'Nother Solent

Advantage: blogosphere.

I was shocked to hear the BBC claim that the Israelis were shocked by this photo of a baby dressed as a suicide bomber. The Israelis who were surprised must have been living somewhere else other than Israel for the last few months. Or perhaps it was just the BBC who were surprised, seeing that they are so out of touch as to have only just noticed this child re-enacting a lynching, and not yet to have noticed this three year old girl coached to say on TV "why we kill the Jews", this little girl dressed as a suicide bomber at a Palestinian rally in Berlin, this whole archive (look under "kids dressed as suicide bombers"), and this boy dressed as a suicide bomber and surrounded by masked adults (scroll down), and several more circling around the blogosphere. Those are just the ones I linked to. The link to the "Jerusalem Post" picture of a child dressed as a suicide bomber, headed "Child's Play" is unavailable.

In fact, as such pictures go, this latest is one of the least offensive. The kid is too young to remember the obscene thing that was done to him. If someone buys the child off his Palestinian parents in time he might yet be saved. (Link and further discussion of the suicide-baby picture found in Damianation.)

Getting back to the original BBC story, anyone have a clue what Palestinian "legislator" Hanan Ashrawi was on about when she described the photo as a "painful image" and said, "To me it is a... strange heroism" ? Huh? Who was being heroic where? Even by the peverted lights of her society I didn't see any heroism going on. Sheesh, anyone would think those were real sticks of dynamite....

The tinnitus will go away after a minute.

And you had plenty of time, so you can chain up your lawyers again. When your mouse went to the link it showed up http://dawsonspeek at the bottom, didn't it? that meant you had at least a tenth of a second to realise it was Dawson and, give me a break, just how likely was it that he was going to do the "quietly" bit?

However this really is quietly persuasive on the same issue. As is this, albeit persuasive in a different direction.

It's all right. Click them. Don't you trust me?

Quietly persuasive.

Paul Wright

of TANSTAAFL described this post about a Palestinian state as "anger management." Great post, great blog, but it didn't assuage my anger at all.

(No kidding on the "great blog" bit. Read this passionate denunciation of Tim Blair's bête noir Margo Kingston. Put up or shut up, Margo.)

And on the ironing - what's with giving away our secrets, male scuzzball?

Scepticism

from reader Angie Schultz about the John Sweeney report mentioned here.

I didn't see the "Correspondent" program you mentioned on your blog, but I did see BBC World's brief little segment on the faked child funerals.

Here's a Beeb web page about it: link

Matt Welch also discusses it; there are comments too: link

Matt did a Reason article on the inflated numbers, but still concludes that there were large numbers of children dying because of the sanctions (actually, I don't remember if he concluded it was because of the sanctions, or if he just said "during the sanctions period", something like that).

Matt cautions us again (in the comments page, and to me in email) that Sweeney's report contains no hard math. I was stunned by the tone of the article, which is not what I'm used to seeing on the BBC.

(I find BBC World annoyingly sensationalist. I became disgusted with them when they reported on the "panic" weeping through the streets of New ork during the anthrax mailings. Even as their reporters talked about panic and hysteria, behind them in the real streets, people carried on as normal. You could *see* them. Just because sensationalism uses calm tones and plummy British accents doesn't mean it's not sensationalism. Feh.)

Sweeney's tone on the web page is not calm, but he turned it down a bit for the TV report. The only thing that really struck me about that was the fact that they showed the former torturer and his little girl. They didn't
show her trying to walk, but they did let us get a good look at her little crushed feet---which looked plump and healthy. Of course, inside, the bones might be gravel, but outside they looked just fine. I hope her father isn't using her (and *abusing* her, with the braces described) to get back at his former boss, whatever kind of a monster he is.

There's some interesting stuff about Saddam's son Uday's unnatural lusts, too, on the BBC page.

You can't expect any better from them, can you?

Here is a classic Joanne Jacobs post on the treatment of disabled students.

"In other words, special education doesn't mean educating students to function in the world. It means letting them grow up without self-control, manners or, inevitably, academic skills and knowledge. These students are being treated like animals."

Read the rest.

You Are All Guilty.

Racial harassment officer sends libellous letter to every single resident of a street. (Via Libertarian Alliance Forum.)

Busy day tomorrow

(Thursday), so no blogging for me. And light posting for the next few days. Yup, gonna post that light all over the place. I'm stuffing some ultra-violet into envelopes right now.

"Those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush."

At least one reader, Mitchell Porter, didn't believe in the Chinese classification system that was featured in Teresa Neilsen Hayden's Making Light and wrote, "I have never seen this anywhere, except as a Borges quote.I'm pretty sure he made it up."

But my regular correspondent, A Regular Correspondent writes:

"Some Chinese classification info:

"The philosopher you were thinking of was not Voltaire but Michel Foucault (I think; of course, Voltaire might have said something about it too). Foucault's quote:

"In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing that is demonstrated in the exotic charm of another system of thought is the limitation of our own."

"Well maybe; there again it may demonstrate that another system's poor filing may see the stages of an animal drawing class re-filed as an animal taxonomy :-)."

And there you have the answer that makes the classifications practical, given the formal style of Chinese art. For (a) one assumes that Imperial creatures must be drawn in a special style that shows their Celestial nature. This, naturally, is Lesson One. Conventions cognate to those we use in cartoons would cover the trembling of category (i) and the "innumerable ones" of (j). Category (m) would make a fetching study, suitable as a Mother's Day project to take home.

"The classification is alleged to come from the charmingly titled tenth century work, 'The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge'. I have encountered mild speculation that it is apocryphal but its age and oddity rather inclines me to believe in it."

Much as I want to believe in it too, the tedious demands of honesty compel me to state that Foucault got the quote from Borges. Perhaps acknowledging the Higher Necessity of charm in relation to truth, my correspondent moves on to the ideal China of Kai-Lung.

"An ancient Chinese drawing class in which these would have been natural successive lesson titles is hilariously described in 'The Ill-regulated Destiny of Kin Yen, the Picture Maker' from 'The Wallet of Kai Lung' by Ernest Bramah. (Kin Yen, having paid for only half the course, finds he has only been taught to draw human figures facing to the right, so has to start a new artistic movement that only illustrates funerals, processions and people alienated from each other.)

[Changing topics!] "Some thoughts were prompted, very indirectly, by your 4 and 1/2 rating of Brendan whasisname's remarks. His reasons for rejecting human rights seem very dependent on the states' rights doctrine you wisely reject (with equally wise practical qualification; relevant Burke quote: 'All that we have a right to do is not always wise to be done').

"However the 1/2 just happened to make me wonder, did Burke wholly disbelieve in human rights or only half-disbelieve? (Following quotes are from memory; better check or ask me to if you ever want to use them.) "

Fiddlesticks! Chesterton never checked his quotes, so why should I? Also, where is your gamesmanship? Don't you want the fact that you can extensively quote Edmund Burke from memory advertised?

"On the one hand, Burke valued the 'rights of Englishmen', not the French revolution's 'rights of men'

'It has been the uniform policy of our constitution to assert our rights as an entailed inheritence from our ancestors, to be transmitted without diminution to our descendants, without reference to any other or more general concept of liberty.'

and asserted that their 'rights of men' could only give or be 'the right of the naked savage'. However he also valued a government in which 'no man, or description of men, could trespass on the just rights of any other man or description of men'. His concept of rights links them to duties:

'Government is easy; teach obedience, give commands, the thing is done. Freedom is even easier; let go the rein. But a free government is a difficult thing.'

'Men must possess a certain fund of moderation to be fit for freedom, otherwise it is noxious to themselves and a perfect nuisance to everyone else.'

"To the politically correct, human rights seem to be some kind of innate quality. You are born with them, so if you are ever discovered to be without them, someone must have stolen them from you. To Burke, I think they were more like something that had to be built and for which you had to take responsibility, not something the world owed you. If you built a temple of liberty, you could live in it; or you could inherit it, along with the habits required to maintain it. If you lacked the ability to operate a given state of freedom, then you couldn't enjoy that state, and were not wronged thereby, any more than people who don't know metalworking are wronged by having to use stone tools.

"What I'm wondering is, does thinking of human rights as an intangible which those who would possess them must (re)take possession of in each generation, like a national character, instead of something everyone is born with, like sentience, mean you don't believe in them? As the debate is usually framed, by me as much as others, yes. The politically correct own the term and have since 1789; to have any hope of being understood, you must deny it and call Burke's concept something else. But you could defend the idea that he believes in half the concept. People should possess these rights but the 'should' describes their duty to make and maintain rights that are intangible but not innate, still less owed.

"Hannah Arendt has a most interesting and detailed analysis of the breakdown of human rights for various groups before world war II. Her conclusions stress the 'practical soundness' of Burke's concept and the uselessness of the more common French one. I don't agree with all of 'Origins of Totalitarianism' but it has much good matter in it. (By the way, do you have my copy of her 'On Revolution'?)"

Yes. Small coffee table, centre-left pile, under the copy of Bulbasaur's Big Day and the letter from the school about the Easter holidays. Can't think why you didn't notice it before.

Oh, phooey. All these brainy people also think Borges made it up. Gagrind, thy name is Google.

Great White Telephone time.

Instapundit is rude about an absolutely puke-worthy fan article idolizing (I choose the word advisedly) Cornell West.

Ferrari awaits a ruling

on whether they are allowed to bore motor racing fans to death by sublimating all individual ambition in their team members.

Talking of Junius

, read his latest post which incorporates an Observer article by John Sweeney describing how far the Iraqi government will go in its propaganda. I didn't see Sunday's "Correspondent" programme to which the article refers. Does anyone who did have any comments?

Faster than a speeding blog...

Literally within minutes of my posting the mention of Brendan O'Neill below, I had two e-mails. The first hit the mat at 11.21 and came from Chris Bertram of Junius and said:

I was thinking of posting something on Boneill's latest too, (though am currently busy trying to disentangle all the various ways Rousseau talks about freedom). I take it that when you say that you agree with him about 4.5/6, you don't agree that the rights of states to non interference (as embodied in the UN charter) should trump individual rights, since that would be an extraordinary thing for a libertarian to agree to.

and the second came at 11.24 and was ex anima Brendan himself . It said,

So...which one-and-a-half do you disagree with?

I am put to shame. I plucked the figure of 4 1/2 out of the air as approximately expressing my agreement-level. The extra half sounded um, you know, sort of humorous.

Bloody hell, that's lame. Next time anyone asks I will be ready with a complex sum involving 0.15 agreement with point one, 0.8 agreement with point two and so on, which will all most certainly add up to 4.5 exactly.

Chris Bertram is right; supporting states rights over individual rights would be absurd for a libertarian. It is, however, often imprudent and officious to try and fix the problems and arbitrate the quarrels of strangers.

Talkboardfightin' man.

Tal G in Jerusalem had a link to a Guardian chatroom where the subject up for discussion was the Middle East. That link will keep changing as more comments are added, so I'll preserve a notable exchange below. Look at the speed of response from "reality1948". Remember, if you want to rule the talkboards, you gotta keep reading those blogs.

————————————————————————————————————————
reality1948 - 05:48am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#63 of 79)
>"What makes you so sure of it ? Common sense dictates that when you stop occupying and oppressing a people, that people will become less belligerent"

Because there are so many groups in the world today who are so much worse off than the palestinians and don't teach their 5 year old children to kill people by suicidee in kindergarden.

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lind3420 - 05:50am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#64 of 79)

Exactly, where did you hear this information?

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reality1948 - 05:51am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#65 of 79)
The children are taught hate from a very youung age as the picture in this link shows. A kindergarden graduation where a little girl celebrates lynching with fake blood on her hands.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=3346

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Basil44 - 05:53am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#66 of 79)
reality1948,

You may have a point here, other people may behave differently. However, this is a trait Jews share with the Palestinians (whith which they are genetically-related: correct me if I'm wrong): the same fierce tribalism and religious fanaticism which helped Jews survive as a people in foreign countries for about 2000 years. It's like you are blaming yourselves.

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AJSch0ll - 05:55am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#67 of 79)
Palestinians: Armed with more than stones

http://www.adl.org/israel/photo_gallery.html

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lind3420 - 05:58am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#68 of 79)

What are the Israeli children taught? Do you think they are taught to love Palestinians? They all have to do mandatory sevice. Where is the info on this. Your site was not very informative, nor credible.

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reality1948 - 06:03am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#69 of 79)
Every time a bomber blows themself up, you hear an interview with their mother who is so happy and that she wishedd she had more sons to blow themselves up.

There is nothing congenital here, its indoctrtination into a cult of death, that most mulims in the west must find an abomination, considering suicide is terrible sin in Islam.

I truely pity the palestinians for what their "leaders" have turned them into and what they are doing to their children.

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lind3420 - 06:04am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#70 of 79)

Link, please. I have not seen the mothers so happy. Please inform me.

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reality1948 - 06:05am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#71 of 79)
Do you think those pictures are made up? Want me to post a link of a picture of palestinian "Sesame Street" with a 3 year old girl taught to kill jews.

Israeli children are not taught to hate palestinians. In thruth most pity them for what their leadership has turned them into.

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reality1948 - 06:06am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#72 of 79)
http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD39102

An English translation of a London based newspaper's interview with a mother of a suicide bomber.

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Basil44 - 06:09am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#73 of 79)
Reality1948,

Even if what you say is true, you are as fanatic and brainwashed as them if you believe that this will not change even if these people regain their freedom from racial oppression. Show my something similar that occured before the occupation in 1967.

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reality1948 - 06:10am Jun 25, 2002 BST (#74 of 79)
http://talg.blogspot.com/2002_06_23_talg_archive.html#78090960

The full article in english.

and the original in Hebrew

http://images.maariv.co.il/cache/ART309971.html

It ain't chance.

Joe Katzman links to and comments on a compelling article by Ralph Peters about what makes a country unsuccessful. I have meaning to capture the Winds of Change and set them blowing for the New Model Army for ages, and now I've finally got round to it.

Also welcome Brendan O'Neill, writing from a very different (or, to use the technical term, wrong) perspective but nontheless managing to have broadly the same opinion as me (what we in the trade call being right) in 4½ out of his six shibboleths of received opinion.

The worst yet.

You should read this. Link to it. Pass it on.

"Avishai, 5, the family's youngest, began shrieking, after he awoke from the commotion. The terrorist soon opened fire on his tiny body. "

God knows, I've said this before, but the defining feature of the Palestinian terrorists is that they seek out civilians, women, children and old people to kill, and the defining feature of Palestinian culture is that they like it that way. In this case the terrorist deliberately murdered three children and their mother. One by one.

A few days ago three Palestinian children, two of them from the same family, were killed by the Israeli army. They weren't harming anyone; they were going to market in Jenin, thinking that a curfew had been lifted when it had not. Someone panicked and opened fire. Those children's lives are not worth less than Avishai's and his two brothers. But they weren't murdered.

(Link found in Dawson, original report by Harvey Tannenbaum.)

Bizarre

as it may seem, given their "Free Country" campaign, the Telegraph website has hidden away this important story under a catch-all link title in tiny, tiny print. You see if you can find it. Now that you've failed miserably, I will show my irritating superiority by waving a careless hand and saying, "Here it is: 'Blunkett adopts EU arrest warrant.' "

"More moppets, if you can stand it"

was John Weidner's comment about this story covering the Palestinian 'Sesame Street'. I don't blame them for the adding the disclaimer, either. Jim Henson, a man who gave innocent pleasure to millions, would reach out from the grave to sue the **** out of them if they omitted it. And here, courtesy of Little Green Footballs, is a five year old re-enacting a lynching as part of a kindergarten class.

Who said this?

"And it is necessary to reflect that the Palestinian suicide bombers don't even ask these questions. For the suicide bombers are executioners, the executioners of whole Israeli families. The immolation of their own lives does not excuse the fact that, in their last moments, they are able to see the Israeli child in the pram who will die with its mother, the Israeli family eating its pizzas on a hot Wednesday afternoon, the old folk celebrating a Jewish religious festival who will be his or her victims. The 17-year-old Palestinian girl who blew herself up to kill a 16-year-old Israeli girl remains an awesome symbol of youth destroying youth."

Click here to find the surprising answer.

An example to us all

is cited in Travelling Shoes.

Among their other crimes

, the North Korean regime won't even tell their own people about South Korea's sterling performance in the World Cup.

UPDATE: Given the outrageous incompetence of the referee in Korea's game against Spain, I'd correct that last phrase to "won't even tell their own people about South Korea's peso performance in the World Cup."