Saturday 1 December 2012

All that twitters is not droll

I was once invited to join Twitter by somebody who said it was 'tremendous fun', but I'm glad I didn't. It seems to have turned into something rather unpleasant - an echo chamber for gossip, often malicious. Its structure has become very lopsided; a small number of celebrities have tens of thousands of followers, while most people just follow and re-tweet. It can distribute rumour at great speed, and the correction of mistakes is painfully slow. It no doubt provides fascinating data for network theory, and it is said to have played a part in the Arab Spring, but I am not convinced it is making the world a better place.

Friday 30 November 2012

Palestine in International Law

I was wrong to think the vote for Palestine would be a hollow victory. I have received the following from Clarity Press, publishers of Palestine, Palestinians, and International Law by Francis F. Boyle, Professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law: Professor Boyle said today: "This can be the start of a 'Legal Intifadah' by Palestine against Israel: 1. "Palestine can join the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court and file a Complaint with the ICC against the illegal settlements and settlers, who are committing war crimes; 2. "Palestine can join the Statute for the International Court of Justice, sue Israel at the World Court, and break the illegal siege of Gaza; 3. "Palestine can join the Law of the Sea Convention and get its fair share of the enormous gas fields lying off the coast of Gaza, thus becoming economically self-sufficient; 4. "Palestine can become a High Contracting Party to the Four Geneva Conventions [this deals with the laws of war]; 5. "Palestine can join the International Civil Aviation Organization and gain sovereign, legal control over its own airspace; 6. "Palestine can join the International Telecommunications Union and gain sovereign legal control over its own airwaves, phone lines, bandwidths."

Tuesday 27 November 2012

Two states

The UN General Assembly is to vote on Thursday on a resolution to recognize Palestine as a member state. It will probably pass with a big majority, but it will be a hollow victory. In the first place the U.S. will prevent the Security Council from giving it any substance. Secondly, no Israeli government would be able to remove the half million Israelis from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and their presence makes a 2-state solution impossible. The two populations are almost completely mixed up, more than 20% of Israeli citizens being non-Jewish, and at least 15% of people on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem Jewish. As for the unfortunates of Gaza, it is unthinkable that their present imprisonment should be permanent The only viable solution would be a single, highly decentralized, demilitarized, secular state with equal rights for all citizens irrespective of ethnicity, religion or language - everything that Zionists have refused for 65 years, and which Britain and the UN failed to impose in the 1940s. I don't think this is totally unrealistic. The reward for the Israelis would be general recognition for such a state, with its capital in a united Jerusalem, and the end of a permanent state of war. They would be able to return to the ideals that Jews did so much to promote down the centuries: peace, international harmony, human rights and respect for law. Their present devotion to a racially defined nationalism and the rule of force is hardly inspiring.

Friday 23 November 2012

I can't get those Israeli submarines out of my mind. They must periodically need repair and maintenance and re-provisioning. It obviously can't be at an above-water harbour. Have they dug out a huge under-water facility on the Israeli coast? Or do they have an agreement with the US to use American facilities? That would be collusion in potential mass murder of the most terrible kind. Against such an enemy violent resistance is worse than useless; it gives Israel an excuse to claim that they are retaliating in self-defence. There is well organized passive resistance on a large scale on the West Bank and in Jerusalem, but it is the idiots who let off rockets from Gaza who get all the publicity. Until Western governments see sense, all that we outsiders can do for the Palestinians is to work with the non-violent resistance: publicize them, demonstrate for them, send them money, visit them...

Thursday 22 November 2012

Israel again!

I heard a fascinating talk by James Martin last night: War and Peace in the Nuclear Age. He described Israel as possessing nuclear submarines armed with enough warheads to destroy every city in the Middle East. As it would take only four nukes to destroy Israel, they would have to launch a first strike if they felt sure they were about to be attacked. This puts the whole Middle Ease mess into perspective. Since Israelis believe their own propaganda, it would be too easy for them to think they must push the button. Just to complete the picture, Dr Martin said that "the Koran tells Muslims that Israel must be destroyed"; this is such a preposterous fabrication that it can only have come out of the mind of some crazed Zionist. The Koran says nothing of the sort. President Ahmadinejad is quoted as saying "Israel must be wiped off the map", but as I have explained before, what he said in Persian was "Israel [not Israelis] must vanish from the page of time" - something that could happen as peacefully as the demise of Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union, if Israelis would agree to live peacefully in a multi-ethnic state (as Jews did for 13 centuries under Muslim rule). It is increasingly clear to everybody except Zionists and their puppets in the governments of America and its Western allies that the existence of Israel in its present form cannot be reconciled with peace.

Tuesday 13 November 2012

Britain is reported to be making contingency plans to station troops on Syria's borders. When will they learn to keep out of the Middle East? They've been at it since the 1850s and little good has come of it. The disaster of Syria is that no outsiders can take sides without making things worse - worse for Syrians because it prolongs the agony, worse for the region because getting rid of Asad has been Israel's aim since at least the 1980s. Meanwhile Netanyahu, frustrated by the return of Obama, is ratcheting up tension with Gaza at the same time as approving yet more settlements on the West Bank and in Jerusalem. Now we have a vote coming up in the UN on whether to recognize a Palestinian State. That would just mean prolonging the fiction of a 'two-state solution', which Israel's settlements has made impossible; there is now no way the frontier of a viable state can be drawn. There was a two-state situation from 1948 to 1967 and Israel destroyed it; how can they pretend now to want it after spending 45 years making its return impossible? The only viable solution is a single, decentralized and democratic state, with equality for all its citizens regardless of 'race', language or religion. Such a solution can only be achieved with help from the international community, and that means America must be included.

Saturday 27 October 2012

Peaceful Buddhists?

The Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Burma) are being horribly persecuted. The Tamil Hindus in Sri-Lanka have been horribly suppressed. The ordinary people of Cambodia were horribly massacred. Each of these things has happened in a country with a Buddhist majority (though of course the oppressors in Cambodia were acting in the name of Communism). I have no doubt that good Buddhists are peaceful people, as are good Christians, good Muslims and good Hindus. But a lot of bad things are done by people who imagine that they are good followers of their respective religions. Religious labels don't mean very much.

Thursday 25 October 2012

Zionism

Haaretz has just published the results of a survey of attitudes to Palestinians. Of the 503 Jewish Israelis interviewed, 58% consider that their country practises apartheid towards Palestinians, and nearly half would like still more of it. Nobody should be surprised; Zionism is based on the idea of a Jewish state, so non-Jews cannot properly be part of it. For immigration purposes, a Jew is anybody who satisfies the Nazi criteria, in other words it is a racial, not a religious definition. So the UN was quite right in 1975 to adopt resolution 3379, determining that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". The resolution was retracted in 1991 as part of the phony "Peace Process", which has given Israel another 21 years to cement its hold on the West Bank and East Jerusalem and to turn Gaza into what David Cameron has called "an open-air prison camp". It is time to reinstate the UN resolution and to apply sanctions to Israel. But will most Americans ever accept that? I believe that what holds them back is their fear of accusations of being anti-Semites: "Hey, you guys, we don't hate Jews; look, our best friends are Israelis! And our best friends' enemies are our enemies." But how can the Religious Right, the inhabitants of Jesus-land, not have inherited the medieval hatred of the people who "killed their Saviour"?

Tuesday 23 October 2012

Gulag

Those of you who do not remember the Soviet Union may not know that it had an archipelago of terrible prison camps, the G.U.L.A.G., in which some of their greatest citizens languished or died. Well, thanks to the Pussy Riot we now know that Russia still has its gulag; it's just been announced that the two demonstrators who are in prison are being sent far away from Moscow, where their children are, to harsh prison camps in the East. Now that the Tories are in full retribution mode, perhaps they should consult Putin about how to run a gulag. Or perhaps we could remind them that the only civilized use of prison is for deterrence and rehabilitation.

Friday 19 October 2012

Look back

It's so easy to stop blogging. There are lots of news stories around, but none looks of lasting importance, so I'll look back at something from the past. With Cameron pledging £50 million to commemorate the start of World War I, it's time to start thinking about the absurdity of it all. A particular point that interests me is how arbitrary it was that Turkey got involved at all and that it joined the Germans and Austrians. There was good reason for them to remain neutral, and there were Turks who wanted to join the British and French. Perhaps it all came down to the fact that Germany was building a railway from Berlin to Baghdad. Defeat very nearly destroyed Turkey. It certainly led directly to the disasters that have afflicted the Middle East since then.Imagine the world now if Israel had been established in East Prussia! The Turks would do well to remember their past now and to keep out of events in Syria.

Monday 8 October 2012

Peace at last?

It looks like the end of a war that has been going on intermittently for 114 years - one year for every sura of the Koran. The Sulu Archipelago - the Muslim southern half of the Philippines - was never successfully occupied by the Spanish, but it was handed over to the United States (along with Cuba and Puerto Rico) by the Treaty of Paris of 1898, and it has been fighting control from Manila ever since. Now at last an outline agreement has been reached between the Philippines Government and the Moros resistance movement for the islands to achieve regional autonomy. This is the sort of sensible agreement which should be possible in other areas of the world, where a local majority is in conflict with a wider political unit, so why do we have so many little wars going on?

Sunday 7 October 2012

The right man?

I very much hope the police have charged the right man with the murder of April Jones, but it is less than two years since the arrest of Christopher Jefferies for the murder of Joanna Yeates. The papers quickly turned him into a hate figure and wrote as if he had already been found guilty. In fact he had nothing to do with the killing. Until there is a trial we shall not know what evidence the police have against Mark Bridger. Children said they saw April get into a van, at least that's what I remember from the first reports. If traces of her were found in Bridger's Land Rover that will prove nothing, as he had already taken her with his own children on an outing. But the press seem already to have decided he is guilty. It is very difficult for the police to do their job when hundreds of volunteer searchers and dozens of journalists are milling around. Innocent until proved guilty is an admirable principle. I hope that it will be applied too to the five extradited to America on terrorist charges.

Friday 5 October 2012

Extradition

I feel uneasy about the extradition of a batch of five men to the US. The five cases are very different. Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan are British citizens. Ahmad was picked up in 2003, when the Iraq war was raging. He was paid £60,000 compensation because police treatment was judged to have been tantamount to torture. He and Ahsan have been in prison without charge for 8 and 6 years respectively. Al-Fawwaz and Abdul Bari are Saudi and Egyptian respectively, and have been imprisoned without charge for 14 and 13 years. Abu Hamza, also Egyptian, is the only one of the five to have been convicted of a crime in Britain. He lost his hands defusing a mine in Afghanistan, when he was one of Britain and America's Mujahid allies fighting against the Soviet occupation. Now they are to go to the US under the infamous extradition treaty of 2003, which does not require the Americans to supply any evidence against them. What sort of treatment they will get there seems very uncertain, given that none of the people involved in torture during the Bush presidency has been charged with any offence, and given that there are still inmates of Guantanamo who have not had a proper trial.

Wednesday 3 October 2012

Missing

According to one website, 200,000 people are reported missing in Britain every year. Another says 250,000. Clearly so many that nobody knows for sure. I heard at a recent lecture that one percent of these - 2000 to 2500 are still missing after a year. A daily paper would have to publish five or six hundred names and photos every day to keep up. Yet for the past two weeks the headlines have been dominated by just two missing persons, with heart-wringing interviews and endless detail about searches. I am not saying that friends, relatives and police should not be concerned for every case, but the prominence given to a few of them suggests a desire to distract from issues that concern everybody. For example this morning, Ed Milliband's great speech was pushed down the agenda, and the remarkable election result in Georgia got hardly a mention. Still, I was glad to see that the (Conservative) Chairman of the parliamentary Select Committee on Education has called on Guvnor Gove to stop rushing into half-baked new policies.

Sunday 30 September 2012

Housing

There is an enormous need for affordable housing in Britain, but the new houses and flats being built seem to be for wealthy people either to live in or to let to tenants. Four big houses have just been built near to us, but the least expensive is £3.85 million. Even a bed-sitting room can cost £1000 a month to rent, and small flats are advertised at more than £2000. Yet that would be the mortgage rate on a house costing hundreds of thousands of pounds. So why does the government encourage buy-to-let schemes? We should do the opposite; have a tax regime that encourages landlords to sell their surplus housing. That would bring down house prices and help owner occupation.

Friday 28 September 2012

Wot no history, again!

A few blogs back I quoted T Blair's contempt for history. Now D Cameron has made himself look foolish by similar ignorance. Perhaps we should make ministers pass the test that they have inflicted on immigrants applying for citizenship (well, to be historically accurate, it was Labour ministers... same thing!). These are the very people whose life ambition is to 'make history', forcing through half-baked policy changes just for the sake of doing something. I wonder how many of them have read the history of the 1930s; they are making some of the same mistakes that governments made 80 years ago. And how many of them have reflected on the fact that the terrible revolutions of the past three centuries were born of gross inequality? The misery presently visited on the Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Irish are comparable with the conditions that produced the French and Soviet revolutions and the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.

Thursday 27 September 2012

Guvnor Gove

Britain's wretched education system just goes on getting more divided. We already had public schools (actually private, but benefiting from charitable status), grammar schools, comprehensives and Church of England primaries. Blair introduced academies and multiplied the number of faith schools. Guvnor Gove brought in free schools. Now he wants to create an 'English baccalaureate', which will be not English but Anglo-Welsh and not strictly a baccalaureate. His 'EBacc' will not compare with the real baccalaureates, French, European and international - highly regarded school-leaving exams taken at age 18 - but will be a new version of O-levels. The more schools are reorganized the worse they seem to get. The sad thing is that we had in the comprehensive an excellent system, but we never spent enough on it to make it work. The public schools are in effect comprehensives, since they will take in any dunce whose parents are rich enough to pay, but what is good enough for the wealthy is deemed too good to be provided free to the rest of the population.

Tuesday 25 September 2012

Burr

I have just read Burr, a brilliant novel by Gore Vidal - the first (chronologically) of his Chronicles of Empire, covering the period from the start of the War of Independence in 1776 to the death of Aaron Burr in 1836. He was the hero of the failed attempt to take Quebec, then New York senator, and Vice President 1801 to 1804. He became notorious after killing General Alexander Hamilton in a duel. After that he set off on a risky attempt to liberate Mexico, was charged by President Jefferson with treason - for which there was no evidence - escaped conviction, but spent the rest of his life in disgrace. Burr is portrayed convincingly as the one honourable man who keeps his word in a world of scoundrels who betray their friends in their struggle for power. He could have been President if he had not kept his promise to help Jefferson to that position - Jefferson the hypocritical 'radical' who owned a bevy of slaves and fathered children by a slave concubine. Two things I learned in particular: that America was dominated from 1776 to 1825 by Virginians, whose farms depended on slave labour; and that the new Republic was from the outset bent on imperial expansion, with the ambition of taking control of the whole of North and South America.

Monday 24 September 2012

Riots

More riots in China! Bad enough to close down a factory producing components for Apple's i-phone5! Is the Chinese government losing its grip? It looks as though its encouragement of violent demonstrations against Japan has backfired. Watch this space! On the other hand, the Muslims in France are to be congratulated on their mature response to the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo; they quietly ignored the provocation.

Saturday 22 September 2012

'Muslim rage'

Avaaz has put up a charming sequence of pictures to counteract Newsweek's inflammatory front page, showing ordinary Muslims going about their daily work and play. It is important to remember that the number of violent protesters is very small. However, that does not mean that most Muslims are indifferent to Western attitudes; on the contrary, quiet resentment is very common, and has been ever since 1959, when I first visited an Arab country. The question I have been asked over and over again is 'Why can't you treat us as equals?' For fourteen centuries Christians have looked down on Muslims and disparaged their Prophet, and now atheists do the same. This leaves them with a deep sense of injustice, and they point out that they revere Jesus and the Jewish prophets and that they accept Christians and Jews as 'People of the Book'. In one respect they are more Christian than most Christians, for they accept the story of the Virgin Birth as literally true. A peaceful future can only be built on mutual respect between all cultures.

Friday 21 September 2012

More provocation

And now the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has pitched in with several pages of material offensive to Muslims. Some people, in their efforts to be clever, are extraordinarily stupid. They appeal to 'democracy' and 'freedom of expression', but their efforts are worthy of Goebbels and Der Stürmer. Having lived for years in Muslim-majority countries and enjoyed the generous hospitality of many ordinary people there, I find it very painful that some Westerners are ready to hate the religion that produces such behaviour. In fact Muslims have often treated each other far worse than they ever treated Christians or Jews.The quarrel between Sunni and Shia began with a dynastic dispute more than thirteen and a half centuries ago and is still killing people daily in Syria and Iraq, with the potential to start up elsewhere.

Thursday 20 September 2012

Rich list

Two items in this morning's news: the wealth of the 400 richest Americans has grown in the past year by 13% to $1.7 trillion, equivalent to one eighth of the nation's whole economy, according to Forbes magazine. Beside that the fines of $11 billion imposed for malpractice on 26 pharmaceutical companies in the past three years look like peanuts. Admittedly, some of the ultra-rich use their money and influence wisely, but plenty of them do not. Meanwhile Republicans call Obama a socialist or communist because he wants a modest amount of redistribution. Our lopsided world gets more unbalanced every year. How much longer can this go on?

Wednesday 19 September 2012

Tiptoe out

The latest 'green-on-blue' killing of NATO troops by their supposed allies in the Afghan security forces should convince everybody that the West's war in Afghanistan is lost. The only question is how to get out as quickly as possible. I think the answer is on tiptoe. No deadline, no noise: just remove troops quietly before there are blue-on-green revenge killings to make things worse. And start with the little English prince! And this should be the beginning of general disengagement from the Muslim world. We should stop all arms sales, stop supporting 'friendly' dictators, stop aiding insurgents, stop sending helicopter gunships or drones against suspected terrorists. They should be left to sort out their own problems in their own way. We have been trying to control Muslim populations for hundreds of years, especially since their fossil fuel reserves were discovered. We have tried to force them to sell us oil and gas on our terms, but even that has not worked since OPEC was created. In the end, any savings we ever made were long since cancelled out by the immense expense in warfare that the policy engendered. Will any of this happen? Probably not, as long as America maintains its imperial mentality, but that rests on the hegemony of the dollar. Sooner or later, the decline of the American economy will bring about a dollar crisis and a new international monetary system. That may be not so far into the future.

Monday 17 September 2012

Riots in China

Amazing news! Riots in China,where the public is usually held under such tight control! But these are not protests over the widening gulf between rich and poor or the denial of free expression; they are expressions of nationalist fervour directed against Japan. It is all because of a dispute over some uninhabitable lumps of rock claimed by both sides, and more exactly about the division of possible oil fields. With Japan closing down the nuclear power stations on which it has relied so heavily, access to petroleum is potentially a vital interest. The simple answer to this, as to all territorial quarrels, is international law. But in our crazy world hardly any government wants the simple solution. Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941, pledging their countries to peaceful resolution of disputes, Yet America turns a blind eye to Israel's illegal settlement of Palestinian land acquired by war, and Britain refuses to go to the International Court over the Falklands. Are we just hopelessly tribal animals?

Sunday 16 September 2012

Wot no history?!

Speaking in 2003, the abominable Blair said 'There has never been a time when... the study of history provides so little instruction for our present day.' This was the man who had helped the abysmal Bush to invade and occupy Iraq. It was earlier that year that a journalist (I think it was Robert Fisk) asked him in a press conference to comment on the Sykes-Picot agreement. Blair had not heard of what Mr Sykes and Monsieur Picot had agreed in 1916, namely the division of the Arab Provinces of the Turkish State between Britain and France, out of which came the whole sorry mess of the modern Middle East. There is now total incomprehension between most Westerners and most Muslims; and much of it is down to ignorance of history. People in the West can't understand why so many in Muslim-majority countries get worked up about a crappy anti-Islamic home movie made by adolescent idiots in California. People in the Muslim world can't understand why they seem to suffer so many gratuitous attacks from America and Europe. The trouble is that most Westerners do not know what every Muslim knows, even if only in the vaguest way: that Islam once ruled the known world between Europe and China, and that its supremacy was then taken away by the expanding British, French, Dutch and Russian empires. This was not supposed to happen. Muhammad had come to renew the religion of Abraham, Moses and Jesus; their followers should have accepted his message. This folk memory does not make for easy relations. Westerners don't look back so far. For Americans, history starts in 1776, and even of that they seem to remember a mythical version. Europeans are aware that their continent was once dominated by the Roman Empire, but the history of the nation-states goes back only a few centuries, and even the 19th century seems like a different world. With leaders like the bothersome Blair, our knowledge of history is not going to improve.

Friday 14 September 2012

Justice!

As soon as news came of the killing of the Ambassador, Obama ordered two warships to move to Libya (into territorial waters?!)and demanded that the killers be brought to justice. But what about the idiots who made an inflammatory anti-Islamic film and put a clip on YouTube? And who dubbed it into Arabic? Is there no law against hate-speech or incitement to violence in California? The people responsible should be brought to justice too. Or would that be too displeasing to Romney and Ryan? The next few weeks will be an anxious time in America and in the world. Romney comes across as a fool who would shoot first and ask later, and Ryan is a disciple of the abominable Ayn Rand. How he squares Catholicism with her gospel of egoism is a great mystery, but he probably believes in the Prosperity Gospel - the doctrine that God's elect are marked by their wealth. The greatest anxiety is over Iran. Will Netanyahu hold off his project of bombing Iranian nuclear facilities? Perhaps it depends on who he thinks will win the presidential election. He probably fears that if it is Obama the opportunity will have been lost, in which case he might be tempted to unleash the demons before it is too late. But the catastrophic consequences could change the election anyway. A ray of hope: Sami Michael might be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature next month. He is the voice of sanity, an Iraqi Israeli who calls for equality and respect between the peoples of the once-Holy Land - European and Oriental Jews, ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews, Jews, Muslims Christians and Bahais, Israelis and Palestinians. It's the only way.

Thursday 13 September 2012

Right on cue the excellent American Ambassador to Libya dies in a fire provoked by a ridiculous anti-Muslim film put together in California with ham actors and an idiotic script on a low budget. But this is just the latest product of the anti-Islamic industry that I mentioned in my last post. The hate-Islam business has several levels. There is an academic wing, with people like Patricia Crone producing endless sceptical studies that cast doubt on every aspect of the religion's own account of itself. Then there is a populist literature like Tom Holland's 'The Shadow of the Sword' that makes the scholars' abstruse works accessible for the ordinary reader. People like the producers of this new film turn this junk into naked insults. And finally thugs like Breivik decide to get into action. Unfortunately, there are Muslim hotheads who respond with violence, and there is a lack of Muslim leaders giving a calm and reasoned answer to the Islam-haters. A vicious circle of attack and counter-attack is set up, giving the impression that there is an inevitable and general clash of civilizations. Most people are ignorant of the centuries during which Christians and Jews, and later Hindus and Sikhs lived peacefully in societies ruled by Muslims. In the West, and particularly in America, the Medieval Christian demonization of Islam is reborn.

Wednesday 12 September 2012

Some Egyptians have rioted because of an American film, which they say insults the Prophet. Why are there so many Muslims who lack the self-confidence to laugh at such pinpricks? Muhammad himself ignored disrespectful talk. The Koran says (6:68): "When you hear the signs of Allah disbelieved and ridiculed, do not sit with them until they turn to other talk." Did anybody see the ridiculous film recently on Channel 4 "Islam: the Untold Story"? A clueless looking Roman historian, Tom Holland, who seems to know no Arabic, wanders around claiming that we know hardly anything about the origin of Islam. He visits several extreme sceptics, who say they can tell him next to nothing, and he consorts with a group of Bedouin as if they were experts on Islamic history. There is a minor industry out there, casting doubt on every source of information, claiming that the Koran was gradually put together to provide an origin story for the religion, scorning the oral literature that began to be compiled within a few decades of Muhammad's death, ignoring the chains of authority that the early Muslims quoted "A told me that B said that the Prophet told him..." There's nothing like that for stories in the Gospels. As for the Koran, since the same text is used by Shia Muslims as by Sunnis, it must have been finalized before they started fighting, 24 years after the Prophet died. Otherwise the Shia would surely have edited it to support their claims. This gives credence to the Muslim claim that an official edition was prepared 19 years after his death, on the basis of sheets guarded by the Prophet's widow Hafsa and probably written by his secretaries under his dictation. No other religion has a document so unassailable. What does risk bringing dishonour on Islam is the continuing violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims. The Koran says (4:93): "Whoever kills a believer intentionally, his recompense is everlasting hell..." Ninety years ago there was serious talk of recognizing Twelver Shia as a fifth, Jaafari branch of Sunni Islam. Alas it came to nothing.

Saturday 8 September 2012

Over a year since last I blogged! Is this going to be an annual event. I intend to try again, and for today I have suggestions for the French police searching for the killers of Mr and Mrs al-Hilli: go to Baghdad! A friend has said that al-Hilli went there recently in an attempt to get back property confiscated by Saddam Hussein. Well, after America turned Iraq into a capitalist free-for-all, that property must have been taken over by some local oligarch, just as so much was grabbed by Russian billionaires in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. If anybody had a motive for getting rid of al-Hilli, that person is likely to be in Baghdad, or wherever Iraqi oligarchs hang out. Al-Hilli probably discovered he was being stalked; that would explain his sudden departure on holiday. And it would explain why, from the camp-site where the family spent their last night, he headed up such a remote track, hoping to throw off his pursuers - until he saw a green 4-by-4 and realized the game was up. There is not much chance that his 8-year-old daughter will have understood what was happening, and I'll be surprised if anything is found in England, except perhaps some correspondence with people in Baghdad. Perhaps the French should call in the Iraqi police to help. Or perhaps Tony Blair could supply a list of Iraqi oligarchs!