Indonesian PM Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is 180 degrees wrong when he says that the solution to the fight against terror is to be more tolerant of Muslim sensitivities.
He couches this in terms of the argument about the Mohammed cartoons. He says that it is important to win the battle for “hearts and minds”. The freedoms of thought and expression in the West weren’t obtained by winning hearts and minds. They were won because the number of heretics was so great that negotiation was the only viable path.
Islamic fundamentalists will only be encouraged if their actions cause a moderation of Western secularism to accommodate their sensitivities. They need to be confronted with the unachievability of their ambitions. Anything less will prolong the pain. This applies as much in Australia as it does in Indonesia.
February 28, 2006 | Graham
Yudhoyono 180 degrees wrong
February 27, 2006 | Graham
Dragon’s teeth gambit leads to detente in Iraq
The bombing of the golden-domed Askariya Shrine in Samarra was blamed on Al Qaeda and led to an outbreak of sectarian violence that so far has killed at least 227 and raised the possibility that Iraq might slip into civil war. But it may have had a perverse effect – peace might break out instead.
The original dragon’s teeth gambit was played by the Greek hero Jason on the fields of Colchis. One of the trials he had to undergo to win the Golden Fleece was to plough a field and plant it with the teeth of the dragon. From the teeth grew a field of warriors. An ordinary hero would have tried to fight them, but Jason threw a stone (or his helmet, depends who is telling the story) into the middle of the crop and the “sons of the earth” ended up fighting each other to the death. They were so quarrelsome they blamed the person next to them for the missile.
Who knows whether bin Laden or his lieutenants know the myth, they played the tactic when they bombed the mosque and didn’t take credit for it. Or maybe it was someone else, but nevertheless the same tactic.
Problem is that myth is never as true as reality. According to this NYT report it seems that the Sunni minority have looked into the abyss and have decided it is better to be a minor, but certain, part of something, rather than an uncertain expectant heir of chaos. As a result of the violence they now want to talk business.
Wonder how long it will be before this is reported here? Or will it be submerged in the rather odious schadenfreude, of which this post by Tim Dunlop is a particularly striking example.
Note also in the report the slippery role of Moqtada al Sadr. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he perpetrated the outrage. If I were a financial planner I’d be selling him a life insurance policy while her still could buy one.
February 27, 2006 | Graham
Howard didn’t know
Originally posted with apologies to Banjo Paterson and courtesy of that great contributor to traditional poetry – Anon. But see comment below. Attribution and copyright apparently belong to Mike Carlton.
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him at the wheat board, years ago
He was chairman when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him
Just on spec, to make the point, that “Howard doesn’t want to know”.
And an email came directed, not entirely unexpected
(And I think the same was written in some Middle Eastern bar)
‘Twas his CEO who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it,
“Trevor Flugge’s gone to Baghdad and we don’t know where he are.
But when he left Australia, he was going to meet with Alia,
A trucking mob in Jordan, who were keen to grease the wheels
For 10 per cent commission, they could swing Saddam’s permission
To get our wheat accepted: it’s the mother of all deals.
But I guarantee, Prime Minister, that there’s nothing at all sinister:
The chaps at DFAT told us that the sums looked quite okay.
When you’re selling wheat in billions, what’s a quick 300 million?
If it keeps the Nationals happy it’s a tiny price to pay.”
Sitting here at Kirribilli, I’ve been thinking, willy nilly
That it’s somehow reminiscent of the children overboard:
But I can handle Rudd and Beazley as I always do, quite easily,
By endlessly protesting that there’s nothing untoward.
I’ll tell Bush next time I meet him at the White House, when I greet him,
That I’m sure he’ll understand about the wheat board’s quid pro quo:
He’ll forgive this minor error in the global war on terror
When I look him in the eye and tell him Howard didn’t know.
February 23, 2006 | Graham
Tell us what you really think
Four days ago I was critical of a Saulwick poll which had been interpreted by the SMH to suggest that we’ve become a meaner society under John Howard. Today there are two reports of polls which put a different light on this interpretation.
The first is also reported in the SMH under the headline “Open views thrive despite PM’s stance: study”. This is a marginal improvement on their earlier portrayal of Howard as the omnipotent corrupter of the national character, although it still suggests that he is opposed to an “open” society. I was going to add “whatever ‘open’ means”, but the article, based on a paper by Gabrielle Meagher and Shaun Wilson presented to a seminar today, defines it for us.
“Australians have become more approving of working mothers, same-sex couples with children, immigration and government expenditure on public services, and are strongly against the privatisation of Telstra, electricity and Australia Post.” Not quite how I would have defined “open”, so I’m glad I asked. Wouldn’t have picked opposition to privatisation as a sign of “openness”
Opposed to this Howard “stands for traditional family values, Christian morals, the monarchy, and “a blokesy version” of nationalism. [He]has banned same-sex marriages, tailored welfare to deliver most benefits to traditional families, and reinvigorated the role of churches in social policy.”
Why do Australians put up with this puritanical fellow? It’s the economy stupid! “The Government remains popular because of the strength of the economy and the weakness of the Opposition, the authors say.”
In fact there’s nothing new here. Our 2001 On Line Focus research summed up that year’s federal election more or less like this. Australians liked Kim Beazley and they liked what he stood for and promised, but were concerned that he wouldn’t deliver. They didn’t like John Howard, nor what he stood for and promised, but they did believe that he would deliver. Faced with a choice between uncertain pleasure and certain pain, they chose certainty.
Nice to be confirmed by a paper at an academic conference some five or so years later. The paper also tends to confirm that John Howard isn’t making us anything, even if he is trying to, certainly not meaner and nastier, and if anything, as a society our attitudes are travelling in a more tolerant direction. Vale Saulwick.
The second poll is the Anholt National Brands survey. It polls roughly 25,000 people worldwide and its third quarter 2005 poll ranked Australia as the friendliest country in the world. This latest quarter we’ve been overtaken, but only by the Canadians. Now if we’ve got meaner and nastier over the last decade, it’s been from an extremely high base. The survey does have some methodological issues, but it is a pointer that maybe we’ve conned ourselves into thinking that things are more miserable than they really are. John Howard’s Australia just might be a golden age, pity so many of us are grumbling our way through it.
February 22, 2006 | Graham
More complexity on those cartoons – burn Dante’s Inferno
More evidence of the gormlessness of Australia’s media on the Mohammed cartoons is coming to light. This NYT article outlines how the cartoon issue pits Muslim against Muslim. It also indirectly poses a really strong question to Al Jazeera (one of the media organs criticising the cartoons):
What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras, or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony?
In other words – isn’t your offence not only selective but misdirected?
Stephen Crittendon on the Religion Report interviews Paul Marshall who wrote an article for National Review, which has a portfolio of examples of Islamic, as well as European, portraits of the Prophet. Shiites frequently represent him, perhaps partially explaining why there were few, if any, riots in Iraq.
When it comes to Western portrayals of Mohammed, Dante has Mohammed in the eighth circle of hell with his entrails being drawn. Pictures by Blake, Rodin and Dali represent this. Dante invented the modern Italian language, but, what the heck, if his book offends Muslims, let’s burn it.
This is an important issue. Not to stand up on it is to allow others to dictate how our societies, and the world, should be run. But regimes which favour freedom of speech and back human rights are also those which have done most to advance the course of mankind. Islam has a long way to go before it has earned the right to lecture us.
February 20, 2006 | Graham
Saulwick poll commits classic error
Well, maybe it’s not the Saulwick poll that commits the error, but the SMH analysis of it. A classic error in opinion polling is to ask subjects what they think other people are thinking. This is “classic” because the reason for doing opinion polling is so you don’t have to rely on what people think other people think, or guess for yourself, you ask the people doing the thinking what it is that they are thinking (hope that is clear).
The reportage of the polling suggests that we are a “meaner” country because 50% of us think so. The headline “A meaner country and a good job too” also implicates those in jobs in this deterioration in “niceness”.
Saulwick didn’t necessarily phrase the questionnaire – pollsters act on instructions from their clients, and sometimes these instructions aren’t the ones you would have given yourself. This questionnaire was obviously phrase to the SMH the headline that it obviously wanted.
Why? Because the poll is skewed. It asks people whether they think Australia is “meaner”. So it sets the agenda before laying down the rest of the questions. If it didn’t have a preconceived agenda, it would have left the issue of describing Australia to the respondents and given them an open question. That’s what we do with our online polling, and it has consistently got us better results than the so-called professional pollsters.
Having said that, there is a large percentage of the population that thinks Australia is meaner under John Howard even in our polling, but what we find is that it aligns more or less with voting intention. We also find that it is poorly related to how people perceive their own actions and circumstances.
When you delve below the surface of the Saulwick Poll, that is what they find too. Interestingly, while 50% thought we were meaner, only 30% thought Australia a worse place to live than it was before Howard came to power. How do you explain this?
While Howard has many negatives his performance is rated overall as a positive – because the economy is doing well. People are happier when they are wealthier, despite the efforts of happiness researchers to prove this is only relative. They also tend to be more generous – because they can afford to be. The combination of those two things is that when people make a concrete judgement about the world around them, rather than an abstract one, they describe what they see rather than what they fear. So their response to this question says that less of them really think that the place is worse than it was, and the growth in the economy is one reason for this.
Of course, one of the reasons that they think the country is meaner is because they are told that it is. In a sense, what the SMH is measuring is the success of its own propaganda. Despite the odd conservative contrarian, the SMH message is Hanrahan’s – “we’ll all be rooned”.
One thing that they do get right, is that Australians are not happy with Howard’s performance on health. That too is something that our polling confirms, and which might be the saviour of Peter Beattie when Queensland goes to an election next year. It will also probably take health off the agendas of the South Australian and Tasmanian elections – there are no votes in it for the Liberals.
Howard has been a successful politician, but at a cost which he has transferred inter-generationally. Who’d be his successor? Most of the bad public relations will eventually boomerang the guy in centre stadium.
February 20, 2006 | Graham
Shorten Figjams Beazley
If Bill Shorten is any sort of political seer, it appears that Kim Beazley will lose the next election, but he has Bill’s support to remain as leader. In the introduction to yesterday’s The National Interest, new presenter Peter Mares referred to the “…deep malaise that keeps the ALP out of power,” before proceeding to his interview with Shorten.
Many of Mares’ questions echoed the comments of former Labor Senator John Button who was interviewed by PM on Friday . Button said:
“But it’s implicit in their position that they think Labor is going to lose the next federal election, which is sort of sad.
I mean, why don’t these guys if they’re very clever stand for marginal seats against Liberals? Why are they standing against members of the Shadow Ministry?”
To Mares’ variation of this proposition Shorten replied that he lived in Maribyrnong so he wasn’t going to run anywhere else, and besides he thought he could “communicate a Labor message as part of a Beazley Opposition” (you can hear it at around 39 mins on the audio) and help to win marginal seats from the Liberals.
Unfortunately Mares didn’t probe this comment, but it seems to leave only two possibilities. Either he’s running to win Maribyrnong but lose Australia, or he thinks that as a pre-selected candidate he will be a member of the Beazley opposition and campaigning around the country, not just in his own seat. In the light of the interview with Button, who would be privy to what was being said around the branches, it would appear to be the former.
But if it is the latter it would reprise another of Button’s comments:
“All I would say about Bill Shorten is that I think he’s a capable guy. He’s in fact mentioned that to me several times himself. I think he’s got a lot of ability. It’s not for me to say when he should decide to run for Parliament.”
Which leads to another possible interpretation, which in fact covers all three – FIGJAM.
February 18, 2006 | Graham
Remedial maths for Danna Vale
Danna Vale thinks Muslims are out-breeding us all (whoever “us” are) and Australia will end up being a Muslim country.
We’ve published Kevin Donnelly a lot. His theme is that the education system has deteriorated over the last 30 or more years. It’s a thesis to which I’m sympathetic, but then you get statements like this from baby boomers and you wonder just how good maths teaching really was in the “good old days”.
And it’s not just Danna. The Australian has bought into the issue in a big way with contributions by Mark Steyn and Angela Shanahan (no link, but buy today’s edition).
The problem with the theory is this. Muslims make up 1.5% of our population. According to Shanahan the fertility rate of Islamic Australian women is 2.68, while all Australian women have an average fertility rate of 1.7. Assuming (and a demographer would do better than this, but it’s close enough to reality to illustrate my point) that a fertility rate of 2 is required just to replace the parents. That means that the .68 goes to the increase in the population, or a total of 204,000 more muslims.
But assuming that the average Muslim woman is 25 by the time she’s finished having children, those 204,000 more Muslims take 25 years to turn up. I’ve no idea what percentage of the population that will make Muslims in 2031, because immigration will be building the population, and some of those immigrants will be Muslims, but it won’t make them more than 3% of the population, and probably less. Some takeover.
Shanahan ought to be well aware of the mathematics of fertility as well as the psychopathology of scapegoating particular religions. She’s a Catholic woman who, if my memory is correct, has had nine children. As a result of her religion and fertility she ought to be well aware of the demonisation of people of a particular religion coupled with a fear of their fertility.
As Shanahan says “…this is an issue about…religion…That is why Islamic women have large families.” She points out that not only are they fertile, but they tend to marry within their religion. Just like Catholics did.
Perhaps Shanahan frets because Roman Catholics actually have become a significant force in Australia. But they started with a significantly higher base – the Irish – which was boosted by postwar immigration from Catholic Europe, and they still make up only around 30% of the population.
And of course now Catholics have the same fertility rate as the rest of us.
There are reasons to be worried about Islam, but this isn’t one of them.
February 18, 2006 | Graham
An act of solidarity with Muslim journalists
I may regret this later, but I’ve decided to reproduce one of the Mohammed cartoons. This is an act of solidarity with a number of journalists in Muslim countries who have been jailed for republishing the cartoons.
According to Reporters sans frontières seven journalists have been thrown into jail in Yemen, Syria and Algeria for publishing these cartoons and twelve others are being prosecuted in five countries. I’ve reproduced the RSF release below.
For me this is qualitatively different from boycotting Danish goods, or burning Danish embassies, and deserves a considered, but commensurately stronger, reaction.
I’ve chosen this cartoon deliberately. I’m prepared to justify it because it makes a serious point. Islam provides religious justification for suicide bombing. This is an issue for Islam, and for the rest of us. Less than one hundred years ago our civilisation, (although, I would argue, not Christianity, our nominal religion), justified taking over others’ countries in the name of Empire, or progress, or a version of manifest destiny. We now recognise that as wrong, and it makes the world a more certain, and more certainly just, place.
Similar attitudes are manifested in the Islamic world and they need to do something about them. For me, that is what this cartoon says. This is not an On Line Opinion editorial decision, it is mine alone.
Call to free journalists imprisoned in Prophet cartoons row
17th February, 2006
Reporters Without Borders today launched an appeal and a petition for the immediate release of seven journalists thrown into prison in Yemen, Syria and Algeria for reprinting the controversial Prophet cartoons as part of informing their readers.
“Whatever one thinks of the cartoons or whether they should be published, it is absolutely unjustified to jail or prosecute journalists, threaten them with death or shut down newspapers for this reason,” the worldwide press freedom organisation said.
At least twelve journalists are being prosecuted in five countries and seven have been jailed. Some face long prison sentences if convicted. Two editors in Jordan have been charged with provocation and encouraging disorder. Three journalists have been jailed in Yemen and charged under article 103 of the press law, which bans publication of anything that “harms Islam, denigrates monotheistic religion or a humanitarian belief.” Reporters Without Borders calls for all criminal cases among these to be dropped.
Thirteen publications have been closely temporarily or permanently in Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Yemen, Malaysia and Indonesia for reprinting the cartoons. Reporters Without Borders demands that these bans be lifted.
A conference to discuss the cartoons crisis on 9 February in Paris stressed that nothing could justify the imprisonment of journalists. More than a dozen journalists, intellectuals and religious officials from Western and Arab/Muslim countries attended the meeting, organised by Reporters Without Borders and the Arab Commission for Human Rights, and appealed for calm and dialogue. A similar conference will be held in Cairo on 25 February.
Reporters Without Borders calls on everyone to take a stand in support of the imprisoned journalists, who were simply doing their job and passing on news that made headlines around the world.
February 16, 2006 | Graham
Abu Ghraib and the Mohammed cartoons
Yet more material offensive to Islam has been published – by SBS. In this case the publication is of photos from Abu Ghraib jail and shows Islamic prisoners being physically and sexually abused. You can see the photos by clicking here.
I can’t see how these could be less offensive, although not for exactly the same reasons, as cartoons actually depicting the prophet Mohammed, but the only person so far that I have heard say they were too offensive to be published is Pentagon spokesman Brian Whitman. He is quoted as saying that the release of additional images of prisoner abuse was harmful and “could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world.”
I have no problems with SBS showing the photos, although I’d be disturbed if any of my younger children were accessing them, but it’s the reaction to their publication that fascinates me. It suggests that the objections to the Mohammed cartoons and the refusal by many media outlets to publish them, were an expression of an ideological position on the proper way to treat Islam, rather than anything to do with free speech itself.
When the images invoke deserved criticism of the US, causing offence doesn’t appear to be an issue.