If this report is correct, Brown’s Britain is about to achieve a new low.
The government is expected to offer a last-minute compensation deal to help push the 42-day detention plan through. Under this, any suspect held for more than 28 days and later not charged could receive £3,000 for each extra day in custody, the BBC has learned.
We have now reached a point where the British Government is happy to put civil liberties up for sale.
Back in November I had pedantic remarks to make about a tragic story from Afghanistan: ‘BBC English: the decline and fall continues’. The point was that the BBC, in reporting the possibility that UK ‘friendly fire’ had killed two Danish soldiers, reported the story as MOD investigating claim UK ‘friendly fire’ killed two Danish troops. ‘If one individual had been reported dead’, I mused, ’would the headline have referred to the killing of “one Danish troop”?’
Well, CBS News has indeed broken that particular stupidity barrier with their headline today, reporting on the deaths of three British soldiers in Afghanistan: ‘Afghan Violence Claims 100th British Troop’.
Why is this stupid? Here’s an article that explains all. Here’s another, with added lefty hand-wringing (more of the same here, in the fourth paragraph down).
UPDATE: They’ve corrected it to ‘100th British soldier’, which is nice to see but doesn’t really make up for their initial dumbness.
Jane Kramer’s New Yorker article about Nadia Abu El Haj is a piece of one-sided puffery in which Abu El Haj is depicted as a martyr to the dark forces that threaten scholarly freedom of inquiry and expression in the academy, and any notion that there might be serious criticisms of her work based on scholarship rather than politics or ideological bias is dismissed out of hand. The less than even-handed approach taken by Kramer to Abu El Haj’s work is made clear from the outset, in passages such as this, discussing the responses to Facts on the Ground:
The book was praised by colleagues who responded to the critical tropes that were Abu El-Haj’s legacy from scholars like Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, and Edward Said, and dismissed by colleagues with a theoretical or a political or simply a turf interest in dismissing it.
So those who liked the book were scholars engaged with the intellectual movement of which it was part; those who didn’t were acting from motives of bias or vested interest.
Perhaps the most striking and questionable aspect of the article, however, is its depiction of Abu El Haj as an innocent abroad, a high-minded scholar taken aback by the very idea that anyone could see her work as controversial in any way that goes beyond ‘an exchange of letters in the kind of scholarly journals no one outside the academy reads’. Kramer quotes Abu El Haj’s description of herself as ’not a public intellectual. I’m drawn to archives, to disciplines where the evidence sits for a while. I don’t court controversy’. Perhaps she is sincere in saying that: after all the view that Israel is a repressive illegitimate colonial state is hardly controversial within the academy. On the contrary, it’s Middle East Studies Groupthink 101. It’s when people outside her own inward-looking peer group start to challenge the things she says - pointing out, perhaps, that she certainly didn’t let ‘the evidence [sit] for a while’ in her sympathetic account of the violent destruction of Joseph’s Tomb in Facts on the Ground - that she finds things uncomfortable. If you write books containing that kind of thing, and publish them, and have people buy them and read them, controversy will find you out. If you don’t like it, perhaps you are in the wrong line of work.
The account given by Kramer of how Nadia Abu El Haj came to be working on Israel is rather touching. If we are to believe what Kramer tells us, Abu El Haj was this close to devoting herself to the anthropological study of Palestine: ‘She wanted to figure out the place, the issues, the source of nationalism there’. But her dissertation adviser at Duke University changed the current of her studies by suggesting that she look at Israel instead: ‘you need to understand the institutions that have the power - the institutions of Israeli nationalism’. And that was that. This promising young scholar would henceforth devote herself to the study of Israeli national identity and Israeli institutions of power. What a radical choice to make. Picture the scene:
Dissertation Adviser: So, you want to analyze and critique the sources and nature of Palestinian nationalism and national identity?
Promising Young Scholar: Yes, that’s right. Palestine needs serious study. I want to figure out the place, the issues, the source of nationalism there.
Dissertation Adviser: Nah. Power’s the thing. Israel has the power. Study Israel.
Promising Young Scholar: Gosh, could I? That had never occurred to me. I bet hardly anyone ever critiques Israeli nationalism.
Dissertation Adviser (thinks): Booya! Another victory for intellectual diversity in the academy.
It’s hard to see what good Kramer’s article, with its patent biases, will do: it doesn’t inform, it doesn’t analyze, it doesn’t investigate, it doesn’t question. Written as it is in the dead-in-the-water prose that characterizes so much American big-title journalism, it doesn’t even entertain. It fails to engage with any of the serious criticisms of Nadia Abu El Haj’s work, and barely acknowledges their existence. It seeks to relate the Facts on the Ground controversy to the wider issue of the politicization of Middle East Studies, but does so in a way so skewed and blinkered that what it tries to say is rendered worthless; how seriously can you take someone who quotes Rashid Khalidi as an authority on academic ethics, and does so apparently with a straight face?
On the plus side, this being The New Yorker, there are some good cartoons in there.
Jane Kramer on Nadia Abu El Haj: further reading
‘The Petition’: link to the original article in PDF format
Phoebe Maltz: A balanced account
Orthodox Anarchist: The New Yorker takes aim at the Zionist thought police
Solomonia: The New Yorker dances to Nadia’s tune
The Bwog: Nadia Abu El-Haj speaks
Martin Kramer: Are Columbia’s Palestinians … Palestinian?
In case you weren’t aware of the background to yesterday’s news that a group of Muslim scientists and clerics want a global time based on Mecca to replace GMT, two invaluable videos available at YouTube present the cutting-edge Islamic science underlying the Mecca Time movement. They both feature Dr ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid, a scientific luminary from the Egyptian National Research Centre.
The first video, ‘Science in Islam: Mecca is the centre of the world’, is from Al-Majd TV, Saudi Arabia, and dates from 16 January 2005. Highlights of this discussion include the claim that the Ka’ba emits short-wave radiation, that ‘this radiation is infinite’, and that this is why anyone living in Mecca or travelling there will live long, be healthier, and be ‘less affected by Earth’s gravity’. The existence of the ‘zero-magnetism zone’ halfway between the north and south poles ‘where the pull is equal from both sides’ is also considered: ‘the magnetic force has no effect there’.
The companion piece to this is ‘Science in Islam: Mecca Time must replace GMT’ from Mihwar TV, Egypt, recorded on 26 December 2006, in which Dr ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid expounds the benefits of Mecca Time. In Greenwich the magnetic field is 8.5 degrees, while in Mecca ‘the magnetic field is zero’. This means that when time is measured from Greenwich there is a discrepancy of 8.5 minutes ‘between the northern and southern hemispheres’. ‘Air traffic’, warns the doc darkly, ‘cannot be organized in this way’. There’s also a lot of fascinating information about blood, circulation, magnetic force, and why circling the Ka’ba will fill you with energy (clue: it’s all about going from right to left).
Such is the world of modern Islamic science, in which religious fundamentalism meets Time Cube. You infidels are educated stupid, not comprehend the zero-magnetism Mecca Time truth of Earth-centre infinite radiation wisdom.
Even the time must submit. ‘Muslim scientists and clerics’ want the world to adopt Mecca Time, reports the BBC:
Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth. … The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.
One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.
Some geologist. (1) Magnetic north is constantly on the move. (2) The line of longitude upon which Mecca is situated also passes through, for example, the Russian cities of Yaroslavl, Voronezh and Rostov-on-Don, so presumably those places (along with others in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia, Kenya …) would have equal claim to whatever divinely-ordained distinction is claimed for Mecca. (3) There are also alignments of the earth’s magnetic field where magnetic north and true north are the same, but such lines are not equivalent to lines of longitude and anyway Mecca isn’t on one.
He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.
I find the notion of Royal Navy battleships circling the globe coercing people into setting their watches according to British diktat rather appealing, but it didn’t really work like that. GMT was adopted as a standard by consent, not imposed by force. Perhaps the distinction between the two is not well understood in Islam.
According to the Gulf Times’s report on this gathering of dunces, a man called Yasin a-Shouk has invented an Islamic watch that runs anti-clockwise. If the standard of scientific knowledge on display at this conference is any guide, the symbolism is appropriate: for Islam, intellectually at least, time does indeed run backwards.
[P.S. How long are pious Muslims going to permit this infidel organization to go on associating the name of the Holy City with commercialism, gambling, and garish decor?]
Anthony Burgess (1917-93) is a writer who’s rather neglected today, but who (in addition to being very readable) always has interesting things to say. Some of the most interesting, and often prescient, are about Islam and its relationship with the West. I’ve written a new essay exploring this theme which is available at greycat.org: ‘”The old enemy”: Anthony Burgess and Islam’.
Further to my earlier post on Jane Kramer’s article in The New Yorker: still haven’t read it. Phoebe Maltz has, and says what she thinks here. An alternative view can be found at the Orthodox Anarchist (where there is also a link to another PDF of the full article).
There’s also an audio interview from KPFK (Los Angeles) in which Jon Wiener talks to the writer of the article, Jane Kramer. It can be accessed from this page - the direct link to the audio is here. The relevant portion of the programme starts at 21:00 and is about 15 minutes in length.
As it happens, I have just republished my own ‘Was Nadia Abu El Haj treated fairly?’, an article originally commissioned by History News Network and published by HNN on 12 November 2007, here on greycat.org. You can find the article here.
Back from hospital, back at the keyboard, and the first new post in a while is on an old topic: Nadia Abu El Haj. I’m very grateful to Richard Silverstein for alerting me to ‘The Petition: Israel, Palestine, and a Tenure Battle at Harvard’ by Jane Kramer, published in the current issue of The New Yorker. I haven’t read it yet, but when I do I may say something about it here (but only if I have something worth saying).
Here’s the link to a copy of the article (in PDF, at Scribd) which Richard Silverstein provides in the entry on his blog.
Apologies for the recent lack of activity around here: I’ve been unwell. Things should be back to normal shortly.
The February 2008 issue of All The Rage is out, and the theme this month is ‘time’. I ramble on about the relative nature of time, the thought of Henri Bergson, and the cluelessness of post-modernist historians:
No past event is intrinsically in the past. It is only a past event in relation to other events that are in the present and the future. This does not mean, as some post-modernists like to tell us, that the relationship between past and future is consequently meaningless. Time passes and change occurs: did the trendy post-modernist historian write any of his vacuous articles before he was born? No, and nor will he write a single word once he is dead.
The highlight of the issue, however, is editor Leila Johnston’s mind-opening piece on ‘time and the future of writing’:
You could, if you wanted, read the great art of the past century as a laborious delivery of 21st century individualism. Maybe it was a kind of battle to own the unknowable years ahead. Whatever lay in front would still be beyond reference, but pehaps naming it as such meant it could be deliberately uncontrolled in ways the present and past could not. Unlike the past, which was vulnerable to subjective reading and revision, the future represented a lack of context, an absence of meaning. We can view this effort to represent chaos as rather quaint - so obviously idealistic, so clearly doomed to fail.
You can find the February issue of All The Rage here (PDF): go and read the lot, and look at the pictures.