Mark Fox's Weblog

Every once in a while – typically in the depths of winter a Canadian politician suggests that Canada should annex the Turks and Caicos Islands, a pair of small island chains 600 miles (970 km) southeast of Miami that have a total of 30,000 residents. With the British Overseas Territory in the midst of a corruption crisis, the British government has imposed direct rule.
Slate.com examines this action and notes that it is unlike to spread to Canada no matter how rapidly Canadian minority Parliament fall.

I’m sure somebody could have wrote a positive portrayal of the conditions of Jews in Nazi Germany as late as the last days before Kristallnacht in 1938. You could have said that there was anger at some outside organization but none against individual Jews and be no more a fool as NY Times columnist Roger Cohen in his puff-piece on Iran and its treatment of Iranian Jews.

Jeffery Goldberg and Richard Z. Chesnoff also have opinions on the accuracy of Cohen's statements.

MSNBC reports that a senior US official has stated the United States won't participate in a U.N. conference on racism in April unless the final document is changed to drop all references to Israel and criticism of religion.

Currently Israel and Canada have already announced that they will boycott the upcoming World Conference Against Racism in Geneva from April 20-25, known as Durban II due to its proposed agenda.

The original 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa degenerated into an anti-Semitic hatefest and the American and Israeli delegations left midway through. Some of the events in Durban included Jews being personally insulted, comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany, elimination of any mention of anti-Semitism in official texts, physical assaults against Jews, and the selling of notorious anti-Semitic forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion".

It’s good to see US President Obama making the important decision to not provide any respectability to a disreputable event.

A MSNBC article on the fighting in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia notes an interesting fact that could account for the Georgian government launching its offense the day of the Olympic opening ceremony:

He also speculated the timing of the attack, hours before the opening ceremony in Beijing, could be a signal from the Georgian government. The Russian resort region of Sochi, just miles from the border of Georgia's other separatist region of Abkhazia, will host the 2014 Winter Games. "It might be a signal to the Russians saying that the Sochi Olympics will not go the way Russia wants if there is no progress on the settlement in Abkhazia," Popescu said. Besides being important to Georgia as a matter of national pride, Abkhazia also includes more than half of Georgia's Black Sea coast and is believed to have significant oil reserves.

The article also notes that Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia earlier this could have sparked additional tension:

Tensions rose markedly this year after South Ossetia basked in Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia, calling it an international precedent that legitimized its own refusal to remain part of Georgia.

South Ossetia’s backer, Russia does not recognize Kosovo's independence but consistency is not needed in international politics.

The New York Times reports that Russia and China have vetoed an American-led United Nations Security Council effort to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe citing excessive interference in the country’s domestic matters. The report states that it would have passed without the vetos:

The United States, having earlier in the week mustered the nine votes needed to pass the sanctions, stalled on bringing the resolution to a vote until it became absolutely clear that Russia was determined to stop it. Once the Russians made it clear that they would exercise their veto, the Chinese, often leery of taking a lone stand on delicate human rights issues, followed suit.

The so-called "excessive" measures are in fact very minimal:

The sanctions that the United States proposed had included an arms embargo, the appointment of a United Nations mediator, and travel and financial restrictions against Mr. Mugabe and 13 of the top military and government officials in Zimbabwe. The Council has moved away from broad trade sanctions in recent years because they were considered too harmful to the civilian population.

Sadly South Africa was one of the members to vote against the resolution:

In the end, nine council members voted to support the measure including the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Panama, Costa Rica, Croatia and Burkina Faso. Beside the two vetoes, the other votes against the sanctions were cast by Libya, Vietnam and South Africa. Indonesia abstained.

The Washington Post’s PostGlobal page has an editorial by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, Consulting Editor of The Economic Times which India's largest financial daily in which he argues that there is no moral grounds to oust Robert Mugabe from rule in Zimbabwe. Aiyar starts with the “others do it defense”

Robert Mugabe is indeed an odious ruler with blood on his hands. But since when is that a disqualification to rule? The world has long been full of rulers even more odious and bloodthirsty than he.

The vast majority of 20th century world rulers were bloody autocrats, and the shift to democracy in the 21st century has so far been partial and unconvincing. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan are autocracies. Does anybody suggest UN action to topple them? All the Central Asian republics are autocracies. Does anybody suggest toppling them? No, because they are generally pro-Western autocracies, and that apparently expiates their sins. Of Mugabe's many crimes, the one that is apparently unforgivable is that he has confiscated the land of white farmers, killed some and driven out others. In earlier times, when he accommodated whites, the West hailed him as a great freedom fighter. Britain even knighted him. These encomiums were poured on him despite his killing 10,000 to 20,000 members of the rival Matabele tribe during an uprising. Nobody called him a bloody criminal at the time. Only when he turned viciously against whites did the western media and political class suddenly find in him despicable qualities that had somehow escaped them earlier.

There is much to be said for the Westphalian principle of not interfering with the internal affairs of countries, no matter how odious their rulers or practices may be. Better would be economic sanctions that may spur an internal process in Zimbabwe that ousts Mugabe. These may simply worsen economic misery without ousting Mugabe. Yet that is a risk worth taking.

I wonder what Aiyar would have said to the Jews of Nazi Germany, Ukrainians of Stalinist Russia and the intellectuals (or merely glass wearing people) of Cambodia under Pol Pot? Die is probably the answer.

Following Arun Gandhi's anti-Semitic rant in the Washington Post On Faith section and later apology, the Anti-Defamation League has stated that the apology was not enough as it lacks a “retraction of the suggestion that Jews "overplay" the Holocaust to manipulate the international community”.

The ADL also notes that the apology does not retract at all his claim that that "Israel and the Jews are the biggest players" in promoting a "culture of violence that is eventually going to destroy humanity."

Gandhi's statement is having an impact elsewhere; the President of the University of Rochester where Arun Gandhi's M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence is located vehemently disagrees with the Gandhi’s statement and intends to discuss the matter with him on his return from India.

Others expressing outrage include Professor Judea Pearl, mother of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl who wrote a letter to the Washington Post’s CEO. She takes aim at Gandhi’s semi-apology:

Gandhi and the Post cannot be exonerated by making distinctions between "Israel policies," "Israel existence", "Judaism" or "Jewishness", as Gandhi has attempted to do in his semi-apology. The title of Gandhi's article reads "Jewish identity," and one's identity is an inextricable part of one's psyche and being. Your editors approved of (perhaps even composed) this title, and they understood exactly what it means, who is being blamed for the world's violence, and how dangerous the consequences of these words may be. The hatred that killed my son Daniel was created by wreckless incitements of this sort, propagated and aided by the very media of which he was a proud member.

In light of these complaints the editors of the Washington Post On Faith section issued their own apology stating:

When we undertook this project over a year ago, we wrote that our goal was to shed light on a subject—religion—that too often generates heat. The Gandhi post failed to comply with that mission.

It’s very disturbing to note that many reader comments attacked the On Faith editors’ apology and defended Gandhi. I guess hateful people like to stick together.

The New York Times announced Tuesday that the Freakonomics Blog by bestselling authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt has moved to its site and in an impressive show of generating traffic, one of their first blog posting on the new site was titled “If You Were a Terrorist, How Would You Attack?”.
The posting has over 590 comments, made the front page of the Drudge Report, and numerous other blogs.

I wonder if the NY Times has a blog by an ethics professor or other person who can examine the question of whether asking this question in the first place was a good idea. Terrorists no doubt have ideas of future attacks but having them vetted by the US public seems wrong.

CNN has a story on the arrival of the world's biggest container ship, the MS Emma Maersk in Britain on its maiden international voyage from Sweden to the Far East and back to Europe with 11,000 cargo containers of mainly Christmas related goods. The ship, which weighs 170,000 tons (190,400 U.S. tons) is too large for the Panama Canal even if the recently approved widening goes ahead.

A few of these ships would have been handy during World War Two, 190,400 U.S. tons is an entire convoy of Liberty Ships.

CNN reports that Saudi Arabia is planning to build a multi-billion dollar fence along its entire 560-mile (900-kilometer) border with Iraq to prevent terrorists from entering. The fence will have a number of high tech features to allow for the detection of intruders. The article states:

Although the government in Riyadh has not released complete details of its plans, security experts familiar with the project said it would include electronic sensors and ultraviolet cameras capable of detecting any attempt to breach the fence.

The fence will not be electrified, but it will have sensors capable of alerting security forces if anyone tries to cut through the links, the experts said on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about the project to media.

The Middle East Economic Digest, a regional news magazine, reported this month that it would contain a double-lined fence with 135 electronically controlled gates, fence-mounted ultraviolet intruder detection sensors, buried radio detection sensors and concertina razor wire along the entire, mostly desert frontier.

This fence falls in the category of a Double-Layer Fence, a described in Slate.com’s Explainer article. A bill before the US Senate proposes a 698-mile double-layer fence along the Mexican border to seal off part of the 1,920-mile US border with Mexico.

Maybe both countries can buy the needed technology from Israel, which unfortunately has experience in this area.

While it is not on par with discovering that a Nobel Prize winner was a member of the Waffen SS it is disturbing to discover that a professor at your alma mater and author several books and columns that your read is a raving 9/11 conspiracy theory nut job. Mark Steyn reports on the views of A. K. Dewdney, adjunct professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario:

"To account for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush White House has produced a scenario involving Arab hijackers flying large aircraft into American landmarks," writes the eminent Ontario academic. "We, like millions of other 9/11 skeptics, have found this explanation to be inconsistent with the facts of the matter." Instead, he argues, a mid-air plane switch took place on three of the jets. "The passengers of one of the flights died in an aerial explosion over Shanksville, Pa.," he writes, "and the remaining passengers (and aircraft) were disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean." Most of us swallowed "the Bush-Cheney scenario" because we were unaware that, when two planes are less than half a kilometre apart, they appear as a single blip on the radar screen. Thus, the covert switch. Instead of crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the flights were diverted by FBI agents on board to Harrisburg, Pa., where the passengers from all three planes were herded onto UA Flight 175 and flown on to Cleveland Hopkins and their deaths. By then, unmanned Predator drones had been substituted for the passenger jets and directed into their high-profile targets. The original planes and their passengers were finished off over the Atlantic.

Why he and others believe in this nonsense is a uncomputable function.

AP reports that the Lebanese government has announced that the Lebanese cabinet has voted unanimously to send 15,000 troops to stand between Israel and Hezbollah should a cease-fire take hold and Israeli forces withdraw south of the border.

And they could not have decided to do this, say a month ago? United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 has called for this since 2004 and earlier resolutions since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 which the UN certified as complete.