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TALLRITE BLOG
You can write to me at blog2-at-tallrite-dot-com |
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Image of 2005 |
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| January 2006 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
My apologies for the hiatus from October through December 2005
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ISSUE #115 - 29th January 2006 [284]
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Hamas ... the Future Peacemaker People are expressing shock that the terrorist party Hamas convincingly won last week's election to the Palestine Legislative Authority, defeating Fatah. No less than 78% of the electorate voted - which should be an inspiration to the complacent democracies of America and Europe. Fatah is of course the long-dominant party founded and run by the late, unlamented Yasser Arafat, whose greatest contribution to the welfare of his people was to die last year. Today the party is led by Mahmoud Abbas, whom I have described as the Palestinians' “great hope”. Notwithstanding Fatah's loss, Mr Abbas fulfilled this destiny by staging this wonderfully executed free election.
The Israelis said "If a government led by Hamas or in which Hamas is a coalition partner is established, the Palestinian Authority will turn into an authority that supports terror. Israel and the world will ignore it and make it irrelevant.” “The Palestinian people voted for resistance and Hamas will turn this victory to the service of the Palestinian people and the protection of the resistance” proclaimed Ismail Haniya who is from (Israeli-cleansed) Gaza and is Hamas's senior leader. If nothing else, the surprise result gives the lie to Arafat's perpetual claim that he and his personal party Fatah represented, for 40 years, the hopes, confidence and aspirations of the Palestinian people. January's poll was the first and only time this canard was ever properly, transparently, fairly tested in an unrigged fashion. And the people comprehensively rejected Fatah for its mismanagement, corruption and utter political failure to - nay, its absence of any real effort to - find a lasting solution to the Israel problem. Other than the private bank accounts of Fatah nomenklatura, there is almost nothing to show for the billions of €uros and dollars raining down on the Palestinian Authority thanks to EUropean and American taxpayers over the years. My view about Hamas's assumption of Palestinian power is different from that of many politicians and commentators. I think the election result is to be welcomed. The more radical, violent and antipathetic to Israel the winning party the better. Let me explain why. But let me first confess that my reasoning assumes that Hamas will remain democratic and accept the will of the electorate in future elections, rather than turn into a Nazi party. Also I am assuming that Fatah will accept the current Hamas victory without starting a civil war. I hope these are not heroic assumptions. Hamas does two things, which are in stark - almost oxymoronic - contrast with each other.
In brief, Hamas delivers, Fatah doesn't. Hamas walks the talk, Fatah just talks. So whom would you rather do business with? For Hamas, the time for games is over. It is no longer merely sniping from the margins. It has nowhere to hide for it is now indisputably accountable to its electorate.
Let's assume that Hamas makes a reasonable stab at delivering the social services. This is only to be welcomed and it can hardly do a worse job than Fatah. Their standing among Palestinians can only improve as a result. But what will happen if it decides to implement its radical agenda? Many Muslims may find the idea of Sharia law attractive in principle, but few have enjoyed it in practice. Just go to Afghanistan and ask any woman or one-handed man, or peruse any of dozens of Iranian blogs. Sharia is not the way to enhance your appeal to the broad body of voters. Fighting Israel, with bullet and suicide bomb will certainly be popular. But it will not be without price.
With the burden of office, these are the kind of dilemmas that Hamas is going to have to deal with, while the eyes of their people, Israel and the world remain steadfastly upon it. Though it may take some skirmishes with Israel for Hamas really to understand the alternatives and consequences facing it, I believe a sense of reality will emerge through the fog. Hamas will begin to compare the pros and cons of
And when it does this, the makings of a genuine, durable peace will be there. For no-one on the Palestinian side has ever been in a better position to deliver peace, and under better terms, than Hamas the future peacemaker. Israel's new government better watch out. Their easy negotiating days, with a worthless adversary or none at all, are coming to an end. For the first time, someone with authority and legitimacy is going to be driving a really hard bargain. And when that bargain has been struck, I hope the negotiators come to Belfast and knock a few DUP and Sinn Féin heads together.
Those Central European Immigrants Ireland, UK and Sweden are the only three countries that allowed full and free access to their respective labour market by nationals from the ten states in Central Europe and the Mediterranean that joined the EU in May 2004. The other twelve EU countries, fearing that a tsunami of low-wage professionals and artisans from the new states would overwhelm them, drive down salaries and steal jobs from locals, placed various cunning restrictions to thwart the would-be immigrants.
Modest estimates were made about how many Central Europeans would invade and swamp the local economies. For example, the British government, when it was trying to sell its open-door policy to parliament and the people, averred that only 5-13,000 would come and stay, too few to notice. Comparable figures were bandied around in Ireland and Sweden. But it was all tosh and spin, numbers played down for ideological reasons to push through a policy which countries such as Germany, France and Italy and the rest of Old Europe were vociferously rejecting. No free labour markets for them, then. What happened? Well Eurostat and the CIA paint the following picture for the period since the new countries joined.
Other sources indicate that the bulk of the immigrant numbers in this table are coming from the new EU countries. The rest of the immigrants are either offset by emigrants, or else fail to register and thus don't appear in the official figures. (A separate report shows that no fewer than 166,000 migrant workers from the new accessions states have registered in Ireland alone since May 2004, though these include migrants that were in the country illegally prior to that date.) What we see from the table is not only that actual immigration is far greater than the politicians warned, but that, as you would expect, it correlates very much with the receiving country's wealth (GDP per person, GDP growth) and job opportunities (low unemployment). Though Sweden with its high unemployment might be an exception, these immigrants, far from stealing jobs from the Irish and Brits, are in fact fuelling their respective economies by filling vital vacancies, and thus enabling the natives to get even richer. Ireland alone will need another 30-50,000 new workers each year for the next decade or more, ie maybe half a million. Unless there's a baby boom. Long may this immigration flow from Central (and for that matter Eastern) Europe continue. For by mistake, these countries - and proportionally Ireland in particular - have blundered into attracting large numbers of immigrants who might otherwise have found their way to other EU countries, and these immigrants
If you don't want to build up or increase social problems in a generation's time, particularly of the Islamicist sort that France, Britain, Germany, Australia and other countries are currently experiencing, this migration is to be encouraged not thwarted. If there is to be any real objection, it should surely be
about whether a disservice is being done to the source countries such as
Lat Those Irish, Brits and Swedes who are shouting for immigration controls to stop these “Polish plumbers” and their friends are being disingenuous. In fact they are just playing to a particular gallery and do not have the best interests of their country and countrymen in mind. Note: The idea for this post
came from a letter
On 1st January, Spain, as I witnessed on a recent visit, introduced its own version of Ireland's smoking ban. Smoking is Spain’s number one killer with the country ranking second in Europe for per-capita consumption, so you can understand why it has followed the Irish lead. Although the ban applies to workplaces and (some) public areas, the most visible symptom, for a foreigner, is that bars and restaurants now have to declare whether they are smoking or non-smoking and put a sign to that effect in their window. If they declare themselves as non-smoking, all is sweetness and light. But if they opt for smoking, then children (below 18) are not allowed in. And if the establishment is over 100 m2 in size, it has to reserve at least 30% as a properly ventilated non-smoking area. This is evidently on the same basis that if someone pees in one end of the swimming pool, people at the other end won't drink it. That reminds me of the sign in the swimming pool of the beautiful marina in Muscat, Oman where I once had the good fortune to live and work. “You will note that there is no P in our OOL. Please keep it that way.” I always felt that for the more, er, robust members, they should augment this with another one that read along the lines of “... there is no *** in our L, please keep it that way.” Ireland's smoking ban spawned a number of new businesses, including patio heaters and awnings for pubs whose tobacco-addicted customers have to puff and huddle outside in the cold and rain of winter, and hurricane-proof cigarette lighters. In Spain, the big new business is apparently ... lollipops, and manufacturer Chupa Chups (slogan : “Sucking is good for you!”) expects domestic sales to soar this year. With no extra promotional effort, January sales are already going to be 5m pops, worth €1.1m, compared with 2m last January. Why is this? Well, Chupa Chups believes
that anxious smokers keen
to quit, or loathe to go out into the sunshine for a drag, crave lollipops’ on-stick holding and sucking qualities,
which apparently make you feel you are pulling on a cigarette.
Furthermore the ingestion of glucose is an added source of pleasure.
It all sounds rather raunchy. You have been warned.
Unpublished Letters to the Press I started producing this blog in 2002, for better or for worse, out of frustration at the non-publication of various letters I would write to newspaper editors on assorted topics. I still write them and many (most) still don't get published. So unless the material already constitutes the particular topic in a post, I am going in future to include unpublished letters as a line item in the blog. As if anyone is interested. Here are five for January.
----------P-A-L-E-S-T-I-N-I-A-N-S---&---I-S-R-A-E-L---------- Quote: “[Hamas] would be willing to extend its year-old cease-fire with Israel. But ... we have no peace process. We are not going to mislead our people to tell them we are waiting, meeting, for a peace process that is nothing.” Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar Mahmud Zohar, Quote: “The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel does not mean disregarding the rights of others in the land. The Palestinians will always be our neighbors. We respect them, and have no aspirations to rule over them. They are also entitled to freedom and to a national, sovereign existence in a state of their own.” Ariel
Sharon, in September 2005 before the UN, Hamas,
as elected leaders, now have t he responsibility Hattip: Not a Fish Quote: “I have reached the conclusion that the Zionists have absolutely no right in what they call Israel, that they have built their state not beside but on top of the Palestinian people, and that there can be no peace as long as contemporary Israel retains its present form.” Ireland
muddies the waters ----------E-U---------- Quote:
“No political entity can be built on a movement of France's
poet prime minister Dominique de Villepin, He
would rather we believe that Each
postulation, in relation to uncertain limits,
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ISSUE #114 - 22nd January 2006 [195]
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Iraq - The Exhilarating Notion of 2006 A month after its third successful, election in the space of a year, Iraq finally has a truly democratic government. The steps taken to get to this point, orchestrated by George Bush, are astonishing, especially 2005's three elections, all carried out to the pre-set timetable, in the face of naysayers insisting they be delayed.
And therein lies a remarkable sequence. Two unwilling and yet peaceful transfers of power, in the space of under two years, from Mr Allawi to Mr Jaafari, and now from Mr Jaafari to whoever the new guy is. I wonder whether this has ever happened anywhere in the Middle East. They say that the mark of true democracy is the ability to kick the rascals out. Perhaps the true mark is the ability of kicking out someone who is not even a rascal. It's worth recapping on these remarkable events because they tend to get submerged in the media by the succession of bad-news stories of bombings, battles, kidnappings, ransoms, head-hackings. Thus 2006 kicks off with one of the most remarkable transformations of a country ever achieved, from autocratic totalitarian dictatorship to Western style representative parliamentary democracy in less than three years. No Western country in history has achieved this on anything like such a timescale. So when was the last time something comparable did happen? Why, only a year ago. That time it was Afghanistan, and it took almost four years. So not only is George Bush's vision of defeating IslamoNazi terrorism through freeing the peoples of the Middle East by democratising them, coming to fruition, country by country, but he's getting better at it each time. And if you doubt that the rest of the Middle East is also changing, look at
I find incipient liberation of the Middle East from its thugs, tyrants and other illegitimate rulers an exhilarating notion to begin the year. Though not, of course, for TTIRs.
That pin-up of the Left, the USA-hating Israel-hating American Jew Noam Chomsky, renowned professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was in Dublin last week. It was a rare chance to get a glimpse of his techniques and rants in action. There is hardly any US non-politician who is more outspokenly political and partisan than Mr Chomsky, nor more (in)famous. So it is curious that he visited Dublin as a guest of the supposedly non-partisan charity Amnesty International which campaigns on behalf of political prisoners.
Apart from his preposterous ongoing claim that America's aim in Iraq is to prevent democracy in order to control its oil etc, it was fascinating to observe his technique. He is undoubtedly a skilled and articulate orator with a prodigious mental encyclopaedia and a moderate-sounding tone, yet since he talks such nonsense, it is extraordinary how convincing he sounds and how many people believe him. His modus operandi is to decide on his conclusion (eg the West is evil), then to seek out any facts that support it, whilst suppressing those - generally the overwhelming majority - that don't. In interviews, he deals with the (occasional) hard question by quoting from various academic, published and newspaper sources, including himself, in such detail and at such length that it is impossible to refute his argument without going away to forage for his references and their context. He started his Dublin speech by declaring that it wasn't George W Bush who declared today's War on Terror, but Ronald Reagan 20 years ago, his target being Central America and other areas (p2). This is to show that members of the current administration (Rumsfeld, Negroponte etc, p7) fought on the side of American terror then (eg the canard of facilitating Saddam's WMD, p9) - and of course they continue to do so now. He even says the first George Bush “authorised Saddam to crush the Shi’ite rebellion in 1991”(p12), cleverly and wickedly equating Bush's failure to support the rebellion with authorising Saddam's brutal suppression of it. There is no doubt that the US did support Saddam during his eight-year war against Iran, judging him to be a lesser threat than the Ayatollah Khomeini, but this neglects two things.
Mr Chomsky classifies the US/UK invasion of Iraq as a criminal aggression because it meets the Nuremberg definition, “Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State” (p4). But in a classic legerdemain, he neglects to note the illegitimacy and criminal behaviour of Saddam its ruler whose violent overthrow was the only means of liberating the Iraqi people from him, and that Saddam was the target not the people. He quite clearly prefers Saddam. America's use of vetoes to avoid censorious UN resolutions is cited as yet more proof of guilt (p6), yet without acknowledging that the UN, a club of predominantly dictators, is intrinsically anti-American, which is reflected in all those vetoed resolutions. Incidentally, he also refers to vetoed resolutions as “resolutions”, subtly giving the impression they were passed anyway though they were not. His principal criticism of the Iraq invasion would be laughable if it were not believed by so many. It amounts to the fact that to fight terrorism is to spawn more terrorism (p8), therefore you should eschew fighting and allow the terrorists to continue to ply their trade unmolested. To use his words (p8), “stop acting in ways that – predictably – enhance the threat”. His solution? To “begin by considering the [Islamic terrorists'] grievances, and where appropriate, addressing them, as should be done with or without the threat of terror” (p10). If you're an American or an Israeli and I kill you, it's your fault for not bothering to understand me. Therefore you're the terrorist not I. And that about sums up Mr Chomsky's world view. For a more rounded summary, have a look at what Mark Humphrys has to say about someone he calls a “life-long enemy of human freedom and human rights”.
Austria Rubbishing its EU Presidency On 1st January, Austria assumed its Buggins alphabetical turn at the coveted yet poisoned chalice that is the EU Presidency, taking over from the UK. An advantage of the rotation is that each six-month presidency is full of energy and new ideas as the presiding country tries to make its mark in the short time available before collapsing in exhaustion. The flip side is that there's no continuity of presidential policies, but on balance that's probably desirable as most of them are rubbish anyway. In the UK's case, one of its big things was to conclude a seven-year budget that was equitable (in particular cutting those egregious CAP subsidies that massively reward huge agricultural conglomerates). Tony Blair succeeded in the former part but failed miserably in the latter, handing bitter rival the virulently pro-CAP Jacques Chirac a rare and untrammelled victory. So here was a sensible policy (cut the subsidy), but rubbishly executed (abandon the effort ignominiously just to get a deal - any deal). Result: rubbish presidential policy, resulting in an inequitable overblown €862 billion budget that punishes success and the poor. Now we have Austria's chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel with his own hare-brained ideas. Last May he steered Austria's parliament into ratifying the EU Constitution (though wisely without the risk of a referendum). So, with this victory under his belt, you might understand why one of his big EU presidential things is to - yes - resurrect it from the Franco-Dutch grave to which it has been consigned. His foreign minister Ursula Plassnik, | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The
ostensible reason for his visit was to give this year's annual Amnesty Lecture,
titled 