May 2008

LONDON – Governments have their head in the sand about immigration – and this is as true for the U.S. as it is for Western Europe, the Middle East or South Africa. The riots and horrible street murders in South Africa vividly portray what happens when a country pits a foreign sub-proletariat against a resident proletariat, especially at a time when the economic pie doesn’t seem to be expanding fast enough. The main trouble is that modern capitalist-inclined governments rather like it – immigration keeps down wages. (I’m not talking about the immigration of professionals – and how governments like to mislead the public by often conflating the two!) It provides an underclass who live on the margins of established society. They may not pay income taxes, (although they pay VAT and every other kind of consumer tax) but this is made up for by their willingness to do dirty jobs, night...

If a visitor from space were to read history books of human behaviour, they would certainly conclude that the answer is yes.  This is because history has largely been written as if it were the history of man, tending to move from battle to battle, because that’s what interested the authors. If, however, our visitors were to read the acclaimed Quaker sociologist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Elise Boulding, they would gain an entirely different picture.  In The Underside of History Boulding tells the other half of the story, as she traces the evolution of woman’s role from the Paleolithic to modern times. She demonstrates how very recent it is that women have begun to move from the ‘inner’ or domestic world to the ‘outer’ or political world. She considers that empowering women – to dismantle their history of being devalued and to reconstruct true equality between the sexes – will lay the...

May 24, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Osama bin Laden has made Al Qaeda’s position crystal clear in his latest tape released on May 16th. He said the fight for the Palestinian cause is the most important factor driving Al Qaeda’s war with the West and that was the primary reason for 9/11. It sounds topical enough given the amount of attention that Washington is presently giving the Israel/Palestinian peace quest. But in truth bin Laden may well be behind the curve. A two state solution can no longer be a viable political goal, because: a) in terms of the demographics a Muslim majority in Israeli-controlled territory is less than a decade a way, b) the Israelis have effectively created a single state encompassing both Jews and Palestinians. To all intents and purposes it imitates the South Africa of apartheid days, a unitary state with a minority group attempting to rule...

May 17th, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Finally, a voice from the UN is saying something sensible about the world food crisis. John Holmes, the UN’s humanitarian aid chief, is asking UN agencies to cool some of their dire rhetoric about the impact of high food prices. By the yardstick of the last big food crisis in 1974, that had U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger running to an emergency UN conference in Rome to pledge that “within a decade no child should go to bed hungry”, it is not such a severe event. In terms of real prices the price hike is not so high as it seems; in terms of the rise of consumer buying power over the last 34 years it is not biting so deeply. Moreover, take wheat and rice out of the equation and many food prices have not risen so significantly – millet and barley...

LONDON – Once again the CIA and MI6 are publishing dire warnings of the vitality of Al Qaeda. Once again the Islamic world as a whole is being tarnished by association. U.S. presidential contender John McCain is saying that America needs a leadership “to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism”. And the words still ring in our ears from Samuel Huntington’s treatise, “The Clash of Civilizations”, the book that in many ways triggered this paranoia that infects the politicians, the press and the public discourse. “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, IT IS ISLAM”, he wrote. Few, if any, in the Western leadership seem to make the point that Al Qaeda is a deviant phenomenon within the Islamic world, just as Hitler was a deviant phenomenon within the Christian world (commentators seems to overlook Hitler’s early speeches calling on Catholic principles)....