Here’s the real-life flipside to Valley of the wolves, Iraq: a Turkish military court has released the phenomenally brave gay consciencious objector Mehmet Tarhan. An excellent piece by Bernard Bouwman in Dutch in the NRC describes how our man decided after 9/11 that this fight was not his in any sense and–traitor!–refused to serve when…
Livingstone doesn’t travel well, but I thought this was really good. Galloway is deranged and has no place in London, but even he doesn’t go as far as the charming anti-whateverist who told me last night that, in her carefully considered opinion, 9/11 would never have happened had it not been for the invasion of…
Well it seems that way to me: Now that Saddam-era censorship of movies has lessened, movies with sex scenes and nudity are getting particularly popular in Iraq. Men between the ages of 17-45 are the keenest cinema-goers, although many Iraqis are not happy about these canges. One Baghdad resident complained, “Families can not go to…
I had a re-run of the old Iraq drunken brawl the other night with a left-wing journalist, who said basically that democracy would never work there and (after a couple more beers) did not work anywhere else, particularly not in Britain, because it’s just not the kind of thing humans are good at. This peculiarly…
Spanish socialists were against the Iraq war because they don’t think it important that other people should be able to enjoy the same basic freedoms we do, soon. José García Domínguez on new domestic PSOE-speak: “Inequality is demanded by university lecturers in their struggle to avoid evaluation. Inequality is demanded by students who want grades…
From Popbitch: Abu al-Zarqawi is the mastermind behind this week’s gruesome hostage beheadings in Iraq. By filming himself doing the beheadings and then selling the resulting snuff movies as DVDs all over the Middle East, al-Zarqawi has turned himself into radical Islam’s hottest celebrity. What nobody has pointed out is how influenced by hip hop…
The news (via Normblog) that the Iranian justice system has strung up a mentally incapable and unrepresented 16-year old girl for getting to know a boy shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anyone who has heard the stories of those who escaped the revolution or the various officially sanctioned torture and murder…
