In today’s Guardian, the fearless Oliver Kamm ventures into choppy waters with a qualified defence of rendition:

The principled objection to rendition is that it stands outside legal process, and the rule of law is the best means we have of constraining arbitrary authority by our own governments. But there is no supranational sovereign authority that can effectively implement the body of international law. After 9/11, peace campaigners urged a judicial approach to bring the perpetrators to justice. What they would have advised if Osama bin Laden had unaccountably declined to turn himself in was never put to the test…

There is an important role for Britain, whose commitment to the war on terror (a phrase I use without irony because it is accurate) is beyond dispute, to intercede with the US administration. There should be no rendition to autocracies whose word on the issue of torture is untrustworthy, such as Syria. Renditions should be used only in extreme cases, against those suspected of directly plotting terrorist acts. The country to which they are transferred must exercise due process under its own laws.

But Europeans have a responsibility too. We are the beneficiaries of American efforts to disrupt terrorism. Diplomacy on the issue of rendition should deal with anticipating and preventing abuses. It should not be an opportunity for hyperventilation on the identity of the hated Bush-Cheney regime and our declared theocratic enemies.

Naturally, rumblings ensue. One comment in particular caught my eye as it distils what might be thought of as the very essence of a Guardianista worldview:

The entire rendition process is about the desire to feed and sustain the sadistic fantasies of that perverse constituency which amuses itself with the Threat of Terror and the War against Evil. The victims themselves are merely stage props in this public demonstration of the anger and power and implacable stupidity of the Empire… Only by reducing international society to a clash between cultures and races can the neo-conservatives prevent people from coming together to deal with the real problems, poverty, disease, environmental degradation…

Ah, bless.

What’s interesting to me is how the subject is currently being discussed on the Guardian’s own moderated website, or rather reacted against, very often with wholesale fantasy. For every partially serious response to a particular point, there are two, perhaps three, comments that are unhinged and simply perverse, albeit in a broadly similar way. I stopped counting after a dozen different commenters asserted, smugly, that no war against terrorism exists, or that the West shouldn’t have made efforts to defend itself, or that the US is some kind of fascist autocracy, or that Osama bin Laden and his associates weren’t responsible for 9/11, or that the US government killed its own citizens for unspecified reasons, or that Bush and Blair are morally indistinguishable from homicidal jihadists. As a thumbnail sketch of Guardianista opinion, or a large part thereof, these reactions are worth noting. 

Ibn Warraq reviews Caroline Fourest’s Brother Tariq: the Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.

Fourest reveals Ramadan’s art of duplicity, which encompasses an entire repertoire of rhetorical subterfuges, from doublespeak and equivocation to euphemism and lies of omission. Ramadan claims that he accepts the law in Western democracies — so long as the law “does not force me to do something in contradiction with my religion.” He calls the terrorist acts in New York, Madrid, and Bali “interventions.” He claims to be a “reformist,” but defines the term to exclude the concept of “liberal reformism.” He tells a television audience that he believes in the theory of evolution, but neglects to mention that his book, Is Man Descended from the Apes? A Muslim View of the Theory of Evolution, argues for creationism…

That Ramadan is an impostor is evident even in the titles that he freely accords himself. He claims that he is “Professor of Islamic Studies (Faculty of Theology at Oxford),” and the biography in the inside flap of his Western Muslims and the Future of Islam describes him as “Professor of Philosophy at the College of Geneva and Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.” But as journalist Gudrun Eussner has shown, Ramadan is merely a research fellow at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, where has given just three lectures. Nor is he a professor at Geneva, especially not at the university there. He was a teacher at a sub-university level in the Collège Saussure, and he served as a “scholarly associate” at the University of Fribourg, teaching a two-hour course every two weeks, “Introduction to Islam.”

Ramadan has been described by Theodore Dalrymple as “the second-hand car salesman of Islamic fundamentalism” – which seems a tad unfair to salesmen of used cars. For more on Brother Tariq’s habitual dissembling, and the contortions of his left-leaning groupies, see here.

Related. And. (h/t, Andrew Bostom.)

Via Protein Wisdom, The Thin Man sends us this. Readers may spot a thematic link with the previous post. 

After recent terrorist attacks, Spanish police are in no mood for leniency. This man picked the wrong time and the wrong way to try to support his drug habit.

Further to recent comments on the ideological disdain of territory, this may be relevant. Over at Harry’s Place, David T says something I find bizarre. In discussing the Nassim Saadi deportation case and its broader implications, he says,

I think it is quite right that we should not deport individuals to countries where they will be tortured. A country which deports – or even connives in the rendition of – a person who they know or suspect will be tortured bears moral responsibility for any torture which takes place. If you oppose torture in all circumstances, as you should, then it does not do to argue that your country bears no guilt for what happens after deportation.

This is quite a remarkable bundle of claims and one that’s often asserted wholesale rather than argued. Why doesn’t it do? One might, for instance, take the view that a person of foreign citizenship convicted of serious crimes, whether they include terrorism or not, has broken a fundamental covenant with the host society. And thus, one might argue, the conditional protections extended to visitors by that society are forfeit. Tax payers could conceivably have moral objections to paying for the food, medicines and accommodation of foreign prisoners intent on doing them harm, and possibly spreading their intentions among others, either in prison or at large.

In light of that, expulsion from the host society seems a not unreasonable consequence and certainly within the realm of consideration. If a person facing expulsion runs the risk of ill-treatment, even torture, by third parties overseas, it’s not exactly clear why that should imply some vicarious moral responsibility. (Though one could argue it may discourage foreign nationals from committing serious crimes in the first place.) Awareness that such acts may or may not take place in other countries doesn’t imply that one condones those acts. It merely implies one no longer feels an obligation to protect an unwelcome and hostile visitor from the actions of third parties. Indeed, in instances of egregious criminality, including terrorism and attempted terrorism, I suspect quite a few people would be happy to see the perpetrators dropped into international waters and allowed to fend for themselves, to whatever extent they can.

Update: More in the comments.

Update 2: Over at Harry’s Place, Brett Lock is angry.

I am angry because there is more public debate about the rights of terrorists and criminals facing deportation than there seems to be for genuine, innocent and vulnerable people.

I wonder whether legitimate asylum seekers might fare better in their applications, and their welcome, if the broader public was reassured that visitors who abuse such favours could be expelled without great difficulty.   

Cath Elliott shares her wisdom in today’s Comment is Cheap Free. The self-proclaimed feminist and trades union activist targets an Aspen Times column by Gary Hubbell, whose grumbling about the presidential candidates’ alleged pandering to special interest groups is promptly, and inevitably, compared to that of the BNP. What catches the eye, though, is Elliott’s highlighting of this passage from Hubbell’s article:

Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock. He recoils at the mere sight of her on television. Her very image disgusts him, and he cannot fathom why anyone would want her as their leader.

A fair point, one might think. Much as many have recoiled from the current incumbent of the White House, due in part to his limited ability to convey whatever thought processes may take place behind his eyes. Ms Elliott adds,

This isn’t because she’s a woman, he goes on to say, but because she is who she is.

Again, sounds like a fair point. My own impression of Hillary Clinton is of a shrill and dissembling harpy forever peddling victimhood – quite often her own – and struggling with rather vengeful authoritarian urges. Pointing that out says nothing in particular about the rest of womankind, at least among those of us who think in terms of individuals, not symbols of some designated group. However, Ms Elliott disagrees: 

I for one don’t believe him. Hubbell and his new-found cheerleaders across the net give the game away when they reserve the worst of their ire for Hillary Clinton. This isn’t about a crisis of identity for poor working class men; it’s a defence of masculinity and a last desperate effort to cling on to the power that men have enjoyed for centuries. Just another anti-Hillary misogynist rant, then.

And nothing at all like a hackneyed far left rant against the “defence of masculinity” – which, as every good-hearted person knows, is an unspeakable vice and almost certainly a cover for something more unspeakable still. But hold on a minute. Does this mean that we men folk aren’t allowed to take a dim view of a presidential candidate if she happens to be a woman? What about Clinton’s female critics – do they get some special license to be unkind by virtue of having internal genitalia? What about men who dislike Hillary Clinton but quite like Condoleezza Rice? And, by the same thinking, does any disparaging of Cath Elliott immediately signal misogyny and oppression, regardless of what claptrap falls from her mouth? Are quasi-Marxist power dramas and the dislike of an entire gender the only conceivable motives here? And if I point out that Ms Elliott looks and sounds like an Eighties cliché, is that just my desperate attempt to cling to masculine power? I think we should be told.