Global

Flegs and Anthems

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Originally posted on Slugger O’Toole…

On The RoadI was interested to note the Union Flag carefully positioned immediately beside Belfast PUP Councillor Julie-Anne Corr Johnson for her interview with BBC NI’s The Viewrecently. “On one hand they tell us the British identity of Northern Ireland citizens is under threat”, she thundered, “whilst at the same time denying British citizens like me access to British laws and British rights.” The openly lesbian Corr Johnson was objecting to the DUP campaign for a ‘religious opt-out’ to equality laws for same-sex couples.

It was interesting, because in Northern Ireland flags aren’t usually identified as symbols of equality or human rights. In particular, those most likely to consider the Union Flag an important political symbol have traditionally been those in Northern Ireland least likely to support gay rights; on gay pride marches, neither Union Flags nor Tricolours are to be seen at all. In that context, Corr Johnson’s positioning of herself with the flag was an interesting and clever subversion of the accepted political order. I’m a Unionist and a Loyalist too, Corr Johnson was saying, and actually people like me are the ones committed to actual British values, not the DUP and TUV.

That sort of cultural positioning and visual imagery is common in the United States, where the flag and Constitution seem to outsiders almost to be objects of worship. Over there, claiming a share in the flag is now a core strategy of not just LGBT activists, but minority activists in general. Was it always thus?

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Sexual and Religious Freedoms: the First Casualties of Russian Crimea?

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The excellent Forum 18 organisation, which supports freedom of religious belief and disbelief in Europe and Asia, reports a recent wave of harrasment of and raids on premises owned by Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses in what is now Russian-controlled Crimea. Officials claim they are merely searching for ‘extremist’ literature and the region’s Prime Minister has … Read more

Is Paddy Ashdown right? Is it time for an end to Sykes-Picot?

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ISIS blows up a border post on the Syria-Iraq border. From the ISIS propaganda video 'The End of Sykes-Picot'.
ISIS blows up a border post on the Syria-Iraq border. From the ISIS propaganda video The End of Sykes-Picot.

Paddy Ashdown had an unusually courageous article in the Guardian on Thursday calling for the West to accept that the 1920s-era boundaries of Middle Eastern countries should be redrawn. Courageous doesn’t mean sensible. How does his argument stack up?

“This is the start of a long conflict which could cross the entire Muslim world”, says The Guardian subheader, correctly, “The west’s strategy must accept the end of the old imperial borders.”
 

There’s much that’s sensible here, including the admission that the West neither has the men nor the money to think about remaking the Middle East through force of arms, even if that were possible. So Paddy is essentially calling for Iraq to be allowed to fall apart, for Southern Iraq to be allowed to fall into Tehran’s sphere of influence, for the West to arm the Kurds and for an end to Sykes-Picot.

This is might well happen whether or not “the West”, with its vaunted idea of its capacity to shape events, likes it. Iraq, as an entity, is currently in the last chance saloon. We should not forget that collapsing countries always leave some mess behind. In this case, it will be particularly bad as there is no agreement as to what the boundaries between the various successor entities might be. On off fighting over legitimate ownership of Kirkuk, for example, could last for generations in that context. In fact, I think Paddy knows this so maybe he’s just calling for us to accept that the Syrian Civil War is turning into the War of Syro-Iraqi Succession?

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Nobody loves themselves a conspiracy theory anywhere in the world like they love themselves one in the Middle East

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The latest conspiracy theory doing the rounds in the Middle East: ISIS is a front established by the USA to legitimise a reinvasion of Iraq, and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is actually a Jewish actor called Shimon Eliot. (Of course the actor was Jewish.) Here’s a sample from the Turkish twittersphere:

Of course, conspiracy theories are hardly unique to the Middle East, and some of the commenters in the comments zone on the Guardian website are hardly less convinced that ISIS is a convenient excuse for the Americans to reinvade Iraq: to be honest Fisk isn’t far off that sort of terrain this week.

But there is something spectacular about the sheer scale of the conspiracies that ordinary people in the region imagine are confected in the world. Provincial Turkey in the weeks after 9/11 was fascinating. Of course, the educated provincial secular élite scoffed at the theories and it was generally a fascinating time to hang out with them and talk about the world. But among the ordinary Mehmets on the Yenişehir omnibus, an awful lot happily believed that “Amerika kendini yaptı“ (America did it itself) and “Hiç Yahudi o sabah işe gitmiş“ (they say none of the Jews went to work that morning). Not all of them believed that sort of tripe, by any matter of means, but a lot.

Hussein Ibish has a brilliant piece, Baghdadi Denial Syndrome, on the atonishing unwillingness among Sunnis, across ethnic and national lines, to believe that ISIS can’t possibly be a real phenomenon. Many refuse to believe that Sunni Muslims could be responsible for the sort of maiming/crucifying/baby-starving antics that ISIS gets up to. In a way, that’s sort of sweet: it’s a counter to the Daily Mail coverage that mutters behind it’s hand, you know, they’re all secretly a bit like Abu Hamza. But it’s still nuts, and damagingly, self-righteously, nuts in that it transfers the blame for all problems to other people like Westerners, Jews and Shi’ites sets Sunni Islam on a non-tenable moral pedestal in the process.

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Feast of the Transfiguration: Thousands Face Death on the Mountain

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Mountains are somewhere apart from the mainstream of the world. They are often gorgeous, above the general fray of life, intensitying the beauty and hiding the ugly side of reality on the ground in the vistas they command. Approached wrongly, or in difficult conditions, they can be places of death.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, when Christians remember the pilgrimage of Christ with Peter, James and John – up an unknown mountain, but probably Hermon or Tabor. The prophets Elijah and Moses appear to them, and Christ’s face and clothes are transformed, and begin to radiate light. God the Father’s disembodied voice pronounces Christ as his son, recapitulating his baptism in the Jordan, and the episode is often held to mark a turning point in Christ’s journey, where it begins to run towards its culmination in Jerusalem.

The mountains of Galilee, on one of which the incident took place, sit at one end of an arc from the mountains of Kurdistan. On a straight line, about 500 miles of flat Syrian desert separate them, desert which for three years, since the start of the Syrian Civil War, been one of the most violent battlefields on the planet.

Two months ago, Syria’s torment blew back across the border into Iraq with a vengeance. The self-styled “Islamic State” has proclaimed itself the resurrection of Sunni Islam’s Caliphate, in abeyance since the collapse of the Ottoman dynasty 90 years ago. In the past few weeks, ISIS has made a serious advance from the Sunni heartlands of West-Central Iraq into the ethnic and religious kaleidoscope of the Far North.

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Iraqi Christians in Parliament Square

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I attended the national demonstration on the persecution of Iraqi Christians in Parliament Square, London on Saturday 26 July. There was a large turnout of Iraqi and other Middle Eastern Christians, a healthy and welcome presence of Iraqi Muslims, a disappointingly small number of British Christians who looked like their ancestry was from these islands … Read more

Prisoners of Conscience on St John the Baptist’s Day

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gxMq7s0ELE

I always had a good appetite as a child, getting stuck into seconds and more whenever I had the chance. My mother, observing this, would often remark, “Son, you’d eat the head of John the Baptist.”

John the Baptist’s messy end is one of the best known of Bible stories. Like most Gospel stories, it is a short narrative and doesn’t go in for detailed descriptions of personalities and motives. As so often, much of the popular memory of the story doesn’t come from Scripture at all.

Oscar Wilde’s grotesquely brilliant play Salomé, later turned into the first true 20th Century opera by Richard Strauss and then into a Holywood epic by Columbia Pictures, has added much to the popular perception of John the Baptist’s death, even among those who have never seen any. Scripture does not record the nymphomaniac, borderline necrophiliac, Salomé of Wilde, Strauss, and Rita Heyworth, but instead a girl very much under the thumb of a ruthless mother with a personal grudge against John because of his uncompromising sexual moralism.

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The Good Samaritan Visits North Belfast

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And, behold, a certain pastor stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down the Whitewell Road, from Bellevue to Greencastle, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

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Russia, China, Crimea, Xinjiang and Putin’s Risky Gambit

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Photo credit – www.kremlin.ru under Creative Commons licence.

Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole with a few amendments of no particular significance to improve the readability…

A friend on Facebook led me to this Ambrose Evans-Pritchard article in the Telegraph on the possible impact of Putin’s Crimea gambit on Sino-Russian relations. Pritchard has his own prejudices, of course, and the headline is terrible – there is no Sino-American diplomatic co-ordination to effect a ‘double pincer’ but – the article is worth reading. China’s failure to back Russia at the UN Security Council was significant, but not surprising.

It’s a useful corrective on a UK mainstream media narrative dominated by commentators telling us the West has miscalculated in doing anything other than patting Russia on the back over the past month, as it is claimed that Russia will simply reorient itself towards China in the event of any sanctions.

Let’s start with the idea that Russia will reorient towards China. China is, of course, a rapidly growing market for both energy and commodities. There is, however, no gas pipeline between Russia and China. China already sources a huge amount of energy from Central Asia and the Middle East (never forget that 90% of Gulf oil flows east). Why should China buy Russian gas and not Kazakh or Turkmen gas through an already existing pipe? Evans-Pritchard correctly points out that China is an assertive player in the New Great Game taking place in Central Asia over gas and much else.

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Italy’s Five Star Movement – is this what The End of History looks like?

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Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole and Lucid Talk…

In 1992, Francis Fukayama predicted in The End of History that the end of the Cold War would impend not only an era of triumphant liberal-democratic capitalism, but one where political evolution had reached its final form. Western democracy, he argued, was the best form of state organisation practically achievable by humans.

The folly of such naïve Western triumphalism, already being challenged by China’s authoritarian wave of economic growth when Fukayama wrote his book, was laid bare by Mohamed Atta and his accomplices on September 11th 2001, before finally being buried by America’s failure to create new orders in Iraq and Afghanistan. But within Western societies, it could be argued to have some grain of truth.

The class-driven politics of the greater part of the 20th Century is dead in nearly every established democracy. The model of working-class left and bourgeois centre-right was in trouble long before the implosion of the Soviet empire. Technological changes and, arguably, the success of European-style welfare states in expanding the middle-class rendered its logic outdated.

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