Selves and Others

Endpiece

Forget the figures. The tally of seats won and councils lost can be interpreted to mean anything from "no Tory breakthrough" (John Reid) to "Blair must go" (Clare Short). (...) [page 18 | Comment]

Last autumn I visited a Sufi shrine just outside Peshawar in the North West Frontier province of Pakistan. Rahman Baba was a 17th-century mystic poet, and his tomb has for centuries been a place where musicians and poets have gathered. A friend who lived nearby in the 1980s advised me to go on a Thursday night when great crowds of Pathans would sing mystical love songs to their saint by the light of the moon. (...) [page 18 | Comment]

Behind the closed doors of the Hollywood men’s club, there is a problem. How to market a movie about a group of husbands who under the guise of the Stepford Men’s Club conspire to murder their wives and rebuild them as compliant domestic sex robots, and at the same time convince a modern audience that the movie is not really about the dreaded F word (feminism) and is deeply relevant to our times? The solution they have come up with is a shrewd deployment of the film’s biggest assets: its female stars. (...) [page 17 | Comment]

Over there, they bury one great communicator and talk reverently of his unquenchable optimism. Over here, we bury (or bruise with some brutal kicking) our own wonderfully fluent communicator, glowering balefully at his targets and touted achievements. Optimism? Forget it. Labour, like the Tories, takes a Euro-pounding. Only the bleakest, sourest pessimism will do. (...) [page 17 | Comment]

Hell hath no fury like an American Democrat scorned. Given the pious mendacity of the current administration, anger is currently the Democrats’ regular emotion of choice. Just the mention of defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, attorney general John Ashcroft or vice-president Dick Cheney will set diatribes in motion. But if you really want to see them in a rage wait until the Bushwhacking stops and someone admits that they voted for Ralph Nader, the anti-corporate crusader, in the 2000 presidential elections. (...) [page 17 | Comment]

America is "massively vulnerable" to another big terrorist attack because of President George Bush’s insistence on diverting resources from internal security to the war in Iraq, Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism chief has said. (...)

From the refugee camp of Sunkaer Laran, the mountains of East Timor are so close you can almost touch them. It is so close, and yet so far, for people gazing towards the border from their scruffy plywood huts in Indonesian West Timor. (...)

in Baghdad

A suicide car bomber trying to attack an American base killed 12 Iraqis yesterday and an assassin shot dead a senior education ministry official.

The suicide attack, the 15th so far this month, was aimed at the US army’s Camp Cuervo in Baghdad, but was intercepted by Iraqi police. They had seen a car veer off the main highway at 9.15 am and drive the wrong way down the road. When two patrol cars tried to stop the vehicle it blew up, killing four policemen and eight civilians. (...)

An independent inquiry is to be held into Gulf War syndrome, the range of unexplained illnesses suffered by soldiers who served in the conflict 14 years ago. (...)

From Paris to Prague, Europe’s governments suffered ritual humiliation at the polls last night, as protest votes were cast in their millions, mainly for with Eurosceptics and fringe parties. (...)

in Belgrade

For the fourth time in less than two years, Serbs voted in presidential elections yesterday, to choose between the isolation of their past and a thorny road towards the future, Europe and democracy. (...)

in Paris

President Jacques Chirac’s party suffered a humiliating rout in the European elections, scoring only 16.8 per cent of the vote in the lowest-ever turnout in a nationwide election in France. (...)

in Rome

He has conducted a campaign after his own character: innovative, abrasive and domineering. But when Silvio Berlusconi harangued reporters outside his local polling station after voting in Milan on Saturday, his adversaries hit the roof. (...)

An 18-year-old girl in the Sudanese region of Darfur had a knife stuck into her vagina by an assailant who said, while gloating: "You get this because you are black." Militiamen arrived at a village mosque in the same region and defecated on Korans before executing the imam and his muezzin. More than 30,000 civilians have been murdered in the past year. A million have been forced to flee into neighbouring countries in what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.

All the victims are Muslims. Yet there are no furious e-mails circulating to ignite outrage, no campaigns, no demonstrations, no condemnations from the Muslim Council of Britain, The Muslim Association, The Muslim News or Lady Uddin, who has been so very busy this week sounding off about Islamaphobia. The Arab League is predictably silent, proving yet again its own worthlessness.

The reason? Because these perpetrators are not wicked Jews, or power crazed Christians, or Hindu fanatics or Islamaphobic western secularists, but Arab Muslims.

The brutes are members of Janjaweed - heavies encouraged and allegedly armed by the morally repugnant Sudanese government. These evil, land-grabbing allies want to eradicate or expel settled African Sudanese farmers and their families. It is true that the conflict is complicated by other internecine troubles. But this is ethnic cleansing by Muslims of Muslims. If human rights are universal, and they are, this tragedy should be attracting as much censure as the devastation in the occupied lands of Palestine. Instead a reprehensible silence reverberates through the mosques and Muslim communities. It seems we can only get charged up when we can blame non-Muslims for our many ills.

Policies promoted by the American, British and Israeli governments are deeply injurious to Muslims world wide. It is indisputable that blameless Muslims face increasing prejudice at work, on the streets, in schools and when they travel. A close friend of mine, now at Cambridge, faces daily abuse as a "Paki" because she wears shalwar kameez. Taxi drivers throw money back at her and kids hound her as she walks in London. She has been physically attacked too. This is new, she says. Never before has she faced such constant harassment. But discrimination is only one of the multiple problems faced by decent Muslims. Sexism, oppression from bad governance and corrupt leadership is as destructive. Truth to tell, even counting the Iraq war and Palestine, more Muslims today are demeaned and broken by other Muslims than by non-Muslims.

Recently the beautiful Saudi television presenter Rania al-Baz had her face shattered by her husband because she answered the phone without seeking his permission. She had 13 fractures and needed umpteen operations to rebuild her face. She came forward to talk about the circumscribed lives of her countrywomen and the unimaginable levels of domestic violence. Similar domestic violence destroys lives in the West, but in many Muslim states the law gives women no protection and defines females as inferior beings. I have seen evidence of brutality against British Muslim girls and women, evidence which is now well hidden, thanks to the epidemic of total veiling that is now spreading across the UK. Nowhere in the Koran does it say that you cannot show your face and hands to the world. It beggars belief that educated Muslim women are now choosing this shroud to unthinkingly assert their "freedom". Some of them articulated these ideas on Panorama last night.

I want to weep for them and their sisters who have no such choice, who are beaten, even killed if they transgress these cruel sartorial rules.

Violence, it seems, comes easy to Islamic authoritarian men. No wonder they get such good business from the US which needs to outsource torture in this war against terror. I recently met a well-educated, but obviously heartbroken, Iranian cab driver whose fiancée, three months pregnant, was stoned to death (hellfire would be too good for these monstrous believers).

Dozens of Iranian women have been stoned to death often by frightened prison inmates and mullahs enjoying some good sport. The state has got heavy again with dissenters held and tormented in secret detention centres. In Egypt, Tunisia, Afghanistan, state terror is an embedded form of statecraft. In Pakistan, human rights activists complain bitterly about the detention of parliamentarians and the hounding of journalists. And in the UK - as in Palestine, Jordan and elsewhere - honour killings are rife, sanctioned by the sickening piety of leaders.

Racism promoted by Muslims against non-Muslims is also getting worse in all territories with Muslim majorities. Indian, Pakistani and Filipino workers in the Gulf states are treated like dirt, abused racially and denied any autonomy.

Christians have to worship in secret in many Islamic countries as do other persecuted minorities such as the Bahais and Ahmedis (a Muslim sect hated by mainstream Sunnis).

Britain’s biggest Muslim cultural centre was opened in London last week. Would such a centre for minority faiths be allowed to be built in any of the Muslim countries today?

How ashamed I feel that hundreds of thousands of Muslims worldwide went apoplectic over the headscarf ban in France but have nothing at all to say about Muslims committing appalling acts and injustices. No, it is not understandable. No there is no excuse. Just because the power politics of the world leave many Muslims furious (and I feel that fury too) doesn’t mean they can then do as they damn well please. And please don’t throw the book at me. I am sick of Muslim warriors who argue that all those committing terrible crimes against humanity are not following the true path of Islam. They take refuge in the ideals of the faith so they don’t have to face the ugly realities. It is not what Islam says but what Muslims do that should matter.

This scam has run its course. There are some Muslims who have started to reject orders which seem to them hypocritical and wrong. They still castigate the West for its greed and manipulations which have left Muslim states in crisis but are equally hard on Muslim regimes and groups for serious human rights failures within families, communities and countries. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui of the Muslim Parliament is one example, as is the wise imam Dr Abduljalil Sajid of the Muslim Council for Religious and Racial Harmony. Such individuals who deserve our respect are instead threatened by Muslim fanatics.

They carry on regardless. Imam Sajid has edited a reassuring new booklet - Why Terror?, published by Grosvenor Books, which contains reflections by 19 thoughtful Muslims worldwide. One of them, Hisham Shihab, used to be an extremist Lebanese militiaman trained to kill Christians. Today, a reformed man, he is a lecturer and journalist who writes: "We need to alleviate the miserable economic conditions most Muslims live in. But that by itself will not answer terrorism. The lack of democracy and human rights in Muslim societies creates a vacuum of leadership that is often filled by extremist groups. We must look to our own wrongs."

Amen to that I say.

Burlington, VT, Jun. 14 (UPI) — You know the joke: How can you tell when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving. It’s cynical, I know, but it works because all too often it’s true.

And why do leaders so often choose "misstatements" over candor?

A pithy answer was provided Jack Nicholson in that signature moment at the end of "A Few Good Men." Jack glares at Tom Cruise and snarls, "You can’t handle the truth." It’s a basic operating principle for many public officials: People are poorly equipped to deal with harsh realities, so tell them what they want to hear. (...)

So desperate are Bush Republicans to kill Michael Moore’s latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11, they have hired a public relations firm to set up a web site attacking Moore. The site, MoveAmericaForward.com, claims to be "non-partisan," but a glance at the "About" page of the site reveals the director and staff of Move America Forward are all diehard Republicans, anti-tax activists, and former legislative staffers. The PR firm is Russo Marsh & Rogers. (...)