The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

This press release is embargoed until 2230 hours on Thursday 6 October. Before that time it is only available through the link which you have been sent.

President George W. Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …” And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, “Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.” And by God I’m gonna do it.’”

Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: “I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state.”

Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace - Mondays 10, 17 and 24 October, from 9.00 to 10.00pm on BBC TWO.

The BBC Press-Release; via BoingBoing

Do you know what is currently the greatest failure of all? Well, if in doubt, google. Note that the page contains only one sponsored link, which you should definitely read.

(And just to make sure that the results are not going to change any time soon, this is my contribution to Google’s search engine: miserable failure.)

As of next week UK citizens will not be allowed to smile on their passport photographs. Seemingly, current facial recognition software is unable to handle smiling faces. (From today’s Metro)

I can see the next phase; the police will be given power to stop and search any smiling person, in case s/he is a terrorist trying to avoid recognition by CCTV cameras. So next time you might want to smile, better make sure nobody is looking.

Found this rather amusing parody on some US Post Stamps at Stay Free! Daily (via boingboing.net). The originals are here.

They say picture is worth 1000 words, and this one is just so beautifully symbolic. (Via boingboing.)

Horrific, cowardly, those are words that first spring to mind. It caught us by surprise even though in the back of our minds I suspect we all knew that a major incident on the UK mainland was unavoidable.

Tony Blair has made his speech to the nation in response to the attacks from the G8 summit. While I appreciate that at times like these the national leaders need to speak clearly and firmly, I wonder where this rhetoric will lead us:

It is important that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world. … Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations throughout the world.

As an immediate reaction to these horrific events this response is fine, but as a policy statement it would be wholly inadequate. Of course we are determined to, and should, defend our values against this kind of atrocity, and we expect our leaders to take firm and uncompromising steps (and if that requires radical measures, then let it be). However, the issue of terrorism will not go away as long as we think that the ultimate aim of terrorism is to destroy our way of life; terrorism is not an end in itself but rather a means to an end, and if we are to have any hope of getting rid of it, we have to ask why.

Why is it that certain people are prepared to inflict such suffering on others, and die in the process? Why is it that these people hate us? There are underlying reasons why, and without reflecting on these reasons, and responding to them in an appropriate way, we can never win the ‘war on terror’.

It was one of the remarkable features of the western response to the 9/11 incidents that this question did not seem to be asked by those who are responsible for waging this ‘war on terror’ on our behalf. Instead we responded by pretty indiscriminate retaliation against Afghanistan and Iraq, which only fanned the flames of extremism, giving it a justification for further acts of terror (should it need such justification — is there really any moral difference between blowing up a bus of innocent people with a backpack of explosives and the dropping of a laser-guided bomb into a civilian neighbourhood? I, for one, am horrified by both).

In the UK we often speak of not dealing just with crime but also with the causes of crime; perhaps it is time that our leaders take the same approach to the problem of terrorism.