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… but not by the international press, for whom this 360km² strip of land seems to hold more fascination than the rest of the Middle East put together. Everything that happens there is much worse than comparable things happening elsewhere: hunger, illness, poverty, overcrowding, unemployment, even darkness is much darker there. The BBC, naturally, has been in the forefront of keeping the world up to date with just how unspeakably ghastly everything is, serializing an aid worker’s Gaza diary (’Poverty is deepening here, as is stress and despair, especially among the most vulnerable, women and children’), reporting on power cuts (’At least 800,000 people are now in darkness’), and making it clear where the blame lies (’Israel closed Gaza’s borders last Thursday’).

However, it turns out that the place has a border with Egypt too, and the BBC has been forced to adjust its usual choice of Gaza map - which didn’t mention Egypt at all - to one which accords more closely with reality. This isn’t a problem, though, for in the looking-glass world of the BBC, Egypt sealing its border with Gaza forms part of Israel’s blockade:

At the time of Israel’s “disengagement” or withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, an international agreement launched new policing of the Rafah border.

Essentially, a combination of CCTV cameras providing live pictures to the Israeli authorities and a team of EU monitors at crossing points was intended to ensure proper control, and protection against the smuggling of guns and explosives which could be used to launch attacks against Israel from Gaza.

Those arrangements broke down progressively, partly after Hamas won the parliamentary elections in Gaza of January 2006, and totally after the final seizure of all power in Gaza by Hamas in 2007.

The EU teams withdrew. The border closed.

It has become part of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, which Israel says is a necessary response to rocket attacks from Gaza which kill and injure Israeli citizens.

Meanwhile the stage-managing of Gaza’s blackouts, the careful planning of the ’spontaneous’ breaching of the border, Hamas’s fabrication of Gazan ‘food shortages’, and the fact that Israel at no time has left Gaza deprived of electricity, are among the aspects of the situation disregarded by the BBC in favour of propaganda like this:

The border was destroyed by Hamas militants after an Israeli blockade of Gaza led to a shortage of food, fuel and other vital supplies.

Israel said the blockade was aimed at preventing rocket attacks by Palestinian militants on its settlements near the border.

So it’s all down to the Israeli ‘blockade’. Surely never in history has a state withdrawn from a territory that its critics had spent years demanding it withdraw from, only to find that it is still, by those very same critics, held to be responsible for everything that goes on there. Israel is expected to provide food, fuel and power to the very people who are dedicated to its destruction, and is savaged by the international community when it reduces (never cuts off, only reduces) that support.

Meanwhile, whatever Gaza’s hardships, the local manufacture of rockets never seems to be interrupted, and those deadly missiles continue to rain down upon the towns (not ’settlements’ as the BBC would have it) of Israel. Presumably they are putting them together by candlelight.

For more on the media’s delusions of Gaza, Cinnamon Stillwell’s ‘Pallywood’s latest attractions’ is strongly recommended. Read Cinnamon’s post, and follow her links.

UPDATE 30 January 2008: Der Spiegel has published a grimly fascinating article on the Gaza rocket industry, ‘A visit to a Gaza rocket factory’, in which engaging Gazan rocket-builder ‘Abdul’ (a geography student by day) shows off his propellant-making skills to reporter Ulrike Putz. Some highlights of Abdul’s cheery chatter: ‘Fertilizer for the rocket fuel … we get it in Israel’; ‘The Israeli blockade doesn’t affect us; it’s just intended to plunge the people into misery’; ‘If we kill soldiers, then we are more than happy. If it hits a child, then naturally we are not happy’. Naturally. (Information about this article came via Solomonia’s post ‘Why should Israelis continue to support this?’ - why indeed? Acknowledgements and thanks.)

Orientalism: the East systematically misrepresented and exploited to suit the ideology and purposes of the West. Here’s a prime example, from the BBC: ‘Hospitality in a suspicious world’, by BBC Middle East correspondent Kate Clark. It comes from a long-established BBC Radio Four programme called ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ which sits somewhat outside the constraints of regular reporting. The programme, writes one distinguished BBC journalist, offers BBC reporters the chance to ’say things you cannot say anywhere else. You are freer to be yourself … to react, draw broad conclusions and even step over that barrier so many BBC correspondents set up and say what you really feel about what you are doing’.

‘Hospitality in a suspicious world’ begins with an account of Clark’s conversation with a taxi driver in Kurdish Iraq. He told her his woes: ‘”Rent,” he said, “had gone up five-fold and petrol prices 20-fold since 2003″‘. No mention of what else might have changed for him as a Kurd in Iraq since 2003, but taxi drivers aren’t known for accentuating the positive. Anyway, moved by what he told her, Clark apparently ‘paid him a bit extra’. His reaction? ‘He called me back to argue over the money because he thought I had paid him too much’. This, we are led to conclude, is a noble soul. Mired in economic hardship that is the West’s fault (everything is much worse ’since 2003′, don’t forget) he nonetheless refuses to take more than his fair share of Ms Clark’s UK-taxpayer-funded expenses account. And, the report makes clear, this is not unusual: the Middle East is full of this kind of selfless generosity.

‘Why do you go to such dangerous places?’ people often ask me. They mean dangerous, Muslim countries. I usually report from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East.

‘Do you have to wear a headscarf?’ I’m asked.

‘Do you ever feel threatened as a woman?’

It is difficult to explain that the sort of generosity and open-heartedness shown by the Kurdish taxi driver is very compelling and very normal across the Islamic world. It is generally a good place to be a guest.

Ms Clark does indeed appear wearing a headscarf in a picture illustrating the article, and later admits to feeling nervous ‘just walking down the street in Kabul’. But that isn’t allowed to distract from her central point: the people of the Middle East (the people of the Muslim Middle East) are generous, hospitable, welcoming, noble, and if they aren’t, it’s our fault.

But it has become more complicated.

Bin Laden’s war and the US-UK military response, and the polarisation between the Western and Islamic worlds mean such ordinary human encounters have become more difficult.

Western journalists are now targets for some Muslims in some Muslim countries. And it does not matter what we actually do or believe, we may be considered enemies.

Before 2001 in Afghanistan ’there was very little anti-Western sentiment, not even from the Taleban’ whereas now ‘many Afghans, including some friends, speak darkly of Western conspiracies to oppress the Umma, the global Muslim community’. You see, it’s not just extremists who express anti-Western sentiment. Even friends of BBC journalists feel that way. But only since 2001, when we suddenly started being horrible to them.

Afghanistan, says Clark, is ‘a place where strangers offer you tea and a bed for the night, where proverbially, people say that, when faced with guests, what is important is not how big your house is, but how big your heart is’. The Taleban weren’t very hospitable: they threw Clark out in March 2001 because her reporting ‘was not based in reality and conflicted with the Taliban way of thinking’. In a report on her expulsion published in The Daily Mirror on 20 March 2001 Clark described a Taliban hitting her in the shoulder with the butt of his Kalashnikov:

‘He assumed that I was an Afghan woman who shouldn’t be where I was with my face uncovered. I yelled back at him, “How dare you? I’m from the BBC.” As soon as he realised who I was he was very apologetic - he kept smiling and saying sorry’.

Had she been an Afghan woman he would not have stopped at one blow, and smiles and apologies would, one imagines, have been in short supply. That particular Afghan’s heart was clearly not big enough to accommodate hospitable feelings for the women of his own country, only for foreign women working for news organizations.

Clark then moves on to her experiences in East Jerusalem and the West Bank during ‘the first Palestinian intifada’ which, she helpfully reminds us with the impartiality for with the BBC is famous, was ‘the uprising against Israeli military occupation’. She recounts an occasion when, in a Gaza refugee camp, ‘an adult carefully explain[ed] to a small child who had picked up a stone to throw at me, that this would be shameful - I was a guest’. If she’d been an Israeli - man, woman or child, soldier or civilian - stoning would have been fine and honourable. But no - Kate Clark was a guest, and a guest of a particularly useful kind, so to stone her would have been ’shameful’. Just as in Afghanistan, those hospitable hearts are not quite big enough.

Yet the Palestinians were wonderful, apparently: not a gun or a rocket, not a bomb or a riot to be seen. They bought her cans of cola, even though they couldn’t afford to. They were hospitable, generous, and, Clark tells us with a flourish of self-hating post-imperial guilt worthy of Robert Fisk himself, they graciously forgave her for being British and therefore, along with every other Westerner, responsible for their current plight:

Palestinians were generous despite their bleak, constrained lives. Lives which, they were usually too polite to point out, my country was historically, partly responsible for.

Yes, once again, it’s all our fault. Their ‘bleak and constrained lives’ are our fault - not their fault, for consistently rejecting peace and resorting to violence and terror, not the fault of their fellow Arabs, for doing nothing to ease their plight and exploiting them for their own political ends, not the fault of their corrupt, incompetent and thuggish leaders. Our fault. Politely, they refrain from blaming us, however, and we should be grateful to them for their civilized restraint.

‘You want to find out what is going on’, as a journalist, says Clark.’ And you particularly want to hear from the marginalised and powerless’. It’s strange that the marginalised and powerless so often occupy the centre of the stage for the Western media and dictate the script from which its representatives read.

Clark ends by telling us that visiting Iraqi Kurdistan was a ‘treat’. ‘It is Iraq and it is safe’, she declares. And that is thanks to who exactly? She doesn’t say. She then returns to her taxi driver:

When I eventually managed to pay the Kurdish taxi driver his extra fare, I thought, ‘this wouldn’t happen in London’.

But actually it does sometimes.

If the driver is Afghan or Pakistani or Iraqi and we chat about his home country, I do quite often end up trying to drive the fare up, while he endeavours to drive it down.

This glibly patronizing little tale is very hard to believe. For a start taxi fares in London are rigidly regulated - there’s no scope for haggling. And what if they’ve chatted about the driver’s home country and disagreed? If he’s a secularist Afghan, or a Pakistani Christian, for example (to name two truly ‘marginalised and powerless’ groups)? Does the same apply? But that wouldn’t happen, because we’re not dealing here with real people with diverse views: we are dealing with an orientalist stereotype, devised to flatter the self-lacerating sensibilities of a guilt-ridden, self-hating West.

Edward Said could never have predicted the intellectual back-flip that ‘orientalism’ has performed. Conceptualized by him as an ideology through which the West oppresses the East, it has become a means through which the West can oppress itself. Yet it still draws upon the same roots of caricature and stereotype: not least, a sentimentalized and romanticized view of the Middle East as a place inhabited by modern versions of the noble savage, who shame the decadent West with their generosity of spirit and their innate sense of hospitality. Meet the new orientalism, even more misleading and dangerous than the old sort.

The most-read article on greycat.org over the last week has been ‘Dresden: the making of a baroque city’.

Baroque cities have been described as representing ‘the cosmic-dynastic grand illusion’ with the great palace acting as the focus, ‘sending its surveillance and benevolence into the far corners of the geometrically disciplined urban universe’. This vision is perhaps most dramatically expressed in completely new cities such as Karlsruhe and St Petersburg; but it is fully present, on a smaller scale, but nonetheless in the grand manner, in the development of Dresden during the baroque period.

There’s an interesting article in the current issue of the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine on the design of First World War aircraft. The gist of it is that while huge advances in aircraft design took place between 1914 and 1918 lots of good ideas took a long time to be adopted and lots of bad ideas persisted much longer than they should have done.

Most of the improvements emerged from trial and error. But what if designers during the first World War had had the tools for simulation and analysis that are available today? Many of the errors would have been avoided had the firms of Fokker, Sopwith, Nieuport, and the rest had a few desktop computers. 

The question is asked tongue-in-cheek, of course, but the article does take a rather teleological approach. The history of technology offers very few cases of straightforward development towards the best solution for whatever problem is being addressed; the process of technological change tends to be a lot more complex, indirect and contingent than that, and technical issues are never the only ones at stake: social, political, financial and cultural factors all play a part, and can end up being more important than the simple question (if it is simple) of what is ‘the best technology’. Heavier-than-air craft of military value only dated from about 1910; the whole area of military aviation was new and largely unknown; the pressure of war forced improvisation as much as it did innovation; engineering at the time was as much an intuitive pursuit as it was a technical discipline, particularly in aviation where gifted amateurism was the order of the day; and the luxury of hindsight was - of course - not available at the time. What is surprising is not that Great War aircraft were not better than they were, but that they were as good as they turned out to be.

The issue of interrupter gear is raised at one point - i.e. a system that meant you could fire a machine gun forward along the axis of the aircraft without shooting your propellor off. Its invention is ascribed to Anthony Fokker, and the author wonders about ‘the inability of the British and French, who could build both engines and machine guns, to quickly contrive a satisfactory way to synchronize them’. My understanding was (and I haven’t time to check this with a reliable source right now) that it was the French pilot Roland Garros who invented the first effective interrupter system, which he fitted to his own aircraft, and that it was when he was shot down that the Germans found the secret, improved upon it, and fitted it to the Fokker Eindecker, with devastating results.

Peter Garrison, ‘What the Red Baron never knew’, Air & Space Magazine, February 2008.

From the ‘has the world gone mad?’ department:

Pantomime gun must be registered 

A Cornish village drama group has had to register a toy gun with the police to comply with health and safety rules. Carnon Downs drama group in Cornwall have also had to keep their plastic cutlasses and wooden swords locked up for the pantomime, Robinson Crusoe. Producers of the show called the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) rules ‘farcical’. A spokesman for the HSE said the rules were designed to make risks ’sensibly managed’.

The gun produces a flag with the word ‘bang’ written on it.

Most-read article on greycat.org over the last week: ‘The shadow of Stonehenge: paganism, fate and redemption in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. For more, see the post from the last time it reached most-read status.

Admirers of Gene Wolfe’s epic fantasy of the far future The Book of the New Sun will recall the guild cloak worn by the central character and narrator, the torturer Severian: not black but fuligin, the colour darker than black. ‘I’ve never seen such black - so dark you can’t see folds in it. It makes my hand look as though it’s disappeared’. Then there’s Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove album with its all-black cover: ‘How much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black’. And we musn’t forget what Father Ted taught us about the special blackness of priest’s socks, which are blacker than any other type of socks. ‘Sometimes you see lay people wear what look like black socks but if you look closely you’ll see they’re very, very, very, very, very, very, very dark blue’.

Anyway, the point of this is that fuligin has now been invented; a substance of which ‘none more black’ can honestly be said has arrived; the truly, perfectly black priest’s sock is now possible at last. Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have used carbon nanotubes to create ‘the darkest man-made material ever’. According to Imperial College theoretical physicist Sir John Pendry, ‘they’ve made the blackest material known to science’.  Next stop: superdark materials. Which are apparently even darker.

Something about whales brings out the mystic in otherwise admirable people, and very embarrassing it can be. Deep in the Southern Ocean a Japanese whaling flotilla is at work, tracked and harassed by the anti-whaling forces of Greenpeace (the Esperanza) and Sea Shepherd (the Steve Irwin). If there’s one thing the latter two organizations hate more than whaling, it’s each other, and co-operation in the cause of the whales has not been very evident down there: each has been going its own way in the hunt for the Japanese.

But, the Melbourne Age reports, it turns out that the radicals of Sea Shepherd have a great advantage over their establishment rivals at Greenpeace. The whales are on their side.

Greenpeace declined to comment on Esperanza’s position, but the western location confirmed Sea Shepherd president Paul Watson’s belief that the whalers were likely to be working north of Prydz Bay, in the Co-operation Sea, where he was headed. He also said a whale showed him the way. ‘Yesterday a large humpback whale surfaced beside the Steve Irwin and seven times raised his long flipper into the air, and seven times brought it down pointing in a direction due west, as if to say “go this way”.’

Captain Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd, is a formidable figure, a man Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey would have called ‘a capital seaman’,* but it’s hard to respect someone who really believes that a whale popped up out of the water for him, knew who he was and what he was doing, and gave him a helping flipper. Yet Watson is typical of a paradoxical but strongly-rooted tendency in the conservation movement to put humanity at the centre of everything: he cannot see the whales in their own terms, he has to humanize them and believe that there is some kind of relationship there that sanctifies his anthropocentric view of the natural world.

The ‘they went that-a-way’ whale is not an aberration for Watson. If you visit Sea Shepherd’s web site you’ll find that the whole enterprise was inspired by a similar Disneyesque fantasy:

In June 1975, Robert Hunter and Paul Watson were the first people to put their lives on the line to protect whales when Paul placed his inflatable Zodiac between a Russian harpoon vessel and a pod of defenseless Sperm whales. During this confrontation with the Russian whaler, a harpooned and dying sperm whale loomed over Paul’s small boat. Paul recognized a flicker of understanding in the dying whale’s eye. He felt that the whale knew what they were trying to do. He watched as the magnificent leviathan heaved its body away from his boat, slipped beneath the waves and died. A few seconds of looking into this dying whale’s eye changed his life forever. He vowed to become a lifelong defender of the whales and all creatures of the seas.

Presumably defending ‘all creatures of the seas’ would mean protecting giant squid from the sperm whales who prey upon them (’Paul recognized a flicker of understanding in the dying squid’s eye …’) but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Despite his claim to care not only for ‘the whales, dolphins, seals’ but for ‘all the other creatures on this earth’ the truth is that only some species are of interest: the ones that are beautiful, that make people feel bad about humanity but good about themselves, and that can have human characteristics - the nice ones, at least - projected onto them. Watson even claims that he has been ‘rewarded by friendship with many members of different species’: friends with dolphins and killer whales? It must put a strain on things when one of your friends hunts down, tears apart and starts to eat another. But such conflicts are absent from Watson’s world because he sees nature only from his own point of view, and interprets it in accordance with his own moral, aesthetic, and even spiritual, standards. Nature is harmonious and peaceful, filled with gentle, intelligent, beautiful creatures. It’s just human beings who screw it all up and stop it being what human beings like to think it should be.

By the way, the Jolly Roger flown by Sea Shepherd’s Steve Irwin (formerly Farley Mowat) is not just for show. The ship is unregistered and is, genuinely and legally, a pirate. Watson is quite proud of this, holding forth about what he imagines is the noble history of pirates:

‘It was not the British Navy that ended piracy in the Caribbean, it was Captain Henry Morgan who did that, and he was a pirate,’ said Captain Watson. ‘I am proud to add my name to the long list of honourable and noble pirates like Sir Francis Drake, John Paul Jones, and Jean LaFitte.’

Henry Morgan certainly did not end piracy in the Caribbean, which continued for thirty years after his death in 1688 and was eventually brought to an end by the actions of the British and Spanish navies. Nor were Morgan, Drake or LaFitte pirates; they were privateers, licensed by letter of marque to prey upon the commerce of their country’s enemies during time of war (and LaFitte was a slave-trader, among many other disreputable things: ‘honourable and noble’ he was not). As for John Paul Jones, that great man was an American naval officer, and to suggest that he had anything of the pirate about him is insulting as well as profoundly ignorant.

* Another quote from Jack Aubrey: ‘I have always liked whalers’ (Patrick O’Brian, Blue at the Mizzen (1999), p. 183).

The first ‘most-read’ of the new year, and the new favourite essay at greycat.org is ‘Burke and revolution: reform, revolution and constitutional conservatism in the thought of Edmund Burke’. Many of the visitors who have been interested in this essay have been from the United States - appropriately enough, for Burke was a friend of American independence.

A comparison between Burke’s reaction to the American Revolution and his response to the French Revolution is instructive in revealing the grounds of his opposition to the latter. In that the French Revolution was an attempt at the wholesale and instantaneous social and political transformation of society on abstract, rationalist principles, it presented a challenge to Burke’s world-view quite unlike that offered by the American Revolution, which Burke saw as essentially a problem in imperial constitutional and administrative relationships. The social and political ideas which Burke marshalled against the French Revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France were not new; his rejection of abstract political theorising and concepts such as universal rights, his belief in inheritance and slow historical development and his respect for the gradually evolving national society, his belief that the current generation is obliged to maintain what previous generations have created in the way of institutions and practices, his insistence that prejudice rather than reason holds society together, all are present in his speeches, addresses and letters on America. Yet there is nothing in Burke’s comments on America which foreshadows the violence of his reaction to the Revolution in France and the anger with which he denounced the French revolutionaries and their works.

Read ’Burke and revolution’ by clicking here. Other essays on eighteenth-century topics can be found here.

Picture: Edmund Burke, engraving after Joshua Reynolds. [Source]

The theme of the January 2008 issue of All The Rage is ‘forbidden knowledge’. Highlights include an interview with Greg Stekelman, better known as themanwhofellasleep, some borrowed opinions from Oliver Holtaway, and typically classy ramblings from Sylvia Bellini. And there’s something from me:

Modern technology, the googleization of the world, has made more knowledge available more easily than ever before, and has led to the concept of ‘forbidden knowledge’ itself becoming devalued. Every conspiracy theorist now has a website, repositories of convoluted nonsense that feed off each other and off the internet itself. Whether it’s 9/11, UFOs, the New World Order or the satanic nature of bar codes, the Truth is but a click away - ‘google it, people!’

‘Forbidden knowledge in the internet age’ can be found on pages 3-4 of the new issue (PDF file) of All The Rage.

Picture: Detail of photograph depicting Eve in the Garden of Eden by Jean Agélou (1878-1921). [Source]