Hope is not a plan

Significant rioting followed rerouting of a Protestant Orange Order parade to move its path away from a Nationalist (Catholic) neighborhood. Unfortunately, this attempt to deflect an intentional inflammatory act by the Orange Order just gave them an excuse to call for violence.

The BBC story

Police Constable Sir Hugh Orde says the Orange Order bears "substantial responsibility for the rioting and attacks on his officers." (Many of whom were injured.)

Belfast's most senior Orangeman, County Grand Master Dawson Bailie, told the BBC on Monday that the Orange Order was not responsible for the weekend disorder.

He added: "I'm not condemning anything at this moment in time."

Because obviously, a sane reply to having your parade rerouted in a way that displeases you is throwing firebombs at police officers (from the government to which you profess to be loyal). Bailie is a little kid saying, "You made me hit you! It's your fault! You got me mad!"

From another BBC story we have more BS cover-your-ass behavior from Unionist leadership:

DUP leader Ian Paisley denied prompting riots by saying the parade re-routing "could be the spark which kindles a fire there would be no putting out".

"At that time I was in the midst of trying to get a way whereby this would not happen. And it has happened - my words have been proved to be right."

This is push-polling of the worst sort, where people are hurt and killed as a result. The IRA's been scared into pretending to behave. The UDP and their ilk need to catch up.

We've been talking a lot lately about cognitive dissonance, the idea that people will adjust their ideas to minimize the conflict between them, even to the point of lying extensively to themselves.

I wonder how much cognitive dissonance is at work in the minds of some Islamic radicals. Several insurgent and Al Qaeda declarations in the wake of hurricane Katrina called it the work of Allah, smiting the bad folks in the States. In light of that idea, though, one has to wonder what over twenty thousand people, many of them children who were at school, did to warrant God's anger.

More broadly, over 335,000 people in Muslim nations have died in the last ten years just from seismic events, not counting this latest quake.

There are, of course, cognitive-dissonance-reducing answers to all this. "We're being tested." "They were unbelievers."

But that's foolish. They're just natural disasters. They don't play favorites, except inasmuch as money can minimize their effects. That, at least, we can help with.

Pat Robertson has made another foolish remark:

On Tuesday, Dover voters ousted the local school board, which had tried to introduce the concept as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Mr Robertson said on The 700 Club.

...and...

"God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in His eye forever," Mr Robertson said.

"If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them."

I don't know about Pat Robertson and his oddly non-benevolent God, but I call on Charles Darwin for help all the time, and so do the citizens of Dover and every other American city. For example, right now, Dover is full of children who have been vaccinated, treated with antibiotics and often given other medical care that is driven by an understanding of biology based on evolution.

Pat Robertson can have his odd, limited God who gets tired and turns away from His people. I'll keep my biological sciences and the understanding that, just possibly, Genesis might not be a literal story the way Robertson understands it.

I have to imagine an omniscient, omnipotent God would be able to create a universe from a big bang that would unfold exactly as He planned it, and we'd still be able to successfully model it as evolutionary action over time. But that's not really Robertson's point. Just as with the Taliban, our American religious radicals want control. You can almost feel the thrill Robertson gets when he calls down God's power on a random town in Pennsylvania. It's much easier than actually spreading the Gospel, and he gets to feel good about himself.

A youth wing of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Muslim organization in the predominantly Muslim nation of Indonesia, plans to guard Christian churches again this year.

Tatang Hidayat, national coordinator of NU's Banser group, said: "We have an annual programme to set up posts to secure Christmas. For this year, I have contacted groups from other religions like the Hindus and Buddhists and they have responded positively."

Around 17,000 policemen are expected to safeguard Christmas celebrations in Jakarta alone.

The fear is that radical Islamic groups such as Jemaah Islamiah will attack Christian churches, as was done in 2000.

This is pretty much the only way sectarian violence can be successfully eliminated -- groups opposing their own violent derivatives. I'm sure that the members of Nahdlatul Ulama firmly believe that Islam is the one, true faith, and may well be hoping for its worldwide spread, but they have recognized, as an organization, that it is unhealthy for them to have Jemaah Islamiah attacking churches (after all, violence against Christians is only going to radicalize Christians, not convert them).

The Al Jazeera story

Armed groups in the Palestinian territories have threatened to attack Danish, French and Norwegian nationals after cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad appeared in European newspapers.

The Al Jazeera article

The cartoons in question depict Muhammad in a militant light. The main issue, of course, is that they depict him at all. Still, from the outside it seems a little off to respond to a militant depiction with death threats. From the inside, it surely is quite different.

From a BBC article surveying the latest round of protests over depiction of Muhamad:

Hundreds of people took part in the morning demonstration in Afghanistan's Laghman province, in a second day of protests in the city.

"They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and to their newspapers," he said.

Well, then.

I just read a BBC article about Nasir Abbas, former member of Jemaah Islamiya and trainer of jihadis in the southern Philippines. The article discusses his role in Jemaah Islamiya, and how the killing of over two hundred civilians in Bali in 2002 pushed him away from the organization. He is now an informant for police in Indonesia.

The key step in his path away from contemporary jihadi, from the article:

"I train people for war, for battle," he said. "We are killing for defence. We are fighting for our right. And we are not attacking civilians but soldiers."

"I feel sorry, I feel sin," he said, "because they used the knowledge to kill civilians, to kill innocent people."

Notably, when he was taken into custody, the Indonesian police surprised him by treating him with respect, whereas he'd been expecting torture.

As part of an ongoing legal and social struggle in Pakistan related to how women are treated, the country recently revised its rape laws, moving handling of rape cases out of the jurisdiction of Sharia (Islamic law) and into the civil courts. The six-party Islamic alliance MMA is protesting this move.

Why is this significant?

The civil code in Pakistan is influenced by British law, which means that a rape case would be prosecuted much in the manner that a westerner would expect (that is to say, not always effectively, and often allowing damaging attacks on the victim's reputation, but with the basic rules of a criminal court in place).

Under Sharia, the victim of a rape would need to have four male witnesses to the crime, or else she would be punished for adultery.

The MMM is protesting that this legal change will encourage "free sex" as well as "lewdness" and "indecency."

It is hard to express more clearly than in this example how certain aspects of fundamentalist Islam -- as it is practiced -- are incompatible with a sane, civil society. As Wafa Sultan said, the current problem is not a clash of cultures, but a clash of eras. Right now, it is medieval Islam versus the modern world. And much as medieval Christianity gave us such horrors as "Kill them all! God will know his own.", medieval Islam gives us horrors like assuming a woman is adulterous because she wasn't raped in front of enough witnesses.

The BBC story
The al Jazeera story

Today, paroled loyalist murderer Michael Stone attempted to breach the Northern Ireland parliament buildings at Stormont, where discussions over devolution were taking place. He came in with a gun, a knife, and one or more bombs, and was rapidly tackled by Stormont security.

Stone most likely falls into that category of people who, despite espousing a sectarian cause, wouldn't be happy were their ostensible wishes to come true, as it would remove the actual thing that gives them meaning -- the celebrity and power involved in being a player in "the struggle."

Check out the video associated with the linked BBC article to see that at least some other people can't put their sectarianism away, either. Note especially the speaker who can't help but make a strongly political statement about the devolution talks, then tacks on a comment that, of course, the important part was that no one was hurt.

Good work by the Stormont security staff, who unhesitatingly took on an armed man.

The BBC article

Incidentally, since I just mentioned Ian Paisley as better than fanatics who are killing people right now I should note that he, like Gerry Adams, has fronted for groups of fanatics who have, indeed, killed quite a few people, tortured others, hurt even more, and cultivated a culture of fear and hatred out of a personal vanity and unwillingness to back down or live a normal life.

Also, from his very informative website I learned that the EU presages Revelations, that Billy Graham is a closet papist, and that the EU is a conspiracy to steal British sovereignty.

You'd think that last one wouldn't be an issue for a die-hard Christian, for whom nations are a secondary concern, at best. But then, Paisley confuses nationalism and faith, a sin common throughout the world.

But if he wants to be a nutter, I support him in yelling as loud as he wants, right up until he advocates hurting other people.

...and everyone needs their attention. In the continuing tradition of desperate attention seeking, Pat Robertson has a "divine revelation" of a mass casualty attack on the U.S. in 2007.

God told him. Just like God told him that Bush's Social Security initiative would be approved in 2005. Except it wasn't.

"I have a relatively good track record," he said. "Sometimes I miss."

But I thought God said? Or maybe you're just making things up, you self-aggrandizing ass.

This really is a week of little people trying to feel big.

CNN article

The second expected body has been found in the wreckage of the Madrid airport. Diego Armando Estacio, 19, and Carlos Alonso Palate, 35, both of Ecuador, were killed in their car by last week's ETA bombing of the airport.

No matter what, calls ahead of time or no, if you're setting off bombs, you're going to kill people.

al Jazeera article

"Who remembers now the destruction of the Armenians?"

From this CNN article, transcripts of taped conversations between Husein and his aides prior to killing 180,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign:

"I will strike them with chemical weapons and kill them all," a voice identified by prosecutors as that of Majeed, Hussein's cousin and a senior aide, is heard saying.

"Who is going to say anything? The international community? Curse the international community," the voice continued.

This is not to make the Hitler-Hussein comparison, but to point out that anytime a genocide is ignored, it sends the message that you, too, can get away with genocide.

This is also not a time for people to self-righteously say "Well, we toppled this genocidal bastard," because the Anfal campaign happened on the Reagan-Bush watch, and we left it alone because it had very little to do with us.

Just like Sudan.

This CNN article talks about the Klan experiencing a resurgence, as a certain insecure subset of us white folks apparently is afraid of not being in the vast, vast majority anymore.

It's nice to see people able to get together to celebrate their racially pure* Italian-English-Slavic-French-Nordic-Swedish-Swiss-German-Spanish-Portuguese-Scottish-Irish-Russian-Georgian-Basque-North African heritage.

*NB: It's entirely possible that one or more of these broad ethnic groups may have just a shade or three of "not-white" in 'em. Just maybe. You know, like the parts that were ruled by Arabs for centuries. And so forth.

I'm more "racially pure" than almost any given "white" person in the Klan will ever be, and I still think you're all a bunch of tools. Enjoy standing still and feeling weak and insecure, if that's what floats your boat.

I'm certainly stronger than that.

Which is to say that sectarian violence is not terribly original.

Lest you end up over-focused on the violence in Iraq, consider the continuing sectarian violence in southern Thailand. More than two thousand people have been killed since the beginning of 2004 as would-be Muslim separatists wage a futile war against civilians of other religions in lieu of being able to upset the eminently pragmatic Thai army.

Recent violence has included the killing of Buddhist commuters followed by the shooting of Muslim civilians and the bombing of a Mosque, the latter being blamed on the Muslim separatists, who are suspected of trying to rile other Thai Muslims. Blaming that bit of violence on Muslim separatists seems a bit too pat, but it's really hard to say. The one given is that it's people on both sides who get a sense of purpose and meaning out of violence who keep sectarian violence going.

al Jazeera article

This week, al Jazeera reminds us that violence often comes as a result of a mismatch between national borders and ethnic boundaries. In our modern age, these conflicts are the unwieldy children of sometimes arbitrary and sometimes very intentional batching and dividing by the major powers of the twentieth century. The territory once bounded by Soviet borders is a poster child for this issue, whether it's Georgia trying not to further subfragment following its release from the USSR, or the ongoing problem of Tatars returning to the Crimea half a century after Stalin banished them to Central Asia. Similarly, the wake of the Ottoman Empire continues to be alive with conflict, most recently embodied in the declaration by the government of Turkey that they will take military action against Kurdish separatist groups hiding within Iraq, despite past requests from their NATO allies that they not cross that border.

Given the increasing power of the smaller party in modern conflict, and the loss of a major bilateral struggle to drown out other noises, it seems likely that wars of ethnic identity will continue as the defining kind of conflict well into the foreseeable future.

Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland's first minister, head of the Democratic Unionist Party and general purpose, murder-inspiring sectarian hate-monger, has announced that he's retiring from both the ministerial and DUP lead positions.

Simon Jenkins has some kind words for Paisley in his column:

Then the big man began. Like a revivalist preacher from the deep south, Paisley ranted over the sodden slopes of Stormont. It was electrifying and archaic. The curses of God were called down on "old red socks", the Pope, the "anti-Christ", whom Paisley was later to heckle with primitive discourtesy in the European parliament. Catholics were damned - "they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin" - and King Billy glorified. The crowd sang hymns and roared. It was like watching a mad Celtic druid blessing the Brythonic hordes before confronting the Roman army.

The man was a monster, a fanatic, a hangover from the middle ages. I remember wondering how on earth Britain had allowed Ulster's constitution so to fester as to have this man roaming the woods and hills of Ulster. One thing Britain does not do well is postcolonial partition. It creates a fertile breeding ground for the likes of Paisley, and his antagonist, Adams.

Jenkins sees it clearly:

These men eventually eliminated moderate leaders so they could claim moderation for themselves. They smashed power-sharing so they could share power between themselves. They now pretend that change could not have been faster because the people would not let them. The climate of public opinion in the province was not ready.

That is a lie. These men were the climate, and it was one of systematic bigotry and violence. They chose their methods and terrorised all who opposed them. While religious sectarianism elsewhere in Europe was on the wane, lovers of Northern Ireland had to watch in despair as it drifted to ever greater separatism - territorially, politically and psychologically.

...and...

What restored devolved government to Stormont was not Good Friday but, as Adams claimed yesterday, a decision by him and Paisley to abandon their former ways, stand on their heads and compromise. Each got what he wanted and could seek comfort in old age, lubricated with exorbitant amounts of British money.

Needless to say, Paisley was soon "Paisleyed" by the hardliners he had once led, and has had to resign. As anyone who walks the Falls will know, the Real IRA is still a menace to Adams. The legacy of four decades, if not four centuries, of communal hatred is entrenched in segregated schools and housing estates. The men who now claim to have brought peace to Ulster delayed it so long that their peace is insecure and their landscape traumatised.

Paisley was one of the worst in terms of thriving on the power of the tribalism he stoked in his people, and the countertribalism that stoked among the Catholic minority, and the continuous cycling of the two.

My personal recommendation to Ian, in his dotage, is that he consider missionary work. Perhaps he can go to Saudi Arabia, and explain to the locals just how bad the Catholics are.

BBC article