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John Fund interviews one of the members of Zimbabwe’s opposition.
Zimbabwe is in the news this weekend as its 83-year-old strongman, Robert Mugabe, arrives in Lisbon to attend his first European Union summit meeting in seven years. His appalling human-rights record has led British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to boycott the meeting.
While the spotlight has not recently been on this deeply troubled land, there are dissidents who do not want the world to forget. Earlier this year I met with one of them, a tall, charismatic 41-year-old who attended the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual chatfest of thinkers and well-heeled idealists sponsored by the Aspen Institute.
But Arthur Mutambara, who leads one of the main opposition groups fighting the Mugabe tyranny, wasn’t in the Colorado Rockies to exchange pleasantries. He startled the crowd with blunt language that isn’t normal parlance for politicians from the developing world.
“We Africans are responsible for our problems, and we must take charge of our lives,” he said in a commanding, deep voice reminiscent of James Earl Jones. “We must move away from aid to genuine investment. We must ensure that after getting rid of a dictator we plant deep roots for the rule of law and actually improve the lot of the people. So when we who believe in democracy triumph, I ask you to judge us harshly if we fail to live up to our promises.” …
Paul Greenberg on Russia’s election.
The latest election results out of Russia are more Russian than ever, more’s the pity.
The latest czar had no problem arranging a victory that would have made old Mayor Daley or Boss Crump look like a piker. The outcome was so forgone a conclusion that the usual European election monitors didn’t even bother to show up. Besides. Vladimir Putin’s regime had delayed granting them visas for so long they were denied a chance to witness all the preparations for the big show. …
Stanley Kurtz posts at The Corner on the attempts by a Canadian Islamic group to censor Mark Steyn.
… This is a big deal. The blogosphere has so far largely missed it, but this attack on Mark Steyn is very much our business. There may be an impulse to dismiss this assault on Steyn, on the assumption that it will fail, that Steyn is a big boy and can take care of himself, and that in any case this is crazy Canada, where political correctness rules, rather than the land of the free. That would be a mistake. The Canadian Islamic Congress’s war on Mark Steyn and Maclean’s is an attack on all of us. I’ll say more in a moment about how a Canadian case can reach into America, but let’s first take a look at the goings on up north. …
One of Steyn’s critics is caught with his pants down. Cool thing is Mark does the honors.
…Hello, Mr Henley? Anybody home in there? Those are quotation marks, because they’re someone else’s words – not the blatant racism of the racist douchebag Steyn but of a prominent Scandinavian imam. It’s tempting to say to Jim Henley, “Douchebag, douche thyself”, and leave it at that. However, in an attempt to divine his thinking on the subject, I’d like to ask him this: …
David Warren comes to Mark’s defense.
… For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant’s right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgments on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers — for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.
My hope is that this case against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s will be fruitful. It will be, if it inspires enough people — especially journalists, of all political persuasions — to express outrage at what has been done; and inspires Canada’s free citizens into the necessary political action to put an end to the human rights commissions themselves. The worst possible result is if the case fails to produce this response.
Ayann Hirsi Ali notes the times when Muslims are tolerant like when they tolerate the fundamentalist thugs.
… It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked†by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.
But where are the moderates? …
Jeff Jacoby is not reassured by the Iran NIE.
… The intelligence agencies’ record for accuracy doesn’t inspire confidence. Not everyone embraced the NIE’s startling judgment. Even the UN’s nuclear inspectors were dubious. “We are more skeptical,” an official close to the inspection agency told The New York Times last week. “We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.”
Given the history of US intelligence blunders, such skepticism is well warranted. The intelligence community badly underestimated Saddam’s nuclear progress before the first Gulf War and badly overestimated his stock of WMDs — a “slam-dunk,” George Tenet insisted — on the eve of the 2003 war. It was taken by surprise when Pakistan went nuclear in 1998s, just as it had been stunned when the Soviets went nuclear in 1949. The intelligence agencies didn’t expect Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. They didn’t foresee North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. They were blindsided by Sept. 11.
Now they conclude that the Iranians have shelved their nuclear weapons program. Two years ago they concluded the opposite. “Across the board,” the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission found in 2005, “the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors.” Considering their track record, that sounds about right.
Power Line spots a photo from Iran.
Division of Labour learning to love the big box store.
Coyote Blog provides perspective on wealth.
Hit and Run calls Bill Buckley on his love for smoking nazis.