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Further to this post about Mali and, in particular, the final two links I gave there, here is Karima Bennoune, professor of international law at the University of California, Davis:

Before the recent French intervention in Mali began, 412,000 people had already left their homes in the country’s north, fleeing torture, summary executions, recruitment of child soldiers and sexual violence against women at the hands of fundamentalist militants. Late last year, in Algeria and southern Mali, I interviewed dozens of Malians from the north, including many who had recently fled. Their testimonies confirmed the horrors that radical Islamists, self-proclaimed warriors of God, have inflicted on their communities.

First, the fundamentalists banned music in a country with one of the richest musical traditions in the world. Last July, they stoned an unmarried couple for adultery. The woman, a mother of two, had been buried up to her waist in a hole before a group of men pelted her to death with rocks. And in October the Islamist occupiers began compiling lists of unmarried mothers.
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Policy decisions regarding this potential Afghanistan-in-the-Sahara must be informed by the fact that what is happening there is not simply a question of regional or global security, but of basic human rights. The current intervention in Mali could deal a decisive blow to the recent advance of fundamentalism across North Africa, but only if French and West African soldiers take care to distinguish between civilians and their jihadist oppressors, who hide among the innocent.

The rest here.

Remember Mohamed Morsi, and the view from one of his advisers that, while statements of his against Jews might come well from the mouth of a Muslim Brotherhood official, it was different now that Morsi was Egypt’s president? Functional anti-Semitism was my suggestion. That turns out to have been too optimistic. Morsi is reported to have said last week to a group of US senators:

I think we all know that the media in the United States has made a big deal of this and we know the media of the United States is controlled by certain forces and they don’t view me favorably…

Maybe by ‘certain forces’ he meant to refer to people quite unknown to you and me. On the other hand, maybe the headline on this piece is there or thereabouts. (Thanks: JA.)

Jonathan Steele, writing at well-you-know-where, refers to the ‘Mugabe-phobia’ of the British media. He’s worried that, with elections due this year in Zimbabwe, passions might become inflamed and ‘the old battle positions resume in Britain’s media as well as Zimbabwe’s’. The good news from that country might then be overlooked.

But phobia? I don’t suppose it could be a perfectly rational dislike of the Zimbawean leader: on account of, among many other things, the Gukurahundi in 1983, in which some 20,000 people were killed by the 5th Brigade; or Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out the Trash) in 2005; or his vote-rigging and use of violence in the elections of 2008.

What might be forthcoming from the same journalistic source? ‘That Stalin, he wasn’t such a bad guy’? ‘The caring side of Pol Pot’? Etc.

You remember the Royal wedding back then? No? Maybe you were busy with other things, or looking away out of republican principle. Well, here it is again – but slightly tweaked. (Thanks: AC.)

Here are a few reading links on the intervention in Mali and related matters.

Susanna Wing:

Simplifications of the ethnic, religious, and political dynamics of this crisis will not help to resolve the complex issues that are at its root. Thanks to 20 years of (admittedly shaky) democracy, most Malians treasure political participation as a key component of citizenship. What they want now is not less democracy – precisely what, to their minds, the Islamists and separatists would bring – but broader participation and greater freedom. In an op-ed in The New York Times, Oumou Sall Seck, mayor of Goundam in northern Mali, shared a common view among Malians when she wrote that “Lawless and godless men – who hide behind Shariah and demands for Tuareg independence – are now beating and raping women and conscripting children to fight their ‘holy’ war.” It is no surprise that a majority want to live in a secular Mali with its current borders intact and, preferably, a legitimately elected president.

Similarly, reports have erroneously implied that France’s intervention is nothing more than neocolonial adventurism. May Ying Welsh, a correspondent for Al Jazeera English, argued on Democracy Now that France’s campaign was driven by its resource interests in the region. Meanwhile, the archbishop of Accra wondered if the intervention was not another “colonisation attempt.”

To be sure, the weakness of the Malian state is tied, in part, to the legacy of French colonialism. And critics are not wrong to point out that France has important strategic and economic interests in the region. (France’s nuclear power plants feed off the uranium mines in nearby Niger.) But the idea that these factors drove France’s intervention is incorrect.

In reality, the Malian army could not withstand the advances of Tuareg separatists last March and had no chance of holding off an offensive by the jihadists. Particularly after the fall of Konna, the Malian government was in real need of help. The troops that ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States) promised to send were simply too slow to materialize, so France stepped in.

On the street, Malians are generally supportive of international assistance. According to accounts from the field, the majority of Malians support France’s intervention. For now at least, people are waving the French flag in the streets of Bamako (merchants claim that the flags are in short supply) and some Malian mothers are even naming their newborns “Hollande.”

Of course, France’s welcome will wear thin as the conflict drags on…

David Blair:

Anyone who saw the recapture of this town of 35,000 people after its brief occupation by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) had no doubt that they were witnessing a liberation.

One group of brightly dressed women thanked me personally, treating my protestation that I was not French as a show of modesty. Here in the town of Ségou, 100 miles to the south, Tricolours also fly from shops, homes and tree trunks.

Perhaps this is only a deceptive “golden hour” before popular acclaim turns into resentment and suspicion. Perhaps the Malians who wave at French soldiers today will be tossing grenades at them tomorrow.

But, somehow, I doubt it. Instead, the early days of France’s expedition to Mali suggest that assumptions about al-Qaeda’s supposedly vice-like grip on its new heartland in north Africa are mistaken.

Tony Blair:

David Cameron is right to warn that this is a battle for our values and way of life which will take years, even decades. It is also a battle we cannot shirk.

Dan Hodges:

Perhaps, thanks to the firm action from progressives like Hollande, the tide is finally starting to turn against the kneejerk pacifists. [‘Pacifists’? – N.G.]

Diakaridia Dembele and William Davison:

Mali’s Islamic leaders praised the French-led intervention to oust insurgents controlling two-thirds of the West African nation as the US said it was ready to offer support to the mission.

“The intervention of France in Mali has nothing to do with a fight against Islam,” Mahmoud Dicko, president of the Islamic High Council of Mali, told reporters in Bamako, the capital, on Tuesday. “It is a fight against crime and terrorism.”

Hold everything! I nearly forgot these two.

Glenn Greenwald: ‘the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism’. Seumas Milne: ‘armed intervention is being ratcheted up in yet another part of the Muslim world.’

Perhaps forgetting them would have been better. Do they suggest to you another meaning for the word ‘drone’?

As most of us struggle with plummeting wages and living standards, the more interesting question is: “Why aren’t there riots in the streets?”

Those are the words of Laurie Penny and come from a column of hers in the New Statesman about MPs’ salaries and, more generally, inequality in Britain. Perhaps they’re just for rhetorical effect and their real intended meaning is to urge people to get angry about it. But Penny likes the thought enough to reprise it twice. ‘Why’, she asks, ‘do we continue to accept this situation? Why – let’s be frank – isn’t Parliament Square on fire?’ And again: ‘How long can the logic of inequality, the logic of “workers” and “shirkers”, withstand public rage?’

As she’s attached to the question of why-no-riots, let me offer one part of an answer to it: because not everybody thinks like you do, Laurie.

In fact, she’s aware of this when she wants to be, for she deploys a version of the dominant ideology thesis. She explains popular quiescence by reference to ‘a new morality of money and power that justifies inequality’. Leave aside that inequality is not that new; it is a long-standing feature of capitalist societies (to say nothing of other human societies); but Penny even writes in one place as if she, too, is under the spell of the dominant ethos, of ‘the idea that the free market, despite all evidence to the contrary, rewards everyone justly and therefore we all deserve what we end up with’.

She should credit her non-rioting, non-arsonist compatriots, or at least many of them, with as much intelligence as she has. There are large numbers of other people who care about inequality, whether by being opposed to the current extent of it or by being in favour of (some version of) social and economic equality. But most of them are looking for a constructive democratic way of dealing with this. They too saw what Penny describes from 2011: ‘riots rag[ing] in England, the kids in hoods smashing up the high street’. Not all egalitarians saw this as a worthwhile response. It was possible, indeed, to be critical of it.

Gideon Haigh, top cricket writer and occasional contributor to normblog, has a piece in the Australian about cricket’s relationship with food. It’s a tasty dish. Here are just a few excerpts from it:

It wasn’t so much what Sir Donald Bradman ate as how he ate that forcibly impressed his contemporary Jack Fingleton: ‘He was a study when not out during lunch of a big innings. He had, in Sydney, the inevitable light batting lunch in the dressing-room of rice custard, stewed fruit and milk. Each slow mouthful was an essay in method, in digestion, in cold planning and contemplation of the feast soon to follow in the middle.’
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One of my favourite cricket photographs features England’s master batsman Len Hutton arriving in Fremantle in September 1946 for the first postwar Ashes tour: usually the dourest of Yorkshireman, he is gazing as covetously at a banana as Shane Warne might (once) have eyed a blonde, having encountered nothing so exotic for years in ration-stricken Britain. Hutton might even have developed a bit of a thing about the fruit. A famous story concerns the young Colin Cowdrey playing some speculative strokes just before lunch during a Test in Adelaide, and receiving a cryptic message from Hutton in the dressing room in the form of a banana. ‘The captain saw those shots you played, and thought that you must be hungry,’ explained the twelfth man.
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Shane Warne returned from his first season of club cricket in England having gained so much weight that his father picking him at the airport did not recognize him. I played for a club in England that only ever bowled on winning the toss, on grounds that nobody after tea was physically capable of rolling their arms over.

There’s more on cricketers and their relationship with food in this earlier post by Bob Borsley.

Writing about global development, Owen Barder criticizes the ‘do no harm principle’. He says that in medicine and development it makes no sense to insist on doing no harm, because you wouldn’t be able, then, to do anything at all. Sound policies can have harmful side effects: ‘Lorry drivers are harmed when the railway is built’; a medicine may save many lives but harm a few. He sums up what he takes to be the sound moral position on this question as follows:

We should pursue policies which do (much) more good than harm, which take account of the broader consequences, which take proportionate steps to limit the harm and risks, and which are careful and responsible about looking after those who are likely to lose from change.

As a statement for the context in which he formulates it, one can see the point of his argument: risk-free and cost-free policies are hard to come by, and some harms may have to be countenanced in order to secure greater all-round benefits. But if we take this in a more general way as laying down a moral standpoint for all contexts, it’s in need of qualification. More good than harm isn’t always enough to swing it.

First, there are some harms which are not acceptable whatever the benefits they might be thought to secure. This is so for those who think that there are fundamental human rights that may not be violated. That’s why, for example, the right against torture in international humanitarian law is non-derogable: it is to be respected in all circumstances, including war, crisis, and national emergency. Nothing, no putative benefit, justifies the use of torture. Second, benefits which are very long-range and uncertain don’t necessarily outweigh costs that are immediate and to existing persons, even if in abstract the former appear to be greater than the latter. Real costs can’t be defeated by very speculative benefits.

There are doubtless more qualifications necessary than just these two, but the point is that the ‘Do no harm principle’ can’t be adequately replaced by a purely quantitative measure of goods against harms. Some harms should not be done in any circumstamces. Some benefits are too uncertain to justify definite harms. (Via.)

Try this mental exercise. If I say to you ‘bananas’, ‘oranges’, ‘apples’, ‘plums’, ‘grapes’, you can get hold of the differences, right? OK, now see what you make of this: ‘bowl of fruit‘. Did you have trouble? I’m guessing not. Now, here’s another exercise: ‘imprisoned without trial’; ‘tortured’; ‘forcibly evicted from their homes’; ‘brutalized for participating in public protest’; ‘fired from their jobs for belonging to a trade union’. Again, any difficulty seeing that these are distinct cases? Surely not. But if I spoke of them all as the ‘injustices‘ perpetrated by some regime or other, your knees would not, I hope, go all wobbly.

There are several different strands in the objection made to the war on terror – both the thing itself and the phrase. Pretty well all of them are unpersuasive, in my own view, but I won’t go over the whole collection again. One that is worth special mockery is the notion that to speak of a war on terror as a general phenomenon is bad because… the referent is composed of particularities. You’ll be able to disentangle this strand of argument from a leader in today’s Guardian. David Cameron is taken to task there for falling foul of the injunction ‘don’t talk about global wars’. He is praised for acknowledging the existence of ‘different insurgent groups in north Africa with local leaderships and agendas, not all suffused with the same ideology’. The failures of al-Qaida are, too, due to its thinking of its cause in global terms. It has been weakened by ‘local specificity’. And so forth.

One might think that the Second World War – or the First, or any war – had been just a great shapeless flom, with no distinguishable parts, or countries, phases, interests, strategies, diplomatic, political and military aspects, regional and local specificities. One might think this, if thought came into it.

There are certain clear common features in the war on terror, one of them suggested by the last word of its much-lamented name, others to do with the illiberal nature of those organizations making use of terror to try and achieve their aims, another to do with the military ‘component’ in the waging of it by democratic countries.

According to these reports Dutch kids at a school in Leiden are using the word for Jew – ‘Jood’ – to mean ‘cool’. It has been observed by academic linguist Marc van Oostendorp of Leiden University. I’d be interested to know how the usage emerged. Is it based on the same sort of inversion as has changed ‘wicked’ and (so I learned just a few days ago) ‘sick’ into terms of approval? Or is the origin a more neutral or generous one?