Inside the Asylum

Egyptian seeking to head UNESCO, apologizes for saying he would burn Israeli books. I want the job ... please don't pay attention to my past words. I only said it because of the Palestinians, but I'm sorry now.

Egypt's foreign minister said Friday his country's bid to place its candidate at the head of UNESCO, the UN's culture body, was on track despite a row over remarks on burning Israeli books... Egyptian Culture Minister Faruq Hosni is in the running to become the Arab world's first head of the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation since 1999. But his bid has been overshadowed by a row over a 2008 comment he made that he would burn Israeli books in Egyptian libraries. He apologised for that remark this week, writing in Le Monde newspaper that the statement had not been premeditated and was meant to show "indignation" over the plight of Palestinian people. Gheit said Friday that "we understand that France is supporting this candidature," but a French foreign ministry spokesman said France would not comment publicly on its choice.

Good old French. You can always count on the French.
Incidentally, seeing as there was an Arab head of UNESCO in 1999, and there's another one running strong in 2009, I wonder what the Arab world's cultural record has been like in the last few ... centuries.

About 10,000 books have been translated into Arabic in the past millennium, according to a 2003 study by the U.N. Development Program... About 300 new translations appear each year

10,000 books in a millennium ... 1,000 books per century ... 10 books per year ... Still, they're doing better now with 300 a year right? In Britain alone roughly 200,000 new books are published per year. Of those, about 3% are in translation, or 6,000 translated works published in the UK per year. Yes, I can see why a book burning Egyptian would think he has a fair shot at heading UNESCO.

Obama has chosen Egypt for his upcoming address to the Muslim world. He's going to kick off his Middle East peace initiative there, no doubt. He hasn't the faintest clue that he's being gamed, even when the clues aren't all that hard to pick up. Take this for example:

[There have been] discussions in Washington last week between Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and senior White House and State Department officials, including National Security Advisor James Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In an interview with the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al Awsat, Aboul Gheit said that U.S. officials had asked him what the Arab response would be if Washington pressured Israel to reach a peace agreement... If Israel accedes to international demands, "the Arab states could accede to gradual normalization, each according to its own considerations." That implies that Egypt does not see the Arab peace initiative as requiring Arab states to normalize relations with Israel uniformly and simultaneously. Rather, normalization is something each country would institute at a time it deems appropriate. Aboul Gheit also rejected Jerusalem's demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, saying this would endanger Israel's Arabs.

As I said in the previous post, the Arab powers don't give a crap about the Palestinians except as a tool in their own geo-political games. The "Peace Process" is just another game, the one used to manipulate those well meaning but oh-so-naive Americans who keep insisting on sticking their beaks into matters they know nothing about.

I've been reading an awful lot about the Middle East peace process, blah blah blah. Obama keeps stressing that the key to peace is for Israel to make concessions to the poor Palestinians. Arab powers keep insisting on the same thing. Israel must allow an independent Palestine, Israel must allow millions of Palestinian refugees to return, Israel must do this or that, all for the poor Palestinians. Only recently Egypt is reported to have said the following:

"With regard to attempts to say Iran is a common danger, President Mubarak's and Egypt's priority is on the Palestinian issue... This will remain the priority regardless of the numerous dangers and threats in the Middle East."

The thing Obama and pretty much all the media are missing, but which everybody in the Middle East knows ... no one in the region gives a crap about the Palestinians. Other Arabs despise them. I'm not exaggerating. Palestinians get hassled far more than anyone else at border crossings in the Middle East, and are treated little better than the Jews by most fellow Muslims. Egypt doesn't give a crap about Palestinians. Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran ... the whole lot of them are only interested in using the Palestinians as a convenient weapon on the international state, and they want to keep them in poverty and desperation to ensure their weapon doesn't go away. You doubt my word for it? Well, let's see what Refugee Resettlement Watch has to say on the issue shall we?

Iraqi Palestinians blast Arab countries, call them hypocrites. We have written in many past posts that the Palestinians are kept as refugees from generation to generation to fuel Arab hatred toward the Jewish people and to serve as the sore in Israel’s side... Now if only more news organizations would[tell...] the truth we would be making major strides in bringing peace to the Middle East.

Think about what this means: Obama's whole Middle East peace strategy is founded on a mistaken premise. Everybody in the Middle East knows this. Obama looks like a well meaning moron to the Arabs. Of course, morons can be useful if manipulated in the right direction ... so let's just see how far we can push it before he catches on. Israel's strategy by contrast is to wait it out until Obama either a) wises up to the game or b) loses power and another idiot comes along and starts the game all over again. Of course Israel hopes for c) someone who actually knows what is going on, but they know from bitter experience not to expect that.

Why do American academics love Hugo Chavez? I know he's a socialist lefty and all that, but it's not as if he loves them back.

Luis Carbonell, president of the Commission of Human Rights at the Venezuelan Association for the Advancement of Science (ASOVAC), told SciDev.Net that he believes the episode demonstrates Venezuelan scientists' lack of independence. "There is an official disdain towards critical thinking. Science centres are even banning researchers from expressing public opinions or making statements to the media without the official consent," he says. He gives other examples, such as universities restricting Internet access.

Jaime Requena lost this tenured academic job recently.

Requena says his work and his opposition to the government of president Hugo Chávez are the reasons for his dismissal.

Shocking stuff ... a tenured academic can lose his job for criticizing his president? Imagine the empty corridors at pretty much every university in the United States if that had been the case during the Bush years.

I thought I was fairly familiar with the history of the Pacific War, and the post-war settlement and occupation of Japan. Today, I just learned something new. First, some background.
During the decades prior to World War 2, Japan had acquired a considerable Asian empire, including Korea, which it had effectively dominated after its defeat of Russia in 1905, and which it formally annexed in 1910. Other territories included Taiwan, various islands in the Pacific, and from 1931 much of northern China. During this time lots of Japanese moved overseas to live in these territories. According to some estimates, when Japan was stripped of her empire in 1945 they had to repatriate 6 million people, only half of whom were military personnel. OK, so far so good. I knew all this, but I didn't know the following. I guess it should have been obvious that during these years there would be lots of people who would move from the imperial territories to the Japanese mainland, and that many of these would want to go back to their original homelands after Japan was defeated, and of course lots of them would be Korean, and naturally enough a lot of those would come from the north of the Korean peninsula. Makes sense, but I just never thought about it until reading this story:

Starting a decade after its defeat in World War II Japan let almost 100,000 people leave Japan and move to North Korea, most of them ethnic Koreans who had settled in Japan during the peninsula's decades as a Japanese colony. Traveling with them were several thousand Japanese nationals, their wives, husbands and children... In reality it was a huge scam, and rather than warn the gullible travelers, Japan's government made it easy for them to leave. Smiling and waving to relatives and friends, they shipped out from Japanese ports to a socialist utopia and docked in a Stalinist hell. The fate of many is unknown, but as a group they fared poorly under the gaze of Kim's secret police.

The article itself is rather silly (in my view). It tries to argue that this issue is sufficient reason for the Japanese to want the North Korean state to continue on as it is, and you can already tell from the part I quoted that it blames the Japanese for the repatriation woes of the Koreans and their families. At a time when Japan was still struggling to cope with 3 million returned Japanese, I don't see any reason why they should be blamed for encouraging people who were, after all, Koreans, from returning to Korea of their own free will. For all the talk of how it is the international community's responsibility to do something for the people of North Korea, it is in truth the responsibility of the people of North Korea to do something for themselves. You can't blame the Japanese for the nature of the North Korean government and its secret police. Still, even though I disagree with the argument of the article itself, I learned something new, and that's got to be a good thing.

Yet another "who the heck writes these headlines?":

Fake model scout gets man to strip

Oh, wrong again:

Australian police are looking for a chubby man in his 50s who posed as a male modelling agent and convinced a 19-year-old man to strip for him during an audition.

Posted by Filthy Stinking No.9, Comments (0)

I think this is a case of someone saying one thing and meaning another?

Ahmed sat with his friends in a small cafe [in Cairo] talking about the upcoming visit of U.S. President Barack Obama. "Cairo is really lucky to welcome Obama as I think he is capable of changing the tarnished image of his predecessor," said Ahmed, 27, who works as a teacher in a primary school.

However, he can't like Obama very much, because we walks on taboo ground by stressing BHO's middle name!

"Barack Hussein Obama is the first African-American to be the President of the United States. His second name is Hussein, which refers to his Muslim background. He promised to close the ill-reputed prison of Guantanamo. I think all this must make us believe that he is going to achieve change," Ahmed added

Don't tell me Ahmed is a Republican!?