You know, we hate to disillusion Nursultan Nazarbayev, but his authoritarian state really doesn't need Borat to give it a bad name. ISCKON is the "Hare Krishna" movement, rather than mainstream Hindus, but that doesn't make this episode smell much better. Neither does the fact that (as Press Trust of India notes) India's reactionary BJP is predictably exploiting the issue. From the Indo-Asian News Service, Nov. 22:

It is vindicating that French complicity in the 1994 Rwanda genocide is finally coming to light. But it was actually Paris' tit-for-tat of a judicial order for the arrest of Rwandan military officers following Rwandan charges of French support for the genocidaires that pushed the affair into the headlines by provoking Kigali to expell the French ambassador. The French judge has also called for Rwanda's President Paul Kagame to face a UN tribunal for his alleged role in the plane crash that sparked the genocide. Some 25,000 rallied in support of Kagame in Kigali following the judge's call. (Jurist, Nov. 23). Now, is it possible that Kagame's forces really did shoot down the plane? Of course it is—just like it is possible that a lone Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe burned down the Reichstag in 1933. And if it is true, it will be just as meaningless—notwithstanding the claims of the French Rwanda-revisionists and their useful idiots.

Now this is pretty depressing. Pakistan finally moves to overturn the atrocious anti-woman Hudood ordinances, under which women are punished for "adultery" if they report a rape. The Islamist opposition links backlash against this long-belated bit of progress with (legitimate) calls for democratization. This exemplifies how the US can do no good in this part of the world: the State Department doubtless pressured the Musharraf dictatorship to do away with the Hudood ordinances, to give Washington's GWOT ally a minimally plausible imprimatur of secularism. But because it happens in the context of a military regime being pressured by its imperial patron, this allows the would-be jihadist totalitarians to dress up their clerical reactionary agenda as a pro-democracy struggle. And even elements of the idiot left in the West get confused. From the Pakistan Tribune, Nov. 25:

Now here's an hilarious conundrum for the idiot left that cheers on reactionary Islamism as heroic anti-imperialism. Are we supposed to oppose this garbage when conservative Christians do it in the US, but support it when conservative Muslims do it in Turkey? From Reuters, Nov. 23:

From Cuba's Prensa Latina, Nov. 24 (we've annotated, and clarified their typically poor English):

Members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) charged national leaders with genocide and force[d] disappearance at the [federal] Attorney General's Office [PGR] Friday.

From Reuters, Nov. 25:

MADRID - Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison's former U.S. commander said in an interview on Saturday.

From Reuters, Nov. 23:

BOGOTA - Colombia's right-wing militia leaders on Thursday called for the establishment of a truth commission that would allow them to reveal who collaborated in their illegal war against left-wing rebels.

Is it civil war yet? You tell us. Commentators have weaseled out of calling it that by making an arbitrary litmus test the fracturing of the "unity government"—even if that government has little real power and violence on the ground is approching Bosnia '95 levels. Now, it seems, even that litmus test is about to fail. From Lebanon's Daily Star, Nov. 25: