is this Islam?

What other religion allows its clerics to preach the death of non-believers in the name of God? What other religion condones the murder, mutiliation and torment of children? Moderate Muslims will tell you such outrages are contrary to the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet. But moderate Muslims lack the organizational werewithal to deal with the extremists. There is no centralized hierarchical structure. There is no equivalent to excommunication, and no consensus as to what constitutes heresy.

It is time for moderate Muslims to change this. They need to establish their own transnational conference to undermine the legitimacy of the preachers of murder and hate. Their continued failure to do so forever condemns them to share the blame for the acts of their evil bretheren.

Such a conference also needs to re-evaluate the role of women in Islamic society. Muslim men respect women who are chaste and reverent. But segregating them and hiding them behind a veil limits the possibilities for both romance and friendship. The non-availability of women is frustrating for single men and leads to resentment. When men marry they want complete control and dominance. Long-standing resentment, or a wife's failure to live up to her husband's ideal, can lead to violence and cruelty. So often justified by religious teaching. Any woman who seeks an education, or a role outside the home, is often seen as a whore. So many women in Tahrir Square in Cairo were turned upon by their male fellow protestors. It is an ongoing recipe for social and economic disfunction. And the frustration and resentment of young Muslim men makes them ready recruits for acts of terrorism.

going through the motions

Does President Obama seriously believe the Israelis and the Palestinians can achieve a peace deal? I doubt it. So what can he possibly hope to achieve by the planned year long peace talks? If the talks fail, as they almost certainly will, Obama will look even lamer than he does now. The only way the talks can succeed is for the US to threaten to dump Israel, by cutting off military and financial aid, unless and until Israel curtails its expansionary settlement building. I just don't see that happening. Obama backed off when Netanyahu called his bluff on settlements last year, and his entire Presidency is characterized by a general lack of backbone.

Unless the Israelis get a super push from the US they will happily continue down the expansionary path. The Israelis will talk and talk and talk. And as they talk the settlements will expand, and more and more Palestinian territory will be occupied and annexed. It's a wonderful stalling tactic for them. If the Palestinians walk out they will say they tried. If the Palestinians make concessions, as they always have, Israel will eventually renege on its part of the bargain. Just as the US broke just about every treaty it ever made with the Indians.

In the unlikely event that Israel's negotiators make concessions, either the Israeli parliament will reject it or the government will have to make war on the settlers. Why should they give up anything when they are winning, with America's continued backing all but guaranteed?

So why are the Palestinians there at all? Well it is only Fatah for a start, the party that lost in the Palestinians' last democratic election. Because Fatah relies on the limited foreign aid it gets to prop itself up. If Fatah walks out that aid is in jeopardy. But even Fatah has its limits. If the temporary partial freeze on settlements is not extended there is no way they can save face with their people. They would be conceding defeat before the process is even begun.

How can there be peace talks when one party continues to wage war? Israel's illegal occupation and annexation of Palestinian territory is what the hostilities are all about.

Only the US can put a peaceful stop to Israeli expansion and it simply won't. Israel intends to continue its unrelenting 60 year expansion until every Palestinian is either dead, permanently exiled or confined to concentration camps. The final solution to the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians only hope is for enough foreign military intervention to do at least some damage to Israel. If these hostilites do break out the US will find itself hopelessly trapped in the Israeli camp, and will pay ever more dearly for it.

a tragic figure

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

William Shakespeare 1564-1616: Julius Caesar (1599)



How could we better summarize the unfolding drama of the Obama presidency? Here is a man who held the nation in his hands on the night of his election. But in failing to seize that moment he has condemned his Presidency to limp from disappointment to tragic disappointment.

Certainly he was right to hold out the offer of bipartisanship until his inauguration. But once the Republicans showed their true colors he should have trampled them down and dispatched them with all guns blazing. And a man with his oratorical powers could have scattered them to the far corners and kept them hiding under their rocks for one, if not two congressional terms.

These were the stooges of the disastrous Bush presidency. The cowards who failed to speak up when conservative principles were discarded to the trash. The ignorant who didn't know any better. And the populists who didn't care. In a breathtaking political instant it was they who claimed the mantle of fiscal responsibility, and stole the moral high ground. Emboldened by Obama's weakness they managed to pull off the greatest "flip-flop" in American history. The people who all but bankrupted the country were suddenly the champions of government restraint. Not content with that, they painted their President as a Fascist and a Nazi, and made him the scapegoat for all the nation's ills. Like Dr Goebbels they succeeded in their "big lie" because they had the ruthlessness that Obama lacked, reinforced by a complete lack of moral responsibility, and aided and abetted by a servile media. How else could we have gone straight from Cheney's "deficits don't matter" to cries of "we'll all be ruined"?

As soon as these reptiles poked up their heads Obama should have hammered them down. They were the ones who lead the country into an ill conceived and disastrous war, who dragged down America in the eyes of the world, who decreased taxes while escalating spending, who mismanaged government, who failed to address the health care shambles, and who dared not burst the economic bubble. These disasters should have been labelled Republican disasters, as they truly were. And if at first the message failed to resonate with the American psyche, the accusations should have been repeated over and over until the reality sank in. The sudden conversion back to conservative values should have been ridiculed for the joke it was, and the Republic Party made to re-earn the respect of the American people.

But it wasn't just a matter of letting the Republicans off the hook. The instinct for seeking bipartisanship was a good one, but the way to realize it was to hammer the Democratic Party with the same, if not greater ferocity. The Party has been morally neutered and leaderless for over a decade. There is no unity of vision and nothing resembling a backbone. The Democrats dance to the tune of the same vested interests as the Republicans and are equally despised by the American public. Obama had the same mandate from the American people that Bush had. Reform the electoral system, clean up the corruption and drive the lobbyists out of the temple. And this is what he had promised to do. He had the people with him. He could have gone over the heads of Congress to the people, and shamed both parties into accepting his leadership.

He continued talking like a Washington outsider, but his actions contradicted his words as they began to do in all other areas. Rather than take Congress by the horns he chose to hand over the initiative for vital health care reform to a hopelessly ill-equipped committee of insiders. Perhaps he saw advantage in later playing the knight coming to the rescue of the maiden. But it looked more like Pontius Pilate not wanting to get involved with anything messy. Whatever his thinking, it proved a disastrous miscalculation. He was barely able to rescue himself. He has been playing catch up ever since. For the rest of his term he looks condemned to wade through "shallows" and "miseries". With astonishing rapidity the Democrats lost their Senate "super majority". But even a Democratic minority would have been enough for a President who had the option of appealing directly to the people.

If Obama had chosen to ride the tide in those early days his could have been a great presidency. But there is no recovering from a lost opportunity of this nature, as Shakespeare well knew. Like Hamlet, crippled by his early indecision, Obama can only earn his place in history now by sacrificing himself for the greater good.

ban bio-fuels now

America has a new weapon of mass destruction. And it is being used to inflict increased suffering, misery and death on the world's poor.

The last twelve months have seen massive rises in the prices of staple cereals and grains culminating in the spectre of widespread famine. For the billions who already spend more than half their income on food, the price rises spell malnutrition at best, and eventual starvation. The world's big food producers are banning exports, governments are exhausting precious reserves to subsidize food prices, armed guards protect food warehouses, and protests and food riots are breaking out everywhere.

The production of bio-fuels is not solely responsible for these price rises, but it has been a major factor. Things can only get worse if present expansion plans continue. The evidence against bio-fuels is now overwhelming. What seemed like a good idea has proved to be a disaster. It is time to admit it was all a mistake and dismantle the infrastructure.

All the touted benefits of bio-fuels have failed to materialize:

• It was never environmentally significant to begin with. It might be clean burning, but its contribution to air quality will be negligible.
• At best it can be argued that it is carbon neutral. Carbon is fixed from the air in ethanol production and released on burning. But this ignores the fact that energy is used in its manufacture. And the fact that ethanol does not burn as efficiently as gasolene, results in more carbon exhaust per mile driven.
• The only way to make up for the lost food production capacity is to cultivate more marginal lands and destroy more rainforest. There is already powerful evidence of these disastrous environmental consequences. Poor farmers world wide are abandoning food production to supply the more lucrative bio-fuel market, and rainforest destruction is accelerating. The latter tips the carbon equation further in the negative.
• That leaves energy independence. But even if present plans to boost production are realized, the overall impact on fuel supplies will not be significant.
• Economically the initiative is a dead set loser. Ethanol is heavily subsidized and the need for subsidies is likely to continue indefinitely. Now add to that the costs of increased emergency food aid to poor countries like Haiti. Better to invest the money in solar, wind and nuclear power.

At the end of the day the only beneficiaries of the whole sorry mess are America's over subsidized, and mostly wealthy farmers, and the politicians they control. One United Nations envoy called it a "crime against humanity". Make no mistake. We are party to this crime so long as we allow these criminals to get away with what is, literally, mass murder.

There are two other factors driving food price rises. One is adverse weather conditions. The devastating drought which destroyed Australia's wheat crop may well be a hint of things to come. The threat of climate change is no longer something Americans can ignore.

The other major factor in the price rise equation is increased meat consumption. The Indians and the Chinese have not dramatically increased their caloric intake. But they are eating more and more meat. That means calories which were feeding people have been diverted to livestock. It takes four times the calories to feed a meat eater. If Americans drastically reduced their animal food intake, it would free up enough grain to feed more than half a billion people. If China and India forego increased meat consumption as well, the crisis would be well and truly over. One year ago meat eating was simply a luxury the planet could not afford. Now it will directly cost millions of lives. And condemn hundreds of millions to the devastating physical and mental effects of malnutrition.