Charles Moore recalls how the BBC in particular has presented a consistent narrative of anti-Americanism to its British audience.
Today, we are presented with a similar narrative - so powerful that I find that 90 per cent of people here believe it, even those who think of themselves as conservative. The narrative is that America is bullying and naive about the outside world. It is very keen on killing people. George W Bush is taken to embody these characteristics, since he wears cowboy boots and is inarticulate and prays a lot. (Fine for Muslims to pray, not for Christians.)
The same could be said in most European countries, and it is even more true in Norway, where the dominant news agency NTB, the state broadcasting NRK and all major newspapers are leftist, in particular on international affairs.
Moore is not alone in asking why UNSCAM is getting so little media coverage, and comparing it to the spotlight on real or alleged American sins:
Suppose that the reports accusing UN officials of corruption in the oil-for-food programme had been made against America. Suppose that it was Halliburton, the company for whom Vice-President Dick Cheney once worked, which had taken 10 per cent off the oil-for-food contracts. Suppose that America were accused of the sort of behaviour that has been alleged, on the basis of Iraqi official documents, against France and Russia. I think we would have heard of little else. As it is, though, the oil-for-food story has somehow drifted away in a muddle about who's going to run the next bit of the investigation.
Here is a MEMRI translation of a deeply disturbing report from Iran. The Arabic London newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reports that "The Brigades of the Shahids of the Global Islamic Awakening" (snappy name, eh?) has replaced the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Department of Liberation and Revolutionary Movements, which is responsible for Iran's terrorist sponsoring abroad. The newspaper has obtained a tape from a leading teacher, theoretician and strategist with the new organisation (known only as H.A.).
He attacks Khatami and other reformists, and claims that Iran is now ready to strike against Britain and the United States, both with suicide bombers and missiles (it is unclear whether the term "missiles" is intended literally or refers to human suicide attackers).
"After [H.A.] harshly attacked Khatami and the reformists, he said in his speech: 'The West sees us as terrorists, and depicts our strategy as terrorism and repression. Had our youth agreed to Khatami's teachings and interpretations, it would never have fought the arrogance, and would never have defended the holy places – because Khatami speaks always of being conciliatory, of patience, and of rejecting terrorism, while we defend [the line of] toughness and war against the enemies of revolutionary Islam. I take pride in my actions that cause anxiety and fear to the Americans.
"'Haven't the Jews and the Christians achieved their progress by means of toughness and repression? We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization and for the uprooting of the Americans and the English.
"'Our missiles are now ready to strike at their civilization, and as soon as the instructions arrive from Leader ['Ali Khamenei], we will launch our missiles at their cities and installations. Our motto during the war (in Iraq) was: Karbala, we are coming, Jerusalem, we are coming. And because of Khatami's policies and dialogue between the civilizations, we have been compelled to freeze our plan to liberate the Islamic cities. And now we are [again] about to carry out the program.'
Even more ominous and direct:
"In his speech, he added: 'The global infidel front is a front against Allah and the Muslims, and we must make use of everything we have at hand to strike at this front, by means of our suicide operations or by means of our missiles. There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them.'
"In another part of his speech, he emphasized, 'If Israel dares attack the [nuclear] installations at Bushehr, our losses will be very low, because [only] one structure will be destroyed – while we [i.e., Iran] have means of attacking Israel's nuclear facilities and arsenals such that no trace of Israel will remain.'"
This may very well be bluster from a group of old fanatics, or rhetoric to satisfy the more extreme elements, but with Iran, it is very difficult to know. On its face, the above sounds like declaration of war against not only the US and Britain, but the entire west.
Israel have long pursued the policy of assuming that when someone threatens to kill you, they mean it, and respond in kind. What will Israel do if it judges there is a real chance that Iran will preemptively attack it with nukes? We live in a very dangerous world.
If there is just a chance that Iran really intends to use their nuclear capacity if and when it obtains it, can we afford to wait and see? The consequences can be disastrous either way. This shows that it is imperative that the world insists that Iran halt its nuclear programme, and that those who work for regime change from inside Iran should receive all the help they can get.
As I read news, commentaries and blogs, I tend to set aside those articles I intend to blog about for later, or I write a long or short blog article right away.
Not unusually, I run up a big backlog of articles I intended to cover. Then I either have to forget about most of them, or do like this:
ColumnistReggie Rivers in The Denver Post writes a breathtakingly stupid article, arguing that the US military is equivalent to the institution of slavery. Yes, he concedes the US armed forces are voluntary, but the poor soldiers were "fooled" into joining. Oh geez.
Saudi Arabia and Italy agrees that the United Nations should be given "full powers" in Iraq. Hey, nobody expects anything from the Saudis, but what has the Italians been smoking? The UN having "full control" would be an absolute guarantee that Iraq never becomes a sovereign democracy. The US lead coalition at least has a possibility of succeeding.
Speaking of the UN... Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson have written the book "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Matters", to be released soon, and it details massive scandals in UN peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. It details that "soldiers" sent to Cambodia from Bulgaria were really prison and psychiatric ward inmates, and that they drank, raped, crashed cars and generally misbehaved instead of keeping the peace. Oh yeah, drinking:
A favorite drink among the U.N. personnel at the parties was the "Space Shuttle." It was made "by distilling a pound of marijuana over a six-week period with increasingly good quality spirits. It is a work of love, and the final product is an amber-colored liquid that tastes like cognac. We drink it with rounds of Coke."
Perhaps they'll serve that one in the UNSCAM investigation hearings?
Back home in Norway, the opposition has started doing its job in the Mullah Krekar (picture) case: asking how come Krekar and his family could keep their refugee status considering they immediately violated the terms and traveled back to Iraq. The whole idea of a refugee asylum is that people who receive it can't travel back to their home country.
Several politicians now want to know how that could have happened. Signe Øye of the Labour Party told newspaper Aftenposten that the practice discredits the entire asylum system.
"We should find out who's responsible for this," said Per Sandberg of the Progress Progress [sic], criticizing the "wall of silence" that Norway's immigration agency has built up around the Krekar case.
Magnhild Meltveit Kleppa of the Center Party called the Krekar case "an example of how the system should not function."
Even if this is an obvious attempt to get at Erna Solberg and the Conservatives (Høyre), these are questions that should be answered.
If only our esteemed politicians could work together to lift up Mullah Krekar and throw him out of the country for good, I'd be happy.
Now this is one of the stranger stories I've heard. A boy conned another boy that he met in a chatroom to kill him, by pretending to be a number of different persons.
The boy - who is now 15 and can be referred to only as John for legal reasons - persuaded his friend, known as Mark, now 17, to stab him to death in order to pass a fictitious initiation test for the British secret services in a meticulously planned attack one Sunday evening last summer.
John, seriously injured, has now been sentenced for incitement to murder himself, a legal first in Britain.
Howard Carmack, known as the "Buffalo Spammer," received the maximum sentence for 14 counts of identity theft and forgery, a spokesman for New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said.
Carmack sent out 825 million bulk e-mail messages using stolen identities and forged addresses, the court found, and was the first defendant to face charges under the state's new identity-theft statute.
Roger L. Simon calls it the mother of all coverups. It appears nobody is really interested in getting to the bottom of UNSCAM, the UN oil for food palaces scandal. Least of all, strangely enough, the US government and governor Bremer.
John Ashcroft is being criticised for repeating claims from the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades in his recent terrorist warning. Al-Masri, widely believed to be a "one man with a fax machine" jihadist group with no operational capacity, has taken the blame not only for the Madrid terrorist attacks, but also for accidents like last year's North America blackout, a brief power outage in London and the bad lighting on the Paris Hilton video (well, scratch the last one).
Apparently, the FBI is taking the brigades seriously, and that worries some terrorism experts.
American Shias urge coalition to stand firm in Iraq
Around 5,000 US and Canadian Shia Muslims are right now gathering for their second annual convention in Washington DC, organised by the Universal Muslim Association of America (UMAA). However, since the majority of attendants are firm supporters of the coalition's effort in Iraq, we should not expect much media coverage, even as the organisers request media presence to help address misconceptions about Shiites.
They have many concerns, based on what relatives and friends in Iraq tell them, one of their primary ones being that extremist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is crushed.
"Our people view Moktada al-Sadr as a dangerous renegade and adventurer, who threatens the safety of every Shia Muslim in Iraq," Jafri said. "We do not want the Coalition forces to inflict harm on the holy sites in Najaf or Karbala, but we want al-Sadr firmly defeated. The best action would be to support the Iraqi Shias in combating him. Give them the power and they will get rid of the problem."
The second concern is to make sure that the coalition does not give up.
Jafri said Iraqi Shias are "terrified that if the U.S. in Iraq leaves, the Wahhabis concentrated in Falluja and Tikrit will begin a wholesale genocide of Shias, repeating the earlier actions of the Saddam regime."
One curious fact: last year's Shia convention had Paul Wolfowitz as a speaker, and he won multiple standing ovations from the audience.
The Iraqi Governing Council nominated one of its own members, Iyad Allawi, as prime minister of the Iraqi interim government. The White House supported him, and UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi also gave him the nod. Allawi is a Shiite, a UK trained neurologist, a military officer who turned against Saddam in the 80s and were forced into exile, and he has strong ties with US intelligence.
The United Nations acknowledged the timing of the council's announcement was a surprise, but said Brahimi would work with Allawi on the makeup of the government, due to be announced in the coming days.
Allawi had been "high on (Brahimi's) list" of possible premiers," spokesman Fred Eckhard said at U.N. headquarters in New York. The announcement "is not how we expected it to happen ... but the Iraqis seem to agree on this candidate."
The press is understandably playing up the differences between the UN and the US over this choice. So far he appears to be the Iraqis' choice, not the US government's. A person with strong security background appears to be preferrable to deal with the situation in Iraq right now.
Update:Glenn just pointed out an interesting debate: Mickey Kaus thinks that Brahimi picked Allawi because his lack of grassroots support in Iraq ensures he will not be elected. But the Beeb says (as do others) that Brahimi only grudgingly accepted the choice because the IGC was united behind him.
Initially a UN spokesman in the region said Mr Brahimi welcomed the choice.
But later in New York, chief UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said: "Mr Brahimi respects the decision and is prepared to work with this person on the selection of the other posts in this interim government".
Mr Eckhard insisted there was no discrepancy between the two statements - but he conceded that the decision had not been announced in the way expected.
Still, nobody is suggesting that Allawi is a bad choice, so far.
Polly Toynbee's Guardian article is far and away the most stupid I've seen on the topic of obesity and diet, and saying that is saying a lot indeed.
The argument is that social inequality creates obesity. Obviously, it is not being poor, because richer countries have more of an obesity problem than the poor ones. Yet, in rich countries, the poor are more often obese than the rich. Ergo, Polly quips, it is inequality that causes obesity. When a poor guy sees a rich person drive past in his Mercedes Benz, he gets so depressed that he supersizes his Big Mac.
And, like all nonsense arguments that are extremely popular in Europe, 1) it puts Americans in a bad light; and 2) there is statistics to back it up. And if not real statistics, at least Polly can parrot back some popular misconceptions.
The inequality/obesity link is mirrored internationally. America has by far the most unequal society and by far the fattest. Britain and Australia come next. Europe is better and the Scandinavian countries best of all. No doubt there are also social policy reasons for this: the best social democracies pick up family problems earliest and offer most support, putting people back on their feet, preventing social exclusion. But the narrower the status and income gap between high and low, the narrower the waistbands.
Previously, some right wing nut used Scandinavia as a hellish example on how gay marriage allegedly destroys the institution. Now, suddenly, Scandinavia is thin & fit socialist heaven, proving the marxist truth about obesity.
But, sorry, no go. Norwegian men are actually the fattest in Europe (ahem, this blogger excepted).
As Thomas Huxley said, "The great tragedy of science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." But in leftist journalism, facts are rarely allowed to disturb a politically correct theory.
A simple sanity check should be sufficient to discard the idea that the cause of obesity is social unequality. People are much less equal in developing countries than in the west.
Update: The Daily Ablution has a serious, comprehensive fisking and debunking of the column, with statistics and even a graph to demonstrate how far out to (diet) lunch Polly Toynbee is. Thanks to Joseph for link.
Back home in Norway, the opposition has started doing its job in the Mullah Krekar (picture) case: asking how come Krekar and his family could keep 
