Author: Ophelia Benson

The Wolfowitz Matter is fairly enthralling. The level of narcissism and self-absorbtion that must be involved rivets the attention.

Wolfowitz effectively blamed Riza for his predicament as well, saying that her “intractable position” in demanding a salary increase as compensation for her career disruption forced him to grant one to pre-empt a lawsuit…The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said some board members hope a strong statement of dissatisfaction would persuade the Bush administration to withdraw support for Wolfowitz. But the White House views the stakes as larger than control of the World Bank, said a senior administration official, with U.S. resolve and power on the line — in particular the longstanding right of the United States to name the head of the institution.

‘Resolve’ – they’re big on resolve in this administration. Well they would be, wouldn’t they – given how incompetent they are, given their inability to take advice or listen to people not in the magic circle, given their insistence on putting political hacks with no relevant experience in crucial, often highly technical jobs – how could they not value ‘resolve’? That way stupid, venal, greedy, mindless mistakes become tests of character, which they always pass with flying colours simply by being obstinate and refusing ever to admit error. What a good wheeze. Merit, ability, experience, knowledge, good judgment, all go out the window, because all that matters is resolve and power. Great! Terrific! They can’t find their own rumps in the dark, but they’re resolute and thuggish; perfect! Just what one wants running 1) the US and 2) powerful international institutions. Spiffy.

“Mr. Wolfowitz placed his own personal interests in opposition to the interests of the institution,” the report found. “In so doing, he undermined the legal safeguards the institution had in place to protect itself from the harm it has unfortunately now come to experience.” The report reserved its sharpest judgment for the public struggle Wolfowitz has waged to save his job in recent weeks, criticizing the bank’s probe in the press. “It has turned an internal governance matter into an ugly public relations campaign,” the report said, asserting that in unleashing “public attacks,” Wolfowitz “denigrates the very institution he was selected to lead.”

Well but that’s because it’s not about the World Bank, it’s about Paul Wolfowitz. Let’s get our priorities straight, shall we?

There’s some funny stuff in this piece by Anthony Gottlieb on the new atheist books.

In some religious research, it is not necessarily the respondents who are credulous. Harris has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps…Harris takes at face value a Gallup poll suggesting that eighty-three per cent of Americans regard it as the Word of God, and he, like Dawkins and Hitchens, uses up plenty of ink establishing the wickedness of many tales in the Old Testament. Critics of the Bible should find consolation in the fact that many people do not have a clue what is in it. Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount.

Cool. Bible is Word of God, but who cares what’s in it? That’s the spirit! So if God actually dropped in for a beer and a handful of Doritos, nobody would look up from Maximum Exposure to say ‘how do’ and ask what the divine plan actually is? If God parted the heavens and announced in a loud voice that it was time to listen up and take heed, everybody would just say ‘yeah, yeah’ and take no further notice? If there were a CD with what eighty-three per cent of Americans regarded as the actual voice of God singing ‘It Had to Be You,’ would they not bother to listen? What a very pleasing thought.

And there’s a dreamy incoherence in their conviction that moderate forms of religion somehow enable fundamentalist zeal and violence to survive. Are we really going to tame the fervor of an extremist imam’s mosque in Waziristan by weakening the plush-toy creed of a nondenominational church in Chappaqua?

Well if you put it that way…

Joan Smith considers the Shambo question.

The temple has been served with a notice insisting that he be put down, prompting outrage among representatives of the country’s Hindus, who consider cattle sacred and claim that slaughtering the infected animal would be an affront to their religion. “It strikes at the very core of our beliefs,” said Ramesh Kallidai, the secretary general of the Hindu Forum of Britain…[I]n 1935, when a voluntary testing scheme was introduced for cattle, 50,000 new cases of human TB were recorded annually in this country and 2,500 people died from a form of the disease passed on through cow’s milk. That’s why testing was made compulsory in 1950, along with a raft of other measures designed to prevent transmission between cattle and humans. The low incidence of the disease in recent years is in large part due to the measures adopted in the past century.

So there you have it: ‘the very core of our beliefs’ versus the public health. The public health should trump the beliefs.

One of the myths promulgated by believers – a sacred cow, if I might use that term – is that there is no conflict between science and religion. Nothing could be further from the truth, as this sorry tale demonstrates, and I’m beginning to wonder whether there are any limits at all on the demands by different faith groups for special treatment.

I can answer that. No, there are no such limits. Fasten your seat belts.

Nick Cohen takes a critical look at sectarianism.

The old sectarian leaders [Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley] looked like a pair of exhausted warlords, who, after 30 years of a pointless conflict, were content to settle for a division of the spoils. There was no hint of a common political culture, no shared understanding of the principles of secular democracy, just a truce between bosses in which each left the other free to run his fiefdom and the quangos and ministries which went with it. A bus ride through Belfast should convince doubters that the Good Friday Agreement created partition and called it peace. The walls that went up to separate Catholics from Protestants in the Seventies have not been torn down. There are more of them now than ever. Catholics travel for miles to avoid a Protestant leisure centre and Protestants go out of their way to avoid a Catholic newsagent.

Doesn’t that sound lovely? Just like Baghdad, and Darfur, and Kashmir, and Kano, and Trincomalee, and Istanbul, and all the other dulcet harmonious fragrant bits of the globe where people devotedly hate each other for being in the wrong Whatever?

Mutual loathing ought to have been combated by breaking up Northern Ireland’s segregated schools…For all the praise given to them, just 5 per cent of Northern Ireland’s pupils attend integrated schools today…[T]he overwhelming majority of Ulster’s children can go from four to 18 without having a serious conversation with a member of a rival creed. They mingle only when they reach the workplace because, oddly, the religious discrimination on which the education system rests is illegal at work.

Yeh that is odd – because whatever it is that makes religious discrimination a bad idea at work – bad enough to make it illegal – is also what makes it a bad idea at school; only more so because children are more credulous than adults.

Down with sectarianism, up with universalism.