Let Them Eat Crap

You obviously will know about the horsey in the national diet if you are British, on the assumption that you have not been away on Mars for the past few weeks.  For the rest of the world, those who are blissfully ignorant of these shores, let me just say that the British public, or the poorer part of it, was being fed horse meat pretending to be beef. 

Shocking! Shocking!  Mind you, I’m not convinced that those who buy tripe (possibly?) like Findus’ or Tesco’s deep frozen lasagne really know or care what they are eating, so long as it has a meaty taste.  Then there are the burgers.  Lord alone knows what’s in those.  Actually, we do know – udders, guts, sexual parts, all rendered down; revolting enough, even when it is not horse. 

There was a readers’ poll in the Daily Telegraph recently arising from the horse meat scandal. The question was simple: do you think it acceptable to eat horse meat or not?  I voted no, because I would no more eat horse than I would eat cat or rat.  Rat, yes, this is something I will come on to in a bit or a bite.  The result of the poll - revealed after one had voted - was almost neck and neck, the antis winning by a mere nose.  So, whether or not the pros actually eat horse burgers they do not think there is anything wrong in principle here.

Oh, but there is.  First of all the issue is about honesty.  I know one virtually has to have a PhD now to make sense of the labelling on food products, but at the most basic level people have a right to know if they are eating beef or dog meat.  If they have a preference for dog that’s fine, just as long as they understand what it is they are buying.  I say dog, knowing full well that the Telegraph poll would have produced a far clearer result if that had been the product in question, though there are some places in the world where dog is considered tasty and nutritious. 

The real issue, the issue that is beyond the comprehension of the unimaginative, is that of adulteration; of the corruption of food, a corruption born of the drive to feed the masses with the cheapest product available.  “Let them eat cake”, Marie Antoinette is falsely alleged to have said.  But that is positively benign compared with the “Let them eat crap” of the modern food Tsars.

The adulteration of food was big issue in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in England and the United States.  The problem got worse with industrialisation, when cheap food was a necessary corollary of low wages.  In the States it got so bad that the New York Evening Post published a parody of a well-known nursery rhyme;

Mary had a little lamb,
And when she saw it sicken,
She shipped it off to Packingtown,
And now it's labeled chicken.

Upton Sinclair caught the mood in The Jungle, a novel published in 1906, which described the dreadful conditions in the meat packing industry.  But sick lamb pretending to be chicken was not enough for him; oh, no.  He went that step further, claiming that the workers who had the misfortune to fall into the rendering tanks were ground up and sold with the rest as Durham’s Pure Beef Lard! 

We have come a long way since then, with legislation and inspection aimed at reducing corruption (meat) and corruption (human).  No we have not.  If anything the situation is getting worse.  Corruption, in one form or another, is the name of a pretty dirty game; and when it comes to meat things can get an awful lot dirtier.  It’s not really that long since England was beset by the BSE crisis, when it was discovered that rendered meat products was being fed to cattle, with disastrous human results.  We learned from that that we clearly learned nothing.  For now horse is in the stakes and the steaks.

Keep your eye on that horse; keep your eye on the one named Profit, the odds on favourite; for that is what it’s all about.  We have enough pasture in England to produce all of the lamb and beef we need, with pork and chicken not far behind.  But we have become a link in a longer and longer international food chain.  The more extended it gets the greater the opportunity for criminal intervention.  Writing in the New Statesman (Meat Market, 22 February), Colin Tudge rightly asked “If crooks along the tortuous food chain can add horse to our meat products, why not dog, or rat, or cat?”  Yes, why not?  He raises some additional pertinent questions;

Given that the world trade in bushmeat is now vast, why not add bush fat of baboon?  What’s to keep out the meat that has been assigned for pet food?  Why not meat that has been condemned?  What guarantees can be given? 

None, it would appear, though we have had a Food Standards Agency in England for the past twelve years, a guarantor that clearly guarantees nothing.  Then there are the supermarket chains like Findus and Tesco, who have singularly failed to investigate their suppliers.  Then there are the politicians, who assure us that our meat is ‘safe’ when they know full well that, as a member of the European Union, we as a country have no proper control over the product that comes from the Continent.  Horse meat today; cat or rat tomorrow. 

I think there is a strong element of cynicism here.  As I say, the horse to watch is Profit.  The poor - and it is the poor - are the principle victims of our two for one deep frozen food culture.  In the wake of the horse fiasco, super market chiefs are saying that their products are likely to become more expensive, that the days of cheap food are over.  This suggests to me that they already knew that there was something fishy, make that horsey, about the stuff they were selling, that or they simply did not ask too many pertinent questions.  Get ‘beef’ from Mexico or Bulgaria rather than local suppliers – why not?  It’s cheap and goes very well in burgers and lasagne.

This is a story, as Tudge says, that might turn nastier yet.  The world food chain is out of control, or falling in to the control of unscrupulous profiteers, pirates of all sorts, the sort of people who only care about Profit, the one horse they do not want to see fall.  Inevitably the scandal will settle down as cosmetic changes are made, as politicians issue further assurances and standards are supposedly raised, as the public’s fickle attention turns to some other tale of woe.  Those who have become veggies, fearful of eating horse, will return to meat.  The pendulum will swing the other way in this best of all possible worlds.  At least until it is discovered that the benighted public have been eating something a lot less benign than horse.  In the meantime I would strongly urge you to avoid Durham’s Pure Beef Lard. 

I'm as Mad as Hell

Network is a movie made in 1976 that features Peter Finch as Howard Beale, a deranged TV news anchorman.  In a sublime moment of madness Beale speaks to the nation at large, clearly striking a cord.  This is the wonderful “I’m as Mad as Hell”, rant;

We know things are bad — worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'

Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot — I don't want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. [shouting] You've got to say: 'I'm a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!'

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!...You've got to say, I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE! Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

Well, then, I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.  I was as mad as hell on Valentine’s Day, taking part in a One Billion Rising event in London’s Parliament Square.  One Billion Rising, if you’ve not heard of it - and lots of people have not - was a world-wide day of action intended to draw attention to the problem of sexual violence towards women and children across the globe.  The Billion in the title is intended to emphasise that one in three women will be raped or beaten in their lifetime, that’s approximately a billion human beings.

My first article of 2013 drew attention to the appalling rape case in India, where the victim was butchered as well as assaulted.  Sexual violence is an issue I feel strongly about, an issue that is simply not taken seriously enough by so many politicians, lawyers and judges, evidenced by the asinine comments of an applicant for a senior legal position in Indonesia, something else I drew attention to (Damming Daming, 27 January)

One Billion Rising, marked in 160 countries, was inspired by Eve Ensler, the American playwright responsible for The Vagina Monologues.  I should say that the day had no particular political overtones, and it was not specifically for women; for sexual violence concerns us all, men and women alike.  The inspiration for the day was Ensler’s outrage over the remark last year by Todd Aitkin, a politician of a particularly dense cast of mind (mind, what mind?) to the effect that some forms of rape could be defined as ‘legitimate.’ 

As I say, I was at the London gathering.  So, too, I’m delighted to say, was Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative MP for Harwich and North Essex, showing that campaigns of this kind are not simply the preserve of the political left.  He later explained his position in a blog on the Huffington Post;

Why did I go? Violence against women affects men. These women are our mothers, sisters, partners, daughters. No man would dismiss this campaign whose life has been touched by violence against someone he loves. But I went because men have to be part of this campaign. We cannot leave women to try fix this problem on their own. Men commit most of the violence. Men still run so many of the institutions - the police, the judges, the courts system - which historically were poor at addressing the causes of violence against women - or dealing humanely with the victims.

The central event of the Parliament Square gathering was the release of 109 balloons, a poignant occasion, each balloon marking the life of a woman lost to male violence in Britain last year alone.  That same day there was a debate in Parliament on the need for better sex and relationship education, something I personally feel passionate about.  The ‘zero tolerance approach to violence and abuse in relationships’ was approved without a vote. Unfortunately the government us still refusing to commit to definite measures here.  In my own way, from my own corner, I will keep pressing. I would rather speak than lapse into silence.

We simply can’t be silent.  This is an issue that won’t leave us alone.  We cannot or should not retreat into quietism, hoping for peace as the world gets tighter and tighter, drawing ever closer to our own thresholds.  We are all human beings and our life has value.  Time to stand and shout – I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.  

Hell Hath no Fury like Jemima Scorned

“He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathers not with me scatters abroad”, so says the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.  It’s a sentiment that finds fulsome echo in the Gospel according to Saint Julian.  You know who I’m talking about, surely you do?  It’s our very own Saint Julian Assange of Wiki; our own – worse luck – because he’s still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. 

Apparently Jemima Khan, a former acolyte, recently went to Utah’s Sundance Film Festival, the showcase for independent film makers.  She was there to see the launch of We Steal Secrets, a documentary about WikiLeaks.  Much to her chagrin, Saint Julian of Wiki denounced it without having seen it (Perhaps it came to him in a vision?).  He didn’t like the title, you see, tweeting that it was “unethical and biased...in the context of pending criminal trials.  It is the prosecution’s claim and it is false.”

Jemima was just a bit miffed.  Stealing Secrets is her baby; she executive produced it into life.  The title, as she pointed out to the Holy One, is actually an observation by Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, that it was the US government that was in the business of stealing secrets from other countries.  To this He replied “If it’s a fair film, it will be pro-Julian Assange.”  Yes, yes; always beware those whose egos have grown to third person grandeur!

Hell hath no fury like a Jemina scorned.  An executive editor of the New Statesman, she took to its pages last week in a major exercise in apostasy and iconoclasm.  Oh, how are the mighty fallen in the midst of leaking!  From a prophet of new age honesty, Julian has degenerated into an Australian version of L Ron Hubbard, he of scientology fame, who spread the gospel of abject devotion...or else. 

How the scales have fallen from the Khan eyes.  She once stood bail for Assange after he was arrested on allegations of sexual assault in 2010.  It was all a fabrication, she was convinced, all a conspiracy, a plot by the Pharisees and the Sadducees to bring down the new Christ.  Now she’s not so sure; now the Swedish women who raised accusations of sexual assault against Assange actually may be worth a hearing.  Most important of all, she concludes, there is no evidence that extradition to Sweden would automatically be followed by on onward extradition to the United States, a narrative that does not fit the Assange script at all. 

I was never a disciple, so I was wise before the event.  I always saw this man as a self-publicising, egotistical fraud, who’s only objective was the greater glory of Julian.  It amused me to see all those leftist guardians of moral rectitude and women’s rights, all the Jemima Khans of this world, lining themselves up behind their prophet.  Oh, no; he could not possibly be guilty of sex crime; the women in question were obviously lying, rape fantasies, no doubt.  Or at the most Julian’s forced and unwelcome attentions were, in the words of George Galloway, no more than “bad sexual etiquette.” 

Last summer the Saint, fleeing those who would crucify him, or send him to Sweden, took sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy.  At the time I asked, why Ecuador?  I suppose the reason might be that this banana republic – are there bananas? – is a bastion of truth, justice, human rights and panama hats. Or it might be that Rafael Correa, its leftist president, is almost as childish a narcissist as Assange himself, a little man who wants to cut a figure on a bigger stage.  

About this time Jemima asked Julian to respond to the view of the New Statesman’s legal correspondent that he was no more in danger of extradition to the US from Sweden than he was in England.  Answer came there none.  That’s not quite true; answer, of a sort, came from one Mark Stephens, speaking as Assange’s lawyer, saying that Sweden was “one of those lickspittle states which used its resources and its facilities for rendition flights" - that is, sending suspected terrorists to bad places where they got worse treatment.  Actually, says Jemima, the lickspittle state stopped rendition flights in 2006, a fact inconveniently pointed out by WikiLeaks itself.

My pity always went to the poor women who had the temerity to accuse Saint Julian of rape.  At once his wretched army of left-wing disciples got to work, naming and defaming them on the internet.  If they hadn’t been raped they were now threatened with rape.  Pictures of them were also posted with bull’s-eyes through their faces. 

As I say, Jemima now thinks there may be a case to answer.  I always thought that there was a case to answer. Assange, as I wrote last year, is fleeing from Swedish justice, O. J. Simpson style, which I take to be a measure of his innocence. Quite right, too. Sweden is notorious for its lack of democratic accountability, its biased system of law and its atrocious abuse of human rights. Then there is Correa’s Ecuador, the victim of another campaign of spite and misinformation. It’s simply not true that the country has no culture of human rights and freedom, not true that dissidents are jailed on trumped up charges, not true that journalists are arrested and TV stations shut down for daring to criticise El Presidente. Assange really would be at home there.

Jemima doesn’t regret, she writes, putting up bail for Assange.  Oh, yes, she does!  “WikiLeaks – whose mission statement was 'to produce ... a more just society ... based upon truth' – has been guilty of the same obfuscation and misinformation as those it sought to expose, while its supporters are expected to follow, unquestioningly, in blinkered, cultish devotion".  That sounds like regret to me. 

Hmm, I might be charitable enough to say that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents and so on and so forth, but I won’t!  Assange was never more than an L Ron Hubbard manqué and she was a simple-minded devotee.  I’m minded to quote Kaiser Bill, of all people.  He, in his wisdom, said that stupidity was also a gift of God, but one musn’t misuse it.  Jemima, I fear, is overdrawn at this particular bank.  

Oh, the scorpion simply can’t resist one final sting.  Jemima, the poor little rich girl, writes for the New Statesman, that ancient castle of left-wing rectitude.  This is a publication graced in the past by such lions of English letters as Cyril Connolly, H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestly and George Orwell.  Now, aside from Ms Puddle-Duck, it's a showcase for the likes of John Pilger, Will Self, Mehdi Hasan and, best of all, somebody called Laurie Penny. 

The latter is especially noteworthy.  If ever there is a museum of bad prose and political idiocy Penny Red – her stamp on the world - will be a cherished exhibit; I feel sure she will. Formerly shortlisted for the Orwell prize (poor George!), she was apparently included on a Tatler list last year of the top 100 people ‘who matter.’  My; is Penny what matters? It seems to me that she would be best placed on a list of fashion victims and ugly women.  Alas, this truly is the age of Asses, Pennies and tiresome mediocrity.  

Damming Daming

What, no job?

I began this year by writing about the rape, mutilation and murder of a young woman in Delhi. Last year I wrote about Amina Filali, a sixteen-year-old Moroccan girl who was forced to marry her rapist as a way of preserving her family’s ‘honour.’ Subject to continuing abuse, she killed herself in a particularly horrible way – she swallowed rat poison.

Rape is a dreadful crime, even when it isn’t accompanied by additional acts of brutalisation and violence. It is an act based not on desire but on hatred, on the worst forms of human depravity. Women everywhere deserve the protection of the law. Potential rapists need to understand that, if caught and convicted, they face the severest of penalties. Instead the law, as in Morocco, simply adds to the crime, often by stupid insensitivity on the part of judges and senior legal officials.

The whole world was shocked by the savagery of the Delhi attack, which saw the victim disembowelled. One would have thought that a new sobriety would have descended, at least for a time. Alas, the whole world did not include Indonesia, or at least it did not include Judge Muhammad Daming Sanusi.

Daming, a judge for twenty-four years, serves as head of the South Sumatra High Court. Earlier this month he was in Jakarta, the capital, being interviewed by the House Commission for a possible place on the country’s Supreme Court. This is clearly a serious position for serious people, and who could possibly be more serious than a senior lawyer? After all, they are the guardians and upholders of the law, the protectors of the innocent. Who could possibly be more serious than Daming? Well, the answer has to be, just about anybody.

During the course of the interview he was asked whether the death penalty in rape cases was a necessary change to the law, which at present carries a maximum sentence of twelve years imprisonment. "Both the victims and the rapist", he responded, "might have enjoyed their intercourse together, so we should think twice before handing down the death sentence." Apparently, after a moment’s silence, the panel laughed. It was all a great joke, a joke that just happened to have been made not long after an eleven-year-old girl died after being gang raped in broad daylight in the streets of Jakarta.

Unfortunately the ordinary people of the land, those without sound legal sense, or a sense of humour, failed to see the joke. Thousands took to Facebook and Twitter. The condemnation of Daming was damming. Those who previously laughed discovered, on reflection, that it wasn’t so funny after all. Politicians from the country’s main parties said that they would not support his candidature. He himself, in a contrite and tearful public statement, said that his remark was merely intended to ‘ease the tension’.

"I have three adolescent daughters", he said, ‘and one of them told me that she is very embarrassed and that she felt as if she did not know me at all." He knows her, though; he knows that she might enjoy being forced to have sex. Oh, but wait a minute; it’s never one’s own that are the subject of such observations; it’s the children of others, those who do not matter.

Commenting on his words, the Indonesian Child Protection Agency said;

Has Daming felt what it’s like to be a rape victim or a member of the victim’s family? It’s extremely inappropriate for a Supreme Court judge hopeful to joke about the suffering of people and their feelings.

The sad thing is that this is not the first time that a senior public official has been responsible for such crass insensitivity. Rape is a crime, you see, where the victim is at fault. Last year Fauzi Bowo, the governor of Jakarta, advised women against wearing ‘provocative clothes’ while using public transport just to avoid being raped. This came in the wake of a series of sexual attacks on public minivans, including that of a university student who was subsequently murdered.

Apologies, tears and family disapproval notwithstanding, it’s all too late for Daming. On Wednesday the House Commission appointed eight new justices. He received not a single vote. But the matter does not stop there. On Friday the Judicial Commission, Indonesia’s highest legal authority, recommended that he be dismissed from his existing post. Imam Ashori Saleh, the Commission’s deputy chairman, said that Daming should be removed because his rape remarks breached the judicial code of ethics. The Supreme Court now has fourteen days to decide his fate.

The fact of the matter is that he has become a political embarrassment. Personally speaking, I have little doubt that if this business had been confined to Indonesia’s old boy network of lawyers and politicians the whole thing would have passed without repercussion. It just a little levity, after all, no need to let some casual words detain us unnecessarily - Judge away, Judge Daming. Alas, the levity made an ass of the law and a laughing stock of the victims of crime. Sometimes, just sometimes, ordinary people can make a difference, if their voice is joined in common purpose.

Poor Mexico

Are you American? Then you must be concerned about war. Oh, not some distant conflict, not Afghanistan. No, the war you must be concerned about – surely you must? – is the war on your southern border. Yes, it’s the war in Mexico, that unacknowledged Vietnam.

The war on terror (what a disaster that has been) is bad enough; the war on drugs has been even worse. It’s the sheer savagery of the Mexican conflict that disgusts me, the mutilations and the murderous sadism. Do you know how many people have died in the drugs war? The official estimate to date is 50,000 but those who know about this sort of thing believe that the true total is twice as many. The victims are not soldiers by and large. As Mary Wakefield writing in the Spectator said, they are young boys, babies, mothers and husbands. Severed heads and decapitated bodies are a regular sight on the streets. That's the reality of modern Mexico

Felipe Calderon, Mexico’s drug-busting former president, was a man with a mission. He came to office with a single aim in mind, a crusade, if you like. He would crack down on the big drug barons in order, he said, ‘to restore moral order.’ But the drug cartels are a bit like the Lernaean Hydra of Greek mythology: cut off one head and two more appear. Kingpins were killed, yes, but their organisations simply fragmented. More and more gangs has meant more and more crime. Murder, extortion, rape and kidnapping are now pretty much part of the daily scene.

The problem, as I’ve written before, isn’t really an internal one. The anti-drugs crusade was predetermined failure simply because there are factors beyond the control of the Mexican authorities. The biggest factor of all is the insatiable demand for the produce of the cartels north of the Rio Grande. The drug war in Mexico, in other words, is fuelled by American consumers.

So much money has been wasted and so many lives have been lost in attempting, Canute-style, to hold back an inexorable tide. The American government, aware of the problem, attempted to help Mexico build a dyke. Billions was spent on supporting Calderon’s crazy crusade. American money was spent, for example, on Los Zetas.

Who are they, you may wonder? They are Mexico’s elite Special Forces squad, trained by American and Israeli specialists in such talents as intimidation, ambushing and marksmanship, all as part of the struggle against the drug lords. There is only one problem. Some years ago the organisation set up in business for itself. In what, exactly? Why, in drugs. Nobody does it better than Los Zetas, and nobody butchers children with such professionalism and aplomb. The more your tax dollars are spent on training Special Forces, the more Los Zetas benefit from fresh recruits.

There is an added irony here. Several States of the Union, Colorado and Washington leading the way, are anxious to legalise cannabis. There is Mexico, vainly struggling to contain a problem while its northern neighbour seems to be giving a green light to the cartels, over 40% of whose business is selling cannabis to gringos. When one thinks things can’t get any crazier, why, they do.

Organised crime is now the single most serious problem facing Mexico. Americans know, or should know, all about organised crime and Prohibition. Just consider your own history, consider what a leg up the gangsters were given in that brief decade last century when alcohol was banned.

Mexico has had Prohibition for decade after decade, with the results I have touched on above. The monster has grown to unimaginable proportions. Only legalisation will cut it down to size. But who has the courage to take that bold step? Alas, poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.

Sister, my Sister

I feel ashamed.  Late last month I was loosely aware that some horrible crime had been committed against a woman in Delhi, the capital of India.  But I looked no closer.  I was too full of the joys of life.  I was getting ready to host a party in London; I was looking forward to a family Christmas in the country; I was preparing for my annual skiing holiday.  What was happening in my own life was more important than what had happened to some unknown female in a place as far away as Delhi.

I’m now back to reality, my eyes wide open.  I now know exactly what happened to this twenty-three year old physiotherapy intern, so far unnamed.  If you are at all sensitive to these matters it might be best if you read no further.  She was gang raped, horrible enough in itself, but the details of what was inflicted on her, the violence and the mutilation, are almost beyond any horror that I have the power to conceive.  What happened had nothing to do with sex and desire.  It was an act of atavistic and sadistic hatred.  It was an act that goes deep into India’s heart of darkness.

It was the evening of 16 December.  The woman, let me just call her Sister, was on her way home with a male friend, an engineer.  They had been to the cinema together to see The Life of Pi, something countless numbers of couples were doing that day across the Earth.  They hailed a chartered bus, a private vehicle used to ferry schoolchildren by day.  That night it was being taken on a joyride.  Six men were on board, all members of staff. 

Sister and her friend got on, after being told by one of the alleged perpetrators, a seventeen-year-old youth, that the bus was going in their direction.  No sooner was it underway than the taunts and suggestions began.  The bus had large tinted windows, so nobody from outside could see what was going on. 

Sister’s male friend, trying to protect her, was beaten unconscious with an iron bar.  She was dragged to the back of the bus, beaten with the same bar.  Then the rape began, five men taking turns as the sixth drove the bus around the city streets.  The sexual assault was violent enough.  Making it even worse was the torture. 

Later medical reports show that Sister suffered serious injuries to her abdomen, her intestines and her genitals.  Doctors also report that a rusted iron implement had been thrust into her.  Part of her intestines was pulled out.  She was then almost completely disembowelled.  According to police reports, the youngest of her attackers, the seventeen-year-old, pulled out her intestines with his bare hands.  Later in hospital she was found to have only 5% of her bowels left inside her body.

The couple were then dumped into the streets from the moving bus.  The perpetrators allegedly tried to run Sister over, but she was pulled aside by her male companion.  Both were later found bleeding on the sidewalk and taken to hospital, where doctors struggled to save Sister’s life.  With her condition deteriorating, the decision was taken to move her to a specialist hospital in Singapore. 

It has to be said that the motives here were political and not medical.  She was going to die and the government, already embarrassed, did not want her to die in India.  She did die.  She died on 29 December, when I was skiing on the slopes of French Savoy.

As the details of the horror became public the mood in India turned toxic.  There were widespread public protests in a country where rape and violence against women is commonplace.  Not only that but the law is notoriously slow in dealing with accusations of sexual assault.  There was only one conviction from the 635 cases of rape reported in Delhi between January and November of last year.

Most of India’s rape victims are poor and generally of a lower cast.  Sister was different.  She was a child of India’s emerging middle class.  Disgust at the callousness of the attackers turned to disgust against the government.  Across the country Indians, women and men, protested at the incompetence of the political classes.  As I celebrated the arrival of 2013 half a world away a more sombre mood settled.  Writing in the New Statesman, Soumya Bhattacharya said “We were shamed and chastened, united in grief, and the notion of revelry was not something that figured in most people’s minds.”

Deeply unsettled, the Indian government has promised to introduce harsher laws against rape, including thirty year jail terms, chemical castration and the setting up of fast track courts.  In the meantime shock over the incident led to anti-rape protests spilling across India’s borders to the rest of the Subcontinent.  There were demonstrations in Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.  Even Ban ki-moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations, was moved to make a statement, saying that “Violence against women must never be accepted, never excused, never tolerated. Every girl and woman has the right to be respected, valued and protected.”

Sister was cremated on 30 December in accordance with Hindu custom.  Her fate may, I stress may change attitudes towards women of all castes and classes in India. I certainly hope so.

Sister was my sister.  She is your sister, your mother, your daughter, your cousin, your aunt; she is Everywoman. 

We Cannot Legislate against Lunacy

This is the most difficult article I’ve ever written.  In the face of the appalling tragedy in Connecticut it’s almost impossible to find the right words.  I love words but sometimes they are so inadequate.  Here it might be said that respectful silence is the only response, silence and sorrow in silence. 

But others are speaking and some are shouting, bawling almost.  I raise my voice in a perfect storm, knowing that I’m unlikely to be heard, or if heard I am likely to be misunderstood.  Just about every report I’ve read about the mass shootings last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the town of Newton has raised the issue of gun control, the equation being that the Second Amendment right of US citizen to bear arms equals periodic massacres.  Few seem to pause and think.  The Second Amendment has been in place for over two hundred years but rampaging madmen are a feature of the modern age.  Why, why and why again? 

I’m going to push these whys but first I should declare an interest.  The thing is I enjoy shooting, which opens be to an additional accusation - that of selfishness. I have licences for both a .22 rifle and a four-ten shotgun. I enjoy target practice and I enjoy rough shooting. I really do have to stress that all of the people I have met through this sport are sensible, intelligent and well-balanced. I first learned to shoot staying with family friends near Moultrie in Georgia.  I have little doubt that most Americans who are in legal possession of firearms are also sensible, intelligent and well-balanced.

I do have firearms but unlike Americans I have no constitutional right to bear arms.  It wasn’t always the case.  The 1689 English Bill of Rights – upon which the American version was later based – enshrined the right of people to bear arms for defence.  And so it remained, right into the twentieth century.  In his A Brief History of Crime Peter Hitchens points out that when in 1909 the police in the Tottenham district of London came under fire from a gang of foreign anarchists they asked the public for assistance. Not only did they borrow guns from the local citizens but they also appealed to members of the public to help shoot back.

Over the course of the last century gun control in Britain got tighter and tighter, largely because governments started to fear the people, chiefly for political reasons.  But tight gun control did nothing to stop the Dunblane School Massacre in 1996.  Gun control has done nothing to stop more and more firearms getting in to the hands of criminals.  The truth is the tighter the gun laws have become the more prevalent gun crime has become.  It might be said that while we have disarmed honest citizens we have armed dishonest gangsters. 

Looking to Europe there is Norway, which has particularly strong firearms control.  That did not stop Anders Behring Breivik going on a rampage.  Now consider another example altogether; consider Switzerland.  This is a country whose proportion of gun ownership per capita is among the highest in the world, not far behind the United States.  This is a country where almost every adult male is required by law to bear arms.  Yet it’s also a country with a particularly low murder rate.  Such gun crime as there is mostly involves illegally held arms.

Now I turn my eyes back over the Atlantic.  So far as the clamour for gun control is concerned it would be as well to consider the words of Sammy Gravano, one-time mobster.  In a 1999 interview with Vanity Fair he said – “Gun control?  It’s the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters.  I want you to have nothing.  If I’m a bad guy, I’m always going to have a gun.”  The simple truth is that many types of crimes, as Hitchens pointed out in his book, fall sharply in those districts where normal and law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry concealed weapons. 

It might interest you to know that in England approximately half of all burglaries occur while people are at home.  In America this is as low as one in eight.  In those States which openly licence citizens to use deadly force against intruders burglary is virtually unknown.

What happened in Newton was not normal; it was an obscenity, just as Dunblane was an obscenity.  Adam Lanza – I can barely bring myself to write his name - , a maladjusted twenty-year old, went on a ghastly killing spree.  Why, what was his motive?  Will we ever know with exactness?  Possibly not, but possibly it was no more than a desire for notoriety and fame, that shallow contemporary obsession, the shallow obsession of losers and mediocrities everywhere.

But there is more.  As I noted above, this kind of mass shooting followed by suicide is a feature of our age.  Lanza was not normal; Lanza, as I understand from the Washington Post, had some mental or developmental disorder.  The New York Times reports that it was Asperger’s Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism. Accordingly it seems he was on strong medications. 

Here I can only agree once again with Peter Hitchens.  Writing recently on his Daily Mail blog, he says that it would make sense for the press to explore this route rather than raise a futile wail in favour of gun control.  Is it possible, one has to ask, that there is a correlation between what happened at Newton and the increasing use of modern medications for mental illness?  We badly need answers here.  Instead we are likely to get the usual clichés. 

A world away from Newton there was another murderous rampage last week, though it has attracted far less media attention.  In central China a knife-wielding man stabbed twenty-two children outside a primary (grade) school.  It was less terrible than Sandy Hook because none were killed, though several were taken to hospital, some with severed fingers and ears.  According to police the perpetrator, since detained, is ‘mentally-ill.’  Tight control on firearms means that gun crime is virtually unknown in China.  Instead knives, and sometimes explosives, are used in mass attacks.  The sad truth is we cannot legislate against lunacy.  

Free to Under Threes: Amsterdam by Night

If Paris is beige Amsterdam is red, brick red to be exact.  It’s a compact city, really quite charming in many ways, a city of museums and canals, the city of Van Gogh and Rembrandt. 

I was there a couple of years ago, walking everywhere because it’s possible to walk everywhere, all the attractions being within a reasonably close distance of one another.  It was pleasant to give way to the city’s easy charm, at least by day, because it is charming by day.  The night is different; the night is darker; the night is a deeper shade of red. 

We stayed in the Grand, once a medieval convent and then the city hall and now a hotel.  It’s a step or two from Dam Square, right in the centre of the city.  It’s also a step or two from the Red Light district, another tone altogether.  

Is there anything quite as sad as desire?  Is there anything as sad as women for rent and the men who are drawn to them?  I hate clichés.  I really do not want to say that the prostitutes appear in a state of undress like slabs of meat in a butcher’s window, but that’s exactly how they seemed to me.  It was one of the most depressing things I have ever seen. 

Amsterdam's legalised window brothels have been in existence for over ten years now.  It’s such a part of the city scene that groups of tourists - not potential clients - are taken on walking tours to see the sights.  Thomas Cook, the company originally founded to promote ‘ethical and educational’ tourism, has since 2005 led excursion through the area, delightful jaunts advertised as “free to children under three.”

Personally I found walking through the area really quite threatening in the dark.  I’m glad I was not alone.  It’s difficult to pinpoint but I just felt a general air of menace, not helped by the groups of men of Eastern European and Middle Eastern appearance milling around by the canal bridges.

It was all meant to be different; it was meant to divorce prostitution from pimps.  It hasn’t.  The whole thing has been a failure.  Rather than discouraging criminality it has allowed it to flourish under an uncomprehending official eye.  Now the councillors of De Wallen, the district where most of the brothels are located, worried about the community’s reputation, have decided on a cleanup. 

The problem is the loverboys, not the sad cases who come for sad sex, but the traffickers, mostly of Asian descent, who lure women into prostitution and then keep them there, locked in emotionally and financially if not physically.  According to an article I read in the October issue of the political journal Standpoint (Window brothels get the red light), their victims are put to work in windows so that they can be kept under constant watch, surveyed by tourists, ogled by punters, monitored by pimps. 

Migration from outside Europe has made the problem worse.  A large number of these women have been trafficked illegally to begin with.  Once caught in the game they have no choice but to play the game. Reporting abuse to the authorities might easily result in eventual deportation. 

I use the word ‘pimp’ but officially there are no ‘pimps.’  After all, the whole sordid business is just a business.  Instead of pimps there are ‘managers’ or ‘facilitators.’  I expect it was the ‘managers’ and ‘facilitators’ I saw in friendly groups by night, one of whom attempted to accost me.  As I say, I’m glad I was not alone. 

“People are starting to hear that our system has a lot of crime and violence against the working girls linked to it”, said one of the beat policemen in the area, “The trafficking problem and the Turkish loverboys, they are all coming to the surface now.  Really we have allowed it by being too adventurous with allowing prostitution to be such an attraction in our city.” 

Here is a case where Liberality has had exactly the same effect as Prohibition: in tackling one set of problems it has engendered others, worse in ever degree.  Human trafficking, drug trafficking and money laundering are all in place.  I bet that’s something not touched upon on the delightful meat tours, free to under threes.

The boy has put his finger in the dyke.  To prevent a continuing flood of filth The Prostitution Framework Act will come into force in the New Year.  This includes a requirement that all of the working girls register with the authorities.  It also raises the minimum age for prostitution from eighteen to twenty-one.  Will it work?  It seems doubtful.  It seems more likely that the underage girls and the illegal immigrants will sink ever deeper into the dark of the Amsterdam night, shepherded away by the loverboys to even sadder levels of degradation.  

The Lights of a Perverted Faith

Do you have a definition of abject cowardice?  I do, one that I recently acquired.  A coward is a man who walks on to a school bus, full of children, and shoots a fourteen-year-old girl twice at close range, in the leg and more critically in the head.  The girl in question was guilty of a dire crime: she believes that education is a fundamental right for all.  This was enough to mark her as a target for assassination by the Pakistani Taliban. 

I was a bit out of the loop so far as news was concerned when I was in Tunisia.  But the one item that gripped my attention in early October was a report I saw on the BBC World Service concerning the attempted murder of Malala Yousafazi by a Taliban hitman, principally because she was an active campaigner for schooling for girls which, by their perverted lights, was ‘un-Islamic.’ 

Malala – her name means ‘grief stricken’ – has been active in her cause since the age of eleven.  It was then she began to write a blog for BBC Urdu, detailing what life was like after the Taliban took control of her native Swat Valley in Pakistan.  Her principal fear was over the future of her education – “I was afraid of going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from schools.” 

The Taliban, it has to be said, was allowed to consolidate its position in Swat in an act of retreat and appeasement by the Pakistani government, which hoped thereby to stop the spread of the cancer.  For several months, before they were finally ousted by the army in the summer of 2009, these religious fanatics established their own republic of Islamic virtue, the stuff of nightmares by any reasonable standard.  Men were forced to grow beards and women to wear burqas.  Those who did not comply faced lashing or beheading.  The brutish regime also closed schools, the majority of them for girls. 

After the Taliban’s removal Malala appeared on national television to talk about girls’ education.  Her courage in speaking against the Taliban was enough for the Pakistani government to select her as a fitting recipient of the country’s first National Peace Award for Youth.  But it also singled her out in another way.  At the beginning of this year she was placed on a Taliban hit list. 

That would terrify anyone, particularly a teenager; it would certainly have terrified me.  But Malala would not be silenced by fear. “Sometimes I imagine I’m going along and the Taliban stop me”, she said on television, “I take my sandal and hit them in the face and say, ‘What you are doing is wrong.  Education is our right, don’t take it away from us.’  There is this quality in me – I’m ready for all situations.  So even if (God let this not happen) they kill me, I’ll first say to them, ‘What you are doing is wrong.’”

Her shooting caused widespread outrage, in Pakistan and across much of the world.  How could it not?  How could it not given the callousness of the action, given her youth and given the cause for which she was prepared to risk her life?  Even countries with the most dubious record on human rights recognise the importance of universal education.  I’m almost tempted to say that girls’ schooling is no more of a ‘right’ than breathing; it’s a reflex. 

It’s impossible to breath under the Taliban.  These disciples of Iblis have blown up Sufi shrines, worshipers at mosques, and men and women in markets.  Bombs have been planted to ensure maximum loss of life.  Then there is murder incorporated, the assassination of specific individuals.  Public officials and journalists have been targeted but so, too, have religious scholars belonging to Muslim sects the movement has condemned as heretical. 

Malala was singled out because her campaign for educational rights was an ‘obscenity’, so said Ehsanullah Ehsan, a Taliban spokesman.  Greater poverty of spirit, greater ignorance, I find almost impossible to imagine.  These are people who kill in the name of God knowing nothing of God.  Is there any greater heresy, I have to ask?  There is obscenity alright, the obscenity of the Ehsanullah Ehsan and his debased kind. 

Of all the dark forces in the world the Taliban is among the darkest, deep in evil and ignorance.  To paraphrase some words of Sir Winston Churchill’s, if the movement succeeds all that we have known and cared for will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted faith.

Don't Cry For Me Ecuador

But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.'
'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,” said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.'

We all went a bit mad here last week. Suffering from post-Olympics depression, we had to have a new show, and we did. It’s called Julian of Leaks, or Don’t Cry for Me Ecuador. It features in a starring role Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, a man who makes Narcissus look like a rather retiring and positively self-effacing sort of chap.

Anyway, there he was, Mister WikiLeaks, addressing a rag-tag army, Evita-style, from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London’s Knightsbridge district, where he has been holed up for the past two month, poor man. Well, anyone forced to throw themselves on Ecuadorian hospitality surely deserves to be pitied.

He was ‘forced’ to take ‘political asylum’ there because of a ‘witch hunt’ being carried out against him; because he fears that some massive international conspiracy is at work, set to spirit him away to the United States.

There is only one thing wrong with this scenario: Washington has not asked for his extradition. Sweden has, something he neglected to mention to the swooning multitudes across the street. He is wanted not because he is “making a stand for justice”, as he put it, but to answer charges of rape and sexual assault. He spent a good bit of the past two years fighting extradition in the British courts. It was only when his case failed that he jumped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Why Ecuador? I really don’t know. I suppose the reason might be that this banana republic – are there bananas? – is a bastion of truth, justice, human rights and panama hats. Or it might be that Rafael Correa, its leftist president, is almost as childish a narcissist as Assange himself, a little man who wants to cut a figure on a bigger stage, preaching from the balcony of his ridiculous little fiefdom.

I have a question for you. When is rape not rape? Representative Todd Akin knows. He knows all about legitimate and illegitimate rape. Yes, shocking, shocking for all shades of progressive opinion, for whom rape is rape is rape, for whom no means no means no. Unless, of course, the alleged rapist happens to be a hero of the nursery left, as Rod Liddle wrote in a Spectator blog; unless the alleged rapist happens to be Saint Julian of Leaks.

George Galloway is Britain’s leading left-wing ayatollah, a political crazy man by most normal standards. As the leader of Respect, a party without respect, he leapt to the defence of the Divine Julian. It wasn’t rape at all, he said. He simply had sex with a woman while she was asleep, not bothering to bother with a condom. It was merely a case of “bad sexual etiquette.” In other words, there is no need to ask before an insertion. Respect indeed. All I can say is that any woman who might care to spend the night as a guest in Chez Galloway best keep awake, just to avoid the risk of ‘bad sexual etiquette.’

Galloway has since tweeted that “it’s about WikiLeaks, stupid.” Stupid I may be, but so far as I can see it’s nothing of the kind. It’s about a man full of self-serving and abstract notions of truth and justice while believing himself to be above all such petty considerations as law and due legal process.

Actually, it seems obvious that Assange, for all his protestations, is more afraid of Swedish than American retribution. Oh, but you see, it’s easy to beguile the stupid crowd with talk of injustice and witch hunts, with nebulous conspiracies of all sorts, though there are perfectly sound reasons why he should also face charges in the United States, theft being high among them.

America is an easy target. It would not do at all to talk of the “dark forces” at work in Sweden, the “Saudi Arabia of feminism”, a “nest of revolutionary feminism”, pronouncements the leaky one has made in the past. Sweden, you see, is the sort of place that clearly has rather old fashioned notions of what constitutes good sexual etiquette.

Assange is fleeing from Swedish justice. Quite right, too. Sweden is notorious for its lack of democratic accountability, its biased system of law and its atrocious abuse of human rights. Then there is Correa’s Ecuador, the victim of another campaign of spite and misinformation. It’s simply not true that the country has no culture of human rights and freedom, not true that dissidents are jailed on trumped up charges, not true that journalists are arrested and TV stations shut down for daring to criticise El Presidente. Assange really would be at home there.

The show goes on, unfortunately, one of the more deadening West End productions. Personally I rather hope that the police spirit the star away while he is still asleep, sending him on his way to Sweden. After all, it’s not really extradition if he’s sleeping, merely a case of bad political etiquette.

Death on a High

I was asked recently if I thought drugs should be banned.  The reference, in fact, was to substances that are already banned.  For me the answer is quite straightforward: whatever the moral issues are the banning of substances like heroin and cocaine has had disastrous consequences, even more disastrous than America’s flirtation with the prohibition of alcohol.

I had the example of Mexico in mind, a place where the so-called war on drugs has turned into a war, more barbarous and more savage than many more conventional conflicts.  The statistics are stunning.  To date more than 50,000 people have died in a mere six year period, ever since Felipe Calderon ascended to the presidency in December, 2006, with a promise to stamp out a perceived evil.  He made it worse.  At least 12000 children have lost one or both parents.  Several hundred thousand people have been forced to flee their homes, refugees in their own country, victims of a war in the middle of peace.

It’s not just the killing that’s shocking; it’s the ghastly nature of so many of the deaths.  Beheadings with chainsaws are now commonplace.  This is not just a war between the state and organised crime; it’s also a war within a war, with rival cartels involved in murderous vendettas against each other.  A lot of Americans seem unconscious of the sheer enormity of the problem south of the Rio Grande, a greater threat to national security and well-being than anything that might be happening in distant Afghanistan.

North America is the key, a huge and lucrative market that has acted as a spur to the drugs industry in Central and South America.  There is an obvious and terrible contradiction here.  There would seem to be no connection at all between the so-called flower children and peaceniks of the 1960s and 1970s, high on artificial highs, and grisly mass decapitations in Mexico, but the second is the corollary of the first.  Peace and love equals death and blood; it really is as simple as that.

For the outset the American government’s approach was wholly one-sided.  So far as successive administrations were concerned it was all a supply-side problem.  Deal with the producers, the reasoning went, then you deal with the problems as a whole.  So, in 1971, President Richard Nixon managed to persuade the Turkish government to clamp down on illegal opium production.  All that happened was that Mexican production was boosted still further. 

In 1976 the US Air force sprayed poison on hundreds of square miles of Mexican marijuana fields.  Production simply switched to Colombia, giving the infant drug cartels in that country a massive boost.  When President Regan tried to end the importation of Colombian drugs through Florida in 1982, the cartels simply re-routed their produce through Mexico.  As immigration and drug enforcement agencies have discovered, the 2000 mile border between Mexico and the United States is almost impossible to police adequately. 

The problem gets worse by the day, aided by the fact that many ordinary Mexicans do not perceive the violent drug gangs as criminals but as part of the country’s long anti-state, Robin Hood or Zapata tradition.  For many Mexicans, mired in poverty, the government itself has long been suspect, not an agency for reform and improvement but a source of graft and corruption.  If the drug gangs are violent the state has often been even more violent. 

Every year Mexico celebrates death in the Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, a Catholic holiday with Aztec roots.  But those grinning sugar skulls hide a grimmer reality.  Death is not confined to a single day.  Rather in Santa Muerte, Saint Death, the patron saint of the drug gangs, it is an immediate and ‘living’ presence, if such a paradox makes sense.  Santa Muerte has accompanied the heroin and cocaine across the Rio Grande.  She is making a home in the North, the avatar of an unacknowledged insurgency. 

It will require a lot of political imagination and courage to break her grip.  Violence will only engender more violence.  Controlled legalisation would seem to offer the only way of undercutting the cartels and dispelling Death.  It would seem to be the rational solution.  Unfortunately politicians are rarely moved by reason.  

I’ve Been Visiting Illegal Websites!

Actually, I’ve not but I do have a warning for you.  Not so long ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek reflection on a putative zombie apocalypse.  Now I want to alert people to a genuine contagion, a potential threat to all computer users.  I can speak personally about this because it hit me recently, causing an hour or two of anxiety.  My remarks are specifically addressed to people outside Europe, where the threat, I believe, has not yet appeared.  North America looks likely to be the next target.  

Anyway, it’s a virus that came to England from the Continent, where it first appeared in Germany, affecting Windows users.  It purports to be a notice from the police, appearing right across your screen, saying that because you have been detected visiting illegal sites your computer has been locked.  And, my goodness, it has; all files and icons have disappeared.  Even ctrl alt delete does not work.  The notice proceeds with a warning that unless one pays £100 fine ($130) within twenty four hours then one’s computer will be wiped clean. 

Mine supposedly came from London’s Metropolitan Police Force.  I now know that the scam (other forces are mentioned also) is called the Metropolitan Police Ukash virus.  I was worried but not at all phased. For one thing, I don’t visit illegal or pornographic sites, and for another, this is little more than demanding money with menaces, a practice clearly at variance with all legal and police procedure.  Apart from that the wording and grammar is atrocious! 

However, I understand that a lot of people, visiting porno sites or not, have been seriously unsettled by this, the very idea that the police had such power.  In fact it’s a just a parcel of creepy cyber crooks.  The police themselves are aware of this.  The Met issued its own warning, advising people not to reveal details of their bank accounts. 

As I say, my PC was infected by this Trojan.  Fortunately I also have a lap top and was able to carry out a spot of research.  I linked up with some other users who had been similarly affected, managing to find a solution suited to my own particular problem, once I worked my way through a lot of technical jargon!  The solution seems to be different in each case.  I have Windows7 and for me at least it was relatively simple, though I note that other users seemed to be in deeper crisis. 

I should add that the Trojan managed to get round my existing anti-virus protection, which is a slight concern.  The bigger one is over exactly where this nuisance came from.  I’m always careful.  In future I shall be even more so.   Criminals are imaginative.  It’s up to us to be even more imaginative and not be scared by the unexpected.  Take care out there!