Chad/Darfur/Sudan. Scene of an ongoing and pretty incomprehensible disaster. In June, Save the Children reported that

Over 70 children under the age of five die every day in Darfur

(It’s a fair bet that about 30 of them are probably named Mohammed, of course.)

As Alun pointed out in a comment here, we should maybe start looking at what lies behind the ludicrous Sudanese Toy Story?

I’d like to put all the blame for this on religion, but, I’m something of a materialist and religion is so often just the gloss on real-world struggles over power and wealth.

The UN has reached agreement on sending in a peace-keeping force, according to Associated Press.

U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno warned the Security Council on Tuesday that the Sudanese government is putting up numerous obstacles to the deployment of the so-called “hybrid” force that could destroy the effectiveness of the joint AU-U.N. mission.

Reuters reports that the Sudanese are blaming the UN for the delays. Maybe I am biased but I tend to see the UN point of view as likely to be more accurate. According to Jean-Marie Guehenno, head of the U.N. peacekeeping force, Khartoum is putting conditions which would render the UN force unable to achieve anything.

International experts estimate some 200,000 have died and 2.5 million been driven from their homes in almost five years.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for a junior government minister and a militia leader accused of colluding in war crimes (More from Reuters)

Spanish Inquisitor made some excellent points about the disaster that is the Congo and got some great thought-provoking comments, including ones from the Exterminator, XanderG , Philly Chief and John Evolutionary Middleman the other day.

Although they were discussing the Congo, the issues they talked about apply to the man-made disasters that are increasingly consuming the African continent.

Most of the commenters (being Americans) felt that the USA should do something, although the Iraq debacle didn’t seem like a great model. PhillyChief said, somewhat ironically, “Too bad there’s no oil in Africa.” Tim Little pointed out that there is plenty of oil in Africa in general and a lot of mineral wealth in the Congo.

I have referred to this debate because it expresses where many of us are in relation to the horrors of the world. If we live in the rich countries, we don’t know enough about what is happening elsewhere. These are places we only hear about in terms of war, genocide or political turmoil.

A comment posted here on T_W’s first teddy bear post said:

This is appaling – if she is not freed today I will definately boycot anything Sudanese.

However, I doubt you can find anything Sudanese to boycott. These countries liek Sudan and the Congo are on the very edge of disintegration. And the people are turning on each other, as any people tend to do in the face of social disaster. The insane Islamic stuff is just a part of this process of disintegration.

So given the futility of applying more normal means (like boycotts and tough words at the embassy) of expressing international outrage over the situation in Darfur, all that’s left is the UN.

My feeling here is that the hapless British teacher has been used in the most cynical manner to stir up nationalist outrage, by reference to religion. Governments in Muslim countries are well aware of the ideological power of an appeal to Islam, which provides an opportunity to gather international support in the name of an (imagined) attack on the Prophet.

To misquote Dr Johnson, religion, combined with patriotism, is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

However, the technique is likely to backfire drastically. The rich countries have already gone so far down the road of an inability to distinguish Islam from rabid fundamentalism that most Western populations are starting to assume that any appearance of possible Middle-Eastern descent (as in the case of Jean-Charles de Mendes) implies that an individual is a terrorist.
People in the UK have responded to the Toy Story case with unbelieving shock and anger.

As an irrelevant aside, the suggestion that she was being culturally insensitive and should have known better is utterly mistaken. She was teaching in a Christian school, ffs. Any muslim parents who sent their kids there would have had to accept that they were getting taught by non-muslims. She was clearly English, so she brought her own culture and customs. that is part of the experience of immigrants across the whole world. It’s pretty clear – except to the neo-fascists who use anti-immigration as a rallying cry to bigots – that we all have much to learn (accept/reject) from other people’s backgrounds.

In any case, I can imagine few Muslim families in the UK would stop their children calling their soft toys whatever they chose. Suddenly, not calling your toys after muslim religious figures has become an article of Islamic faith. Have the five pillars of Islamnow become six?

Wikipedia says

The Five Pillars of Islam (Arabic: أركان الإسلام) is the term given to the five duties incumbent on every Muslim. These duties are Shahadah (profession of faith), Salah (ritual prayer), Zakah (alms tax), Sawm (fasting during Ramadan), and Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca)

If I were to add “non-blasphemous naming of soft toys” to the wiki entry, I suspect I’d have a fatwah on my ass before I’d left the page.

Generally speaking, I have a very, very low opinion of newspapers and journalists. I suspect that our supposed desire for 24 hour a day news may be to blame, but the fact is they love to create stories out of nothing, playing on our fears and our preconceptions. Also generalising, I used to think of the Times and the Guardian as being at least reasonably respectable newspapers, where at least some semblance of sensible reporting was taking place. I admit, I may have been a bit naive here.

In yesterday’s Guardian, page 6 and most of page 7 were taken up by an article titled “Do you want Lloyds or HSBC? Account details for sale online” (online version of article). This is a well timed article to play on our fears, both over the missing 25 million HMRC records and our fears about identity theft / online fraudsters emptying our accounts.

Now, I am not for one second trying to say there is no risk or that people do not have their bank accounts hacked and all their money stolen. I just suspect it is a lesser threat to the “average” person than the newspapers make out. In this article, Robert Booth begins with:

It took just 19 hours from first contact with the anonymous Russian fraudster until he collected my $240 (£116.50) payment from a local “drop”.

And then continues, sometimes in the manner of an airport spy novel, to detail how in a short period of time he has found dozens of (mostly Russian) criminal organisations who are selling bank account details for a pittance. It is scary reading. Robert Booth writes about how these “Internet Banking Fraud communities” steal accounts and circulate the details over “untraceable” internet messaging applications like ICQ. (Really, he does write this). He continues writing about his adventures:

The encounter with the anonymous Russian in an internet chatroom was one of scores like it going on at the time. In a separate private message, another vendor promised: “I will give you HSBC full info with 26k Pounds…for $500…When can you wire money?”

The whole (longish) article is like this. There are quotes from people at SOCA, security consultants and the like. All talk about how dangerous the internet is and add to this image of the “Internet bank fraud community” sitting around trading details and earning fortunes as a result:

The community has developed a high level of sophistication so that trusted parties can trade efficiently. In one posting on a forum selling card details a fraudster reports to the rest of the community on the “review” he has conducted of a new entrant to the market.

He has tested his speed of response and accuracy of information supplied and marks him out of 10 for communication, timing and product. “Total: 9/10 nice score,” he concludes and awards the status of “trial vendor”.

Many vendors offer discounts for bulk buyers and even display a replacement policy. If the account details do not work most vendors will replace the data with a different lead. SOCA, which has responsibility for fighting organised internet fraud, has set up a series of cross-border alliances to tackle the problem, but declined to comment on our findings.

Wow. Lock up your bank accounts now! This is scary stuff!

However, you can breathe a sigh of relief gentle reader because, largely, this is a case of a journalist who has fallen for a pretty basic scam. Yes, there is fraud going on here, but the victim isn’t the innocent bank account holder. A simple application of logic (counts most journalists out then) to the basic premise hints at something not being as it seems.

Imagine this, you are a techno-savvy criminal who has gone to all the trouble to acquire account details which will allow you to empty £26,000 from a strangers account. You have done this without anyone knowing or being able to trace it was you. Would you then sit on the account details until another complete stranger got in touch with you and sent you US$500?

What sane criminal is going to turn down the £26,000 (US$52,000) and take one hundredth of that instead. The risk to the cyber-crook remain, he has just given up 99% of his potential monetary gain. In fact, if anything, his risks have escalated significantly because he now has to contend with police sting operations.

It is madness to suggest that these account details are really being sold online for such pitiful sums of money. Cyber criminals who hack into bank accounts will either empty them there and then, or use them for their own ends. Selling the details on to random internet strangers is completely stupid.

Just to underscore my point, the Guardian article finishes with this bit of reassurance:

As sobering as the trade in stolen identities has become, there was a crumb of comfort last night for the Halifax account holder whose details the Russian fraudster was peddling. Twelve hours after the payment had been withdrawn from a Siberian wire office, the Guardian was still waiting for the promised bank details.

So, in reality, I suspect this is the more common type of fraud. People who want to be cyber-criminals but lack the technical knowledge to manage it are being conned by other cyber-criminals who at least have the brains to pretend to be able to do something. The best frauds work by playing on the victim’s greed and willingness to commit criminal acts – I mean if someone is conned into paying £116.50 for illegally gained bank details, who can they complain to?