Back Towards The Locus

[The latest UNAMI report] shows that gender-based violence remains one of the key unaddressed problems throughout Iraq. Numerous murders of women under the guise of so-called “honour killings” are still being recorded as suicides, the report shows, while in the Northern Region of Kurdistan the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) remains a tolerated practice.

The report(pdf) makes for horrifying reading.

UNAMI has reported 139 cases of gender based violence in the last six months of 2008…Out of the total number, 77 women were seriously burned, 26 were victims of murder or attempted murder and 25 were cases of questionable suicide.

…

In cases reported to UNAMI, women have been attacked, wounded and left to die and the death characterised as “accidental” by family members. For example, in the village of Pangeen (Qushtapa sub-district), 16-year-old Kanyaw Maghdid and her sister 22-year-old Lafaw were shot by their father on 23 September. Lafaw told police that her father shot his daughters to “protect their honour” when he found out about the relationship one was having with a boy. Kanyaw died on the spot while Lafaw was admitted to a hospital but later died. At the writing of this report, an investigation has been open but no arrest made yet.

As the Guardian reported last November, things are just as bad in southern Iraq…

Authorities in the southern Iraqi city of Basra have admitted they are powerless to prevent ‘honour killings’ in the city following a 70 per cent increase in religious murders during the past year.

There has been no improvement in conviction rates for these killings. So far this year, 81 women in the city have been murdered for allegedly bringing shame on their families. Only five people have been convicted.

H/t – Rumbold

“American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.”

The New York Times cheerily fails to define “cut off“; what it’ll mean for the farmer’s livelihoods, or, indeed, their lives. “Through extortion and taxation,” the article claims, “The Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade“. Scary, yes, but then the same trade is worth around $1bn(pdf) to farmers. Even without considering the whole running-into-their-villages-in-a-hail-of-hot-death thing, that’ll be acutely difficult to replace.

I suspect that the operation will largely concentrate on the Helmand Province, where farmers produce an intimidating 103,590 hectares of opium(pdf) a year (that’s around one in every fifty-seven, and two thirds of Afghanistan’s annual harvest). Its citizens have already endured Taliban oppression and flighty US missile attacks, and now they’ll have soldiers storming into heavily populated areas to “cut off” crops and, presumably, make it even more difficult to find a new trade. But, then, this isn’t about them. This is about the “crucible of terror“, or whatever they think is most poetic to call it nowadays…

“Many of the new American soldiers will fan out along southern Afghanistan’s largely unguarded 550-mile-long border with Pakistan. Among them will be soldiers deployed in the Stryker, a relatively quick, nimble armored vehicle that can roam across the vast areas that span the frontier.”

Leo McKinstry, Daily Express…

“Even asylum seekers, no matter how fraudulent their cases, are given at least £42 cash-in-hand every week, plus free housing,education, nHS treatment and all their utility bills paid.

As  Mayor Bouchart pointed out, for African migrants this repre- sents unparalleled wealth,  given that the average annual salary in somewhere like Eritrea is just £140.”

Jimmy Young, four days later in the Daily Express…

“Asylum seekers coming to Britain can claim benefits as soon as their claim is lodged. This means that single asylum seekers can receive up to £42.16 a week and married couples up to £66.13 a week almost immediately. In addition to the cash support they can claim free NHS care, free dental and eye care, free housing and free education for their children.

Mme Bouchart points out that if you compare the extravagance of those benefits with the fact that the average Eritrean earns around £135 a year it is obvious why so many people are desperate to get to Britain.”

Here’s part one of seven…

…and here’s Professor Philippe Sands QC, author of the invaluable Torture Team, on the same theme…

This, too, is glorious…

H/t – James

Via Punkscience, this is ludicrously brilliant…

Here’s Harry Phibbs, sounding like an arse…

The Left attacks the ‘Jewish lobby’ for seeking to sustain a ‘Zionist conspiracy.’

Here’s how he could write the same sentence without sounding like an arse…

Some figures on [t]he Left criticise an ‘Israel lobby‘ for their alleged undue influence in promoting Israel’s interests.

The Harry Phibbs De-Arser, for all your Phibbs de-arsing needs! We install specifiers, remove generalisations and absolutely do away with uncited quotes and appeals to ridicule. Invaluable for those that don’t want to smash skull and screen in abject frustration.

ORIGINAL DOWNING ST SMEARS VICTIM
RETURNS TO HAUNT NEW LABOUR

Thatcher Room
Portcullis House
Tuesday 28 April 1.45pm
Formal Evidence Session on UK Complicity in Torture
Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights
Witness: Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan
(currently Rector of the University of Dundee).

In 2004, Craig Murray told us that:

- The British Government was complicit in the most vicious forms of torture
- He had been the victim of a lurid smear campaign initiated by New Labour
- The government was lying about all this

In 2004, much of the public and media was not willing to accept that the government would cooperate with torture or with false allegations against an innocent man. Many still had trust in the basic honesty and decency of government.

The evidence that Craig Murray was telling the truth about torture has now become overwhelming, including from the case of Binyam Mohammed. The UK “benefited” continually from intelligence passed on from the CIA waterboarding programme and from torture in countries including Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Egypt.

Craig Murray suffered the most high profile sacking of any British Ambassador for a century. But in 2005 the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee refused to hear him in evidence, despite allowing Jack Straw to appear and attack him.

Astonishingly, this is the first time Craig Murray will ever have been allowed to give formal evidence in the UK on his grave allegations, and be questioned on the truth of his testimony.

As the Scotland Yard investigation proceeds into MI5 and MI6 collusion in 16 cases of torture, Craig Murray will argue that it is not the security service operatives, but the Ministers who set the policy – and specifically Jack Straw – who should be facing criminal charges.

Contact: Craig Murray on 07979 691085 or craigmurray@mail.ru
Transcript of Craig Murray’s formal evidence statement is at http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/trying_again_my.html

While I agree with Terry Eagleton that avowedly liberal arguments have been co-opted in the services of imperialism, his view of liberalism itself seems a little muddled…

“Liberalism holds that the state should tolerate any opinion that does not seek to undermine that very tolerance. It is an ironic kind of politics.”

This is false; liberalism generally holds that the state should tolerate any opinion. One could, in most conceptions of a liberal society, extol the virtues of tyranny, passionately denounce freedom of speech or defend one’s right to punch someone in the face. Quoth Mill in On Liberty…

“…there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.”

It’s only when you actively attempt to restrict someone’s speech, or genuinely belt somebody on the noggin, that it’s considered legitimate for the state to restrain your actions.

Some could invoke the offense principle, but, as well as demanding a near-universal reaction to an act, and a significant reaction at that, it necessitates that experiencing the act is just about inescapable. Thus, it’s aimed more at people who’d shit in public than loudly castigate *hem hem* western values.