Comment at end
30th August, 2009
LIBYA
SHOCK NEWS!
Blair met Gaddafi for the last time as PM, June 2007
BLAIR IS INNOCENT
OF ANY & ALL BACK-DOOR DEALS
Blair, Brown, Straw and the Scottish (SDP) government. What did they ALL know?
Following today’s Times article – Lockerbie bomber ‘set free for oil’ – and its leaked letters from Jack Straw to the Scottish Justice Minister, we are all at the conspiracy theorising again. And since, like Alex Massie at The Spectator, I can’t see Salmond sitting down to a comfy chat over ANYTHING with the hated British government, we are left with few choices:
1. Megrahi’s release really WAS only on humanitarian grounds.
OR/AND
2. The Scottish government too knew it would benefit Scotland financially from the ‘prisoner for oil’ arrangement.
QUICK BACKGROUND: THE LIBYA CONNECTION
Tony Blair resigned on the 27th June 2007. Since 2003 through largely PERSONAL efforts, he had brought Libya in from the international cold. He had stopped their nuclear ambitions AND had secured hugely important and lucrative commercial deals for Britain. Then came the Lockerbie bombing and the conviction of Megrahi. Blair never ONCE agreed to include Megrahi in any future tit-for-tat arrangement on prisoner release, despite being constantly pressed by the Libyans.
TONY BLAIR’S HANDS ARE CLEAN
On this video interview Tony Blair on CNN explains WHY exactly he did not and could not have had any link with any “arrangement” over Megrahi’s release.
“I did not have the power.” More from Blair here, 22nd August 2009.
One month after Mr Blair left office, July 2007, Jack Straw attempted to hold Blair’ s line on Megrahi’s possible future release NOT being tied to trade agreements. The new SNP government also STRONGLY wanted Megrahi excluded. It may be that his inclusion would have given them a responsibility too many. Straw was not successful with the Libyans.
Six months later, December 2007, fearing the possible collapse of the commercial deals secured by Blair since 2003, Straw capitulated to Libyan demands to include Megrahi in the PTA arrangements. He immediately TOLD the Scottish government that Libya would not agree to his exclusion. (Odd how we have not been reminded of any of this until now, don’t you think?)
Six weeks later, in early 2008, BRITISH PETROLEUM signed a lucrative Libya-oil based deal with the UK government.
CONCLUSION on BLAIR:
All the way through HIS ten years in office Tony Blair NEVER EVER agreed to include Megrahi in any deal of any sort, trade or otherwise.
THAT, Blair’s fair-weather friends, should be remembered by you ALL.
- Secret delegation went batting for British interests in Tripoli
- Revealed: how Shell won the fight for Libyan gas and oil
- When truth about Britain’s dealings with Libya turns out to be a mirage
BROWN’S GOVERNMENT: JACK STRAW’S INPUT
Jack Straw has been involved in any "deal" arrangement longer than Blair
POLITICAL DUCKING AND DIVING
Clearly there has been ducking and diving by all parties involved for ALL sorts of reasons. Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, says that the Scottish Nationalist government wanted a “carve-out” for Megrahi from the prisoner transfer agreement. They did NOT (at that time) want any possibility of his being released under any agreement.
The Libyans would not agree with this exclusion and so Megrahi was not excluded.
“ABSURD”
Straw says it is all “an absurd argument” because the SNP government has released Megrahi outwith any Prisoner Transfer Agreement and only on “humanitarian” grounds.
On a Radio 4 interview today Jack Straw said that in 2003 “we forced Libya to abandon its nuclear weapons development.” (He may have misremembered. He meant to say – “Blair forced …”) Straw also pointed out that it was always open “at any time” to the SNP government to release Megrahi for their own reasons. Until last week Salmond’s government could have decided either way. According to Straw the whole debate is absurd and “academic because Magrehi was not transferred under PTA.”
CONCLUSION on STRAW
This is politics. Impure and simple.
THE SCOTTISH (NATIONALISTS) CONNECTION
The Prisoner Transfer Agreement, April 2009
Salmond in Scottish Parliament 7th May, 2009
Alex Salmond: “The United Kingdom and Libyan Governments ratified a prisoner transfer agreement on Wednesday 29 April 2009.”
The SNP, under Alex Salmond has found that its expected "popular" decision to release Megrahi has re-bounded at home and abroad.
[Aside: That's 29th April 2009. This year. The PTA discussions were clearly set in train by Mr Blair as were Libya's return to the international community and its dropping of its nuclear arms ambitions. However, two years have passed since Mr Blair left office. Two years to amend the PTA before final acceptance and ratification. In the end the actual wording of the agreement had nothing do with Tony Blair.]
SALMOND continued: “An application for prisoner transfer has now been received from the Libyan authorities on behalf of Mr Al Megrahi. The application will be considered according to the agreement, relevant legislation and the merits of the individual case.
Any decision on the transfer of prisoners who are held in Scotland is for the Scottish ministers. In practice, the CabinetSecretary for Justice makes the decision on any prisoner transfer request. That emphasises our point that, whatever decisions are made elsewhere, our decisions will be made on judicial grounds, not economic or political ones.”
CONCLUSION on SALMOND’S SDP GOVERNMENT’s DECISION
They wanted to play with the big boys. They can expect the rules to be tough. This too is realpolitik, Mr Salmond
The Scottish government’s message:
They are NOT the British government. They are NOT under Westminster’s control. They will decide for their OWN reasons and through their OWN justice system, notwithstanding the British government’s and people’s interests.
That might be worth remembering, all my fellow-Scots still based in Scotland, when Salmond presents you with a referendum on Independence due within the year.
It’s also worth remembering that the SDP were NOT in power in Scotland when Blair started to discuss a PTA with the Libyans, and were possibly never expected to be. In fact they had just come into power a month before Blair left in June 2007 years after he had started to negotiate a PTA with Libya.
The new devolution arrangements since devolution in 1998 were always likely to lead to some confusion over power and authority on international issues.
With an anti-union party in place in Scotland – perhaps we ain’t seen nothing yet!
MORE ON THE STRAW MAN
Today in The Times
The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal.
Gordon Brown’s government made the decision after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had hit difficulties. These were resolved soon afterwards.
The letters were sent two years ago by Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to Kenny MacAskill, his counterpart in Scotland, who has been widely criticised for taking the formal decision to permit Megrahi’s release.
The correspondence makes it plain that the key decision to include Megrahi in a deal with Libya to allow prisoners to return home was, in fact, taken in London for British national interests.
In a letter dated July 26, 2007, Straw said he favoured an option to leave out Megrahi by stipulating that any prisoners convicted before a specified date would not be considered for transfer.
On December 19, 2007, Straw wrote to MacAskill announcing that the UK government was abandoning its attempt to exclude Megrahi from the prisoner transfer agreement, citing the national interest.
In a letter leaked by a Whitehall source, he wrote: “I had previously accepted the importance of the al-Megrahi issue to Scotland and said I would try to get an exclusion for him on the face of the agreement. I have not been able to secure an explicit exclusion.
BETWEEN A ROCK AND A SOFT PLACE
A couple of points to sum up -
Straw’s and Brown’s inability to finalise Blair’s trade deals without excluding Megrahi from the PTA does NOT in my opinion make Straw or Brown guilty of anything other than of not being Tony Blair. He it was who brought Gaddafi and Libya in from the cold internationally. He it was who got the oil and other commercial deals in the first place. Whether there would have been backtracking on the inclusion of Megrahi if Blair were still Prime Minister in December 2007 we will never know.
Brown may have been invisible again recently, but the Scottish Nationalist government too has been illiberal with the verity. They say they made the decision to free Megrahi NOT on trade/oil/co-operating with the British government grounds, but for humanitarian reasons. They all knew that Straw had failed to carry through on Blair’s refusal to include Megrahi’s release in the PTA. None of this prior knowledge has been mentioned until today. For the SNP they wanted and NEEDED it to be known that they were above all this grubby trade shenanigans. Their holier-than-thou approach was that Scotland was particularly humanitarian (presumably in comparison to the rest of us.)
As a Scot I can tell you this -
THAT’S RUBBISH!
We Scots are no more humanitarian than anyone else in this great island or in the western world. In fact the Irish are far more generous charity givers than the Scots pro-rata.
The SNP for all its hand-wringing and whiter-than-white cries is as politically driven as any other political party.
But, for their own reasons, oil to replace Scotland’s offshore diminishing resources perhaps, they are just as ‘grubby’ as any politicians in this world where humanitarian, diplomatic and commercial considerations do not always make comfortable or vote-winning bedfellows.
So if not humanitarian what WERE the real reasons for the Scottish government releasing Megrahi early?
SIMPLER EVEN THAT ALL THE ABOVE?
Perhaps the SNP’s action and the ongoing furore is far more simple than all of this. Could it have been a desire NOT to draw attention to the fact that it was Tony Blair, Salmond’s nemesis, who stood firm for years against keeping Megrahi OUT of a PTA. That admission – that Mr Blair was on the SNP’s ORIGINAL side on this – would today be hard for Salmond to own up to and harder to admit publicly.
Instead did they choose to sell the release of Megrahi as being on humanitarian grounds, insisting that the British government had not interfered and could not interfere with their decision? With this, at least the present British government was happy to concur.
So was it just that Salmond wanted to draw attention away from the fact that on this issue, Mr Blair was and still is the only politician whose position has not moved on prisoner transfer?
Worse still, from Salmond’s angle, given all of the mishandling of the Megrahi release decision, Mr Blair above all others has particularly clean hands. His input was only ever for good. Our trade arrangements with Libya will soon come to fruition and prove their value, as will Libya’s increasing distance from its past threatening position vis-a-vis nuclear weapons.
Thank you Mr Blair.
SICKENING, ISN’T IT, MR SALMOND?
RELATED
Alan Cochrane at The Telegraph takes some stick from his commenters after telling the conspiracy theorists to cease their mindless prattle, more or less. There you go, Mr Cochrane – you can’t tell ‘em. THEY KNOW, y’know.
- Libya/Megrahi/Truth/Chinese Whispers
- From ‘Scots Law News’: Compassion for Megrahi
- Straw: Megrahi inclusion in Libya prisoner deal was ‘in UK interests’
- The Herald: Lockerbie is history. Time to talk business
- Megrahi’s Release
- Gaddafi’s son says “no deal”
- Fox News: Obvious tied to oil
- Sky Report – Gaddafi targetted Megrahi retiurn during Blair talks
- Wikipedia on Megrahi
Tags: Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, Gaddafi, Gordon Brown, jack straw, Libya, Lockerbie bomber, Megrahi, SNP, straw man, Tony Blair
July 27, 2010 at 9:58 pm |
KeepTonyBlairForPM wrote “1. No – Catholics are Christians too and do NOT believe in murdering the infidel, just because they are infidels.”
Actually a minority of them do, just as a minority of Muslims back Al Qa’ida or the killing of non-Muslims – but most Muslims, like most Christians are against these actions.
For instance in Nigeria it’s as common for Christians to massacre Muslims as the other way round.
In one incident reported by CNN in January “Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that armed men attacked Kuru Karama in central Nigeria on Tuesday, “killing many as they tried to flee and burning many others alive,” the international organization said Saturday.
The assailants targeted Muslims, reportedly killing at least 150, Human Rights Watch said.
Community leaders from Jos, a city about 19 miles north of Kuru Karama, and journalists told the organization that later in the week they saw dozens of bodies lodged in wells or sewage pits. The bodies of 121 people, including 22 children, had been recovered, the organization said. Most of the homes in the town were burned down, along with three mosques, the group said.
Those interviewed by the group said they thought the attackers were Christian, Human Rights Watch said. But even Christians were not spared. When a Christian pastor tried to stop the attacks he was beaten, a Muslim imam told the group.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/01/23/nigeria.massacre.probe/index.html
There are the same minority of extremists in the US and the UK – but they mostly call for their army to invade Muslim countries and kill Muslims – e.g Ann Coulter, who notoriously wrote that “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”
http://old.nationalreview.com/coulter/coulter.shtml
KeepTonyBlairForPM wrote “Anyway, until Henry V111 this was a Catholic country. And we all know HIS reasons for establishing the Church of England! As for agnostics/atheists/Jews – even Sikhs and Buddhists NO, of course not. The first three are naturally as western as any religious Christian (I have no religious beliefs, btw, in case you wondered) and have a culture based on Christianity/Judaism and the latter two have assimilated naturally into our culture and do not threaten our society by altering it bit by Muslim-Only toilets and Muslim-Only Swimming Pool sessions bit. Oh, and Sharia law courts, of which, the last time they mentioned it, there were 85 (up from 12 just after Brown came in. Brown, not Blair.)”"
Here I think you’re falling for some of the inaccuracies spread by some of the media that you warn about on other issues. The better newspapers tell us something different.
The Times newspaper, after some very alarmist headlines and paragraphs, for instance, says :
“Under the act, the sharia courts are classified as arbitration tribunals. The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.”
In other words they’re not really courts, just arbitration tribunals which can only make a legally binding ruling if both sides in a dispute agree to give them the power.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4749183.ece
I’m assuming here that it’s possible to appeal to a higher court on a sharia arbitration tribunal’s rulings. I’d be very surprised if that wasn’t possible.
Second there have been Jewish family courts in Britain which operate on the same principles for decades
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7233040.stm
I’m sure some of the rulings by both “religious courts” would seem strange and unfair to people not of those religions, but they’re only binding on people who agree to be bound by them.
So this really seems to be hysteria whipped up by the tabloids or else bigotry by some people, or a mixture of the two.
I hope that you just didn’t know this and that you don’t have any prejudice against Muslims – because there are moderates and extremists of every religion – and none.
I agree with you that bringing hatreds from abroad to Britain is not a good thing, but let’s be honest we have plenty of British born, non-Muslim haters and hate-mongers too – racists like the BNP, which got half a million votes in the European elections.
In Scotland i’ve not seen much problem from people whose parents or grandparents were immigrants. Most of them are bilingual and speak English with a Scottish accent. The biggest problems are from white Scottish born racists who hate anyone with a different colour of skin and tell people born here to “go home”.
July 28, 2010 at 12:06 am |
Mr McFarlane,
If it wasn’t so late and I wasn’t up early in the morning I could do as you have done and provide links to prove my case. Oh, all right – just a few.
We all know, as they like to say in other instances, We ALL KNOW that the only so-called religion indiscriminately murdering people worldwide is of those who say they are Muslims. And they kill more fellow Muslims than they do non-Muslims. None of this is to say that ALL Muslims wish to kill people, of course not. But it IS to say that it is written in the koran – which is decreed unchangeable and unchallengeble – that man-made laws (democracy) is not an Islamic concept. It is also written there that lying is essential by all good and true Muslims in order to let Allah’s law rule.
Yes, it is true that there are some Christians that have killed Muslims. Do they also kill indiscriminately, in suidide bombings etc, to secure a place by Allah’s/God’s side (even though that is NOT written in the bible/koran)? I think not.
Robert Spencer’s site http://www.jihadwatch.org/ is a useful start for some of what is going on in the name of Islam.
This site http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/globalterrorism1.html has a map and list of terror attacks. They are not all by Muslims of course, but many, the majority, clearly are.
Atlas Shrugs has some very interesting information, one of the top posts being that “Cameron is worse than Brown.” Not impressed about his remarks yesterday it would seem.
This site – “The Religion of Peace” has a box on the left which shows the number of terror attacks by Islamists since 9/11. Now said to be approaching 16,000.
I DO understand what our papers tell us about Sharia courts – and I DO notice that the government never asked us to vote for them, nor do they ever update us on their number.
I have looked at this in great detail and I realise that Sharia judgements are not binding if a woman decides afterwards to then take her case to a British court. The problem is, she doesn’t, most of the time, becasue of family intimidation. Often this intimidation is by female realtives who do not wih the menfolk embarrassed or “shamed” in open court. So, within many of these tight-knit groups, Muslim women are often heavily discouraged. And under Sharia a woman is worth only half of a man. She only has legal (Sharia) rights to a child in the case of divorce, until the child is seven. And after that age the mother has no rights.
There should be no place in OUR society for this nonsense, if we value women’s and children’s rights. And we did value those rights, until another culture decided some of us needn’t bother our little burka-covered heads about them.
It’s a slippery slope. And the whole of Britain and Europe is on it. The USA and Australia are at the top, but we’re part-way down.
So, I am angry about this. I am very angry. And I am not the least bit racist. Distrust of fundamental Islam/Sharia law has nothing to do with race. I dislike Sharia law in Iran JUST as much. AND I hate racists. That is why some of us presently feel unrepresented.
I do wish Tony Blair well with his Faith Foundation and I am sure it will bear fruit in years to come. But it might take decades. In the meantime, I do not wish to sit back and watch parts of this country taken over by a religion which still thinks it’s fine and dandy to chop off hands for theft, and stone a woman for adultery, or slow-hang a man for being gay.
Where I live presently, and, fyi, I am a Scot too, though not in Scotland now, there are no issues with Muslims. And the Muslims I know are fine people. The trouble is when you go to London. Visit Edgware Road, just round the corner from Tony Blair’s house. You’d think you were in Beirut.
July 27, 2010 at 10:39 pm |
Having said all that I’d like to thank you for not blocking critical comments on your blog and for being willing to debate things.
July 28, 2010 at 12:11 am |
Mr McFarlane,
You’re welcome. I wouldn’t dream of blocking people like yourself, who think things through, even if we don’t conclude similarly. I have refused to publish abusive comments form the hangers’n'floggers, and will continue to do so.
July 31, 2010 at 11:18 pm |
KeepTonyBlairForPM wrote “We ALL KNOW that the only so-called religion indiscriminately murdering people worldwide is of those who say they are Muslims. And they kill more fellow Muslims than they do non-Muslims. None of this is to say that ALL Muslims wish to kill people, of course not. But it IS to say that it is written in the koran – which is decreed unchangeable and unchallengeble – that man-made laws (democracy) is not an Islamic concept. It is also written there that lying is essential by all good and true Muslims in order to let Allah’s law rule.”
That assumes that every Muslim has the same interpretation of the Koran. They don’t though. Different people can interpret the same words or sentences to mean different things. Just as some Christians focus on the Old Testament, while others see the New Testament as superseding it, many Muslims see some of the passages in the Koran as only relating to the time of Mohammed’s life and not relevant to the modern day.
There are plenty of fundamentalist Christians in the US who are for ANY war on ANY Muslim country, just because it has Muslims in it. Many of these Christian fundamentalists also believe that when the Second Coming happens the Jews must be forced to convert to Christianity, or else be wiped out.
The Bosnian Serb extreme nationalists who planned and carried out the Srebrenica massacre were mostly Orthodox Christians, like Mladic and Karadzic.
There are plenty of extreme nationalists in every country who count the lives of people not of their nationality, religion or skin colour as being worthless.
KeeptTonyBlairforPM wrote “Yes, it is true that there are some Christians that have killed Muslims. Do they also kill indiscriminately, in suidide bombings etc, to secure a place by Allah’s/God’s side (even though that is NOT written in the bible/koran)? I think not.”
Suicide bombings are not restricted to Muslims. They’re a tactic that’s been employed by the weaker side in many conflicts – e.g Hindu Tamils in the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka; Marxists, Socialists and Nationalists as much as Shia Muslims in Lebanon when it was occupied by Israeli forces.
There is nothing unique about Islamic extremist groups. Also in fact the majority of Muslim clerics say suicide bombings targeting civilians (of any religion or none) are un-Islamic and wrong – including e.g the Late Fadlallah(Shia) in Lebanon and many Sunni clerics in Saudi Arabia.
Read Fawaz A. Gerges ‘The Far Enemy’ on this.
I can’t understand why you think Islamic extremists are worse than say Jewish extremists, Christian extremists, or extreme secular nationalists.
There’s no rational reason to think they are.
The reason there are more Islamic extremists at the moment is that there are more countries with Muslim populations which are suffering under military occupation or dictatorships (mostly secular or playing both sides) than non-Muslim ones at the moment.
However any population – Hindu Tamils, Tibetan Buddhists, Palestinians (including secular Marxists , Christians and nationalists, not just Muslims) will become more extreme in their views and actions if subjected to extreme attack by others.
Sanctions causing poverty and unemployment don’t help either. Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq was a minority position in Iraq while Saddam was being funded by the rest of the world to invade Iran, because people were employed, had enough to eat and were well educated. The 1991 Gulf War and a decade of sanctions reduced that to mass unemployment, poverty and teachers and lecturers leaving the country – sectarian fundamentalisms thrived. The occupation made things even worse, creating millions of refugees and reducing many people in Baghdad to searching in bins for left-over food – and killing large numbers of people. Kidnapping and sectarian killings to take money, houses and belongings became a growth industry – and almost the only one open to Iraqis.
Palestinians have similarly been radicalised by long decades of sanctions, apartheid and occupation.
If Britain was under foreign sanctions with mass unemployment and poverty or occupied by foreign troops the swing to the BNP would be just as huge.
August 1, 2010 at 12:17 am |
Duncan Mc Farlane – a fully paid-up member of the “it’s OUR fault they’re killing one another” brigade.
Utter nonsense, of course. Islamic fundamentalists have been killing one another for decades, centuries even. LONG before Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s just that, as is the way of the uncaring left-leaning “WE did it to them” daydream believer, WE didn’t notice or worse, didn’t care.
While I don’t quite swallow whole the “evil Muslims/evil Islam” position of this site, there are plenty of numbers, facts and figures there to prove who is killing whom. WHY is anyone’s guess, and probably variable.
Whatever reason there is NO morallly equivalent line to be drawn between what might happen here in Britain if WE were occupied by a foreign force. (Not to mention that this “force” in Afghanistan and also in Iraq, after the first month, is UN, not American or British.)
We, in our culture, would not purport to answer to and serve any God in order to justify killing our countrymen and others of our own religion, as well as those of other countries and religions (and none.) It is a cultural thing, and it is not western culture.
Also, there is NO way we, say in England would turn on others in our own land, say in Wales, because of outsiders’ action.
I do not say that Islamist extremists are worse than, as you suggest –
All extremists are bad. But provide a list for me, please, and not just the odd occasion here and there of ALL the acts of murder by Christians and Jews in recent years. By “extreme secular nationalists” – presumably you mean such as the BNP? How many people have THEY killed in recent years. One, as I recall it, by ONE BNP member, now imprisoned. Presumably you know better.
Islamic fundamentalism is a threat to the world precisely because it IS, and anyone who follows these things can SEE for themselves – in many countries throughout the world, such as Pakistan – Muslim on Muslim. You are not alone in not knowing this. Neither, it seems does the present prime minister. Stupid man.
August 1, 2010 at 3:39 am |
I’m quite aware that Shia and Sunni Muslims have killed one another and other Muslim sects on a large scale, just as Protestant and Catholic Christians continue to kill each other in Northern Ireland and Orthodox Greek Serb Christians and Catholic Croat Christians killed one another across Yugoslavia.
Some Muslims certainly were killing each other before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. However British, American, Israeli, Chinese and Russian forces were also killing a lot of Muslims (including plenty of civilians) and backing a lot of dictatorships who tortured and killed their own people long before 9-11 too – and have continued to since it.
Coalition forces also killed and tortured plenty of people in Iraq, just as NATO have killed and tortured thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, even if the Taliban have probably killed even more, so the Tony Blair line that “it’s not our troops who’re killing them” remains untrue.
US forces in Iraq (and possibly British ones too from the SAS men caught with fake beards and explosives in a car) set Shia and Sunni Iraqis at each others’ throats in a classic colonial divide and conquer ploy.
At the start of the occupation US forces allied to and trained and armed Shia militias to kill and torture Sunnis, seeing the Sunnis as “Ba’athist dead enders”. Then later there was a “re-direction” to arm Sunni militias against Shia, who were now seen as the greater threat as “Iranian influenced”, despite the fact that the main Iranian backed Shia faction – SCIRI – was allied to the US, while Al Sadr’s Medhi army movement was more Iraqi nationalist – and only began seeking Iranian support when US forces began targeting it.
What’s more US intelligence reports show most of the people we’re killing in afghanistan aren’t motivated by religion, but by defending their tribal lands against foriegn invaders
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2009/10/09/most_insurgents_in_afghanistan_not_religiously_motivated_military_reports_say/
Another of the main causes of the insurgency in Afghanistan is the civilian deaths caused by NATO forces – as shown by a report by the US National Bureau of Economic Bureau Research which found a strong link between civilian deaths caused by NATO forces in local areas in Afghanistan and the number of insurgent attacks on NATO forces in the six weeks after these deaths
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10746832
just as many Iraqis fighting Coalition forces did so because they saw them as occupiers or had seen friends, relatives or neighbours killed or tortured by these invaders.
KeepTonyBlair for Prime Minister wrote “Also, there is NO way we, say in England would turn on others in our own land, say in Wales, because of outsiders’ action.
We, in our culture, would not purport to answer to and serve any God in order to justify killing our countrymen and others of our own religion, as well as those of other countries and religions (and none.) It is a cultural thing, and it is not western culture.”
When the last textiles factories were closed down here and moved to third world sweatshops there were BNP councillors elected across the North of England, white youths fighting British Asian youths and a rise in Islamic fundamentalism too – because it pushed unemployment up.
The UK is not immune to the disease of sectarianism which is spread by mass unemployment, poverty, lack of education and war. We are not so different from other countries as we like to think – just luckier than some, so far.
The different cultures, identities and religions of Yugoslavia lived peacefully with each other for over 40 years – before the US demanded faster repayment of loans and “free market reforms” in the late 80s, causing mass unemployment and poverty – and so the perfect breeding ground for sectarianisms.
It’s not about culture – it’s about whether people have enough money to support themselves and their families, whether they’re living under an oppressive dictatorship, whether they’re seeing friends, relatives and neighbours killed.
If Britain was reduced to the economic collapse that Yugoslavia suffered the horrible nexus of crime and sectarianism feeding off one another would come here too.
KeepTonyBlairForPrimeMinister wrote “provide a list for me, please, and not just the odd occasion here and there of ALL the acts of murder by Christians and Jews in recent years.”
The list would be a long one and you’d have to define “recent years”, but as i’ve pointed out already the Bosnian Serb militias that carried out the massacres in the former Yugoslavia are mostly Orthodox Christians, while the Croats who massacred Serb and Bosnian Muslim civilians were Catholic Christians.
the massacres of civilians in the Coalition assaults on Fallujah included many Christian soldiers, including American military Chaplains preaching about “the Devil” being “in this place”. Hundreds of women and children were killed in each assault and many more men, old men and boys – many of them unarmed and non-combatants. Ambulances were targeted. That was one example out of thousands carried out by US, British and Coalition forces across Iraq from 1991 on.
More Afghan civilians were killed by bombing by the US air force in Afghanistan than died on September 11th within the first few years of the war – and more have continued to be killed by airstrikes, missile strikes, death squads, night raids and shootings at check-points right up to present.
Your view that Islam is a uniquely bad ideology or religion is just wrong – it’s no worse than most others and has just as wide a range of different interpretations of what it means by different adherents to it as any religion – which is why Muslims kill Muslims, just as Christians kill Christians, agnostics kill agnostics, Orthodox Greek Serbian Christians kill Catholic Croat Christians etc.
August 1, 2010 at 11:09 am |
Quite where I said in this post that Islam is a ‘uniquely bad ideology or religion’ escapes me right now. Having said that I DO see Islam as the only political-religion, since the other side of its coin is Allah’s rule over the world – the caliphate brought about by sharia law.
Over the years I have asked many Muslims to disown this idea as belonging to the past, just as Old Testament calls to kill ‘the enemies of God’ have long been disowned by Christians and Jews. Answer came there none. The reason, as I see it, is the setup within Islam. It’s “democratic” at the grassroots in mosques, with no Pope-like equivalent, but a child can preach to men (Never a female child of course. They don’t count for some reason.) But when it comes right down to interpretation of the koran NO-ONE is permitted to modernise the religion or alter the koran or re-interpret or dismiss any of its preachings. Death awaits any who attempt this. Not just divine punishment.
Thus it is uniquely medieval in its determination to remain stuck in the past.
Re-telling the tales of how those of other religions have also murdered people takes us nowhere near working out what it is within Islam which means that Muslim fundamentalists kill others today throughout the world, and mainly other Muslims (and torture too in particularly barbaric ways.) I believe that to be the case in today’s world, and does actually apply to Islam more than to other religions. They say they do this for religious/political reasons. Do Jews/Christians etc kill for religious reasons to anything like the same extent?
No. No. No. I do not think the “ah but look at this and that from there and then” stands up to real study. Those differences were usually to do with obtaining or re-claiming land, not Judaism or Christianity or secularism saying ‘our religion’ or atheism says we must kill people in “???’s” name.
If you want a period of time over which to provide the numbers of those murdered by Christians, Jews, secularists etc – to prove your point that Islam is no worse – try since 2003. Or if it serves your purposes of proving how awful they all are, go back to the 1950s. Whatever suits your agenda.
I, and I imagine many of us would be intrigued to discover that those murdered by non-Muslims for fundamentalist ‘religious’ reasons are even a fraction of those killed by the Islamic political religion.
August 1, 2010 at 7:14 pm |
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KeepTonyBlairForPMwrote “But when it comes right down to interpretation of the koran NO-ONE is permitted to modernise the religion or alter the koran or re-interpret or dismiss any of its preachings. Death awaits any who attempt this. Not just divine punishment.”
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Totally untrue. Fadlallah, the most influential Muslim religious leader in Lebanon, did not interpret the Koran to mean that non-Muslims must convert or be killed – in fact he condemned that interpretation as unIslamic. He died an old man recently, peacefully, in his bed. No-one killed him.
You need to read some books by experts on Islamic terrorism like Fawaz A Gerges who will tell you that the reality is that the Jihadist terrorists are in a small minority even in their own countries. Even most fundamentalists, like the Muslim Brotherhoods, who attempt to convert people by persuasion and elections, are their enemies.
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KeepTonyBlairForPMwrote”I DO see Islam as the only political-religion , since the other side of its coin is Allah’s rule over the world – the caliphate brought about by sharia law.
Over the years I have asked many Muslims to disown this idea as belonging to the past, just as Old Testament calls to kill ‘the enemies of God’ have long been disowned by Christians and Jews. Answer came there none.”
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Islam is most definitely not the only political religion. Many, many religious Israeli Jews – including members of the current Israeli government and the former head of Israeli military courts in the West Bank, say that the entire Biblical “Kingdom of Israel” (which includes the entire West Bank and much of Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq and Egypt) has been granted to “the Jewish people” “by God”. During the Lebanon war some Israeli Jewish rabbis said that killing someone who is not a Jew can never be a sin, whether they are civilians or combatants.
You claim that all Jews have given up the “Old Testament” injunction to kill the enemies of God. They haven’t – especially those extremists in Israel who form part of the mainstream there and many Zionists in the US.
Of course there are many decent Jewish people too, who either don’t believe these things or vocally oppose the crimes committed by the Israeli government – e.g Norman Finkelstein, Gerald Kaufman MP and many Israeli activists who stand in front of Palestinian orchards and houses when the Israeli army comes to demolish them, or help them rebuild demolished homes, or distribute food and medicines.
The Christian fundamentalists in the US are highly political (and influential in elections – voting en masse for Bush in 2000 and 2004) too, taking their own interpretation of the Bible , very much including their interpretation of the Old Testament as meaning being gay should be illegal, there should be a death penalty and non-Christian countries should be attacked as enemies.
They include Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney and McCain’s vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin among many others.
Christian fundamentalists in the US frequently carry out attacks killing doctors who carry out abortions and sometimes gay people too, which, if done by Muslims, would be called religious terrorism. Many of them also back any war against a government or country which isn’t predominantly Christian.
In the UK in the 2005 General election there was a Christian Party candidate standing in my constituency and in many others.
You pretend Islam is uniquely bad, but it’s nothing of the kind. It’s one of the world’s largest and fastest growing religions and so there are Muslims in many countries which are ruled by foreign backed dictatorships (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia etc) or under military occupation by other countries (e.g Afghanistan by NATO forces, Chechnya by Russian ones, Xinjiang by Chinese forces),but as i showed in the last post, US intelligence reports show most of the people we’re fighting in afghanistan aren’t Muslim extremists, but local tribes defending their territory against foreign invaders.
What’s more people of ANY religion or NONE resist occupation when a foreign military invades their country or region and starts killing people. Marxists and nationalists did it alongside Shia Muslims in Lebanon. Hindu Tamils have done it in Sri Lanka. Even Tibetan Buddhists had violent uprisings against the brutality of the Chinese occupation. Every occupation and dictatorship is brutal – they all create extremists among people of whatever religions or ideologies suffer under them, because they create so much suffering and the desire for revenge.
It’s also mistaken to demand that Muslims not be involved in politics. Why should they have any less right to become involved in politics than people of any other ideology or religion. I’ve already given you examples of Christian and Jewish fundamentalists involved in politics at the highest leves – why do you think Muslims, most of whom do not believe in the killing or forcible conversion of non-Muslims, but are no more extreme than e,g the Christian Democrats in Germany or Italy, be excluded from any involvement in politics?
And what happens when you exclude some groups from any right to be involved in politics ? You end up with some of them turning to terrorism as with catholics and protestants in Northern Ireland, or the growth of Jihadists in Egypt and Jordan since political parties are banned as a route.
You also completely ignore the fact that for decades our governments backed Islamic fundamentalist groups in order to weaken nationalist and socialist and social democrat movements in the middle east and Indonesia.
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KeepTonyBlairWrote “I, and I imagine many of us would be intrigued to discover that those murdered by non-Muslims for fundamentalist ‘religious’ reasons are even a fraction of those killed by the Islamic political religion.”
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Well since at least 300 women and children were killed in the April 2004 assault on Fallujah alone, many thousands more by Coalition forces in the rest of the war, millions were killed by UN sanctions on Iraq demanded by the US government between 1991 and 2002 and more Afghan civilians were killed by US bombing of Afghanistan in the first few years of the war in Afghanistan than were killed on 9-11, plus many thousands of Muslims, many civilians, by Russian forces in Chechnya, you’d be putting blinkers on to pretend that the numbers killed by non-Muslims were “only a fraction” of those killed by other Muslims.
Talking about conflicts like Iraq as “just Muslims killing Muslims” is flat denial of obvious facts. The killing began when US and British forces invaded and started a war – and killings of civilians by them didnt end after the invasion. The fact that Muslim sectarians also killed other Muslims in large numbers (encouraged by US and British military intelligence to divide and conquer Iraqis) does not change that.
It’s also like describing World War Two or the Northern Ireland conflict as “just Christians killing Christians”. It doesn’t address the actual causes of the wars and terrorism because it’s focused on prejudice against a particular religion and makes the mistake of trying to explain the fighting in terms of that religion being bad, rather than the actual causes.
I say that as an agnostic who is socialist or social democratic, environmentalist and internationalist in my politics.
Before the Holocaust was revealed anti-semitism was the norm across the world and it was wrongly held to be acceptable to be prejudiced against all Jews simply for being Jews, or based on the actions of some Jews.
Today many people have irrational prejudices against all Muslims and immigrants – and a lot of people wrongly see these prejudices are justified by the actions of some Muslims and acceptable.
August 1, 2010 at 9:24 pm |
Mr McFarlane,
You’re putting a lot of time and thought into your comments. Unfortunately, I have some catching up to do at this blog, so I am not going to respond point by point, although given time, I certainly could.
Let’s do this one. You said that Fadlallah, the most influential Muslim religious leader in Lebanon died in his bed an old man.
But that is about interpretation NOT updating or modernising the koran.
I am sure plenty of people interpret the koran differently. And they are encouraged to do so. That’s the democratic bit of Islam and about as far as democray goes within Islam.
My point was about CHANGING the koran. Updating it to today’s world and not that of 1600 years ago. Doing a kind of King James updated version. Interpretation IS permitted, in fact encouraged. Updating or ditching any of the koran is not permitted.
I DO know that jihadists are a small minority. We ALL know that. But they are particularly dangerous. Most of us know that too.
I also know that many Palestinians in Gaza work closely with and WITHIN Israel and do not want the west to stop trade from there, as many are now threatening. Kaufmann and others like him must also know this. I know this from an e-mail I recently received here from such an individual.
Recently a senior British imam issued a fatwa against terrorism. I metioned it here at this site. Then, we heard nothing about it. No-one said that mosques were referring to it or that other imams agreed with it. Nothing. Perhaps it worked. Quietly. Or perhaps our security services are working. Quietly. Whatever, we are not being attacked right now. So something must be working since the security services still say they have roughly 2000 Islamist terror cells they are monitoring in the UK. No Jewish terror cells. No Christian ones. And no secular/atheists cells.
I have no interest in others’ religions in their own lands or cultures. I am just NOT interested. I have no religious beliefs at all but I am content to live and let live. If people need religion, let them have it.
But come to my country, use its laws and its freedoms and its liberalism to push an agenda which is outwith our culture, forget it. It is that simple.
We see that encroaching culture all around us, in the slippery slope of Muslim only toilets and swimming sessions, sharia courts and women inside black tents. And NO DENIAL that there is a caliphate planned or being striven for. That kind of reassurance is the least we can expect from an incoming culture/religion. The VERY LEAST.
You cannot blame many in Britian for assuming that this silence is all part and parcel of the dissolution of western civilisation. I for one treasure western civilisation, with all its faults. It took us centuries to attain it, and then we exported it qround the world.
It is up to others and the so-called “liberal” minded (such as yourself), to defend a foreign culture pervading ours.
Btw, have YOU ever had an answer to the caliphate question. If so, please paste it here with a url for authentication. You can do that when you list the long lists of terror killings by Christians, Jews and secularists.
Just to enlighten us all. But of course.
August 1, 2010 at 7:24 pm |
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KeepTonyBlair wrote”Do Jews/Christians etc kill for religious reasons to anything like the same extent?”
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There’s a simple explanation here. Jews and Christians have very powerful states and militaries to do the killing for them and many of them live in the wealthiest countries in the world and have access to a good education. Most Muslims don’t.
The militaries of predominantly Christian countries such as the US (which also has a strangling powerful Israeli lobby) and of Israel have killed millions of Muslims directly and by sanctions over the past decades (not to mention lots of non-Muslim – Christian or agnostic or atheist Palestinians and other Arabs).
Before Israelis had their own state their militias and terrorist groups in the British Mandate of Palestine carried out terrorist attacks and bombings targeting and killing British soldiers and police and British and Palestinian Arab civilians.
Many Prime Ministers of Israel – Begin and Yitzakh Shamir among them – were involved in carrying out these acts of terrorism to try to get their own state.
During the 1948 war they massacred many thousands of Palestinian civilians in order to get as many as possible of the rest to leave in terror, as shown by the work of Israeli historians like Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris (even if Morris is too Zionist to draw the logical conclusions from the evidence he himself relates in his books) and American academics like Norman Finkelstein.
Now they have a strong military the military committs the terrorist acts and massacres and indiscrimate fire on entire towns and refugee camps for them and it’s called “legitimate military action”.