Islam

Sunday

Daniel Korski

No more Turkish delight?

I’m sitting at the Ciragan Palace’s glass-filled halls on the banks of the Bosporus. I have joined the UN Security Council’s annual retreat, organised by the Turkish government, to give my view on what the UN did right and wrong in the Balkans from the break-up of Yugoslavia. The retreat is meant to continue the Council’s discussion on the overlap between peacekeeping, peacemaking and peace-building. No immediate action will follow the retreat, but the discussion may lead into a more concrete phase during Turkey’s presidency in September. Being here in Istanbul, however, has given me a chance to find an answer to the debate that has sprung up about Turkish government: is

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Hail to the chief

How wrong I was. President Obama, lambasted by his critics for being ponderous, has acted with lightening speed: less than 24 hours after that Rolling Stone article, General Stanley McChrystal was forced out of his job in place of the only person that could pick up where he left off, namely General David Petraeus. In acting swiftly, the US president has moved to restore the authority and respect his position as Commander-in-Chief deserves; and he has begun to re-establish the kind of civil-military relations that need to exist in militarily-capable liberal democracies like the United States.   What effect the change of commander will have in Kabul remains unclear. But

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Pakistan: friend or foe?

One of the biggest obstacles for NATO in Afghanistan has been the role of Pakistan and its intelligence apparatus in supporting the Taliban insurgency. Officially, the Pakistani government deny backing the Taliban insurgency, but even Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, have said they suspect Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence service of being engaged in anti-NATO activities. Now, a new report by the Harvard-based analyst and former head of OXFAM in Kabul, Matt Waldman, takes the accusations to a new level. ‘The relationship, in fact, goes far beyond contact and coexistence, with some assistance provided by elements within,

Tuesday

David Blackburn

A PR disaster for Israel

Prematurely, the world’s press has condemned Israel. As I wrote yesterday, the facts have to be established before Israel can be adjudged to have acted disproportionately. At the moment, the facts seem to support Israel. Video footage shows commandoes descending into a maelstrom of baseball bats and knives, armed with items that resemble paintball guns. The latest pictures released show a hoard of improvised explosives, machetes, bats, crowbars etc. Those sources’ veracity should be scrutinised, but there is nothing else to go on at the moment. Iain Martin has debunked Jon Snow’s absurd genuflection that this is our fault. Being British I apologise for everything, but not this time. Israel

Wednesday

Martin Bright

Devastating Attack on Amnesty International

Gita Sahgal has launched a very powerful attack on Amnesty International on the Open Democracy website on the occasion of the publication of AI’s Annual Report.  Here is the nub if her argument, which is devastating to Amnesty’s reputation: “In his reports to the International Executive Committee circulated for ‘transparency’, the Interim Secretary General Claudio Cordone, has airbrushed out any mention of the  concerns that I forced Amnesty International to face when I went public with my complaint that the organisation has sanitized the reputation of Moazzam Begg, a former Guanatamo detainee. They have treated him as a human rights advocate, although he champions Anwar al Awlaki and al Timmimi. “Like all

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Blood relatives

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn about classical tragedy. The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at

Peter Oborne

Crying in the wilderness

For 30 years Alastair Crooke was ostensibly a British diplomat working in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Columbia and Pakistan. Ten years ago he became Middle East adviser to Javier Solana, playing an important role in negotiating ceasefires between Israel and Hamas, as well as helping to end the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in May 2002. In the summer of that year an Israeli newspaper named Crooke as an agent for the Secret Intelligence Service, and shortly after he was recalled to London. It has been reported that his sympathy with the Palestine cause caused embarrassment to Tony Blair’s government. However, he soon returned to the

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

A grim reminder of the Islamist threat?

Yesterday’s attempted car-bombing in Times Square doesn’t really tell us anything beyond that there are sociapaths willing to blow people up, and that sometimes luck – rather than judgement – foils their bloody plans.  But, given the Pakistani Taliban’s claim that they were responsible for the attempt, it does serve as a grim reminder of the poison seeping out of that region.   The question now, and for the next few months, is whether the West will somehow become more engaged inside Pakistan.  It’s notable how British ministers have increasingly namechecked the country when justifying our presence in Afghanistan – but, still, it seems that the Taliban and other Islamist

Saturday

Quentin Letts

No earthly good

Peter Hitchens writes a stern column most weeks in the Mail on Sunday. It expresses disdain not only for today’s politicians but also for those of us who vote for them. The weekly Hitchens can leave even his fellow right-wingers feeling demoralised. He argues that David Cameron’s Tories are no better than Gordon Brown’s clowns. Anyone who swallows campaign promises from Wesmtinster’s stinking fraudsters — a plague on all their second houses — is, in his view, a fool. Hitchens is brave and clever. He writes fluently, with the eye of a shrewd reporter. The best newspaper columnists have always been contrarians, but surely few have been so consistently against

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

The new AfPak strategy in action – decapitation, reintegration and reconciliation (DRR)

It’s not quite the “we got him” moment, as when US soldiers unearthed the fugitive Iraqi dictator. But the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a top militant commander who is said to be second in command to elusive Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Mohhamad Omar, may be even more significant. By the time Saddam Hussein had been caught, the US was fighting a different enemy, though the Pentagon leadership had not realised yet. Baradar, who was in charge of the insurgency’s day-to-day operations on behalf of the so-called Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s leadership council, is very much today’s enemy – and his seizure should not be underestimated. Doubts remain as

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The rebirth of history

We have Francis Fukuyama writing a cover piece for us this week, revisiting his ‘End of History’ thesis. When he first published it, in 1989, he anticipated what was to become a consensus shared by many, including myself: that autocracy was on the way out. Communism had failed, and was being supplanted by the free society (aka the free market). Capitalism was creating wealth and liberty, and from Minsk to Gdansk people wanted it. Eastern Europe was managing a transition brilliantly. Fukuyama¹s thesis seemed to sum up an incredible spirit of optimism. Perhaps this optimism turned to hubris. After 9/11 Tony Blair and George Bush wanted to accelerate history, and

Sunday

Martin Bright

Gita Sahgal: A Statement

Gita Sahgal has now published a statement following her suspension from Amnesty International. I have seen it at Stroppyblog, but please circulate it as widely as possible. Gita has been an active member of Women Against Fundamentalism for many years. Perhaps the publicity around this case will allow their voices to be heard. Amnesty International and Cageprisoners Statement by Gita Sahgal 7 February 2010 This morning the Sunday Times published an article about Amnesty International’s association with groups that support the Taliban and promote Islamic Right ideas. In that article, I was quoted as raising concerns about Amnesty’s very high profile associations with Guantanamo-detainee Moazzam Begg. I felt that Amnesty

Martin Bright

Amnesty International, Moazzam Begg and the Bravery of Gita Sahgal

It is not often that my cynical jaw drops open at a story in the papers. But the piece on page 13 of the Sunday Times provoked just such a reaction. Congratulations to Richard Kerbaj for blowing the lid on Amnesty International’s relationship with former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg and his organisation Cage Prisoners, who act as apologists for Islamist totalitarianism. Gita Sahgal, the head of the gender unit at Amnesty International’s international secretariat has been campaigning on women’s issues for decades. She is rightly sick of the lazy alliance between some in the human rights world and radical Islamists. She has therefore blown the whistle on the disgraceful arrangement

Friday

John Bew

Talking to the Taliban | 29 January 2010

After the London conference, it is clear that “talking to the Taliban” will become part of the strategy in Afghanistan. But the conference left a number of important questions about what this means in practice unanswered. Talking to the Taliban is not a new idea. Even though he expelled a British and Irish diplomat for holding secret talks with Taliban in December 2007, President Karzai has become an advocate for such negotiations over the last two years. In the Spring of 2009, Saudi Arabia hosted tentative negotiations between Karzai’s representatives and former Taliban, with links to the current movement. But the idea now has a head of steam behind it.

Sunday

David Blackburn

The burka is a symbol of division, but it should not be banned

On the face of it, Nigel Farage is right: “There is nothing extreme or radical or ridiculous” about banning the burka. It is a manifestation of many British Muslims’ indifference to society; it is an expression of wilful separation and a symbol of a nation riven with cultural division. In the sphere of private behaviour becoming political, the burka engenders intolerance – reactionary Islam’s intolerance of liberal democracy and vice versa. In this atmosphere, writers and politicians of all hues have drawn the same conclusion and there is capital to be extracted (perhaps cynically) by taking the seemingly sensible decision to ban the burka. To do so would be misguided as well

Friday

James Forsyth

The government caves in to the Muslim Council of Britain

The government has caved in its dispute with the Muslim Council of Britain. The government broke off relations with the group over its deputy director-general Daud Abdullah signing the Istanbul Declaration. Indeed, Daud Abdullah even instigated legal action against the then Communities Secretary Hazel Blears over her statements about what the declaration called for. But now Stephen Pollard is reporting that the government is bringing the MCB back in. A DCLG spokesperson tells Pollard that an MCB commitment to examine “their internal processes and ensure that the personal actions of all members, including senior leaders, remain true to the organisation’s agreed policies, avoiding a repeat of the issues which arose

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Fighting terror with the National Security Council

Since September 11, Britain has lost one war and is not winning another. But the question of why this is the case remains depressingly low down the agenda. There is remarkably little interest in why the “British army was defeated in the field in southern Iraq”, to quote Gordon Brown’s and David Miliband’s favourite counter-insurgency expert, David Kilcullen. Today, the Tories launched their green paper on national security with speeches by Pauline Neville-Jones and David Cameron. The document is a mixed bag. But the Tories deserve credit for squarely facing up to the fact that Britain is now an “incubator of extremism and an exporter of terrorism”. They are also

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Islam4UK: the clue’s in the name

Irony of ironies, proselytising liberal and convinced egalitarian, Anjem Choudary, told the Today programme that the banning of Islam4UK, al-Muhajiroun and their aliases is a ‘failure of democracy’. A further irony is that he is right, sort of. Alan Johnson’s decision is understandable but incorrect; the surest way to silence these repugnant extremists and reactionaries is through equality and free debate, even though they hold those principles in contempt. The members of Islam4UK abuse freedom to peddle their reactionary ideals and disregard their duties towards society, but that is no reason to proscribe the group. Unless it entertains something more tangibly serious than marches and hosting lunatics on its discussion boards, Islam4UK and its ilk

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Oh dear, Gordon’s done it again

The knicker-bomber must love this. Twice Gordon Brown has jumped on the bandwagon and bounced straight off on both occasions. Sky News reports that the UK did not pass vital information to the US, despite the claims of a Downing Street spokesman. Here’s the key section: ‘During a briefing to journalists today, the Prime Minister’s spokesman said: “There is no suggestion the UK passed intelligence to the US that they did not act on.” But Sky’s political correspondent Joey Jones said it had been an “awful” briefing. “He tried to clear things up but only succeeded in muddying the waters still further,” Jones said. “After he read Downing Street’s statement,

Monday

John Stokes

Overcoming America’s intelligence woes

The failed terrorist attack on a North West Airlines plane last month has reignited the debate about just what can be done to improve the performance of America’s intelligence agencies. Despite spending close to $100 billion since the attacks of 9/11 nine years ago, it has become clear in the aftermath of the failed attack that all the old problems that were identified after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still remain: Intelligence is not shared effectively and the analysis of available data remains weak. To the reformers inside the intelligence community, none of this is exactly news. As money poured in after 9/11 there was