Entre Nous / Musings of a former Belgian

Quote of the day

Todd Seavey in the Wall Street Journal:

Perhaps the greatest evidence that there is little intellectual heft left in the anarchist movement is the occasional protests in Albany, N.Y., where self-proclaimed anarchists turn up to protest budget cuts at state-run schools. It's a satire Burke never could have dreamed of.

Arab Muslim women says openly what many non-Muslims are afraid to say in public

Whew, this one is rich. (From the New York Times, of all places.)

LOS ANGELES, March 10 — Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

"I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings," she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: "Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs."

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."

She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."

She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

Needless to say, her answering machine is full of death threats these days. Because boy, does the truth ever hurt.

Dr. Sanity wonders why this woman -- a psychiatrist with only a year of hospital residency left to requalify in the US -- isn't being hired by the same Ivy League institution that fell over itself to give a fellowship to a former Taliban spokesman with the equivalent of a fourth-grade education.

Raising the minimum wage: not the answer to worker exploitation in Israel

One plank of the Labor Party platform in Israel is an increase of the minimum wage to about US$1,000 --- which is actually about half the median wage after taxes in Israel. According to Amir 'anusclown' Peretz, this would be a decisive blow in the war on poverty.

Criticism from free-market advicates is, well, predictable. Somewhat surprising is an op-ed by Hanna Zohar of Israeli worker's rights lobby Kav la-Oved (freely: "workers hotline").

Unlike Peretz's trade union Histadrut --- whose main rationale appears to be adding even more to the already bloated wages of a small minority of Israeli workers --- Kav la-Oved mostly deals with the problems of people the Histadrut doesn't lift a finger for: foreign workers, employees of manpower companies, and the like. As a result, their perspective is a little different.

Ms. Zohar points out that the greatest problem is not the Israeli minimum wage being too small, but that it itself is not being enforced, and employers violate labor law with seeming impunity. In order to keep down labor costs and especially the excessive difficulty of firing redundant or incompetent employees, an ever-greater number of organizations (including universities and government offices) outsource work --- particularly custodial and security, but increasingly also general office tasks --- to manpower agencies. The lowest bid gets the tender pretty much without questions asked about what they pay their employees. As a result, an ever-larger number of Israelis find themselves working for manpower agencies/security companies/cleaning contractors/caterers/... at sub-minimum wages, without any fringe benefits or union protection of any kind. Other companies or organizations, pleading financial difficulties, let employees go unpaid for months at a time.

The latest National Insurance report on poverty in Israel presented a relatively new datum: 41 percent of the poor work part- and full-time. The growing phenomenon of violation of disadvantaged workers' rights is the main reason for their being driven below the poverty line. This phenomenon is not restricted to subcontracted workers, where a reality of labor rights violations looks like an inevitable fact of life. New victims include directly employed workers in marketing, communications, transportation, tourism and so on. We are talking here about violations of the basic legal rights of workers, violations that amount to a criminal offense.

THERE ARE various reasons for this widespread violation of the law. Privatization, unemployment, globalization and the weakening of trade unions. In this reality, enforcement mechanisms should have moved more intently to contain the widespread violation of labor rights, which amounts to an attack against the rule of law, contributes to social gaps and to deeper more widespread poverty. But in fact so little has been done that one can add "lack of enforcement" to the list of causes of the contemporary poverty trap.

In light of the processes affecting the Israeli labor market, what is required is not only more manpower for enforcement, but also deeper and more acute means of deterrence, which will exact a high price for violations of labor rights. Today, violating labor rights simply pays off. The tough competition in the Israeli market reduces the number of competitors.

The survivors are bigger companies, which employ more and more workers. This is the case in security, tourism, communications and retail food marketing, where companies employ hundreds or thousands of workers. Systemic under-payment and violation of labor rights, even in small amounts, can add up to significant profits.

Enforcement authorities in the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor do not understand - or do not want to understand - the need for changes in enforcement mechanisms. Demands by Kav LaOved and other activist groups are met with indifference.

n May 2005 attorney Eran Golan from Kav LaOved petitioned the Supreme Court to order the ministry's Labor Enforcement Division to publish the names of companies fined for violation of minimum wage. Despite the ministry's eventual consent, which was endorsed as the court's ruling in July, the ministry has still not disclosed the list of delinquent employers, and apparently does not intend to do so. Kav LaOved will have to return to the court and petition again, this time against the ministry's contempt for the court's ruling.

The Treasury has a key role in deterring employers against violation of labor laws. By setting minimum requirements for public tenders, it can prevent convicted labor law delinquents from accessing such tenders, including public security and cleaning tenders, licenses for private welfare services (nursing homes, hospitals and hostels), and public transportation licenses. But the Treasury prefers the lowest bid, even if it is clear that the cheapest offer relies on past and future violations of labor laws.

If law-breaking companies or organizations get punished at all, it is generally by imposing fines that are a fraction of what they save by cheating their workers of what they are entitled to by law.

Ms. Zohar didn't quite go as far as to describe the calls for increasing the minimum wage to US$1,000 as "political masturbation", but that's exactly what yours truly calls it.

Mia Doornaert: "Europe going wobbly"

A reader sent me the following editorial column by Mia Doornaert from Belgian weekly De Standaard (in Dutch, paid subscribers only). Here is my translation:

Bravo, Charlie-Hebdo. The cartoon on its cover this week says it all. A distraught Muhammad covers his eyes and says: c'est dur d'être aimé par des cons [French for "it's hard on me to be loved by arseholes"]. The witty cartoon is actually rather flattering for Islam. It shows that foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics that torch European embassies are not the most representative elements of said religion.

We hear these "angry muslims" protest day after day against "Danish cartoons". Yeah, right. Jyllands Posten is no doubt one of the most read newspapers in the Muslim world. That the cartoons already appeared last September 25 does not matter. Good for the demonstrators that only after months of deliberation they burst out in spontaneous rage.

And of course this rage is our fault. The lands where demonstrations are being held are sooooo much better at the "dialogue between cultures". And if they leave an occasional "beauty flaw", well, the Middle East has oil and thus one might look the other way sometimes.

THe Europeans started getting wobbly as soon as demonstrators threw the first stones. EU-Commissioner Franco Frattini set the tone for, by now, pretty much all EU-leaders. Of course he's in favor of freedom of press. But the press has to be cautious. Cartoons that run afoul of religious taboos "do no service to the dialogue between cultures". We never hear this concern about "needless provocation" concerning mockery and blasphemy against Jesus, the Pope, or his Church. Or about hurtful sexist "humor".

The message is clear. Whoever does not strike back is fair game for mockery. Whoever retorts violently gets a pass. The capitulation of the spirits is already far-reaching. Progressives warn against islamophobia: "like antisemitism is shocking to us, cartoons about the Prophet are shocking to Muslims".

This comparison is obscene. Antisemitism is racism. Jews were murdered off for what they were, not what they believed. Objecting against the presence of people bceause they belong to the wrong "race" is racism. Debating their convictions is democracy. Islam is just as little a "race" as Xianity. Whoever wants to live in a free society has to put up with [Dutch idiom meaning: "the rough-and-tumble of debate"]. Or should we now expunge all passages from Voltaire that poke fun at Mahomet [sic] and only keep his mockery of Xianity?

Wake up, Mr. Frattini. What we see now is precisely a "dialogue between cultures". It is the confrontation between a culture grounded in the principles of the Enlightenment and one that abominates them.

Pretending that the latter is "the Islam", now that is insulting to Muslims. Europe should support the many moderates in Muslim world, rather than pandering to the extremists. The totalitarian version of Islam does not seek a dialogue [with us], but [our] capitulation

In this regard Great Britain seems already past the "point of no return" [English expression in original]. Recently, entertainers had to mobilize to prevent the extension of anti-racism laws to religions. Last summer, the London Tate Gallery dropped a piece by John Latham from an exhibition: sort-of a thick plate of glass in which texts from the Bible, the Gospels, and the Koran were embedded. The latter was enough for this self-censorship. There just had been bloody attacks in London, so you never knew. It also speaks volumes that no British newspaper published the Danish cartoons. Only those who do not know the [British] tabloids could ascribe this to good taste and tolerance.

"In the land of Voltaire and Zola, certain principles shall not be compromised" said the editor-in-chief of Charlie-Hebdo, this week. One might have hoped this would have been the position of the European Union.

But the EU leaves the PM of a member state standing alone in the breach, and this is shocking. For not PM Rasmussen is refusing the "dialogue between cultures". Danish imams did. They want to enjoy the benefits of freedom of expression but cannot accept that a democratic government does not rein in its press. And thus they started inciting the Muslim world against the land that granted them hospitality.

Our PM, who is such a staunch defender of the separation between church and state when it concern the "papists", has not even sent a message of support to his Danish colleague.

Europe goes on being mired in appeasement [English word in original]. It should have learned by now that a totalitarian monster cannot be placated. The more you feed it, the bolder it becomes.

Michael Crichton's "Complexity" speech

A must-read. I can't do it justice by selective quoting.

Alain Finkielkraut: latest victim of the Thought Police

TechCentralStation has a piece by Nidra Poller, explaining how French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut is becoming the latest victim of the French Thought Police, for the crime of having suggested in an interview with Haaretz that just maybe the rioting youth are not just 'victims of oppression'.

Says Poller:

Here in France, where no accusation against America or Israel is too scurrilous for official dissemination and mass consumption, Finkielkraut was beaten almost senseless for developing, with utmost precaution, a thoughtful analysis of the riots. Going beyond the simplistic sociological description of ghettoized youths bursting out in frustration against discrimination and unemployment, Finkielkraut analyzes the violence as a nihilistic attack against the French Republic. He points out the dangers inherent in romanticizing the riots as the justified revolt of the wretched of the earth. And he has the courage to mention that the perpetrators of the street violence are, for the most part, black and/or Muslim…born in France but anchored to an ethno-religious identity that makes their integration well nigh impossible. He cautions against a misguided anti-racism that may become the totalitarian menace of the 21st century, as was Communism in the latter half of the 20th.

Look, everybody who's read espionage thrillers knows the expression: [to recruit a spy] "under false flag". Suppose you are an operative for country [or entity] X operating in country Y, want to recruit a resident of Y as a spy or informant, and 'inducements' such as money or threats to reveal embarrassing pictures with goats are not applicable. But you happen to know that said person is passionate about some cause for which country Z is the standard bearer, or feels some special bond with country Z. So you pass yourself off as an agent of country Z, recruit him that way, and never reveal to him that he is actually working for country X "under false flag".

Many of the so-called "anti-racists" and "pacifists" of today are actually working for causes that they would sincerely abhor working for (such as Islamist totalitarianism). But they have, as it were, been recruited under a number of "false flags" --- generally less blatantly objectionable causes that they happen to sincerely believe in.

First-ever Belgian islamikaze --- a European woman

Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, quoting both Luxemburg TV and sources in the Belgian judiciary, reports that Belgium now has its first home-grown suicide bomber --- a female, ethnically European one at that.

The woman, living in Brussels, apparently converted to Islam following her marriage to a Moroccan immigrant, who hung around in radical islamist circles. She apparently blew herself up in a November 9 assault on an American patrol in Baghdad.

The soldiers found her Belgian passport on her body. As it turned out, she travelled to Iraq via Turkey, and preparations for the islamikaze attack were made by her "loving" husband.

The circumstances make me wonder whether she was pressured/manipulated into this following real or imaginary marital infidelity. We saw this a number of times here in Israel --- where the "Palestinian" woman in question was basically given the choice of "honorable martyrdom" or (presumably slow and painful) "execution". As in addition I consider any Western woman who converts to Islam to be certifiably insane, I consider her more a tool/victim in the hands of her "loving husband" than anything else.

The recommended course of medical treatment for the latter waste of oxygen, in my opinion, would be double orchidectomy without anesthesia, followed by forced ingestion of the removed organ tissue. Death is too noble a fate for this piece of human excrement.

UPDATE: Belgian daily De Standaard (in Dutch) has more. The woman was apparently one Muriel Degauque from the Walloon town of Monceau-sur-Sambre. Born in a working-class Walloon [=French-speaking Belgian] family, she had converted to Islam at the time of her first marriage, to an Algerian immigrant. Five years ago, she remarried to a Moroccan named Aissan, and her Islamic life took a sharp turn for the radical: she started wearing a burqa and even wore black gloves so her hands would not be visible. She moved to Brussels and was barely in touch with her parents.

Apparently she and her husband drove to Iraq via Turkey and Syria, from which latter country she talked one final time on the phone to her parents. Her husband was planning to blow himself up as well, but was killed, together with five accomplices, during a gun battle with American soldiers. An explosive belt was found around his middle.

In an operation against what appears to be a network of splodeydope smugglers, Belgian police made 14 arrests on Tuesday night in Brussels, Antwerp, Riemst, and Charleroi. Nine were brought before an Investigative Judge [= the first stage of felony proceedings in Belgium] on charges of membership in a terrorist organization. Among them is an Antwerp couple who wanted to leave themselves, and were found out by wiretapping. Another was the son of a notorious Koran teacher of Tunisian origin, who was himself expelled in 1991 for incitement.

UPDATE 2: Leave it to Charles Johnson to come up with the headline Exploding chocolate poodle.

Sharon and the Big Bang

The "Big Bang" (mapatz ha-gadol) our political commentators have been predicting for about a year now has happened. Ariel Sharon has left the Likud --- which he himself gathered 30 years ago as a cartel list of three nationalist and pro-market parties --- and formed a new party, which Yediot Achronot reports will be called "Kadima" ("Forward"). The Jerusalem Post reports 15 Likud MKs are joining the new party, namely Sharon himself, Finance Minister Ehud Olmert, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, additional ministers Meir Sheetrit, Gideon Ezra and Avraham Hirchson, Deputy Ministers Ruchama Avraham, Majali Wahabi, Eli Aflalo, Marina Solodkin, Ze'ev Boim and Ya'acov Edri, and Likud MKs Roni Bar-On and (naturally) Omri Sharon. (Even Israelis can no longer keep track of who's a "deputy minister" and who a "minister in [somebody else's] ministry": here is the official list.) Labor MK Haim Ramon has joined the party on the spot, while negotiations are ongoing with several other Labor MKs. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz will instead run for the leadership of the rump Likud, but I personally wouldn't rule out that he will join Kadima later. Shimon Peres is reportedly mulling a (long-overdue) retirement from political life.

Scuttlebutt has it that a number of non-MK public figures are considering joining Kadima, such as "former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, Ben Gurion University President Avishai Braverman [...] and former Likud minister Dan Meridor, who has expressed a desire to return to politics." I would definitely like to see Dan Meridor back.

The rump Likud will of course have to choose a new leader, and aside from Bibi Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz, virtually every remaining senior Likud member has thrown his hat in the ring. Netanyahu is the favorite of a recent poll for the leadership, but with only 41%: speculation has it that, with [Moroccan-born] Amir Peretz recently being elected to the Labor leadership, the Likud would want to stop an exodus of voters of non-Western heritage (persistently and wrongly called "Sephardim" by talking heads) --- that is, either Mofaz (who was born in Iran) or Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom (who was born in Tunisia). Last night's Channel 10 news, which I caought with half an eye, was interviewing cab drivers (usually a good barometer for the "Sephardi" working class vote) who seemed the be split 3-ways Peretz-Sharon-Bibi. (Normally the very suggestion that they might vote Labor would risk bodily harm ;-))

(I have not veiled my contempt for Amir Peretz on this website --- having grown up in a working-class home, I'd like to think recognize socio-economic grandstanding hypocrites when I see them --- but it must be said that he has not only blown new life into Labor, but for the first time made it a serious contender for the Likud's largest voter reservoir.)

For what it's worth, Haaretz published a survey suggesting that Sharon's new party would capture 30 (out of 120) Knesset seats, while Labor under Amir Peretz would stage a comeback with 26 seats and the rump Likud would come in a distant third with 15 seats. The current third party, the centrist-anticlerical Shinui, is expected to shrink drastically, most of its voters going to Sharon's new party Kadima. The far-left Meretz is expected to bleed one-third of its voters to new-style Labor. Far-right parties are expected to hold their own or gain seats.

I was not looking forward to the upcoming elections, as I feared they would offer a Hobson's Choice between Bibi Netanyahu's proven incapability of functioning as PM, and "king anusclown" Amir Peretz's socio-economic grandstanding. (The Histadrut trade union which he leads is not an answer to Israel's economic iniquities but part of the problem itself.)

Not that I am under any illusions that Sharon and his cronies are "a prayer shawl all azure" (as the Hebrew expression goes). But compared to the competition, he is the only choice.

UPDATE: additional polls from the Haaretz ticker:

08:00 PM wins 30 seats in Teleseker poll, vs. 26 for Labor and 15 for Likud (Haaretz)
07:58 PM wins 33 seats in Yedioth poll, vs. 26 for Labor, 12 for Likud (Haaretz)
22:47 Haaretz poll: 37% support Sharon as next PM; 22% favor Peretz (Haaretz) [more here]

It is obviously in Sharon's interests to push elections through as fast as possible, before the "novelty effect" of his new party will wear off. The Knesset has meanwhile dissolved itself with an overwhelming majority.

[JPost editor David Horovitz, no relation to his namesake of frontpage.com and definitely no right-winger, appears to be sharing some of my misgivings about Armand "Amir" Peretz.]

UPDATE 2: Election date set for Tuesday, 28 March 2006.

UPDATE 3: the National Religious Party (once a moderate party, over time become the political arm of the settler movement) and the far-right National Union seriously considering a joint list, or an outright merger. Meanwhile I just heard Netanyahu call Sharon a "dictator" on TV: the Sharon camp is not exactly getting excited. Ehud Olmert: "as usual, when Bibi is under pressure [...] and panics, he starts talking nonsense". And David Tal MK, formerly of Shas, late of the trade-unionist Am Echad faction led by current Labor leader Armand "Amir" Peretz, joined Sharon's list. Every sitting MK who joins Sharon's faction and list is a net gain in campaign funds.

UPDATE 4: Hillel Halkin thinks Sharon's decision to leave the Likud was misguided, but will vote for him anyway:

Partly, it's a question of elimination. Who else is there?

Amir Peretz? So that he can raise our taxes that have just begun to come down and waste several more bloody years trying to achieve a negotiated settlement with a Palestinian Authority that cannot offer Israel acceptable terms and would be too weak to stick to them if it could?

Binyamin Netanyahu? That one-man wrecking crew who more than anyone is responsible for Sharon's leaving the Likud? (Just imagine if Netanyahu had had the sense to back Sharon on disengagement, help him to win the Likud referendum on it, and work to keep the Likud rebels in line: He would be sitting pretty now, a finance minister who had presided over an impressive economic recovery, and Sharon's loyal and undisputed heir. Who can vote for a man with such poor political judgment?)

But partly, too, it's because in a world in which the Palestinians can't be negotiated with on the one hand, and are out-breeding us on the other, unilateral disengagement to borders determined by Israel remains our best strategy. And Sharon is still the only man who can conceivably carry it out, even if he should never have gotten off the bus.

The captain is back!!!

Steven Den Beste now blogging again at redstate.org!!!

And the blogger-driven media initiative of Charles Johnson and Roger L. Simon that went under the sarcastic development name "Pajamas media" is officially launched today under the more serious moniker Open Source Media, http://www.osm.org

Now back to my salt mine ;-)

UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond is also back from hiatus . Check out this and this.

Riotblogging

No pasaran! is blogging the Paris riots. Just go to the main page and keep scrolling.