I've never been a big Castro fan. Yes, it's true that his regime's achievements in the fields of health, education and sport have been exemplary. Certainly, the US government's policy towards Cuba over the past few decades has vacilated between the criminal and the petty. But still, I can't get too inspired about the Cuban leader. Whatever he's achieved and whatever he's endured, Fidel Castro does not derive his legitimacy from the ballot box, a point on which I'm a bit of a stickler. Whi...
I'm getting increasingly annoyed with the way that both the left and the right have responded to the post 9-11 world in which we live. In my opinion, many on both sides disregard important issues when considering how to respond to the threat posed by al-Qaida and their jihadist fellow travellers. Let's start with the right. First off, bravo to most conservatives for understanding three important points: 1. Terrorism is a big problem. 2. Something must be done about it. 3. Bin Lade...
The current intifada in the West Bank and Gaza is now four years old. Forty-eight months in to this uprising, it is clear that, by any measure, it has been a disaster for the Palestinians. Militarily, Israel has inflicted three times as many casualties on the Palestinians as the Palestinians have on Israel. In the past few years, suicide bombers have found it much harder to get through Israel's elaborate security apparatus to wreak haovc in Israel's cities. Economically, the intifada may have...
As a child growing up in Belfast in the 1980s and 90s, I was conscious that many of those in positions of authority were English. At the time Northern Ireland was run by a Secretary of State, a member of the British cabinet. These men tended to be plummy and somewhat useless Conservative MPs, marking time in one of Britsh politics least sought after positions. The soldiers who patrolled the streets and manned the checkpoints were also English, as were most of the people on T.V., who provided ...
If the Hutton report taught me anything, it was that you shouldn't put any faith in government inquiries to get to the truth and to expose wrong-doing. As a leftie, I really should've known this already, but I must confess that late last year, I had hoped that the inquiry into the suicide of British weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly would find fault with Tony Blair's government for the circumstances which led to his death. I believe that Hutton would have seriously weakened the Blair premiers...
Sometimes I think I must have amnesia. Recently I've noticed some in the pro-war camp attempting to put about the notion that the conflict in Iraq wasn't really about WMD after all. With the absence of those stockpiles of nasty weapons, they have tried to pretend that the case for their aggression in the Middle East did not rest on Saddam's non-conventional capabilities. This is rubbish. I don't have amnesia. I remember the run-up to war well. The fact is that the war in Iraq was about ...
I once read a quote about Irish Protestants which I found particularly insightful. It went something like this: "They are not a majority in Northern Ireland, they are a miniscule minority of one million on a hostile planet." I can't remember who said it, but I thought it was a very sharp way of contrasting historic Protestant dominance in the North of Ireland with the fact that we are very much a people apart, unloved and misunderstood by the wider world. It occurred to me recently ...
Three years ago I was lucky enough to spend some time in the West Bank. One day our group visited Balata refugee camp just outside Nablus. We wandered around talking to the people there and witnessing the often wretched conditions in which they lived. At the end we gathered at a community centre to hear a few of the refugees speak of their experience of disposession. There was no overarching emotion that I remember all the refugees sharing. Some were despairing, others defiant, others angr...
The twentieth century was not a peaceful one for Ireland. In the course of those one hundred years, as well as joining in the general European bloodshed of the two world wars, Ireland also endured its own particular agonies: one uprising, one war of liberation, one civil war and finally one agonisingly long low intensity conflict. There were many violent days for Ireland in the years from 1900 - Bloody Sunday 1921, the attack on the Four Courts, the Luftwaffe's raids on Belfast, Bloody Su...
It's not often that I feel the urge to quote approvingly from a former Israeli Prime Minister, but the words attributed to Ehud Barak in conversation with Dick Cheney deserve an airing. The former Israeli premier apparently warned the US Vice President last year that Israel "had learned that there's no way to win an occupation" and that the only issue for the US "was choosing the size of your humiliation." The more I think about the American occupation of Iraq, the more I agree with Barak....
It's nice to know that Robert de Niro and I have at least one thing in common - when we walk down the street, we both get stared at. In this way, though unfortunately in no other, being a white person in Korea is like being a celebrity. Very quickly, you get used to the idea that every time you go outside, you will be stared at. Children will come up to you and say "hello", old people will peer at you, people will point and whisper. To be a white person in Korea is to be some exotic b...
On the eve of the Iraq war last year I was discussing the upcoming outbreak of hostilities with an English friend of mine. "Did you hear" he asked me "that only 25% of British people are in favour of going to war?" "That's pretty low", I replied. "Too right, that's the 25% who permanently want to go to war, they don't care who it's against." He was exaggerating but still he had a point. The British are undoubtedly a war-like people. A depressingly high number of them like to wallow in nost...
The external url is Avnery's thoughts on the mantra "we have no-one to negotiate with". A fine read. Also I found this Link . It's a collection of his recent articles. It includes the story of how he inadvertantly saved Moshe Dayan's life in 1973: "On the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Israeli newspapers are full of revelations about it. Among them is the disclosure that I saved the life of Moshe Dayan. That surprised me, as it would have surprised Dayan, if h...
There must be a limit to how much concrete one country can take before it starts to sink. The Korean peninsula isn't much of a size and the South makes up less than half of it. Yet fifty million people are crammed into this little country. Understandably, the density of population means that spacious villas are a little on the expensive side. The landscape of Korea is therefore dominated by blocks of flats (apartment blocks, if you must) stretching as far as the eye can see, each as ugly as t...
The European Union (EU) usually throws up controversies which are impenetrable to all but the most jargonistically proficient. Debates about subsidiarity, arguments over qualified majority voting, disputes over the minutest detail of agricultural policy; the Union's negotiations are often a matter of zero interest to the average European. So it's welcome that at least one aspect of the current debate on the European constitution is accesible to all. I'm referring here to the argument over...