Month: October 2002

Iceland Restored to International Whaling Commission

In a stunning turnaround due in large part to a misunderstanding over procedural maneuvers, the International Whaling Commission voted 19 to 18 this month to readmit Iceland.

Iceland quit the commission in 1992 and has had its efforts to rejoin the commission blocked by countries angered at Iceland’s plan to recommence commercial whaling in 2006. According to the New York Times, Iceland’s readmittance was largely the result of the Swedish delegation misunderstanding a procedural challenge by Antigua and Barbuda. In its confusion, the Swedish delegation ended up mistakenly voting in favor of a motion that led to Iceland’s readmission.

“We were not prepared in substance to accept Iceland as a member,” Carl Erik Ehrenkronoa of the Swedish Foreign Ministry told the Times, “but it happened anyway.”

As the Times notes, whaling countries are using the same tactics that anti-whaling forces used to enact the worldwide ban on whaling. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, numerous anti-whaling countries joined the commission and the result was the ban.

Now Japan and other pro-whaling countries are encouraging (and, in some cases, outright bribing them) to join and tip the scales the other way. In the lead up to the ban, it was countries such as Switzerland and Austria who joined and tipped the balance toward the ban on whaling. Now countries like Benin, Gabon and Mongolia are joining, and all are solidly in the pro-whaling camp thanks to Japan’s promises of aid to such countries in exchange for their votes on the commission.

Iceland’s readmittance is a likely turning point, given that Iceland says that in 2006 it will join Norway in openly defying the worldwide ban on commercial whaling.

Overturning the ban on whaling is a long way off, given that it would take a 3/4 vote of the commission, but Rune Frovik, spokesman for a Norwegian whaling association told the Times that there was still a lot of value in just a simple majority,

You can do a lot with a simple majority. For many years, the commission has passed what we call hate resolutions calling on Norway and Japan to stop whaling. Soon they might not be able to pass those resolutions.

This change should make the next meeting of the IWC a bit more interesting.

Source:

Iceland joins whale panel, giving whalers stronger say. Walter Gibbs, The New York Times, October 20, 2002.

OSU's HIV Feline Research Will Continue

In June, Ohio State University researcher Michael Podell left his position after a sustained campaign directed against him by animal rights activists. Activists claimed that his research, which involved looking at FIV infection in cats who were administered methamphetamines, was cruel and unnecessary. The research, in fact, produced important findings about the progression of HIV-like illnesses as well as HIV-related dementia.

OSU didn’t effectively defend Podell from animal rights activists while he was at the university, but have decided that they will continue the research that Podell started. Podell conducted his research as part of a grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse.

OSU President Karen Holbrook said that, “Projects such as this one facilitate the design of treatments for humans and animals alike against many deadly viral diseases.”

Protect Our Earth’s Treasures, an animal rights group that regularly protested against Podell, announced that it will renew its protests beginning Nov. 1 until the university abandons such research.

POET director Rob Russell told The Columbus Dispatch, “It’s still the same wasteful project it was before.”

Source:

HIV Study That Uses Cats Will Continue At OSU. David Lore, The Columbus Dispatch, October 30, 2002.

Islam Should Not Be a Sacred Cow

National Review Online’s Rod Dreher has a pretty damning piece about the state of campus tolerance toward differing views. A couple scholars who have documented the repression of Christians in Islamic states was invited to speak at Georgetown, but the frank discussion of the issue was apparently too much for anyone to handle. Even the group that sponsored the scholars disavowed her speech.

Two Jewish student leaders who sponsored the event wrote a bizarre letter to the Georgetown student newspaper complaing that the speakers made “no effort to make a clear distinction between pure, harmonious Islam, and the acts of a few who falsely claim to act in the name of Islam.”

One of the scholars, Bat Yeor, had an excellent retort to this absurd posture,

This is pure nonsense. When one studies the Inquisition or the Crusades, one does not feel obliged to make a clear distinction between ‘pure’ Christianity and those historical events. In a university, the examination of several analyses of history should be encouraged. The Muslim view is exclusively religion-based, and proceeds from the assumption that there is only one valid interpretation of history: the Islamic one. No criticism of jihad is accepted because it is a just war according to Muslim dogma.

This attitude imposes the worst law of dhimmitude on non-Muslims: the refusal of their evidence. The historical testimony of the millions of human victims of jihad is rejected on its face by this doctrinal attitude.

Dhimmitude, by the way, is Yeor’s term for the system of repression that Islamic sharia law directs at non-Muslims. Under sharia, non-Muslims may not testify against Muslims, may face blasphemy charges for teaching their religion (as happens in Pakistan), and are part of a two-classed legal system analogous to the two-tiered system that Jim Crow laws created for whites and blacks in the United States.

Source:

Damned If You Do. Rod Dreher, National Review Online, October 29, 2002.

Malawi Not Serious About Stemming Corruption

Malawi is one of a number of African countries facing a food crisis. Like other African nations, Malawi has taken to blaming all of its problem on international actors such as the International Monetary Fund. But its behavior suggests that most, if not all of its problems, are internal.

Malawi, for example, has been promising for months that it is finally prepared to seriously tackle official corruption — corruption that was behind the government’s sale of almost 70,000 metric tons of grain at the same time that the government knew it was likely facing shortages.

So Malawi had appointed former accountant-general Gilton Chiwaula to its Anti-Corruption Bureau. But that just created new problems as Chiwaula began to get a handle on corruption and his investigation began to threaten some high-placed officials.

So in October, Chiwaula was quickly fired on the grounds that the former chairman of the regional Southern African Forum Against Corruption was too incompetent and did not adequately understand Malawi’s anti-corruption laws to carry out his duties. This came the same week that the leader of the main opposition party in Malawi was arrested for defaming the president.

Yeah, that Malawi government is certainly serious about tackling corruption.

Source:

Malawi sacks top corruption fighter. Reuters, October 23, 2002.

Paul Wellstone’s Memorial Service . . . Er, Political Rally

First Paul Wellstone’s family were reportedly upset at comments being made by Republicans about Walter Mondale over the weekend, but then they go and turn his memorial service into a three hour political rally. Could they make up their minds in Minnesota?

The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura and his wife, along with Trent Lott, walked out during one of the more heated “if you loved Paul, vote for his replacement speeches.”

The oddest report, however, has to be that Lott and another Republican were jeered when their faces were shown on large television monitors at the memorial service. I’ve seen a lot of things at funerals and memorial services, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of jeering.

I thought former Minnesota Republican representative captured the flair of the event best when he said, “The DFL clearly intends to exploit Wellstone’s memory totally, completely and shamelessly for political gain. To them, Wellstone’s death, apparently, was just another campaign event.”

Source:

Republicans decry service as partisan. Kavita Kumar, Dane Smith and Patricia Lopez, Minnesota Star Tribune, October 30, 2002.

Forty Million in Danger of Starvation

The United Nations recently revised its estimate of the number of people facing food insecurity to 40 million as problems in Africa continue to mount.

In the Horn of Africa alone, 14 million people face starvation unless the World Food Program begins receiving donor aid soon. Ten million of those at risk are in Ethiopia which, like other countries in the region, has been hit hard by drought. According to WFP executive director James Morris,

At least 10 million people will need food aid just in Ethiopia. But if this month’s rains stop early, up to 14 million people there will require urgent assistance.

These figures are large and dramatic and the international community should take notice. Unless we come to grips with this problem very soon we face the real possibility of witnessing a devastating wave of human suffering and death as early as next year.

Morris chalked up the Horn’s problems simply to drought, conveniently ignoring the destabilizing effect of ongoing hostilities between Ethiopia and Eritrea which has made it difficult to sustain an agricultural industry in either country.

Source:

Aid please as Horn of Africa raises hungry to 40m. James Astill, The Guardian, October 29, 2002.