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11. oktober 2006
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A small plane has crashed into a New York City skyscraper.
A small plane crashed into an Upper East Side high-rise Wednesday, shooting flames out the windows, raining debris on the sidewalks below and rattling New Yorkers' nerves exactly one month after the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. Police confirmed 2 people are dead.
Christine Monaco, a New York spokeswoman for FBI, said there was no indication of terrorism, but that officials "have been sent to the scene as a routine." FAA spokesman Jim Peters said all three New York City-area airports were operating normally.
Too early for details about the cause of the crash. I can understand that this incident has rattled people seriously. A massive security and rescue operation is underway, and a fire is still raging in some apartments of the building.
Update: Reports say baseball player Cory Lidle from the New York Yankees owned the plane and probably was flying it at the time. Preliminary statements say that four people are dead, including Lidle and one other person on the plane.
PS: Yes, the picture above says "helicopter". That was based on an early false report.
Update 2: In fact, it appears only two people, Lidle and his flying instructor died in the accident. Amazing when you see the pictures.
Interesting fact:
The plane was owned by Lidle, whose passport was found at the scene of the crash, police officials said.
Famously, on 9/11-01, the passport of hijacker Atta was found on the scene, which conspiracy theorists reject as impossible. Surely, this is a less violent event, but showing that those things happen: where hard objects are destroyed, paper items can easily fly away.
Then again, I bet we'll hear conspiracy theories about this tragedy, too. Maybe Bush did it to, eh, remind people about terrorism and to detract attention from the "page" scandal? Yeah, that must be it. Crafty guy, that president.
11:21:57 PM 
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If your impression of European opinion comes from our press, our talking heads and our politicians, you will be grossly mislead about public sentiment on many issues. The New York Times has an interesting article on how worries about Islam and its ability to adapt to democratic states is being seriously questioned, and no longer are these worries the domain only of the populist and far right.
Many experts note that there is a deep and troubled history between Islam and Europe, with the Crusaders and the Ottoman Empire jostling each other for centuries and bloodily defining the boundaries of Christianity and Islam. A sense of guilt over Europe’s colonial past and then World War II, when intolerance exploded into mass murder, allowed a large migration to occur without any uncomfortable debates over the real differences between migrant and host.
Then the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jolted Europe into new awareness and worry.
The subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, and the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Moroccan stand as examples of the extreme. But many Europeans — even those who generally support immigration — have begun talking more bluntly about cultural differences, specifically about Muslims’ deep religious beliefs and social values, which are far more conservative than those of most Europeans on issues like women’s rights and homosexuality.
“A lot of people, progressive ones — we are not talking about nationalists or the extreme right — are saying, ‘Now we have this religion, it plays a role and it challenges our assumptions about what we learned in the 60’s and 70’s,’ ” said Joost Lagendik, a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the Green Left Party, who is active on Muslim issues.
“So there is this fear,” he said, “that we are being transported back in a time machine where we have to explain to our immigrants that there is equality between men and women, and gays should be treated properly. Now there is the idea we have to do it again.”
Now Europeans are discussing the limits of tolerance, the right with increasing stridency and the left with trepidation.
There is an underlying assumption in these arguments, which has long clouded the debate and prevented it from being held in a serious way: that the "real" issue is racism, not legitimate concerns about Islamic beliefs and practices. There is also an unstated premise in the above remarks that the political right has no legitimacy on these issues; only when the left and center complains it is time to wake up.
Be that as it may, Islam is not a race. Like your political ideology, your religion has no right to not be insulted, ridiculed and criticised.
Those who argue that so-called "Islamophobia" (is there a "Christianophobia"?) is really a form of racism are wrong, and they have the burden of evidence if they want to argue the underlying issue is the color of people's skin as opposed to their religiously motivated practices. There has been conflicts with for example South American and Vietnamese immigrants in Europe, often fueled by racism. However, these issues have mostly been muted, and Islam in Europe has become the big issue. Criticism of Christianity in secular Europe, as I have mentioned before, has long been pervasive, strong and not rarely crude and disrespectful. An artwork, a movie or a book mocking Jesus gets wide acclaim among the cultural elites. Anyone trying the same thing with Mohammad better prepare themselves for living with bodyguards at a secret address for the rest of their lives. Compared to Christianity, Islam is by far the greater threat to gay rights, women's reproductive rights and female equality, just to mention the most obvious. Christians like Pat Buchanan or Pope Benedict are considered religious conservatives and even extremists, but were they having corresponding views within Islam, they would have been considered moderate, even liberal.
If this clear and obvious conflict between Islam and European secular culture is not handled, and resolved to some sensible degree, if the political classes ignore it, the situation can quickly become nasty. Conflict spawns extremism, it will radicalise and polarize the population, and in a worst case scenario we could get a similar situation to the breakup of Yugoslavia, except that the conflict will not be between regions, but between intermingled patchworks of population groups. People will, if the responsible parties don't represent their legitimate concerns, vote irresponsible, extreme and probably genuinely racist people into power. At that point, there will be no going back to dialogue, it will be presented as a reenactment of the reconquista, and Europeans may go along with a violent purge that will become another shameful chapter in European history. The time to find a workable solution is now. Give it a few decades of boiling discontent, and this will begin to look very ugly.
6:08:53 PM
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Senator John McCain is guest-blogging at Captain's Quarters, encouraging tough sanctions against North Korea.
2:01:12 PM
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The BBC repeats an old, false media chestnut:
The current US administration has said Syria is a member of what it has called an axis of evil.
The 'axis of evil' speech referred specifically only to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and never mentioned Syria. Arguably, with Iraq out of the picture, one could say that Syria took the place to fill the axis' three-member quota. This, however, has not been explicitly argued by the Bush administration.
4:30:58 AM
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A small group of demonstrators, estimated at around 200, protested recent film footage shown on Danish television in front of Denmark's embassy in Tehran. They threw stones and firebombs at the building, but a huge police presence assured they were not able to set the embassy on fire. The wall, however, can be seen burning on the above picture.
Denmark's state TV aired footage on Friday of a number of members of the youth wing of the anti-immigrant Danish People's Party (DPP) drawing cartoons in August mocking the Prophet. Iran condemned the broadcast.
Reuters witnesses said protesters hurled stones and petrol bombs into the embassy compound. The crowd chanted "Down with Zionists" and "God praise the party of God".
Riot police guarded the embassy and two fire trucks stood nearby. Firefighters extinguished a tire which was set alight next to the embassy compound wall, the witnesses said.
Well, what is there to say that isn't already said? The "cartoons" drawn by the drunk DPP youths at a closed (they thought) arrangement were about as insulting as they could make it. How these politicians-in-making behaved could surely be argued to have an interest for the Danish public, so it's not surprising that Danish TV2 ran it. Predictably, the usual suspects in the Islamic world uses it for what it's worth, but it is interesting that even in Tehran, only around 200 people could be bothered to turn up.
Tehran's parliament urged with a large majority the government to cut Iran's trade relations to Denmark.
This thing about democratic governments not having any control of the media, even state-owned media, is probably so foreign to people under autocratic rule it's not even worth bothering to try to explain it.
Link: Mohammed cartoon mayhem.
1:03:03 AM
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China's angry reaction to North Korea's announcement of a nuclear test was not an act. First the missile test and now the (supposed) nuclear test demonstrates for all the world that North Korea's eccentric leader feels he can do whatever he damn well pleases, ignoring the strong warnings from his big neighbour and de facto lifeline. China has lost face internationally, and it is also deeply concerned with escalating tensions at its doorstep.
So what precisely can China do? One would be tempted to believe that as the major food and energy supplier to the impoverished communist state, China has a lot of leverage. And, in a sense it has. But the powerful options China possesses places it in a difficult position. China wants stability in its neighbourhood, not drama. If China uses its powerful leverage, there is a possibility that North Korea's regime may collapse. In that case, it is very possible that millions of starving, desperate Koreans will come rushing across the border to the north. And the destruction and collapse of a closed Stalinist state where the armed forces have consumed pretty much all resources is not likely to be a pretty spectacle. Regimes in desperate situations have done crazy things before, and if a possibly nuclear-armed state gets desperate, things could really get out of hand. This is the fear shared by both South Korea and China.
I also suspect China is not too eager to play a game that would benefit the US and the Bush administration. If China applies pressure and manages to force it to abandon its nuclear programmes and return to actual negotiations (not to mention if it actually results in a "controlled collapse" of North Korea), it will be seen as more an American victory than a Chinese one. It will be a vindication of Bush's refusal to engage NK in two-party talks. China may have to do just that, seeing as it has lost control of its crazy neighbour, but it will not like it.
China is indeed signalling it will go with tough sanctions against North Korea now. How tough remains to be seen.
Doing nothing will also be an unacceptable choice for China. First, it will reward bad behaviour and set a bad precedent, and second, it will force Kim Jong Il to make another provocation to play his bad hand in the best possible way. His goal, after all, is one-on-one talks and US security guarantees, and it will be a cold day in hell before Bush gives in to such blatant provocation. With the nuclear test card already played out, it is not precisely clear how NK will manage to take this to a game of chicken with even higher stakes. The Chinese leaders are unlikely to sit back to find out precisely where that would take the region.
12:14:42 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.11.2006; 20:04:04.
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