more than sixty deaths amid a spell of severely cold weather - all this in the country that is the fourth-largest oil producer in the world, and has the second-largest natural-gas resources.

In addition, chronic unemployment remains widespread and inflation has continued to climb: the official rate is 19%, though the real figure may be even higher (the cost of housing and of foreign-made consumer and electronic goods has more than doubled in the last year alone). Ahmadinejad is justified in attributing much of the inflation to past policy errors, but he has compounded these by populist and yet wasteful inflationary handouts.

The recipients of these handouts appreciated them, but their euphoria proved short-lived. An illustration is provided by Ahmadinejad's decision at the outset of his presidency to double the price of saffron, which especially helped Iran's poorly-paid saffron-pickers in Khorasan province in eastern Iran; the instant doubling of their income meant that the president had kept his promise to bring some the fruits of Iran's oil wealth into their lives.

By August 2007, however, the picture looked very different. The artificial pricing policy and higher wages for the saffron-workers meant that the price of Iranian saffron had risen fivefold in a year, to $1,945 per kilo; by December, the head of the saffron exports promotion fund was reporting a 70% drop in exports in the first seven months of the Iranian year that started on 21 March 2007. In less than two years, the farmers of Khorasan - who used to cultivate nearly 90% of the world's saffron - have seen their market and (possibly) their long-term livelihoods damaged by a presidential whim.

Iran's sugar industry is also grappling with crisis. The level of domestic demand is around 1.9 million tons per year, but official figures estimate that over 3 million tons of cheap sugar that undercut local produce has been imported. Ahmadinejad often accuses his political rivals of intentionally sabotaging his economic policies. In this case at least, the charge rebounds: Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi - whose reputation in the west is for his role as Ahmadinejad's spiritual guide and adviser - is known to most Iranian people as a major importer of sugar whose companies have dominated the sector since the 1979 revolution. Today, thirty-four sugar factories are facing closure, while workers protesting at not being paid - like those at the Haft Tappeh company in Khuzestan province - have been met by riot police and threats of dismissal.

Iran's Arab neighbours - especially those in the Gulf states that were the principal audience of Bush's speech in Abu Dhabi on 13 January - are flushed with liquidity due to record oil prices; but they have responded by investing in long-term national projects and enhancing their governmental portfolios (including the emergent "sovereign wealth funds") by buying large shares in major international industries. Iran's oil infrastructure is in dire need of modernisation and investment yet the government's policy response to its troubles (including a potential budget deficit) has been to inject about $140 billion in 2007-08 into an already cash-addicted economy; this has had the effect of increasing prices still further.

The rising discontent amongst the very people who were Ahmadinejad's core supporters in 2005 - and whose lives he pledged to improve - may be an important political factor in the approach to the 14 March elections. Its reverberations have already been felt in establishment circles. When he came to power, Ahmadinejad was initially endorsed by many of Iran's senior conservatives, including - crucially - the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The policy failures of the protege in whom they had invested so much is generating strains at the heart of Iran's revolutionary elite. This is evident in Khamenei's rare intervention in a budgetary spat between the government and the majlis, when (in a letter made public on 21 January) he effectively admonished the president. Ahmadinejad is losing support from "above" as well as from "below"....

A contrasting view appeared a few weeks ago on the BBC. Some of the online comments denounced it as Iranian regime propaganda:

Archive Update: Law and Disorder, 7 June 2007

This column is temporarily unavailable on the Newsweek site, so I am posting the full text here:


Shadowland: Law and Disorder, 7 June 2007

When does guerrilla theater become guerrilla war? What the demonstrations against the 2004 GOP convention can teach us about managing the protests at the G8 summit.

The Germans have rolled out the water cannons to defend heads of state gathered for the G-8 summit. Black-clad anarchists and clown-faced crazies are the enemy, and so far the forces of disorder appear to be winning. Despite hundreds of arrests since Saturday, the radicals managed to besiege the seven-mile concertina-wire fence around the conference site yesterday while shutting down road, rail and even water transportation. According to the German government, hundreds of police have been injured, albeit lightly.

Worse than that, for those of us who think George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin have a a lot to answer for, the masses of protesters who have real issues ranging from global warming to the Iraq war and growing political repression, are consistently upstaged by those who make skirmishing with police a self-righteous sport and claim their goal is to overthrow, well, everything. “A new world order can only be created through violent struggle," as one black-clad man who called himself Ernesto told Deutsche Welle.

So, when does guerrilla theater become guerrilla war? How do you draw the line between civil disobedience and outright disorder? Or, for that matter, between peaceful protest and potential terrorism? Keeping the peace while protecting freedom of expression is a constant process of compromise. One thing is certain: to make those vital determinations in today’s complicated and dangerous world, you need good information. But how do you get it?

Since 2004, the New York Police Department has faced several lawsuits about the way it prepared for and protected the Republican National Convention in Madison Square Garden that summer. Critics have attacked it for arresting more than 1,800 people, taking fingerprints and then warehousing many of them under fairly grim conditions for two or three days – until the convention was over. Under pressure from the courts, documents have been declassified that show the NYPD spying on activists and infiltrating groups across the country, in Canada and in Europe.

The police point to the results: 800,000 people were able to protestsin good order during the convention, while only one person – a cop – was hurt seriously. Militants had pulled him off his motor scooter and beat him senseless. If there were terrorist plots aimed at the convention they were deterred or thwarted. (Two men were arrested days before it began as they planned to blow up the nearby Herald Square subway station.)

That the Republicans re-nominated Bush and that the American people re-elected him was not the fault of the cops, Indeed, my impression when I watched television coverage of the convention that August and Septemer was that protesters seemed so out of step with the way most Americans thought at the time, they probably helped Bush’s cause at the ballot box. If the anarchists, anti-globalists, anti-capitalists and others who coalesce into militant formations known as “Black Blocs” had managed to stage their planned “Day of Chaos” on August 31, 2004, I’m sure Bush would have gotten even more votes.

The Black Blocs wouldn’t have cared, of course. Their adherents tend to believe the corrupt bourgeois system never listens to the real voice of the people, meaning theirs. As Ernesto said in Germany, "We have seen how ineffective peaceful mass protests have been. Millions took to the streets to try and stop the invasion of Iraq and yet the corrupt world powers still wage their war. Fighting for change is the only way -- otherwise we face a future of blind subservience, slavery and control."

I’ve covered a lot of demonstrations by these characters, who are often more fascistic than the fascists they say they’re fighting, but I’m always a little surprised by the lunatic violence they set out to inflict and provoke. Although the United States had a taste of it during the disastrous 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Washington State (“The Battle of Seattle”), it’s much more a European phenomenon. The G-8 in Genoa in 2001 was a model of mayhem in which a young Black Bloc protester (surnamed Giuliani, as it happens) was shot by a stranded rooky cop while trying to smash through the window of his car. Some 500 people were injured and property damage was roughly $45 million. At the close of the summit, Italian police raided a building where demonstrators were sleeping and beat the hell out of several of them, multiplying the ranks of protest martyrs.

The Al Qaeda terror attacks on New York and Washington less than two months later dwarfed the anarchist menace and obscured it in the public imagination. But the New York police have stayed alert to the danger, even as they’ve assumed a new Al Qaeda attack could be in the works. They consider, with good reason, that the Big Apple is the number one terrorist target in the world. (The latest alleged plot by rag-tag Islamists was concocted in, of all places, the Caribbean, where plans were hatched to blow up fuel storage tanks and pipelines at New York’s Kennedy Airport. <>)

In 2003, the NYPD created a special squad just to address the specific threats associated with the Republican convention. It answered to the Intelligence Division, which had been greatly expanded since 2002 under Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Deputy Commissioner David Cohen, a former Central Intelligence Agency Deputy Director of Operations. The investigators worked the Web, dipped into chat rooms, shared intelligence with other organizations, infiltrated several groups and started building voluminous files. Hundreds of those documents, which were brought to light during a law suit, are available, with some details blacked out, on the NYPD Web site. << http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/dcpi/nypd_rnc.html >>

Sure, there was some embarrassing wasted effort, like surveillance of the satirical street-theater group “Billionaires for Bush.” But many of the declassified documents support the police position that a storm of violent threats to the convention and to the city was taking shape on the Internet, and they had to know a whole lot more if they were going to shelter the public – including peaceful protesters -- from its effects.

“In our actions we must be strategic, ruthless, efficient, as well as chaotic,” declared one anarchist group in Colorado which seems to be influenced by both Dada and Jacques Derrida. “Like a string of tornadoes and quakes, we will manifest brutal attacks against key targets physically deconstructing the aesthetic of our oppression. We will erect barricades of fire and reclaim space as carnival. Our rage as well as joy will be present on every street corner.” One can guess that such talk is action for this group, and the threat minimal, but it still has to be examined closely.

Then there was the little organization cataloguing surveillance cameras all over Manhattan in hopes they could be taken down by guerrilla protests. Another presence on the Web vowed to “rise up against police brutality and give the police or the National Guard a taste of their own medicine if they tread on the civilian population, and they will be given the same measure that they dish out.” In more concrete terms, several camps were organized around the country to train militants for confrontations with the cops.

In the end, the forces of disorder failed in New York in 2004. But they will keep trying, and to pretend that they are mere dissidents, and essentially ineffectual, would be a serious mistake. As they’re proving once again in Germany, they’re agents of mayhem who thrive on the idea they are being repressed. When the cops outmaneuver them with superior intelligence and planning, it drives the crazies mad, as it were. But the rest of us have a chance to mount demonstrations, if we choose, that are saner, safer, and more likely than any guerrilla theater to bring a president down or a war to an end.

1998: Huckabee on School Shootings

A friend passed along this archived article from The Arkansas Gazette with the note, "OK, now Huckabee officially scares me":

Huckabee: U.S. gave up on religion
School shootings were wake-up call, he says
LINDA S. CAILLOUET
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

SALT LAKE CITY -- Government may have dropped the ball in modern American society, but religion dropped it first, Gov. Mike Huckabee told Southern Baptist pastors Sunday night.
"The reason we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity," he said. "And the reason we have so much broken humanity is because sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior."
Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, addressed his contemporaries at the two-day Pastors' Conference, which continues today. The three-day Southern Baptist Convention begins Tuesday here in the heartland of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the city in which the Mormons have their world headquarters.
Huckabee told the pastors gathered in the Salt Palace Convention Center that while the March 1, 1997, tornadoes which struck Arkansas were tragic, at least the devastation could be clearly seen from a helicopter. In contrast, he said, the catalysts for the nation's recent school shootings -- including the one March 24 near Jonesboro that left four students and a teacher dead and 10 others wounded -- were harder to see but were driven by "the winds of spiritual change in a nation that has forgotten its God."
"Government knows it does not have the answer, but it's arrogant and acts as though it does," Huckabee said. "Church does have the answer but will cowardly deny that it does and wonder when the world will be changed."
The shootings were just one more wake-up call to the nation, he said.
"I fear we will turn and hit the snooze button one more time and lose this great republic of ours."... (more)

Line of the Day: Dowd on Romney/JFK

In the great-minds-think-alike-or-at-least-use-the-same-cliches department:

"The world is globalizing, nuclear weapons are proliferating, the Middle East is seething, but Republicans are still arguing the Scopes trial."
-- Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, "Mitt's No J.F.K."

Also see on this blog:
Give me that Old Time Secularism

On OnFaith:
The Politics of Piety

And Kenneth L. Woodward in The New York Times:
Mitt Romney is No Jack Kennedy

ETA: Beauty is the Beast

Apologies for the tabloid headline, but until her capture last week, 26-year-old Saioa Sánchez Iturregui was listed by Spain's Guardia Civil as one of the most-wanted members of the Basque terrorist organization ETA.

News reports have fingered her as the suspected shooter in the Dec. 1 murder of two members of the Guardia in the southern French city of Capbreton.

Fernando Trapero, 23, and Raul Centeno, 24, reportedly had been installing surveillance equipment when they decided to take a break in a local cafeteria. A source with detailed knowledge of the investigation told me the two young officers, who were in plain clothes, made the mistake of talking about their work loud enough for others in the restaurant to hear. They failed to recognize three people nearby -- possibly seated at an adjacent table -- as some of ETA's most wanted figures.

One of those was Sánchez, known as Hintza, who reputedly was part of ETA's "Vizcaya Commando" responsible for several bombings in Spain before the organization called a truce that lasted from March 2006 until June 2007. (Notwithstanding the supposed ceasefire, a truck bomb was set off in the parking garage at Madrid airport in December 2006.) Sánchez's photo had been circulated by Spanish authorities since last July, along with other members of her cell wanted by the authorities. Three of them were captured afterwards.

According to my source, while the two Guardias in Capbreton were still in the restaurant, one of the three Etarras went outside and checked out their car, an unmarked vehicle the French police had loaned to the Spanish agents. There were also papers in the vehicle establishing that the two men inside the restaurant were cops.

The three Etarras decided that instead of running, they would murder the policemen when they went back to their car. According to news reports, the girl in the group did the shooting. For four days French police tracked the suspected killers across southern France, finally catching up with them in the department of Lozère, in the region of Languedoc-Roussillon. According to the daily "Le Parisien," one of the ways the cops identified the suspect was that she still wore earrings like the ones witnesses saw on the shooter. She also had a gun, according to "Le Parisien," and a search of the car she was in turned up 142 cartridges. Only later was she ID'd as Sánchez. The alleged accomplice arrested with her is named as Asier Bengoa.

Still at large: a third man whose identity, if it is known, has not yet been made public. Some press reports suggest he might be Txeroki (pronounced more or less like Cherokee), who is now the military commander of ETA. He reportedly had met with Sánchez in France in the past. But my source says there's nothing solid at this point to indicate Txeroki was on the scene in Capbreton when Trapero and Centeno were gunned down. - C.D.

"When the Atomic Bomb Explodes..."

This was the terrorism that boomers grew up with:

The Religion Test and Romney

This is the video referred to in the strong New York Times editorial about Mitt Romney's religion speech:



From the Times:

'CNN, shockingly, required the candidates at the recent Republican debate to answer a videotaped question from a voter holding a Christian edition of the Bible, who said: "How you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you. Do you believe every word of this book? Specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand, do you believe this book?"

'The nation's founders knew the answer to that question says nothing about a candidate's fitness for office. It's tragic to see it being asked at a time when Americans need a president who will tell the truth, lead with conviction and restore the nation's moral standing - not one who happens to attend a particular church."

Scene of the Bombing - Paris Law Offices

Update, 9 Dec 2007:
Beware of Bikers Bearing Gifts

According to the French weekly "Journal du Dimanche" the one man held for questioning in this bombing has been released, but police are still looking for a small, slightly built woman seen exiting the building just before the explosion. She was wearing a motorcycle helmet with the visor up and a large, loose jacket, or perhaps biker overalls like those worn by motorcycle courriers in Paris. A witness reportedly remembered her face as "Mediterranean-looking."

The bomb was one of three packages which looked like the business gifts common during the Christmas season. One was wrapped in gold and labeled for the office staff. It contained chocolates, some of which already were being eaten as the other packages were opened. The second, wrapped in silver, was a bottle of good pink Champagne destined for a woman partner in the firm. The third, wrapped in black, was addressed to the real estate attorney Olivier Brane with the note: "In memory of a complicated real estate transaction." He expected to find a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon. Instead, two well-constructed pipe bombs were inside, one of which detonated completely. The explosion, which tore up Brane's hand and injured his eye, killed 74-year-old secretary Jacqueline Ben Bouali.

Questioned in the hospital by police, Brane reportedly said he could think of no one who would target him this way, and appeared puzzled by the note about real estate transactions. "But they're all complicated!" he said, according to the JDD. - C.D.


A bomb delivered to a law office on what the French would call the fourth floor of this building at 52 Boulevard des Malesherbes killed a receptionist and seriously injured one of the attorneys. The package apparently was dropped off early Thursday afternoon by a woman wearing a motorcycle helmet. The international headlines made by this story were considerably bigger than the blast. The only outward sign of damage at the building is the broken window. - C.D.

Photos by Christopher Dickey

PARIS (AFP) (December 7, 2007)— French police were questioning a man Friday over a parcel bomb attack on a Paris lawyers' office in which an assistant was killed and a lawyer seriously wounded, officials said.

The unnamed 45-year-old man was the object of a harassment complaint two years ago from the senior lawyer at the office Catherine Gouet-Jenselme, 60, though the case never reached court, they said.

Police also said they are looking for the woman who delivered the booby-trapped packet to the fourth floor office shortly after noon Thursday. The woman, described as small, was wearing a motor-cycle helmet and left the scene straightaway.

The building in Paris's fashionable eighth arrondissement, or district, also houses the law office where President Nicolas Sarkozy once worked, as well as the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust.

However investigators believe it most likely that the attack was an act of personal vengeance rather than political.

The blast killed 60-year-old secretary Jacqueline Belbouai, who opened the packet, and injured Olivier Brane, 58. The lawyer was hospitalised but his life is not in danger.

Colleagues at the law firm said the parcel was addressed jointly to Gouet-Jenselme and Brane, but they were baffled over why they were targeted.

The law office deals mainly with uncontroversial civil matters such as divorce, property and insurance disputes, they said.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who visited the scene Thursday, said police were keeping an open mind but were confident that the bomb was not delivered to the law firm by mistake.

"There is no favoured theory... It is too early to be able to come to any conclusions. But the other activities in the building were clearly identified, so it seems clear that it was someone in the law firm who was the target," she said....(more)