Category Archives: Middle East

UPDATED: Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel

Aesthetics, Business, Celebrity, Classical Liberalism, Economy, Etiquette, Feminism, Free Markets, Islam, Middle East

Is Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel the most beautiful woman in the world? Indisputably. Her face is simply exquisite. Poise and manners are perfect too. Mrs. Al-Taweel’s simple, rich-girl solutions to endemic unemployment sound more left-liberal than classically liberal, but her heart is pure and she is bright. Married to “Buffett of Arabia,” Ameerah Al-Taweel is also terrifically wealthy. I hope she does not pick up any ho-like mannerisms while in America.

Ameerah Al-Taweel’s Interview With CNN’s Piers Morgan

UPDATE (Sept. 25): It would seem that Princess Al-Taweel is a “micro-credit cultist.” The role of the NGO, as she see it, is to encourage economic growth by doling out loans to plucky people who want to start a business. Her belief in the “Micro-Credit Cult” is understandable. Saudi Arabia is a rentier state, where an aristocratic, authoritarian upper-class manages the country’s vast natural resource of oil. In the Saudi situation, this custodian class is probably more benevolent than a democratic despotism would be.

UPDATE II: Wasted Words (& ‘Lost Cause’)

Ancient History, Hebrew Testament, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Jihad, Judaism & Jews, Middle East, Terrorism, UN

Benjamin Netanyahu speaks on a level incomprehensible to his audience. One doesn’t have to agree with everything Israel’s prime minister says to respect his patriotism, the incisive points he drove home, and his command of history and reasoned argument. I’ve often argued that American leaders—Republican, Democrat and other, wannabe effetes—are unpatriotic. At bottom, they dislike the historic people and work against their interests. Not so Netanyahu. The Arabists on CNN are agreed: Both James Rubin (correspondent Christian Amanpour’s beau) and Hussein Ibish claimed Netanyahu lost. They’re probably right. As usual, the text of the address is not yet out there. The UN feed doesn’t enable a rewind. I’ve replaced it with this C-SPAN hyperlink. I hope an embed of Netanyahu’s speech becomes available shortly.

UPDATED I (Sept. 26):

UPDATE II: My father, whom I have just called in South Africa to wish Shanah Tova, said this about Netanyahu’s “lost cause”: If you were to propose a resolution in the UN that the world is flat, you’d get a majority vote.

UPDATE III: ALL The Victims of September 11

Iraq, Jihad, Just War, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, War

The “SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 VICTIMS” is a site dedicated to America’s victims of the September 11, 2001 assault. It is profoundly moving (even if the hyperlinks to each individual profile do not display). The list, however, is woefully incomplete. All told, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghani civilians have died due to the actions the American state took to avenge the murder of those who perished in the WORLD TRADE CENTER, on AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHTS 11 and 77, on UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHTS 175 and 93, and in the PENTAGON.

On 10.11.06, I made a point of clarifying a study in The Lancet detailing the direct and indirect casualties of our invasion of Iraq:

“In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: heart attack, stroke and chronic illness. Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence, according to the report.”

Moreover, “since March 2003, Iraqis have suffered from an excess of deaths, if you will.”

The relative risk, the risk of deaths from any cause was two-and-a-half times higher for Iraqi civilians after the 2003 invasion than in the preceding 15 months. But ‘the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the U.S.-led invasion.

In 2006, The Lancet cited a figure of 650,000 Iraqis, over and above the mortality rate during the Saddam era. Among these deceased Iraqis were thousands of individuals who had died because, since the invasion, the incidence of heart attacks, cancer, strokes, stress and displacement-related deaths, deaths associated with a lack of health care and potable water, etc had increased twofold, at least.

The total figure is now out of date.

Tomorrow, Sept. 11, think of our casualties—and of those innocent lives we shattered to avenge our dead.

UPDATE I (Sept. 12): NEED TO KNOW. “September 9, 2011: 9/11, ten years later” is a PBS program that offered decent 9/11 programing.

UPDATE II (Sept. 13): “9/11” by Nebojsa Malic of the “Gray Falcon” fame.

UPDATE III (Sept. 19): THE RECKONING: AMERICA AND THE WORLD A DECADE AFTER 9/11.

UPDATED: John McCain Is Scum (The Biggest Bully on the Block)

Foreign Policy, John McCain, Just War, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Terrorism, War

I’ve dubbed him McMussolini, and a serial killer by proxy. John McCain, concurs Larry Auster, is simply “the worst man in America.” Adds Larry: Americans who’ve gone along with John McCain’s latest criminal endeavor, the war of choice against Libya, “share in his guilt”:

McCain has justified the war on Libya because Kaddafi “has blood on his hands”–a reference to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. But, as shown on MSNBC last night by the man substituting for Lawrence O’Donnell, McCain visited Libya in 2009 and had a friendly meeting with Kaddafi. The meeting is shown in photographs, and there is a transcript. At one point McCain expresses his support for “progress in the bilateral relationship” between Libya and the U.S.
So in 2009 McCain had put Pan Am 103 behind him, as he had no choice to do, given that the U.S. had made peace with Kaddafi following his abandonment of his WMDs programs in 2003. But in 2011, the “script” had changed (that ever-changing “script” which tells liberals who is the oppressive villain and who is the saintlike victim in any given situation), and under this new script Kaddafi was suddenly a terrible enemy again and had to be destroyed, and it was as though the 2003 peace, and the good relations Kaddafi had maintained with the U.S. since 2003, including his friendly meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Tripoli in 2006, had never existed.
I repeat that if we had destroyed Kaddafi in 1988 in retaliation for the Lockerbie bombing that would have been just and right; but we did not do that; we let it pass, for 15 years, and ultimately we made peace with Kaddafi, as a part of which he paid substantial monetary damages to the families of the victims. On the political level, the Lockerbie bombing was a closed account, and no U.S. leader had the right in 2011 to bring it up again and say that we had to punish Kaddafi over it.
During the course of his career Kaddafi has been known as a whimsical tyrant. But in our war against Libya, it is not Kaddafi, but the U.S., which has behaved with the whimsicality of a tyrant.
John McCain is the worst man in America; but to the extent that we have gone along with this criminal war we all share in his guilt

UPDATE (Aug. 29): THE BIGGEST BULLY ON THE BLOCK. Huggins wrote: “That Khaddffi needed to be eliminated is not up to debate.” By who? God=USA? In he same vain the (pale) imitation of a Huggins over in the Arab world is saying, “That Bush needed to be eliminated is not up to debate.” And he’d have a solid point. Start seeing matters from both sides, and then you’ll come back to my position: quit invading these backward and benighted regions. What we’ve done—and are doing—to them is way worse than anything these people are capable of doing to us.