Keys Corner

I don’t have much time usually for politian’s opinions, but I have to agree with the British MPs on this:

Friends of the Prime Minister have told The Independent on Sunday that he is planning to set up a Blair Foundation soon after leaving No 10, and one of its main aims will be to promote communication between Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

But the plan has been greeted with incredulity among MPs who say he has done more to create divisions between Islam and the West than any Prime Minister in living memory…

The lengths the US government goes to, to try and convince its subjects that they are under threat from dark forces is truly incredible:

My father, a Palestinian professor named Sami Al-Arian, was arrested over four years ago on trumped-up terrorism charges and submitted to a prosecution over the course of six months that bordered on the farcical. Though he was ultimately acquitted by a jury of the most serious charges against him, the Bush administration has prolonged his imprisonment indefinitely. My father now languishes in a Virginia jail, another victim of the demagogic politics of the so-called war on terror.

Many have wondered why my father would be targeted so vigorously, especially after the government lost a case that cost $50 million…

...When my father’s trial finally began in June 2005, the government presented 71 witnesses, including nearly two dozen from Israel, paraded before the jury for sheer emotional effect. Four hundred phone calls out of half a million the government recorded during a decade of relentless, indiscriminate surveillance of my family were also presented. The prosecutors acted out the phone calls on the 13th floor of a courtroom in downtown Tampa, giving new meaning to the phrase political theater…

I spent some time in the 1980’s regreting that I hasn’t tried to get a job in the USA - I worked on a project which involved regular trips to different parts of the country – including both US coasts, and several cities in the middle of the country, and was very impressed with both the spectacular landscapes and the friendly American people. We know several Brits who did move to the USA and took American citizenship, but now I am really glad we never got our act together. As Naomi Wolf pointed out in the Guardian a couple of days ago, they are already well down the road to having a fascist government.

One law for Wolfowitz, and another for the third world. What a pity the same standards don’t apply in both cases.

Starting in mid-2007, the USA is going to scan in all ten fingerprints of people visiting the USA (at the moment they scan in 2 fingerprints). This allows the prints to be stored in a format compatible with that used by the FBI’s database. The fingerprints will made available to the FBI and international intelligence agencies with no restrictions on their use. Countries subject to the new scheme include America’s staunchest allies as well as other less cooperative states: Britain, other European Union nations, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, for example.

Additionally, according to today’s Observer:

...[travellers] already have their credit card details and email accounts inspected by the American authorities following a deal between the EU and the Department of Homeland Security. Now passengers face having all their credit card transactions traced when using one to book a flight. And travellers giving an email address to an airline will be open to having all messages they send and receive from that address scrutinised.

The demands were disclosed in ‘undertakings’ given by the Department of Homeland Security to the EU and published by the Department for Transport after a request under the freedom of information legislation…

Mars fined for breaching rules on carbon trading, The Independent reports in a headline today.

I thought for a moment that the American government was overreaching it’s imperial ambitions on a galactic scale, but it turns out that the reference is to a food processing company…

It appears that Bush has been caught lying again. By Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. Just like before the Iraq war. Am I surprised?

No.

I remember, when we first visited the USA in 1982, being both shocked and interested in how the American media were reporting on the IRA. At a time when the IRA was viewed in the UK (and many other countries) as an illegal Irish terror-organisation, some American media were running interviews the IRA leaders (who the British politicians would have loved to arrest, if they could find them) and were portraying the IRA as freedom-fighters struggling for the rights of the northern Irish population.

It was an absolute eye-opener to realise how much one’s view of a situation could be manipulated by the slant the media put on a story. Since then, I’ve always tried to read and watch news stories from as many different sources as possible, so that I can form my own opinion about what is going on in the world. So we’ve been periodically flipping to the Al Jazeera English channel on our satellite receiver, waiting for them to start transmitting more than the endless loop of advertising, saying they are starting an English language saervice. And then, we missed the start of the news service yesterday!

We’ll be watching the Al Jazeera channel from now on, in addition to Sky News, CNN, Bloomberg, the BBC and the various German TV stations, to try and get a better overall view of the world news.

By the way, if you look for Al Jazeera’s web site, be aware that Aljazeera.com is not associated with the satellite news channel. The corresponding English language Al Jazeera web site is here.

Looking at the headlines in the internet this morning makes depressing reading.

There has been joint survey by leading newspapers in the UK, Canada, Israel and Mexico, which shows that most of the people in these traditional allies of the USA think that George Bush is more of a threat to world peace than the leader of North Korea (Kim Jong-II) or the Iranian president (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). North Korea and Iran are, of course, both members of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”.

Yes, the leader of the country which likes to think of itself as being the world’s leading example of democracy is seen by many, even in Israel, as being a very threatening person who has made the world more dangerous since he came to power. Here are the top three threats:

At the same time, the German magazine Spiegel is running it’s lead article on a poll by the state TV station, ARD, showing that only a minority (49%) here believes that democracy is working in Germany. The figure is down from 55% in a survey carried out in April this year by the EU and down 11% on the results of a survey in September 2005; it is the lowest value ever recorded in Germany. In the EU survey, the Germans were more satisfied with how democracy was working in their country than the Italians or French, although their satisfaction then was less that the average for all EU countries.

George Bush is quoted on the BBC web site today as referring to

“Islamic fascists… will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom”.

He’s supposed to be brighter than people give him credit for, but I do wonder if he knows the definition of fascist?

There’s a short summary of political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt’s article on fascism (2003 in Free Inquiry) here, which is worth taking a look at. Looking at the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile), Dr. Britt found they had 14 elements in common. To summarise the summary, the 14 characteristics that he identified were:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism


2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights


3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause


4. Supremacy of the Military


5. Rampant Sexism


6. Controlled Mass Media


7. Obsession with National Security


8. Religion and Government are Intertwined


9. Corporate Power is Protected


10. Labor Power is Suppressed


11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts


12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment


13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption


14. Fraudulent Elections

Do those seem to you to match more closely with al-Qaeda or the USA?

Update (2006-08-12):
I see that Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies also thinks using the term “islamic fascists” is nonsense:

There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term. This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one’s opponent, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the content of their beliefs…

Sounds similar to Bush’s redefinition of the word terrorist, which he uses to mean anyone whose political views divirge from Bush’s.

According to The Economist, the answer is that Israel funds a lobby group (AIPAC) in Washington with a budget of nearly $50m and a staff of 200 – allegedly more powerful than the National Rifle Association:

“Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world,” says Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister. The lobby, which is the centrepiece of a co-ordinated body that includes pressure groups, think-tanks and fund-raising operations, produces voting statistics on congressmen that are carefully scrutinised by political donors. It also organises regular trips to Israel for congressmen and their staffs. (The Washington Post reports that Roy Blunt, the House majority whip, has been on four.)

The other factor is the evangelical Christians, representing 25% of the American electorate:

White evangelicals are significantly more pro-Israeli than Americans in general; more than half of them say they strongly sympathise with Israel. (A third of the Americans who claim sympathy with Israel say that this stems from their religious beliefs.) Two in five Americans believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, and one in three say that the creation of the state of Israel was a step towards the Second Coming.

Finally, the Americans probably see themselves in the same boat as Israel – the 9/11 attacks and the rocket attacks of Hizbullah are both seen as “terrorist” attacks on “democracy”.