This is from one of Peter Cook’s 1965 EL Wisty monologues, in which EL is describing the electoral campaign of his political party, the World Domination League:
I’ve got some extremely subtle advertising slogans that should gett the public behind us. Things like ‘vote for EL Wisty and lovely nude ladies will come and dance with you.’ It’s a complete lie, of course, but you can’t afford to be too scrupulous if you’re going to dominate the world. Then there’s another good one, which says ‘if you don’t vote for EL Wisty, horrible black spiders with hairy legs will creep into your room in the middle of the night and bite your ears off.’ That should get the women’s vote. If there is one thing they can’t bear it’s black spiders grabbing hold of them in the night.
Another way I’m going to get people’s votes is to start shouting off about all the filth on television. As far as I’m concerned I could to with a great deal more of it. All the samie I formed an EL Wisty Clean Up TV campaign, pointing out some of the suggestive things that get on the air. The first thing I say they should ban is that Invisible Man show. Have you seen it? It’s absolutely disgusting. It’s all about this man who’s turned invisible because he fell into a vat of HBLO5. That was an experimental magic ingredient in a detergent. Anyway, poor devil falls in this rubbish and he turns invisible, and the programme is all about his amazing adventures. As he’s invisible, the only way you can tell where he is is if he’s smoking. You can see his cigarette moving about in the air. Or else you can see a telephone waving about the place. It’s all very ingenious, but the thing that amazes me is that he does it all in the nude. You don’t actually see him of course because he’s invisible but you can easily tell he’s got nothing on because otherwise you’d see his clothes. Sometimes he dresses up in bandages, poor devil, and dark glasses, and you can see his outline, but you never see any trousers or jackets moving about the place, so it stands to reason he’s wandering about the place with nothing on. A ghastly invisible nudist, there for everyone to see — or, rather, not to see. And, for all we know, there may be millions of other invisible nudists in the other programmes. I might be able to use them in the World Domination League. It’d be a very good slogan. ’Vote for EL Wisty or else invisible nudists will come along and smash you round the face.’
The Onion can still come out with stories that really speak to me: Link.
… but Johann Hari’s experiences with the ’smart drug’ Provigil make it sound a little bit enticing. But also creepy. Link. Excerpt:
A week later, the little white pills arrived in the post. I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. It didn’t seem odd: for years, I took an anti-depressant. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn’t noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn’t stop or stumble once.
Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich – and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. My mood wasn’t any different; I wasn’t high. My heart wasn’t beating any faster. I was just able to glide into a state of concentration – deep, cool, effortless concentration. It was like I had opened a window in my brain and all the stuffy air had seeped out, to be replaced by a calm breeze.
Many of you would probably be familiar with the idea of online games like Second Life being fodder for economics research. Well, this article is the definitive thing I’ve read on the issue, full of fascinating real (virtual) world examples: link (pdf).
The Boston Globe has an interesting article about research into what it means for something to be ‘on the tip of your tongue’. It’s one of those areas where athe subject seems almost banal until you start to ponder it a bit more. Some of the experimental stuff is strange and cool:
A similar fragmentation is at work in the production of language. Lise Abrams, a psychologist at the University of Florida, has demonstrated that, in many cases, the key to remembering a word that has been on the tip of the tongue is to encounter another word that shares a first syllable with the one we are trying to remember. For instance, when subjects are trying to recall “bandanna,” they are much more likely to come up with the solution if they are given “banish” as a hint. “Banish” and “bandanna” mean very different things, but they activate the same network of brain cells devoted to the sound of the words.
The connections can be even more indirect. Abrams has shown that showing people a picture of a motorcycle can help them remember the word “biopsy.” Because the idea of a motorcycle is connected in the brain to the concept of “bike,” which shares a first syllable with “biopsy,” the seemingly irrelevant cue becomes an effective hint.
Rotifers are a group of microscopic animals that are very common and often very pretty. It’s been recently discovered that they have prolifically incorporated genetic material from other organisms into their own DNA. The Not Exactly Rocket Science blog has a good article about it: link. Excerpt:
But among the DNA of the bdelloid Adineta vaga, he unexpectedly found traces of bacterial, fungal and even plant genes, many of which are incredibly rare. About half have no counterparts in animals and one gene is found in only 10 species of bacteria. Some genes appear to have been smuggled into the rotifer genome as a set, for they appear in the same order and orientation that they do in fungi or bacteria.
The genes are not passive hitchhikers either. Many appear to be fully functional; in their native species, they are involved in breaking down sugars and carbohydrates, or producing useful molecules like antibiotics and toxins. The chances are that the rotifers are putting them to similar uses.
And later:
It’s not clear why the bdelloids are so good at incorporating new genes, but their lifestyle may hold the answer. The freshwater ponds they call home frequently dry out and they cope with this by entering into a dry, dormant and extremely tough state. This drying process breaks their cell membranes and shatters their DNA. The bdelloids are very good at repairing these injuries, but it provides a temporary entrypoint for chunks of foreign DNA from species in the surrounding environment that have also succumbed to similar damage.
This newly discovered ability may help to explain the success of the bdelloids despite their rejection of sex. Compared to sex, asexual reproduction is often seen as a poor long-term strategy, for it lacks the chromosomal shuffling that brings about genetic diversity and is thought to gives species an adaptive edge in the face of new challenges. But bdelloids have contradicted this theory by being very successful; there are over 360 species alive today.
Gladyshev suggests that this success may be due to their ability to pick up new genes from their environment. If the main advantage of sex is that it promotes genetic diversity, why worry about it when you have the gene pools of entire kingdoms available to you?
In 1988, the KLF (who had a hit in the late 80’s with their insipid remix of the Dr Who theme) self-published a semi-ironic guide to topping the UK charts. The text of The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) is available online. It is an entertaining read, and full of wisdom: Link.
This passage about how to write the chorus of a hit song is perceptive:
The lyrics for the chorus must never deal with anything but the most basic of human emotions. This is not us trying to be cynical in a clever sort of way when we say “stick to the cliches”. The cliches are the cliches because they deal with the emotional topics we all feel. No records are bought in vast quantities because the lyrics are intellectually clever or deal in strange and new ideas. In fact, the lyrics can be quite meaningless in a literal sense but still have a great emotional pull. An obvious example of this was the chorus of our own record:
“Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, in the Tardis Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who”
Gibberish of course, but every lad in the country under a certain age related instinctively to what it was about. The ones slightly older needed a couple of pints inside them to clear away the mind debris left by the passing years before it made sense. As for girls and our chorus, we think they must have seen it as pure crap. A fact that must have limited to zero our chances of staying at The Top for more than one week.
Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7″ single buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it was all over – the Number One position was guaranteed:
“I’m never going to give you up”
It says it all. It’s what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:
“I’m never gonna let you down I’m never going to fool around or upset you”
GENIUS.
As soon as they had those lyrics written they must have known they could have taken out a block booking on the Number One slot. Then within the next twelve months to have written the chorus:
“I should be so lucky Luck, lucky, lucky I should be so lucky in love”
Out of context, as meaningless to lads as our own Doctor Who chorus was to girls but in those three lines there are for many more meaning than in the complete collected works of Morrisey. Stock Aitkin and Waterman are able to spot a phrase, not actually a catchphrase, but a line that the nation will know exactly what is been talked about and then use it perfectly:
“Fun Love and Money” “Showing Out” “Got To Be Certain” “Respectable” “Toy Boy” “Cross My Broken Heart”
They are ridiculed by much of the media and only have their royalty statements for comfort. History will put them up there with Spectre and the boys. Waterman might be a loud mouthed, arrogant, narrow minded, self publicist, but the man has never outgrown his true, deep and genuine love of “Now” pop music.
The year that the pair of us spent working with Stock Aitkin and Waterman pulled into focus what we had learned about pop music throughout the rest of our lives.
Michael Jackson may be the biggest singing star in the world. Sold more L.P.s than any other artist at any time in the history of pop but he has had very few U.K. Number Ones. If he would like to make amends on this front he should start co-writing with the SAW team or read this manual. He has quite a bit to learn about the opening line of a chorus.
We have just taken a coffee break from writing this lot and while in the cafe have come up with the ultimate Stock Aitkin and Waterman chorus never written. It’s called “Live In Lover”, either performed by Sinitta or ideally by a Dagenham blonde called Sharon:
“Live in lover I want you to be My live in lover for eternity”
Either use it for yourselves or we will go and blow what last vestiges of credibility we have and do it ourselves. We can see it now: we’d call the act “Sharon Meets the KLF” and of course the b-side would have to be “Sharon Joins The JAMS”. If there are any good looking Sharons out there that want to be pop stars please don’t hesitate to contact us.
We are afraid you can’t just go down to the local supermarket and listen to the check-out girls’ talk and hope you can pick up the right line before Waterman gets to it. The line has to come to you and when it does you’ve got to grab it. Mindlessly singing along to the 12″ groove track you have is the best way.
Morrisey has undoubtedly come up with some of the wittiest titles of the decade. “Shakespeare’s Sister”, “Girlfriend In A Coma” or “William It Was Really Nothing” are classic. However, with titles like these he will always be guaranteed a non Top Five placing.
The New York Times reports a wave of Albino killings in Tanzania, because of superstitions about the luckiness of their body parts. Madness.
Police officials said the albino killings were worst in rural areas, where people tend to be less educated and more superstitious. They said that some fishermen even wove albino hairs in their nets because they believed they would catch more fish.
On the shores of Lake Victoria, in northern Tanzania, albinos are a touchy subject. When asked if they used albino hairs in their nets, a group of fishermen just stared at the sand.
One traditional healer, a young man in a striped shirt who looked more like a college student than a witch doctor, said: “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. But that’s not real witchcraft. It’s the work of con men.”
…
But the killings go on. They have even spread to neighboring Kenya, where an albino woman was hacked to death in late May, with her eyes, tongue and breasts gouged out. Advocates for albinos have also said that witch doctors are selling albino skin in Congo.
The young are often the targets. In early May, Vumilia Makoye, 17, was eating dinner with her family in their hut in western Tanzania when two men showed up with long knives.
Vumilia was like many other Africans with albinism. She had dropped out of school because of severe near-sightedness, a common problem for albinos, whose eyes develop abnormally and who often have to hold things like books or cellphones two inches away to see them. She could not find a job because no one would hire her. She sold peanuts in the market, making $2 a week while her delicate skin was seared by the sun.
When Vumilia’s mother, Jeme, saw the men with knives, she tried to barricade the door of their hut. But the men overpowered her and burst in.
“They cut my daughter quickly,” she said, making hacking motions with her hands.
The men sawed off Vumilia’s legs above the knee and ran away with the stumps. Vumilia died.
William Nordhaus, from his book A Question of Balance, quoted in the New York Review of Books:
Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency lightbulbs, or subsidizing ethanol, or providing research support for solar power—but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon. You should conclude that the proposal is not really serious and does not recognize the central economic message about how to slow climate change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is at best rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic inefficiencies.
It’s hard to see how anything else could work. And yet Labor is showing about as much leadership on the issue as the Libs did – even with control of both houses of parliament and a crippled Opposition. From Friday’s SMH:
The average floor area for houses was expected to increase by 145 per cent by 2020, driving up the amount of energy used for lighting and heating. People were also relying more on electricity to meet their energy needs instead of traditional methods, such as a wood fire for heating.
The report found one in four households buys a new television each year and that Australia has the highest per capita sales of power-hungry LCD and plasma screen televisions in the world.
Televisions now use more power than cooking, heating or air-conditioning and are fourth on the list of households’ greatest energy users, behind water heating, refrigerators and lighting.
LCD and plasma screens use more energy than old-style CRT’s of the same size; even worse, they tend to be bigger. It’s hard to see how the obvious response – to apply taxes to them – would make much of a difference: people are already ready to fork out thousands of dollars for their TV’s. Of course, the government isn’t even proposing anything that drastic:
To combat this, Mr Garrett announced the Government would phase in a 10-star rating system for electrical appliances over the next year. It will cover appliances such as refrigerators, clothes dryers, washing machines and dishwashers.
A separate, voluntary labelling system for televisions will be brought in over the next six months, with mandatory labelling and minimum efficiency standards introduced next year.
The energy rating system’s only going to affect the shopping habits of do-gooders (unless the price of energy increases steeply). And besides, encouraging people to buy the most energy-efficient plasma isn’t addressing the problem. As with 4WD’s, what we have here is an expensive luxury item that is harmful to the public good.
In the difficult task of fighting global warming, an easy place to start would seem to be to cut out the high-polluting inessentials: things which, if eliminated, would hardly affect quality of life. In other words, start banning or restricting the sale of products like plasma-screen TV’s and 4WD’s. We didn’t have two-metre TV screens a decade ago, and there’s no reason they should be treated as a right today.
It’ll never happen.
The solutions to global warming that rest on technological advances have huge problems. The physicist Freeman Dyson, in the New York Review of Books, puts faith in technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere:
Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. Keeling’s wiggles prove that a big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world’s forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.
It’s probably more realistic than clean coal, but there are some small problems:
- How on earth could you go about replacing a quarter of the world’s forests?
- How on earth could you do that without it being an ecological disaster?
- If the carbon dioxide is halved in fifty years, where does that leave us in one hundred years? With none? Or do we clear a quarter of the world’s forests again in fifty years?
What’s frustrating is that there is plenty of debate about ludicrously drastic technological approaches that won’t happen for decades, but curbing our present-day luxuries isn’t even on the table.
Patrick House won the New Yorker cartoon caption contest, and wrote an article for Slate about how you can do it too! It helped me understand why I’ve never gotten anywhere when I’ve entered it before. Link. Excerpt:
Should you make a pun or, perhaps, create a visual gag about a cat surreptitiously reading its owner’s e-mail? Neither. You must aim for what is called a “theory of mind” caption, which requires the reader to project intents or beliefs into the minds of the cartoon’s characters. An exemplary New Yorker theory of mind caption (accompanying a cartoon of a police officer ticketing a caveman with a large wheel): “Yeah, yeah—and I invented the ticket.” The humor here requires inference about the caveman’s beliefs and intentions as he (presumably) explains to the cop that he invented the wheel. A non-theory-of-mind caption (accompanying a cartoon of a bird wearing a thong), however, requires no such projection: “It’s a thongbird.” Theory of mind captions make for higher-order jokes easily distinguished from the simian puns and visual gags that litter the likes of MAD Magazine. To date, 136 out of the 145 caption contest winners (94 percent) fall into the “theory of mind” category.
I want to read Now The Hell Will Start, a new book about the true story of Herman Perry, a black American soldier who “shot and killed a white commanding officer, then disappeared into the jungles of Burma, where he joined a tribe of headhunters and eluded capture for months”. Slate has a slideshow with an overview of the story. Slate points out the Captain Kurtz parallel, but it sounds more to me like the Australian legend of William Buckley. Link. Excerpt:
Perry’s unit, the 849th Engineer Aviation Battalion, had been dispatched to the Indo-Burmese wilderness to help build the ill-fated Ledo Road, named after the town near its mile zero. The road was designed to keep Nationalist China flush with supplies after the Japanese had severed access to the more southerly Burma Road in 1942.
Building the road was a far more arduous task than its planners had predicted. An aide to Chiang Kai-shek, China’s conniving dictator, initially estimated that the highway would take just three months to build. It instead took two and a half years and incurred thousands of casualties: The Americans nicknamed it “the Man-a-Mile Road” on account of its lethality. But President Roosevelt and the War Department never could bring themselves to curtail the road’s construction, even as its potential usefulness diminished with the increase of cargo flights between India and China. They were too afraid of losing face, no matter the human toll.
…
The vast majority of GIs who worked the road were, like Herman Perry, African-American. They were assigned to segregated labor battalions run by white officers. The military brass thought that men of African descent possessed smaller cranial capacities than their European counterparts, a deficiency said to be caused by irreversible “premature ossification of the skull.” As a result, most black draftees were deemed unsuitable for combat and were forced to toil as manual laborers behind the war’s front lines.
…
While the MPs combed the brothels of Calcutta, Perry ran deeper and deeper into the Patkais, the forested mountain range that lines the Indo-Burmese border. He eventually stumbled upon a village inhabited by Nagas, members of an ethnic group known for its zeal for headhunting. Against all odds, the charming Perry managed to befriend the tribesmen. He eventually married the chief’s 14-year-old daughter, who bore him a son, and started a small farm in the Patkais, raising rice and marijuana.
Perry was arguably the world’s first hippie.
The Boston Globe has an article about property law and outer space that I found both fascinating and exciting. Link. Excerpt:
And while the question of property on the moon remains, for the time being, an abstract one, for space property proponents it’s far from frivolous. Whether it’s 16th-century English privateer-explorers or the Dutch East India Company, 19th-century American homesteaders or the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, privatization has a long history as a catalyst for discovery, development, and settlement. Now, some say, it’s time to look up.
One of the more straightforward models for celestial private property has been put forward by Wasser. He made his case most recently in an article in the winter issue of the Journal of Air Law and Commerce: The United States and other national governments, he argues, should pass what he calls “land claim recognition” legislation. Under such laws, courts would recognize private property claims on the moon or other celestial bodies so long as the claimant has established a settlement there. Wasser proposes limiting lunar property-holders to plots the size of Alaska – that leaves plenty for others, but also is big enough that selling it off would turn a profit even after what are sure to be the enormous expenses incurred getting to the moon in the first place.
After that, Wasser argues, the process becomes self-perpetuating. Land sales pay for the cost of developing safe transport and that encourages further settlement, which drives up land prices even more.
A key stipulation, though, would be that space property ownership deeds would require the owners to sell people rides to whatever celestial body the property was on – thereby speeding up the process of settlement and spreading around the benefits of whatever space-travel breakthroughs had been arrived at by the property holder.
It is far too early to know how valuable such property claims would be, but scientists and engineers point to a few potential sources of value in the celestial bodies currently within our reach. A medium-sized asteroid, for example, can contain trillions of dollars of gold, platinum, iron, zinc, and aluminum – enough that whoever figured out how to profitably extract it and get it to Earth would single-handedly collapse world prices for those metals and still make out like Croesus. The California-based company SpaceDev, a producer of rocket engines and small satellites, has been trying to figure out how to make asteroid mining viable for nearly a decade.
“The point of all this is to open the frontier for everyone,” Wasser says, “and obviously being willing to sell rides to the settlement would be a way of accomplishing that.”
Another model, proposed by the Houston-based lawyer Wayne White, would make ownership contingent on physical occupation. A company could claim ownership of a piece of space only as big as its employees could physically occupy, and only so long as they were actually there. Such a limitation would, he has argued, prevent people from claiming more property than they could develop.
A third model tries to ensure that the most advanced national and private programs wouldn’t scoop up all the available celestial property as soon as it became accessible. The extraterrestrial property regime envisioned by Glenn Reynolds, a professor and space law specialist at the University of Tennessee Law School, and Robert Merges, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, would be, in most ways, a basic first-come, first-served system. But it would have one key condition: A portion of the total available property would be set aside for a period of time to give developing nations a chance to catch up and to bid once they’d reached the point at which they were technologically and financially able.
George Packer writes in the New Yorker about the dire state of the Republican party in the USA. There are parallels with the current situation of the Liberals here; they’re excellent at winning elections by dividing their critics, but not by actually getting people behind their vision of where the country should go. In Packer’s words “conservatism has retained the essentially negative character of an insurgent movement”. As a result, their winning streak could only last so long, and they are finding themselves completely rudderless now that their tricks are starting to fail them. There’s some interesting insights into the very clever strategies the Republicans have been employing for the past few decades. Link. Excerpt:
Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—“A little raw for today,” he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading “Dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in “the Old Roosevelt Coalition,” it recommended that the White House “exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”
The Nixon White House didn’t enact all of these recommendations, but it would be hard to find a more succinct and unapologetic blueprint for Republican success in the conservative era. “Positive polarization” helped the Republicans win one election after another—and insured that American politics would be an ugly, unredeemed business for decades to come.
Thanks, Lyn.
The New Republic has an article about the growing backlash against al-Qaeda (and al-Qaeda-style indiscriminate killing) in the Muslim world. Link. Excerpt 1:
According to Pew polls, support for Al Qaeda has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years. The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by half or more in the last five years. In Saudi Arabia, only 10 percent now have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, according to a December poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank. Following a wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year, support for suicide operations amongst Pakistanis has dropped to 9 percent (it was 33 percent five years ago), while favorable views of bin Laden in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, around where he is believed to be hiding, have plummeted to 4 percent from 70 percent since August 2007.
Excerpt 2:
After September 11, there was considerable fear in the West that we were headed for a clash of civilizations with the Muslim world led by bin Laden, who would entice masses of young Muslims into his jihadist movement. But the religious leaders and former militants who are now critiquing Al Qaeda’s terrorist campaign–both in the Middle East and in Muslim enclaves in the West– make that less likely. The potential repercussions for Al Qaeda cannot be underestimated because, unlike most mainstream Muslim leaders, Al Qaeda’s new critics have the jihadist credentials to make their criticisms bite. “The starting point has to be that jihad is legitimate, otherwise no one will listen, ” says Benotman, who sees the Iraqi insurgency as a legitimate jihad. “The reaction [to my criticism of Al Qaeda] has been beyond imagination. It has made the radicals very angry. They are very shaky about it.”
Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by Al Qaeda’s leaders turned against them? To a large extent, it is because Al Qaeda and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by which they claim the right to decide who is a “true” Muslim. Al Qaeda’s Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view: First, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s. It is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq, where Al Qaeda’s suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis, most of them targeted simply for being Shia. Recently, Al Qaeda in Iraq has turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its diktats, a fact not lost on the Islamic world’s Sunni majority.
Excerpt 3:
More doubt about Al Qaeda was planted in the Muslim world when Sayyid Imam Al Sharif, the ideological godfather of Al Qaeda, sensationally withdrew his support in a book written last year from his prison cell in Cairo. Al Sharif, generally known as “Dr. Fadl,” was an architect of the doctrine of takfir, arguing that Muslims who did not support armed jihad or who participated in elections were kuffar, unbelievers. Although Dr. Fadl never explicitly called for such individuals to be killed, his takfiri treatises from 1988 and 1993 gave theological cover to jihadists targeting civilians.
Dr. Fadl was also Zawahiri’s mentor. Like his protégé, he is a skilled surgeon and moved in militant circles when he was a member of Cairo University’s medical faculty in the ’70s. In 1981, when Anwar Sadat was assassinated and Zawahiri was jailed in connection with the plot, Dr. Fadl fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he operated on wounded mujahedin fighting the Soviets. After Zawahiri’s release from jail, he joined Dr. Fadl in Peshawar, where they established a new branch of the “Jihad group” that would later morph into Al Qaeda. Osama Rushdi, a former Egyptian jihadist then living in Peshawar, recalls that there was little doubt about Dr. Fadl’s importance: “He was like the big boss in the Mafia in Chicago.” And bin Laden also owed a deeply personal debt to Dr. Fadl; in Sudan in 1993, the doctor operated on Al Qaeda’s leader after he was hurt in an assassination attempt.
So it was an unwelcome surprise for Al Qaeda’s leaders when Dr. Fadl’s new book, Rationalization of Jihad, was serialized in an independent Egyptian newspaper in November. The incentive for writing the book, he explained, was that “jihad … was blemished with grave Sharia violations during recent years. … [N]ow there are those who kill hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non Muslims in the name of Jihad!” Dr Fadl ruled that Al Qaeda’s bombings in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere were illegitimate and that terrorism against civilians in Western countries was wrong. He also took on Al Qaeda’s leaders directly in an interview with the Al Hayat newspaper. “Zawahiri and his Emir bin Laden [are] extremely immoral,” he said. “I have spoken about this in order to warn the youth against them, youth who are seduced by them, and don’t know them.”
Excerpt 4:
Hanif Qadir, now 42, revealed to us that he himself was recruited by Al Qaeda after the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Jihadist recruiters in east London, no doubt noting wealth, sought out Qadir, who had earned enough money running a car repair shop to buy a Rolls-Royce and live in some style. “The guy who handled me was a Syrian called Abu Sufiyan. … I’m sure he was from Al Qaeda,” recalls Qadir. “He was good at telling you what you wanted to hear … he touched all my emotional buttons.” Qadir agreed to join. He drew up a will and, in December 2002, bought a first-class ticket to Pakistan. But, as the truck he was in crossed the dirt roads into Afghanistan, a chance occurrence changed his life: A truck, carrying wounded fighters, approached them from the other direction. Among them was a young Punjabi boy whose white robes were stained with blood. “These are evil people,” another of the wounded shouted. “[W]e came here to fight jihad, but they are just using us as cannon fodder.” Qadir’s truckload of wannabe jihadists made a u-turn. “That kid, he was like an angel. He kicked me back into reality,” recalls Qadir. “When I landed back in the U.K., I wanted to find [the Al Qaeda recruiters] and cut their heads off.”
Qadir never found them, but he became determined to stop others like him from being recruited. In 2004, he and his brother opened the gym and community center in the Walthamstow neighborhood of east London. Soon, hundreds of young Muslims were attending.
The scale of the challenge was quickly clear. Soon after the center opened, he got wind that pro-Al Qaeda militants were secretly booking rooms there for their meetings. Worse, in the summer of 2006, several of those arrested in connection with the Al Qaeda airlines plot, including alleged ringleader Abdulla Ahmed Ali, were found to have attended his gym. But, rather than shutting the radicals out, Qadir continued to allow them to meet. “Sometimes our youngsters get into debates with these people, for example on jihad, and make them look ridiculous in front of their followers,” he says. Qadir believes his approach is finally starting to pay off: “The extremists are burning out: The number of radicals in Walthamstow is diminishing, not growing.”
For his installation, Displacements, artist Michael Naimark 1) put a video camera on a turntable in the middle of a room, 2) set it recording as it span, 3) painted everything in the room white, and 4) put a projector on the same turntable, and set it spinning. Clever. Link.
