'Barbarian invaders'

Just now live on BBC, Nik Gowing while interviewing Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili asked why he (the president) kept calling the Russians the 'barbarian invaders'.
Saakashvili seemed genuinely perplexed as if he could not fathom being asked such a stupid question and then said-
"What else do you call them?"

Also from the Georgian president -the Russians bombed a railway station and some more apartment blocks and now control the east-west highway cutting off Georgia in half.

They look familiar

Don't they remind you of a couple of, um, monkeys?




Now wait! Before you get outraged and get your panties in a bunch, remember what we learnt from the tales from the life of Saint Harbhajan and what our blessed media repeatedly sermonised not long ago- monkeys are like gods to the Indians.


Don't get them in a bunch

Two of a kind

One moral idiot with another-

Where are all the anti-war jholawalas?

Where are all the anti-war activists? Is the Russian invasion of Georgia not a war worthy of their attention? Or are they selective in being 'anti-war'?

Imagine if it was America bombing a small country on some pretext - there would would be such a din of protest in many cities all over the world.

Now we have an authoritarian, imperialistic superpower which has a horrendous past of occupying, brutalizing and even decimating whole of nationalities -and not a squeak out our professional keepers of conscience.

Where are the Indian politicians- they were pretty quick to lacerate Israel over Lebanon, even going to the extent of passing a resolution in the parliament?

What about our 'anti-imperialist' comrades? Or is their 'anti-imperialism' just a charade? (They never had a problem with Soviet and Chinese imperialism)

Where are those bearded jholawalas* and jholawalis*, who when you shout 'America' begin to bark like rabid dogs?

Still waiting for shrill condemnations of Russian aggression from seasoned anti-imperialists like Chomsky, John Pilger , Robert Fisk and Arundhati Roy.

Tiger Hawk asks the same question-

Of course, the Russians have no meaningful justification under international law, far less than the imperfect case the United States and its coalition built to justify regime change in Iraq.

That caused me to wonder, where are the anti-war groups?
----------------------
So far, at least, it is safe to conclude that these organizations are not so much anti-war as they are anti-American and anti-Israeli. It is useful to clear that up. And, by the way, if they decide to organize massive anti-war rallies against Russia and belatedly reveal themselves as intellectually honest, I will be the first to say so.

(emphasis mine)

C'mon guys, where are you? There is a war on you know. Just go out and do what you do best -protest a small country from being bombed by an imperial superpower. I'll throw you another juicy bone -there is even oil involved. You must be drooling by now and I am sure we can expect massive street protests, burning of Russian flag and trashing of the Russian embassies anytime.
You won't disappoint me, won't you?

Won't you?


*The colorful Indian language translator-
jholawala -a scornful term for leftists in India, who have the reputation of dressing sloppily, often in kurtas and carrying a shabby, shapeless bag called a jhola, giving a general impression of poverty and simplicity. However, as in many things concerning the left, impressions can be misleading. Their 'simple' kurtas are often sourced from choicest of trendy(and expensive) boutiques, and the 'ethnic' look that is so sought after is achieved by burning a fair amount of moolah.

There is an interesting page about the jholawalas here.

jholawali -female of the above species, often giving the impression of being aggressive and querulous(think Vandana Shiva)

Note -I do not condone trashing of any embassy. I am merely pointing out the hypocrisy involved.

Send in the stingers

How to deal with a brutal warmongering imperialist like Vladimir Putin?
Max Boot has an answer-
send in the stingers

Amen

Poland and Baltic states condemn Russia

The countries of eastern Europe and the Baltics have been through centuries of misery and tragedy in the grip of the Russian bear.Only recently freed from the Soviet yoke they have the moral focus to condemn Russia without the evasive diplomatese.

I wonder what the Indian official reaction be. Somehow I don't think that it would have the same moral clarity. While India likes to preen on the international stage, the political elites don't have the balls to condemn Russia.

Surprise- external menace lead to larger defence budget

Some Russian, perhaps the ambassador, is currently complaining on live TV that the Georgian defense budget has increased 30 times.
If true, might not that have something to do with the looming Russian menace?

Putin- you sneaky bastard

I leave my blog and the world unattended for a while and this is what happens-
Putin and his boys invade Georgia.

Back from oblivion

I apologize for the longer than expected hiatus. The pressures of the real world outweighed the pleasures of the virtual ones. Reality -I hate you!

However, now that I am back, I hope to be more regular than previously. That's the audacity of hope.

Google -is it good for freedom?

It seems that Google's relationship with freedom is not a happy one.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't have the balls to stand up to China (China is still a greater power than Google). But shutting down some hapless bloggers -why that comes perfectly to the lefties at this monster corporation(yes,the mega-billion Google is a leftist entity by the inclination of it's owners and employes).

This is shocking-
Anti-Obama blogs being treated as spam by Google



What no balls?
-Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

It an irony that one of the Google founders(Sergey Mikhailovich Brin) has come from the totalitarian nightmare state of Soviet Union. Now his creation is behaving a bit like his former motherland. It seems that while in America he has made his riches but has failed to comprehend the import of freedom of expression- but then shutting down opinions that one doesn't like is a universal characteristic of the left.


Google image search for 'tiananmen' as it appears in
rest of the world(left) and in China(right)
(source)

Safer without our police?

A policeman lies dead drunk on the road in Delhi
(photo courtesy the ever lovely Radha)

Wouldn't we be safer if these people just lay on the road like this?
At least then they would not be raping women, bashing the skulls of hapless persons picked off the street, fattening themselves on the blood of the public and otherwise carrying off hatchet jobs (sometimes literally)for one of the most venal class of persons on earth- the Indian politicians.


The government has taken upon itself to provide us safe drinking water. It doesn't. We install water filters.

The government has taken upon itself to provide us a regular, clean supply of electricity. It doesn't. We install inverters and voltage regulators.

The government has taken upon itself to provide health care to all for free or almost free. It doesn't. We (if we can afford it) avoid government hospitals like a plague and take refuge in private nursing homes.

I think if the whole of Indian police just vanished one day, the people would find a better workable solution themselves.

Mahatma Gandhi once sounded like Sharon Stone

Mahatma Gandhi once sounded just like Sharon Stone. On 15 January 1934, at 2:21 pm IST, there was a massive earthquake of magnitude 8.3 on the Richter scale on the Bihar-Nepal border.

Gandhi in a public statement declared provocatively that the earthquake is divine retribution for India's sin in upholding untouchability.

Rajendra Pachauri -say sorry!

RK Pachauri, Sunita Narain, Al Gore and many,many others who have been blaming the devastation of cyclone Nargis on Global Warming -now it is time to admit mistakes and humbly apologize.

This latest research gem appears in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters, and the work was conducted by a team of climatologists employed in Melbourne at the National Climate Centre of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Kuleshov et al. note that “Concern about the enhanced greenhouse effect affecting TC frequency and intensity has grown over recent decades. Recently, trends in global TC activity for the period 1970 to 2004 have been examined by Webster et al. [2005]. They concluded that no global trend has yet emerged in the total number of tropical storms and hurricanes.”

We at World Climate Report could not agree more, and the scientific evidence is overwhelming on the subject of global warming and hurricane frequency! Imagine the reaction we would get if we claimed “the science is settled” and the “debate is over” – hurricanes are not becoming more frequent! Yet, you can visit thousands of websites claiming that hurricanes are becoming more frequent thanks to the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. Climate change alarmists make this claim over and over, the claim is almost never challenged, and the claim is simply not consistent with reality. Give the global warmers credit – from school kids to grandmas, they have the world believing that hurricanes are definitely increasing in frequency, when nothing could be further from the truth.
--------------------------------------
Had these scientists found an increase in the total number of tropical cyclones in the Southern Hemisphere, they would need to hire press agents to handle the global coverage. Their work would be front page news all over the world, Time and Newsweek would be all over the story, and thousands of web pages would trumpet the results. However, they found no trends, or even downward trends, in total tropical cyclone frequency over a huge area of the planet – coverage at World Climate Report is about all they can expect.

Source
(via the excellent Andrew Bolt)
(Abstract of the paper here)

(emphasis mine)

The presidency of George W. Bush-two views

First the conventional, typical, BDS laced view held by 99.97648% of the MSM the world over. This sample is from an editorial in the Times of India-

Many of McClellan's revelations confirm what critics of the Bush administration have been saying all along, namely that it wilfully misled the US and the rest of the world to justify the decision to invade Iraq.

This is a damning indictment of a presidency that has been viewed by many as either bumbling or deceitful. If McClellan is to be believed, Bush and his team of advisers were the latter.

They deliberately spun a web of deception around the Iraq invasion and a host of other issues.
---------------------------------
But now that Bush's term is nearing its end, there is a likelihood of others queuing up to distance themselves from a disastrous presidency.

The second view held by a part of that tiny rebellious and hated minority- the conservatives, neo or otherwise -

George W. Bush - Walking Away a Winner?

We went through similar times in the early 1990’s. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union crumbled and we won the Cold War. Yet it was beyond the typical liberal’s ability to acknowledge that Ronald Reagan had anything to do with these accomplishments. So you had the ludicrous spectacle of bespectacled college professors arguing that Jimmy Carter could have won the Cold War or the Soviet Union would have fallen apart regardless of what we did. In 1992 after Reagan addressed the Republican convention, Tom Brokaw speculated from his national TV perch that the government debt run up under Reagan’s watch would be the Gipper’s principal legacy.

We’re seeing something similar happen now. In the past couple of weeks, two extremely promising news stories have sprung from the War on Terror. The situation in Iraq is looking promising, and there is a real possibility and perhaps even a likelihood that the Iraq war will leave as its legacy a remarkably civilized and progressive country by the standards of the region. More importantly, the war may leave behind a stable and humane nation that will not be hostile to American interests, one that may serve as a beacon for it neighbors.

Perhaps more noteworthy is the CIA’s assessment that “portrays Al Qaeda as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.” While I always take CIA pronouncements of this sort with a grain of salt given the agency’s limitations and recent history of sloppy analysis, this conclusion does square with Al Qaeda’s declining and practically disappearing activities.

Since these have been George W. Bush’s wars, one would think he would receive at least a modicum of credit for any progress. Alas, if Bush is to receive credit, he’ll have to be patient just like Reagan was.
------------------------------

What bin Laden said about the strong horse and the weak horse was right. And he and his minions don’t look like the strong horse running for their pathetic lives in Waziristan for years on end. The Islamic world has watched as al Qaeda has become the weak horse. President Bush deserves credit for fighting the war with the steadfastness he has. Remember, it was less than four years ago when John Kerry implored us to fight a more sensitive war on terror. Somehow I doubt sensitivity would have had the same impact on the Jihadists as the predator drones that now fill their skies.

I’ve never been reticent about pointing out the Bush administration’s shortcomings. Its spendthrift ways, its elevation of unqualified lackeys to positions of importance, its longtime adherence to ineffective tactics in Iraq, its inability to communicate…I better stop – I could go on all day. My point is that the Bush administration has been a flawed vehicle, and I’ve never shied away from saying as much.

But President Bush is on the verge of winning the big ones. It will be no small thing if he has shown and mostly secured the path to victory in Iraq and in the War on Terror before leaving office. It will drive the left crazy and as was the case with Reagan, it will take liberals decades to admit it, but Bush will strut back to Crawford a big winner.

Few remember that Abraham Lincoln spent years running a dreadful war effort presided over by the ineffective likes of George McClellan and Joe Hooker. And those who do remember such things view them charitably, as Lincoln got things right by the end. If President Bush does wind up also having gotten the big things right, something that seems increasingly likely, the enormous successes of his administration will dwarf the failures in history’s eyes.

Read the whole thing.

You are unlikely ever to hear this second view in that 99.97648% of the MSM. So much for giving all opinions a chance.

UNESCO to be headed by a book burner?

When it comes to the UN, nothing is surprising but the fact that this global kleptocracy keeps being shielded from criticism by a sympathetic media-

Egypt's culture minister(Farouk Hosni) is a top candidate to head the United Nations's main intellectual body, but his declaration that he would burn books by Israeli authors has forced him to walk a fine line between appeasing extremists in his country and satisfying Western critics.


Several diplomats familiar with the selection process for director-general of the U.N. Education Scientific and Cultural Organization said yesterday that Farouk Hosni's candidacy could now be doomed, after he told the Egyptian parliament that if any Israeli books were found in Egyptian libraries, he would burn them.

Such a statement is "couched in the language and actions of Nazi 'Minister of Culture' Josef Goebbels," the director for international relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Shimon Samuels, said in a letter to the current Unesco director-general, Koïchiro Matsuura of Japan. "An aspirant book-burner, who threatens to wield culture as a weapon, cannot head the intellectual arm of the United Nations."

"Anyone who presents a candidacy for the top U.N. education body should know that incitement is one of our region's worst problems," an Israeli U.N. ambassador, Daniel Carmon, said. "Hatred helps to create the infrastructure of terrorism."

Read the whole thing.

(emphasis mine)

Amaresh Mishra opens my third eye and piques my sixth sense

(Update - On Amaresh Mishra's theories about the Mumbai terrorist attacks, see here.)

In an article by Amaresh Mishra, this opened my third eye and piqued my sixth sense-

Gujjar turbulence owed a lot to their nomadic status and the British attempt to settle them as peaceful land revenue paying peasantry. During the Mughal era, Gujjars were known for their entrepreneurial role — they not only exchanged milk and other commodities but also guarded the trade routes of North India. The colonial-British State, keen to turn every rural element into a peasant, did not understand the community’s entrepreneurial role. So after 1857, the British classified the Gujjars (and around 150 other Indian communities) as ‘criminal tribes’ through the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. In this move, communities that had fought for Bahadur Shah Zafar in 1857 were openly targeted. Several other forces like the Pardhis of Vidarbha and the Dhangars and the Ramoshi-Berads of Maharashtra and Karnataka also suffered. Most of them were warrior-nomads or warrior-hunters of the Mughal and Maratha era. During the colonial era, basic human rights were denied to these communities. They were literally given an ‘anti-social’ tag. Their position became worse than that of many Dalit communities in the country.

Let me reprise -according to Mishra, the British promulgated the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871

1) to turn every rural element into a peasant

2) to target communities that had fought for Bahadur Shah Zafar in 1857

3) for no other reason, since none is mentioned.

I wonder if there might just possibly have been some other reason, some teenie-weenie fact that some of these tribes actually had a history of being involved in crime over generations-

Each gang developed its own specialty. The Kabutri Nats, famed for their beautiful women, operated as dancing troupes: while the women danced, the men and children frisked the audience. The Bauriahs became confidence men: disguised as sadus (holy men), they duped pious Hindus into parting with their hoarded valuables. The Barwars specialized in brazen daylight thievery, expelled members who stooped to night operations. The nomadic Panjaros rustled cattle. The Harnis forced their women into prostitution and rolled the customers; when the heat was on, they usually beat it disguised as fakirs, often taking a leper along to scare off the curious.

The Ramoosics, also panderers, had a side interest in a bungalow-protection racket. The Bhamptas were railroad thieves. Their favorite trick, best performed on a crowded train, was to frighten a baby, slide to the floor to comfort it, and meanwhile slit open the baggage of the other passengers. The Kolis impersonated cops: descending on a village, they would arrest the village constable on some phony charge, then strip the village. Other groups became counterfeiters, moonshiners, muggers. Children learned crime at their mother's knee. Some tribes pressed a silver rupee, fastened to a piece of string, into a newborn child's throat, where it would form a pocket which, when the child grew up, provided a hiding place for stolen coins and jewels.

And was revenge the only or even the most dominant motive of those eeevil Firangs*(from the same link)-

How to Reform Them? The British liquidated the Thugs, a group of professional murderers who contributed a word to the English language. But the others they decided to recognize as a sort of criminal caste. Under the Criminal Tribes Act (1871), the more notorious groups were segregated in special settlements. All their members had to register at the age of 14, whether or not they had been personally guilty of a crime, faced special penalties, much more severe than those for ordinary offenders.

Later, criminal tribesmen were given a chance to reform. Many settlements were placed in the care of the Salvation Army, various missions and philanthropic organizations. Children were sent to school, taught useful trades.

Me, I am rubbing my eyes furiously. Surely those children eating imperialists could never hold such ideals as reform, sending children to school and teaching the 'criminal tribes' useful trades in their dead cold hearts(oh wait, they had no hearts)? Surely, Mishraji, that cannot be true. I must read it again just to believe that I have read it-

Later, criminal tribesmen were given a chance to reform. Many settlements were placed in the care of the Salvation Army, various missions and philanthropic organizations. Children were sent to school, taught useful trades.

And-

This work was carried on after India became independent. Last week(in 1952-ed.) the state of Uttar Pradesh, following the example of Bombay and Madras, repealed the Criminal Tribes Act, thus freeing all but a small percentage of India's criminal tribesmen from their semi-prison existence.

The authorities were under no illusion that they had abolished the tribes' preference for ancestral occupations; but with the stigma of hereditary crime removed, they hoped to convince the tribes eventually that crime does not pay.

Whaaaatt's that again!!! But wasn't it only the very naughty racist imperialist British who were convinced of "the tribes' preference for (criminal)ancestral occupations"? No wonder then that the independent Indian state passed a very similar law-

In a retrograde step, in 1959, new laws in the form of the Habitual Offenders Act were introduced in various states. Even whilst eschewing branding people of certain communities ‘born criminals’, these Acts retained many of the provisions of the Criminal Tribes Act such as registration, restrictions on movement, and incarceration in ‘corrective settlements’ earmarked for ‘habitual offenders’. The bias against nomads lingered, as is apparent in the way the Acts enjoined the government to look at whether a person’s occupation was “conducive to an honest and settled way of life… not merely a pretence for the purpose of facilitating commission of offences,” while exercising its power to restrict the movement of the person. The police routinely used theHabitual Offenders Act against members of nomadic and denotified communities.

And how dare top Indian politicians speak of cracking down on the 'criminal tribes', even decades later? What are they, as racist as the British or do they hold a grudge against those who carried water for Bahadur Shah Zafar? Hasn't Mishraji told them that there is no such thing as the 'criminal tribes'?-

Bansi Lal orders crackdown on `criminal' tribes

Haryana Chief Minister Bansi Lal has ordered a crackdown on the `criminal' tribes - the Bawarias, Pardis and Sansis. During a visit to the sector-17, Gurgaon residence of Sudhir and Kiran Lal, the couple who were clubbed to death by suspected Bawaria assailants four days ago, Bansi Lal ordered that these criminal tribes be flushed out of Haryana.

What?! "criminal tribes be flushed out"! Just like the eeeeeeeeeeeeevil Englanders used to do? No, that cannot be true in free India fifty years after independence!


********
Ok, enough of sarcasm. Now the conclusion-
This is what our media and 'scholars' do everyday -rewrite history to suit their pre-determined narratives.

(For those who think my sense of time has gone bonkers-how could Amaresh Mishra, whose book came out in 2008 have gone back in time to 1999,the date of the above article, and lectured Bansi Lal: to them I say -
Mishraji is carrying such a weight of history on his patriotic shoulders enlightening us all that he bloody well should have figured out how!)


Note 1-
Amaresh Misra is the author of War of Civilisations: India AD 1857 in which he claims that the British killed 10 million in 10 years(has a jingle like ring to it) after 1857 out of revenge. This astonishing claim is disputed by many experts, including this lady here who asks-

How have historians missed these tens of millions of Indians killed? Which regiments did the killing? Where are the War Office orders authorising the killings? Where are these operations found in the various regimental histories/ histories of the British Army in India?

Note 2-
Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 may be read here(pdf).

Update-
A sample of Mishraji's powerful intellect-

He(Amaresh Mishra) blamed terrorism in India on the growing Indo-Israel relationship and India’s pro-West policies.

(emphasis mine)



*The colorful Indian language translator-
firangi - White skinned foreigner, often a term of derision among anti-colonial, subaltern study types

A case for cultural imperialism

Some ancient(2001) wisdom from the fair-haired one that still rings the bell -

"It is time for concerted cultural imperialism. They(Muslim fanatics) are wrong about women. We are right."

Oppressed ladies in bikinis may take them off

(image source)
Oppressed ladies in bikinis -take off your garbs! Choose liberation in this instead-


(image source)

In a publication full of inanities, this column by Sunita Aron stands out. She defends the state of women's rights in Ahmadinejad’s Iran.

The dress code has not suppressed women in Iran. The high literacy levels has pushed their participation in Iran’s 1979 revolution as well as for the ongoing one million-signature campaign in support of their petition to the government for equal rights in the Iranian law. And they are ready to go to jail too against what they once described as ‘gender apartheid.’

Perhaps it’s time we admit that the equal status of women is not determined by the dress she wears. A woman in a bikini can be more suppressed than one covered from head to toe. It’s time Iran and India realised this.

Read the whole silly thing.

Sunita Aron appears to be some sort of a big shot at the Hindustan Times. Many a times I wonder why the top honchos of our media, print and TV, utter the stupidest of things with a depressing regularity. Here are a few women feeling liberated in Uncle Ahmadinejad's wonderland-


Video of an Iranian woman being arrested by the relgious police even as she shouts,"I don't want to go"

Here is another-

Another video of an Iranian woman being arrested by the IRI police


On the other hand, Kay S. Hymowitz wonders-"Why Feminism is AWOL on Islam"

Similar musings from Robert Spencer-"Two Women Stoned: Feminists Mum"

(emphasis mine)

No outrage until the Americans do it

There would be a deafening roar ten times the size of the sound of a hundred jet engines if American troops did this.When UN does it there is but the sound of silence -

(UN) Peacekeepers 'abusing children'

A 13-year-old girl, "Elizabeth" described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home.

'Elizabeth' tells the BBC about her abuse

"They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me... I tried to escape but there were 10 of them and I could do nothing," she said.

"I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding."

No action has been taken against the soldiers.

From the same page-

UN SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDALS

2003 - Nepalese troops accused of sexual abuse while serving in DR Congo. Six are later jailed
2004 - Two UN peacekeepers repatriated after being accused of abuse in Burundi
2005 - UN troops accused of rape and sexual abuse in Sudan
2006 - UN personnel accused of rape and exploitation on missions in Haiti and Liberia
2007 - UN launches probe into sexual abuse claims in Ivory Coast

So where is the outrage, dude?

(emphasis mine)

Well bowled, Melanie!

Couldn't have put it better in a hundred years-

All these problems(Teen pregnancies,teenage crime,child neglect), experienced disproportionately by those at the bottom of the heap, were foisted upon them by the overclass of which India Knight is a member. It was the champagne socialist intelligentsia which destroyed the traditional family, demonised men, incentivised mass fatherlessness and declared never-married motherhood an inalienable human right, emptied education of content and cut off the escape routes out of disadvantage by withering the grammar schools, declared morality to be a dirty word, paralysed the police through political correctness, enslaved the poor through dependency on the state and then finally destroyed their brains by telling them to eat cannabis cake while themselves showing the way by snorting cocaine on the Square Mile or in recording studios, or getting legless on Crackdaddy cocktails at Boujis nightclub.

Read the whole thing.

(emphasis mine)

William Dalrymple bats for the East against the West

"an upscale Barbara Cartland"?

For some reason I am unable to share the common enthusiasms of our elite classes(in fact, I am tempted to delete 'cl' from the last word)- be it the deification of Amitabh Bachchan or the adulation of RK Pachauri or the relentless bashing of Bush. So when our media-intellectual elites swoon on hearing the name of William Dalrymple, I find myself feeling characteristically indifferent.

William Dalrymple is a historian and an author who is much toasted in the Indian intellectual circles. I am unable to say if that is well deserved, not having read any of his very well received books(although I have just started his The Last Mughal; my opinion of it will follow if I am able to find the time to finish it, having borrowed it from a library).

However, from the introduction to the above mentioned book, from the bits of his interview I have read or seen(I forget which), Dalrymple comes across as apparently sincere but in some ways part of that breed of western orientalists who come to believe(if they did not do so before)in the superiority of Eastern culture and ideas over that of the West.Even if they may claim to be neutral in the culture-wars or may profess to believe in giving equal respect to all cultures and philosophies, their actions and words do let through their bias(or preference, shall we say?) towards the East and against the West.

What most left this impression about William Dalrymple was what he said in a lively debate on the topic "We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values".Somehow I was not surprised that Dalrymple took a stand against the motion. He was on the side of Tariq Ramadan, an Islamist apologist and Charles Glass, a leftist writer.Supporting the motion were Douglas Murray, a conservative writer and commentator, David Aaronovitch, also a writer and Ibn Warraq, former Muslim writer living under a fatwa and the author of‘Why I am Not a Muslim’. All three are despised in British leftist circles as 'neo-cons'.
You may hear the debate here.

In the debate William Dalrymple comes across as a fish out of water. He gave a strong impression that he was on the exact other side -that Eastern values were superior and that "We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Eastern values". However he could not assert this conviction of his(I might be wrong but as I said he does give an impression that such is his conviction). So while opposing vehemently the debate topic and denouncing Western values, he could not take a convincing stand in favor of the opposite, a nod perhaps to the notion of neutrality between the cultures(a notion which I suspect Dalrymple holds with no strong conviction, if at all).

Dalrymple's constant invocation of Akbar as a fair representative of the Orient was logically untenable, since Akbar was unique among the eastern rulers and an exception to many rules.

Hugh Fitzgerald has an interesting description of the debate-

I listened to the Q2 debate once through yesterday morning, and took no notes, but I remember some important details. The resolution, about being unafraid to assert the superiority of Western values, had on one side, supporting the resolution, Ibn Warraq, David Aronovitch, and Douglas Murray, and opposing it, Charles Glass, Tariq Ramadan, and William Dalrymple.

--------------------------------------------

The one who really gave himself away was the odious and stupid and remarkably ill-informed William Dalrymple. He went on and on about how, near to where "I live in Delhi" there is some spot connected to the reign of Akbar. And then he proceeded to tell everyone -- thank god it has been preserved on tape, for all time -- how Akbar, the "Muslim emperor," had called together Shi'a Muslims, and Sunni Muslims, and Jains, and Christians, and even Jews from Cochin, for a colloquy. And he went on and on about how splendid Akbar was. Of course, Akbar was splendid, when he became syncretistic, when he ended the Jizyah, when he essentially stopped being a Muslim in every important way. The British historian V. A. West, in his "History of India," notes that Akbar demanded that those in his inner circle had to abjure the Qur'an -- not exactly the sign of a Muslim.

So his entire speech was all about Akbar, and he apparently did not know that Akbar, the Akbar he praised, is remembered today fondly by Hindus and despised by Muslims. And at one point he even described "Ashoka and Akbar" as Muslim leaders. Ashoka was no Muslim. Could I really have heard him say that? Not possible. No, I suppose anything is possible, especially if Dalrymple shows he has missed entirely the main point about syncretistic Akbar, has not understood the whole point of his later rule, and why he is revered by Hindus and despised by Muslims, though some may now invoke his name to show that “Muslims are tolerant.”

No, Dalrymple’s idiocy about Akbar will live on forever, on the tape made of the other evening, forever made available online with a single click, to haunt him, to mock him, to serve as proof that Dalrymple the historian of Mughal India, “internationally-acclaimed,” is unsteady when it comes to possibly the most important figure in Indian history during the entire Mughal period.

Ibn Warraq, in one of later replies, noted -- too quickly, alas -- that Akbar was no Muslim, and it was clear, according to observers, that Dalrymple was nervous, that he knew he was out of his depth.

And why was he "out of his depth"? Did he not know about Akbar? Never read the "Akbarnamah" of Fazl? Strange, isn't it, that someone who has made his entire professional career out of his supposed knowledge of Mughal India, and has written all his books about Mughal India, appears to be so ignorant about Akbar, the celebrated emperor who during his reign ended the practice of demanding the payment of the Jizyah (his successor, Aurangzeb, promptly re-imposed it) and was clearly indifferent or even hostile to so much of Islam. And Dalrymplecannot claim that little is known about Akbar or his reign, for it was recorded in great detail by Fazl, and by others. Or does Dalrymple not know that, either?

Oh, did I mention that the same Dalrymple (google his name and "Jihad Watch" and "Posted by Hugh" for my many descriptions of him as an upscale Barbara Cartland, singing the life of luxe and volupté at the Mughal court, with love intrigues in the palaces, and trans-racial transgressions, and all the rest of it) a few years ago was earning all kinds of prizes and glory for his book “The Last Mughal.” For that book the claim was repeatedly made that he, Dalrymple, had come along and finally made use of the Mutiny Papers that no historian had seen or used, and until Dalrymple came along had simply been overlooked or, in some accounts, even entirely unknown. But if you read his much-overrated "The Last Mughal" you find, in the footnotes, that Dalrymple takes much, perhaps most, of what he quotes from those Mutiny Papers not directly, but from books by other, much more solid historians. He admits as much. And yet the story still makes the rounds about how William Dalrymple used a cache of papers that no one had known about. Good Christ, you’d think he was Hyde at Malahide Castle. It’s blague. Curious that his self-promoting website, the one you get to by googling his name and then clicking on a link that proudly describes itself as yielding “[t]he Home site of William Dalrymple, internationally acclaimed writer and historian” (who do you suppose wrote that?), continues the tale of the Papers That No One Knew About.

Fitzgerald is practically accusing Dalrymple of scholarly fraud in the last paragraph above. I have no idea if that is true.However do read the whole thing as there is much more on this and the debate including stinging barbs at Amartya Sen.


And here is why(among other reasons) I swoon not on hearing the name of William Dalrymple-

The historian Dalrymple was more comfortable commenting on the West's dark history, than dwelling on the inconsequential present. For Dalrymple Western values were equivalent to the Holocaust. Indeed colonial genocide, Nazism and Marxism were "not freak departures from form," they were rather the logical consequences of Western -- or universal -- values.
(Christopher Orlet)

Christopher Orlet(link above) sums it up nicely-

IT MAY BE ARGUED that Western Civilization did indeed produce Hitler, Ulbricht, Franco, Mussolini, Stalin, Milosevic and Ceausecsu, but the free West also defeated them. Huntington at least would reject the notion that the last three dictators were in any real sense "Western." He maintains that Eastern Orthodox nations of southeastern and Eastern Europe constitute a distinct "Euro-Asiatic civilization." Though European and Christian, these nations were but minimally effected by the cultural influences of the Renaissance. As for Hitler and Ulbricht, the German has never shown much respect for individualism. Most important, these dictators could only flourish by completely crushing Western values. Like Islam, none of these dictators allowed for the West's two key values: self-criticism and individualism.

Granted, the West is no Utopia, and it has seen its share of excesses (My Lai and Abu Ghraib), though these are seen as blots on our name, not good policy. If William Calley got off with a slap on the wrist, Abu Ghraib veteran U.S. Army reservist Charles Graner received 10 years and his "ex-girlfriend" Lynndie England was sentenced to three years in a naval brig.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that such free exchange of ideas could only take place in a Western country. That in itself should prove the superiority of Western values.

Dalrymple's team lost the debate 465 -264.(No, I don't believe that the truth of ideas is a matter of majority voting)

(emphasis mine)