Suicide Bombing: Dossier. posted by lenin

I intend this post to be as informative as it can be while also remaining as concise as possible. A list of references will be provided at the end, and specific challenges or queries will be dealt with as usual in comments boxes or by e-mail.

The old strategies for explaining suicide bombers range from the idiotic to the inadequate: they hate our freedom, they're just jealous, they hate us for being infidels, they are fascists, they have a perverted ideology, they are Muslims, they are desperate, poor and ignorant, they are anti-globalisation, they are psychophaths, they are brainwashed etc etc. Of these, you can probably surmise which ones are inadequate and which are foolish.

Religion.
Take religion. One way of conceiving religion as a causal factor is to see it as part of a 'clash of civilisations', pace Huntington and Scheuer, in which most Muslims either support, accept or acquiesce in suicidal attacks on civilian targets on the West (the 'West' is a poorly defined concept, but let's say for now that it includes Europe, the US, Israel, Australia and some non-Western capitalist powers). This has, I have noted, involved some rather ludicrous distortions of evidence as well as grand extrapolations from limited bases of data. As far as we know, while most Saudi citizens agree with the pre-eminent political goal of Al Qaeda, and while most Palestinians appear to support suicide attacks on Israel, there isn't a great deal of support among Muslims for Al Qaeda or any of its confederates. A tiny fraction of Muslims have actually been involved in terrorism of any kind, and a much smaller number have been involved in suicide attacks. This is ABC stuff, and it leads us directly to the next conception: the Bush-Blair explanation.

Aside from the dim-witteries about hating freedom and "killing people for the sake of it" (as Tony Blair incredibly explained last week), the usual strategy is to say that these people are a benighted, hate-filled minority putting their own malign twist on Islam. If this misses the destructive pre-potency of religion itself, it also manages to omit from analysis the largest bulk of suicide missions that have taken place across the world over the last twenty-five years. Of 535 missions that took place between 1980 and 2003, 191 were carried out in Sri Lanka by secular Marxist groups. Further, of the 224 that took place in Israel, Lebanon and Palestine, a substantial number were carried out by non-religious political groups. Similarly, a number were carried out by the Marxist PKK in Turkey. (Sidenote: about twenty of the 535 attacks took place in Iraq in 2003 alone). The first suicide attacks to take place in Israel were a small number carried out by al-Fatah and the PFLP-GC. The latest wave of suicide bombings in Israel began a few months after the failure of Camp David, launched by the secular Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade, and off-shoot of Fatah. The religion of the Tamil minority is Hinduism, which does involve a notion of reincarnation, but it is rejected by the Black Tigers, the elite outfit within the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In fact, while the idiom used by the LTTE is Marxist, and the iconography Guevarist, the most striking emphasis of the group is on nationalism. The history establishes fairly conclusively that religion is not a necessary factor in the incidence of suicide bombings.

Similarly, the beginning of the very large spate of suicide attacks that began in the 1980s, and which preceded use of the tactic by the LTTE, was initiated by the Lebanese opposition to Israel: this included Hizbollah, but also the secular Baath-Leb, LCP and SSNP. It was a series of extraordinarily efficacious attacks by these groups on US marines, French peacekeepers and Israeli army outposts that secured the withdrawal of those marines and the retreat of the Israeli army to a small strip of land in Southern Lebanon in 1985, which they finally abandoned after severe military pressure in 2000. But here again, although the strategies of justification were often religious, the attacks wound down shortly after Israel's evacuation of the central zone of Lebanon. It appears to have been less the enabling fixtures of religion that inspired those suicide attacks than their efficiency at killing, (and thus evacuating an occupying force). Robert Pape notes that while suicide attacks amounted to only 3% of terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2001, they accounted for 48% of total casualties from terrorism.

From what we know about the attacks on 9/11, we are entitled to infer that while religious commitments provided some of the context for the motivation, and also facilitated the missions by reducing cognitive dissonance, suppressing the fear of death and so on, the main causes lay elsewhere. For instance, Mohammed Atta, having grown up in a middle class family in Egypt, does not appear to have been an especially devout Muslim until he moved to Germany to continue his studies as a city-planner. He seems to have experienced some culture-shock: from being an educated person of some status to being an ignored or scorned outsider; from being surrounded by a relatively puritan environment to a liberal anything-goes place like Hamburg etc. He reacted by becoming more devout. At the same time, he was reportedly filled with fury by the oppressiveness of the Egyptian state and the indifference of the opulent elite to the plight of the poor. He treated colleagues to several earfuls about this, and about the US and the Middle East autocracies. He said that Egypt was being opened up to market capitalism, regardless of the real needs of the people. He complained that Egyptian universities were nepotistic and that the nation had been sold out to the US. In this, a mixture of vicarious outrage and personal affront at his own difficulties in Egypt and Europe can be seen as supplying the initial fuel for his later atrocity. His complaints were secular, rather than religious. They acquired the mould and fashion of religion, it seems, as he met with radical imams in the al-Quds mosque - who expressed a bellicose message against the US, the Middle East tyrannies and Israel - and became interested in becoming a martyr. It presumably required more than interest or desire to see him through, of course: training in camps in Afghanistan (organisational and doctrinal) will have also been among the necessary causes. (Curious detail: he seems to have also had an aversion to high-rise buildings, believing their presence in Arab towns and cities to be an example of the Western incursion).

Moreover, 'martyrdom' in Islam doesn't include self-murder (which is haram), and it has taken some contortions by bin Laden and his supporters to pretend that the act of slamming a plane into a high-rise tower is actually not suicide. On top of that, the motivations of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, albeit that they distantly involve 're'constituting an Islamic nation based on the Caliphate, are oriented around concrete, secular grievances, which Scheuer notes: the presence of US troops on the Arabian pensinsula, the unconditional support for Israel, the blockade of Iraq (Scheuer wrote before the war in 2003), US support for Russia, China and India in various battles with Muslims, support for corrupt Middle Eastern oligarchies. None of which, to avoid some obvious and deliberate misinterpretation, is to credit bin Laden or his associates as a vanguard for Muslim grievances. It is to say that these grievances, whether expressed in a befuddled and hypocritical fashion or not, are not simply duplicitous or deployed instrumentally to win Muslims over. In fact, it is widely suspected that bin Laden's sympathy for the Palestinian cause is opportunistic and belated - but Scheuer notes that it was expressed long before it was taken note of and rejected by Palestinians. The groups that orient around themselves around bin Laden (and now, perhaps, Zarqawi) cannot be simply assumed to be lying about these motives: that they are serious in their rejection of (real and imagined) injustice doesn't necessarily serve to make their actions more just.

Poverty, globalisation, ignorance, despair, personality disorders.
One of the least compelling attempts at a left-wing explanation for suicide bombings has been Dr Caroline Lucas' repeated claims on television that poverty is responsible. Well, if it is a causal factor, it seems to be largely indirect - as in Atta's outrage on behalf of the Egyptian poor. There appear to be deep structural causes that have to do with declining social mobility in Arab countries and the neoliberal doctrine that many of them are importing. However, the profile of the typical suicide bomber - even in Palestine - would be almost threadbare except for the fact that most appear to be male, early twenties, childless, well-educated and have higher incomes than the reference population. They also tend to be psychologically normal and certainly not suicidally depressive, for reasons I will come to. This is not usually the poor lashing out, although it is suggested that in Palestine pecuniary reasons may be involved because of martyrdom allowances. Simply in order to conduct such attacks, certainly on a global scale such as we are seeing recently, one needs to have unusually high levels of intelligence, (the ability to master languages, technical details, learn new skills, quickly absorbe planning information etc etc). And in fact, if the implication is that the actions are carried out in a state of despair at one's own condition, the answer appears to be that suicide bombers are specifically recruited on the basis that they do have an interest in this world and this life. This is partially to efface the ideological stress involved in Muslims committing suicide, but it also has to do with group workings - the absorption of a psychotically violent or seriously disturbed individual into the group would actually destabilise it and risk exposure among other things.

The other thing, as Pape notes, is that this explanation (poverty/despair/mental illness) involves subscribing to a view that the perpetrators act egoistically. Typically, however, they act altruistically - try not to fall off your stool, this is serious. Just like the Kamikaze warriors, the people who tend to carry out suicide attacks do so with what they undoubtedly consider to be noble intentions. This is another point about the selection of candidates - suicide bombing is a message as much as an act, and part of the message is that the individuals are engaged in these acts precisely are not acting out of pathological concerns, but are so outraged by injustice that they will sacrifice themselves.

That isn't the end of the 'despair' argument, however. Luca Ricolfi notes (Gambetta, 2005) that despair of a very particular kind is certainly an animating factor in Palestinian suicide bombings. Citing research by a Palestinian economist, B. Saleh, which shows almost all suicide bombers having been subjected directly to arrest or maltreatment by the IDF, and a good number having had a family member killed, he notes that compounding the desire for revenge is indifference to death. That is, the extreme repression in Palestine produces a "drastic, extreme and tragic contraction of an individual's set of options". Material deprivation leaves individuals with "literally nothing to do or imagine", while specific repression can "generate a progressive dismantling of a person's emotional world" in which "reality has shrunk to a minimum" and is replaced by a highly mental world of symbols and fantasies. Here, liberal economic theory does not hold: man does not always pursue his own immediate interests in such a situation, and such a society. The moral priority of the community over the individual can lead people thus deprived to be willing to sacrifice themselves. Other research produces similar conclusions, as Jacqueline Rose notes:

According to Eyad El-Sarraj, the founder and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, today's suicide attackers are, for the most part, children of the first intifada. Studies show that during the first uprising, 55 per cent of children saw their fathers being humiliated or beaten by Israeli soldiers. Martyrdom - sacrificing oneself for God - increases its appeal when the image of the earthly father bites the dust. 'It's despair,' El-Sarraj states baldly, 'a despair where living becomes no different from dying.' When life is constant degradation, death is the only source of pride. 'In 1996, practically all of us were against the martyr operations,' Kamal Aqeel, the acting mayor of Khan Yunis in Gaza, explains. 'Not any longer . . . We all feel that we can no longer bear the situation as it is; we feel that we'd simply explode under all this pressure of humiliation.'

Fascism, perverted ideology, brainwashing.
One comical aspect of some of the pro-war Left's attempts to efface Blair's co-responsibility for the terror in London has been the ridiculous idea of privileging a 'fascist' ideology as the leading causal factor. Those who debase the word fascist in this way are neither good anti-fascists, nor good analysts of the movements which are under consideration. But leaving aside the academic (though not scholastic) distinctions about precisely what counts as fascism, what we are interested in here is the idea that an ideology of some description is the chief causal factor in the readiness to kill civilians, particularly in the ways that we have seen in New York, Bali, Turkey, Madrid and now London. It is already fairly well established that the tactic of suicide bombing has been used by a variety of groups, with distinct ideologies. There have been different Marxisms, different secularisms, different Islams involved (Al Qaeda appear to be Sunni, but Hizbollah are Shi'ite). The fact is that in each case the ideology does not seem to have been decisive in the decision to use suicide missions. Similarly, no suicide bombers have come from Iran as yet, which is the scene of a particularly reactionary brand of Islamist rule.

Perhaps, however, it will be argued that this specific kind of ideology, and this specific kind of Islamism contains such a noxious mixture of fanaticism, Occidentalist fantasy, vengeful bloodlust, delusion etc that no injustice need contribute to the decision to kill except in a marginal way. There is, in fact, a correlation between the origin of suicide bombers and the practise of Wahabbist Sunni Islam. Pape notes that Al Qaeda suicide attackers are twice as likely to come from a country where such an ideology is widespread than not. However, he also notes that a) Somalia, which was ideologically so convivial to bin Laden that he spent several years there with a few thousand fellow-travellers, has produced no suicide bombers, and b) a stronger correlation shows that Al Qaeda suicide-bombers are ten times more likely to come from a country with US troops stationed in it than not. This obviously does not mean that ideology has no weight of its own, or that the presence of foreign troops is the sole condition necessary for the production of suicide hit squads. It does suggest, at the very least, that the single cause overdetermining the others, is a nationalist response to a perceived injustice against the nation, just as it is in almost every other case of suicide attack. The fact that these attackers may emerge from countries not directly to do with the nation on whose behalf they believe they are acting is only tangentially relevant: nationalism involves an 'imagined community', and if the nation in question is the 'Islamic nation' or the Umma, then the reaction is likely to be just the same as it would be if the nation was Palestine, Kurdistan, Lebanon etc etc. The ideology has its importance in that it puts in an Islamic idiom what might otherwise be expressed in a nationalist or Marxist idiom. As Stephen Holmes suggests, (Gambetta, 2005), many radicalised young men are attracted to the Islamists simply because they appear to be the ones making a call to arms. The decline of the other two big battalions - nationalism and Marxism - has simply made this ideology more attractive than it might otherwise be.

It remains to be demonstrated just to what extent ideology has a role in preparing people for suicide attacks, but it seems on the information prevently available to be less important than specified material conditions. The final thing to think about is that the enabling cognitive processes are not always to do with the ideology which provides the general background and interprets the reasons for going to war. Certain aspects of the willingness to kill have to do with martial 'virtues', honour and so forth. The people who blow themselves up invariably do so in the belief that they are soldiers, licensed to kill on behalf of their aggrieved community. The idea that soldiers should only try to kill people on a designated field of combat is actually a fairly recent exiguous constraint in international law, (and rarely adhered to at that). The self-description as a soldier is obviously easier in cases like Sri Lanka, Chechnya and Palestine where there is a community of support for such attackers, and where there is a video message and posthumous glorification. But it still seems to obtain in the cases of often rootless and alienated individuals, angered by injustice, and attracted to extreme variants of Islamism because of that.


Summary.
Suicide bombing as a tactic is used by various groups in diverse circumstances, but usually as a highly efficient means of combatting a perceived transgressor in nationalist terms. Religion and other ideological apparati do help facilitate self-murder and the murder of others, but as a motivational cause they seem to be inadequate on their own. Similarly, organisations provide cash and opportunity for carrying out such attacks, but not the desire. The variety of motivating factors seem to be overdetermined in the case of the London bombings by a rejection not of what the West is, but what it does. If the West's actions were just, this would simply be a stark Manichean case of good versus evil. Instead, what we appear to have is injustice generating recruits for unjust actions.


Sources: Diego Gambetta, ed, Making Sense of Suicide Missions, 2005; Robert Pape interviewed by Scott Horton ; Jacqueline Rose on suicide bombers ; Jason Burke, Al Qaeda: The true story of radical Islam, 2004; Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, 2004.

Can't win, won't win. posted by lenin

According to a majority of the American public, the US cannot win the war in Iraq . A majority in another poll says Bush deliberately misled the public on weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the US labor movement has demanded the "rapid withdrawal" of US troops from Iraq - this after a lengthy tour of the US by various Iraqi unions, including the IFTU whose love for the occupation dared not speak its name.

All of which could be somehow connected to the decision to withdraw a number of troops from Iraq. The Iraqi Puppet Minister has announced that he would like the US to withdraw "speedily" - about as speedily as next Spring. He did so, of course, just as a US commander was talking about beginning to withdraw troops next Spring . While both the US and Jaffari have insisted that this depends on a reduction of insurgent activity between now and then - surely that will come after the US withdraws - paradoxically, there is an admission that it is highly unlikely that the insurgency will have abated in any way by that point. US military analysts say that while the bulk of suicide bombings can be accounted for by the minority of 'foreign fighters' in Iraq, the armed resistance is gaining an increasing ability to "kill at all levels" . Much as this may involve a deliberate distortion of the reality on the ground (see passim ), it is undoubtedly the case that both the Salafist elements and the nationalist resistance are gaining in efficacy . And current troop levels, so the news reports, are below what would be necessary to successfully fight the resistance.

Dissent at home, losing in Iraq, troops being reduced from an apparently perilously low level, the withdrawal from Saudi Arabia ... I'm almost tempted to suggest that the US is trying to appease Al Qaeda. But but but. The troop withdrawals on the US side ae conceivably a well-timed concession to reality, but they are not the beginning of a process of disengagement: as I've suggested before , a large number of US troops are likely to stay until kicked out, otherwise several huge permanent military bases are going to go to waste. The gesture is of course desgined to address dissent in the US military and at home. The other thing is, the withdrawal from Saudi Arabia is of course designed to help the Saudi regime pacify internal dissent, not satisfy Al Qaeda's demands, since the latter have always phrased their demand in terms of the Arabian peninsula - according to author Robert Pape, moving them to Iraq or Qatar is a distinction without a difference for them, since the national boundaries referred to were created by the British Empire.

However, there is a shift in rhetoric coterminous with a declared alteration of strategy for the US. The phrase "war on terror" is to be abandoned , apparently, in favour of "global struggle against violent extremism". That's a significant hostage to fortune, since the neoconservative White House is the global leader in violent extremism. The point of the change, apparently, is that it underlines the case that armed groups who use terrorism cannot be defeated by purely military means - rather, the social, political and economic causes of terrorism must be addressed. There is to be a general 'struggle' with global extremism, one that involves exertion at all levels. Washington's cause, once strictly a military crusade, is now a jihad in Christian drag. And its wars of terror are beginning to look as much like suicide as murder.

Secret Smile. posted by lenin

Some don't bother to conceal glee in extreme, ruthless violence. In one of Bush's 'State of the Union' addresses, he addressed the controversy over the assassination of some alleged 'terrorists' with a snigger and the words: "Let's just say they won't be a threat to us and our allies any more". I'm paraphrasing from memory, of course. From Bush, this is all too predictable. Having grown up in the most reactionary part of West Texas, with its Klan history, its culture of patriarchy, hierarchy, frontiersman-style exploitation of people and environment and its casual racism, he has an easy affinity with the cracker-asshole voter. Being a C-student, a failed businessman and a recovered alcoholic, he has open lines of communication with millions more. A family lineage that hails from the East Coast aristocracy also leaves its mandarin disdain for the poor, the subterranean and the insurgent. So, it is no surprise that the only truly elevating moments in a Bush speech are those in which he exhibits his taste for killing and whupping ass (or, since some readers will insist, 'arse').

The citation of a column sound-bite from Lord Stevens ("the brain must be destroyed instantly, utterly") prompted one commenter to note that he could practically hear the old pervert's gums beating together. Indeed, it did seem rather salacious. All of which led Mark Kaplan at Long Sunday to remark that:

It’s not just that the secret enjoyment of violence can be passed off as mere neutral description, smuggled in under guise of realism or whatever, and therefore disowned. Hard-nosed unsentimental description isn’t merely the alibi for an obscene enjoyment. The clinical neutrality of the description, the uncompromisingly unsentimental tone is itself the very object enjoyed. To talk about murder, death, suffering in purely technical, medical or scientific terms already constitutes a brutalism of its own, a tone so neutral as to be itself a kind of cold violence. Paradoxically, what is enjoyed is the very elimination of affect.

Unto which :

"Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who's in charge."

...

"Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too."

...

"It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road, and war-related factory has to be targeted."

And :

"He was the author of his own misfortune."

Further :

"Stuff happens".

Finally :

“The biggest mistake was not to properly prepare the public for the sustained campaign of violence facing the country. Even when Mr. Menezes was thought to be a bomber, witnesses were shocked by the ferocity with which he was killed. More should have been done to prepare the public for the forceful response needed to protect them.”

Unanswered questions. posted by lenin

SW has a couple of questions for the Metropolitan Police. I actually have a few for them as well.

Namely:

1) Why is a murder suspect being sent on holiday as opposed to being arrested and detained, pending bail? Is there any possibility he'll be holidaying in Gonzaga?

2) Will the Menezes family also be offered a holiday? Do they have to kill anyone, or is that just a perk of working for the Metropolitan Police?

3) Why does a totally innocent man get 8 bullets while a suspected bomber who does actually have a rucksack on his person merely get 50,000 volts in the ass ?

4) How can the Chief Police Commissioner announce with equanimity that so far, there have been 250 other 'incidents' and seven near killings - how many of these have actually involved anyone associated with terrorism?

5) Since when was it the physiologically case that to prevent movement of the hands it was necessary to "destroy the brain instantly, utterly"? Ever heard of hand-cuffs? How about disabling the arms? The cunning use of physical restraint?

I hope an officer can stop by and help me out with those.

Update on Jerry Hicks. posted by lenin

There's a good summary of the background and developments in this dispute here . However, I received a more up-to-date account in my inbox this morning.

What we now know is that yesterday a number of Convenors went to Rolls Royce's headquarters in London to have talks with the management. Returning, they discussed the situation with Jerry Hicks, and subsequently a recommendation was put to the still striking workers to "return to work in order for a ballot of the Bristol Test manual employees to take place as quickly as possible. This recommendation was proposed, voted on and accepted."

The company will have been informed of the decision to ballot for industrial action today. The ballot will take place between 3rd and 11th August, and an Interim Relief application has been filed on Jerry Hicks' behalf.

You can still send messages of support to jw1610@blueyonder.co.uk and copy them to Amicus general secretary Derek Simpson at derek.simpson@amicustheunion.org. And also, it wouldn't hurt to take Socialist Worker's advice and "Bombard Rolls Royce with fax messages, phone calls and letters of protest. Send your letters to Rolls Royce International, 65 Buckingham Gate, London, SW1E 6AT, phone 020 7222 9020, or fax 020 7227 9178." And if you're really keen, you can "Download the collection sheet from the SWP website at www.swp.org.uk , print it off and take it around your workplace, fellow trade unionists and campaigners".

Things to remember. posted by lenin

Just been sent this excellent piece :

Here are some other important things to remember in thinking about the police actions of 22 July:
(1) There is no general legal duty to assist the police or to obey police instructions. Rice v Connolly [1966] 2 QB 414.
(2) There are special police powers to arrest and search. But there is no special police licence to injure or kill. If they injure or kill, the police need to rely on the same law as the rest of us.
(3) The law allows those who use force in prevention of crime to use only necessary and proportionate force. Jack Straw and Sir Ian Blair say that officers are under great pressure. But this is no excuse. In law, as in morality, being under extra pressure gives us no extra latitude for error in judging how much force is proportionate or necessary. R v Clegg [1995] 1 A.C. 482.
(4) Arguably, the police should be held to higher standards of calm under pressure than the rest of us. Certainly not lower!
(5) The necessity and proportionality of the police use of force is to be judged on the facts as they believed them to be: R v Williams 78 Cr. App R 276. This does create latitude for factual error. In my view it creates too much latitude. The test should be reasonable belief. The police may be prejudiced like the rest of us, and may treat the fact that someone is dark-skinned as one reason to believe that he is a suicide bomber. But in court this reason should not count.
(6) It is no defence in law that the killing was authorised by a superior officer. A superior officer who authorises an unlawful killing is an accomplice. R v Clegg [1995] 1 A.C. 482.
(7) The fact that those involved were police officers is irrelevant to the question of whether to prosecute them. It is a basic requirement of the Rule of Law that, when suspected of crimes, officials are subject to the same policies and procedures as the rest of us.
(8) Some people say: Blame the terrorists, not the police. But blame is not a zero-sum game. The fact that one is responding to faulty actions doesn't mean one is incapable of being at fault oneself. We may blame Tony Blair for helping to create the conditions in which bombing appeals to people, without subtracting any blame from the bombers. We may also blame the bombers for creating the conditions in which the police act under pressure, without subtracting blame from the police if they overreact. Everyone is responsible for their own faulty actions, never mind the contribution of others. This is the moral position as well as the position in criminal law.

Read it all, it's invaluable.

Secrets & Lies. posted by lenin

The more that comes out on the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, the more questions that are raised.

Latest news says that he was shot eight times , seven to the head and one to the shoulder. Aside from the fact that this sounds like overkill to me, I would have thought that it was extremely dangerous to shoot someone you suspect of being strapped up with bombs in the body.

At yesterday's well-attended vigil outside Stockwell tube station (one of a number of such events to have taken place), an RMT official confirmed news reports that a tube driver had a gun pointed at his head by police. Did they imagine that RMT drivers were agents of Al Qaeda, or does this point to a total lack of control on the part of the coppers concerned?

Despite what was initially claimed by police, Mr Menezes was followed all the way from Tulse Hill after leaving a block of flats which was being monitored. He was followed, despite the fact that they didn't know precisely which flat they were monitoring. They allowed him to board a bus - no danger to the public there. They now say they challenged him when he tried to buy a tube ticket. Yet, at least one witness has said that when they chased him the police did not identify themselves as police. All they did was don caps reading 'Police' - well, I hope they had it printed backwards so the guy could read it in his mirrors.

I was in the station yesterday, so I got a fairly good idea of how the route was supposed to pan out (tried to take a pic of the vigil where it was visible from in front of the ticket gates at the usual entrance, but the staff didn't like it). He's alleged to have hopped over the ticket gates, ran across the concourse, dropped down into the escalator, scrambled down a whole flight of stairs with police in hot pursuit, turned the corner onto the platform, tripped into the train, been landed on by two blue boys and then been shot. Okay, so he's got right down into the bowels of the tube system and not detonated himself. They've got him on the ground, and piled onto his back, still no explosion. Perhaps that would have been the time to grab him by his hands and yank up his coat to check for explosives, no? I mean, in the interests of not murdering anyone without at least getting a peek at the evidence first? And having seen the evidence, it might be a good idea to spare the guy's life so you can have a chat with him, mano e mano.

It sounds like a vengeful Dirty Harry scenario to me. Who ever taught the Met Police that IDF advice on dealing with terrorism was good? Who ever thought it would be a good idea to recreate Gaza and the West Bank in South London?

A few other things are striking about this. All the speculation about exactly why Mr Menezes ran from the police, while understandable from one perspective, seems to miss the point. He did run, and he wasn't a terrorist. It seems to me that those who want to speculate about whether his visa had run out, thereby making him an 'illegal immigrant', are seeking a way to shift the blame onto him. Bruce Anderson in yesterday's Independent was quite forthright about it: Mr Menezes was "the author of his own misfortune" because his behaviour was allegedly 'unusual'. So, those big-jawed white guys in jeans and t-shirts who didn't identify themselves but did wave guns around were behaving fucking normally were they?

Those who think that shoot-to-kill is a good policy or even a necessary evil have some explaining to do as well. At what point does one pull the trigger? In this case, a guy was selected for monitoring and following quite arbitrarily it seems - he lived in the wrong block of flats and had slightly dark skin, so could well have been one of the Ethiopian or Somalian men the police were supposedly looking for. So, if a guy you have no good intelligence on even runs away from the police, even if they don't identify themselves, this is good enough grounds for revoking the presumption of innocence until proven guilty and publicly executing a man? The fact is, it is hard to conceive of a situation that is anything but contrived that will lead to a would-be suicide bomber being shot. This imaginary situation is rather like the 'ticking clock' scenario invoked to justify torture: inevitably, the justifying clause is never relevant to the ensuing practise.

In an excellent article for The Guardian yesterday, Gary Younge looked at some other examples of emergency legislation that allowed for vast abuses but did little to protect the innocent:

According to Home Office statistics, 97% of those arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act - a series of draconian measures supposed to thwart the IRA - between 1974 and 1988 were released without charge. Only 1% were convicted and imprisoned.

The strike rate since the declaration of the war on terror has not been particularly impressive either. More than 700 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act since September 11, but half have been released without charge and only 17 convicted. Only three of the convictions relate to allegations of extremism related to militant Islamic groups.

And our allies in this bid to limit freedom at home so that we can ostensibly extend it abroad have not had much more success. According to a recent investigation by the Washington Post, fewer than 10% of the people prosecuted for terrorism were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. Of those, few had any connection to al-Qaida while the remaining 90% were acquitted or convicted of lesser crimes like immigration violations or making false statements.

The only way to stop would-be suicide bombers would be to know who they are. Otherwise you're just blasting anyone with the wrong skin complexion who has a big coat or wires from an iPod hanging out. And if you know who they are, you are perfectly placed to intervene before it ever gets to the stage of public execution with no trial. And the only way you're going to do that, as Younge says, is to cease the demonological drivel and examine what motivates bombers, how they are likely to decide to blow themselves up etc. That way you can avoid a conflagration. New legislation isn't going to help either. It isn't as if there is a dearth of charges with which one could convict those who would blow themselves up in the tube. Murder, conspiracy to commit murder, carrying explosives etc.

For all the talk of how calm and stoical Londoners have been, those who support shoot-to-kill and emote on behalf of 'The Poor Officer and His Family' strike me as nothing so much as hysterical and irrational, if not bloody-minded and authoritarian.

Announcements. posted by lenin

A few nuggets for your perusal.

Today at 6pm, the Stop the War Coalition is to have a vigil outside Stockwell tube station where the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Transport for London says the Northern Line is running at normal service, so the station should be easy to get to. Buy a ticket, though.

The Uncapitalist Journal is up and running. There are a host of excellent posts up already, as well as a newswire and posts from readers. It is an excellent project in my view, pooling a number of eccentric talents (including, of course, myself). Check it out, bookmark it, link it.

This is a classic exercise in unintentional hilarity. The headline says "Bono told me - 'you're song needs to be heard now'". It should say "Telegraph hack tries to exploit terrorism to launch pop career".

Finally, the number of people who say that the Iraq war helped cause the attacks on London has risen to 85% . Rub some faces in that, my friends.

Executed for Homosexual "Crime". posted by lenin

The reporter and blogger Doug Ireland regularly sends me stories from across the world about anti-gay violence and repression. The examples are usually all too predictably depressing and repellent. This one from Iran is particularly disgusting - two gay teenagers were held in prison for fourteen months, during which they were beaten severely, and subsequently executed in public.

It's tempting to think that this relates to the election of the populist Ahmadinejad, but as Direland's article makes clear, it follows from a record of decades of such executions. It appears that the Times initially carried the story uncritically with the Iranian government's cover story - that the boys had raped a 13-year-old. The story is now much more qualified , although check out the contrast between the new headline and that which appears at the very top of the browser window.

Check Direland's story for pictures and ample links.

Met Police trained in Israel. posted by lenin

Just a brief note. In response to the murder of an innocent man at Stockwell station, someone posted a comment saying that the Metropolitan Police had been trained by the Israelis. On a rather odious pro-war site which doesn't really merit your full attention this suggestion was made fun of.

It happens to be true , as several news stories confirm .

The only significance of this fact as far as I can see is that it is one more way in which practises which have been common in Israel for years under a legal 'state of emergency' are now becoming normal in liberal democracies . Surely the next step is to build a big wall around those parts of the Middle East that we want to nick and leave the remaining vassalage to sweat it under watchtowers, the occasional helicopter attack and the regular traffic of bulldozers.

'Imperial Hubris' posted by lenin

A very quick bit of post-prandial criticism, then.

Michael Sheuer is apparently an enlightening yet controversial guy, because he wrote a couple of books as 'Anonymous' - he should have kept it that way. I've just been reading his book 'Imperial Hubris' and I must say it is the most over-rated book to have been shoved in my direction to date. The title suggests an antiwar theme, and many intelligent antiwar commentators - particularly the libertarians at Antiwar.com - have taken a shine to the book, its thesis and its author. But it would be more accurate to say that the title designates precisely the contents of the book, which is very unfortunate for having been published.

The main problem with the book is that it takes as its starting point the ridiculous Clash of Civilizations thesis, developed by the extremely unpleasant Samuel P. Huntington as a riposte to Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History' bilge. Huntington's idea is incoherent - he infers a fundamental cultural sympathy between Islam and Confucianism - Iran and China, united at last. The very notion of 'civilization' as deployed by Huntington is so nebulous as to be useless. The Islamic-Confucian connection that he posits is somewhat undone by the ongoing tensions between, for instance, Vietnam and China. Japan, meanwhile, appears to be much more likely to ally with the US than with Iran or China. In the multipolar world that has ensued from the end of the Cold War, submerged tensions between the US and Europe have come out into the open. I'm being far too generous in treating Huntington's ideas seriously, of course - they're bilge, intellectual detritus emanating from one of the most obnoxious apologists for US power (and, once upon a time, apartheid) to soil a page with his thoughts.

Yet, Scheuer, a former CIA employee who considers himself a moderate conservative, organises his information along lines that suggest a 'civilisational' approach, cites Huntington's ideas approvingly, and argues for them. For instance, he appears to believe that Osama bin Laden has the support of most Muslims, saying "Islam is at war with America"; that the 'war on terrorism' is indeed a war with Islam; that 'they' have ways which 'we' must inevitably find alien; that Bin Laden is "leading and inspiring a worldwide anti-US insurgency" etc. He misinterprets polling data to support the thesis, so that opposition in Muslim countries to an attack on Afghanistan is interpreted as opposition to tackling Al Qaeda (and therefore, tacitly, support for Al Qaeda). He does not bother to mention that a host of non-Muslim countries either had substantial majorities or significant minorities against the war. Scheuer is convinced that Bin Laden is not on the extreme fringe of the Muslim world, but that his message is in fact widely popular - partly because of the importance of Islam in his message, and partly because of the charismatic figure he cuts - a rebel, an icon, a man who left the world of riches for the ascetic life of a warrior (so where did he get that Rolex from, then?). To support this, he cites a rather unconvincing array of anecdotal and academic evidence - relying to a large extent on that ignorant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis.

Scheuer is praised for at least facing up to the reality of US policies and what they are doing to the world. He does, it is true. In fact, he is unflinchingly, brutally honest about it - which is why he has been mislabelled by some as a deranged liberal who wants the US to be wiped out by swarms of plane-crashers and bombers. He repeatedly insists that bin Laden is not merely making it up when he condemns US policies in Palestine, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and elsewhere: he is deadly serious, and it is a mistake to hide behind such cant as 'they're just jealous and hate us cos we're rich n free n they're not'. He suggests that although Al Qaeda is very much interested in creating a new Caliphate in the Muslim world, it has never sought to conquer new land - it insists on 'reclaiming' land colonised by Western imperialism (Iraq, Palestine), or indeed Western culture (Turkey). That won't reassure residents of Constantinople, but he isn't trying to reassure anyone. They do see themselves as opposing injustice to Muslims, and their solution is what they regard as a defensive Jihad to retake what was lost when the British terminated the Ottoman Empire. Scheuer argues that it is the reality of what the US has done to the Muslim world that is inspiring this 'global revolt'. That is, it is US policies which cause Muslims to hate America, not "our freedoms".

But what is Scheuer's solution to this? He is an old-fashioned realpolitiker in many respects. He says he would consider revising some of these policies, to see which ones are really congruent with US interests, but that essentially "the Islamists cannot be appeased" and therefore the US must "get used to and good at killing". Far from being an 'anti-terrorist' operation, the 'war on terror' is a civilizational confrontation, and since the US is not about to depart significantly from its present way of life, "we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing and, yes, by body counts ... The piles of dead will include as many or more civilians as combatants because our enemies wear no uniforms."

Oh, but there's more: "Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills ... Land mines, moreover, will be massively reintroduced to seal borders". And US soldiers and their families had better stop whining too: "each US soldier put in harm's way goes there not just for country, but for pay and other recompense" and therefore "the nation sends you where you are needed and you die if necessary. Only the US Marines always recall this truism and go quietly and efficiently about the business of killing". Now, this is only necessary if the US is to stand by its present policies, but Scheuer doesn't shy away from this - rather he argues that there are only two choices: either the US can continue to delude itself about counter-terrorism and adhering to "canting words about international comity, civilised norms and high moral standards" or it can "act to preserve our way of life - what Mr Lincoln said is man's last best hope for self-government - by engaging in whatever martial behaviour is needed". Two choices: suicide or murder.

Even if America changes its policies, as far as Scheuer is concerned "we are not choosing between war and peace". If policies are changed, this will only reduce the expenditure of "treasure and blood" over time, but the war for now is inevitable, forced on America, liable to become more savage. And the only changes in policy that Scheuer is really interested in are those which may help US interests. He acknowledges what the US is doing to the world - but is a perfect Hobbesian in his surmisal of it, as he is about other things: "Like America or any state, Israel has a right to exist if it can defend itself or live peacefully with its neighbours".

Scheuer has grabbed attention thinks Iraq is the wrong war, while Afghanistan was the right one, a fairly commonplace view. But goodness knows where else the defense of US interests would take him, and with how much ferocity, if he had a say in matters. Despite his moderately isolationist proclivities, which advert to the casually spouted racist gibberish in the book, he is prepared for global conquest of fantastic proportions that, because it is totally unclad in doctrines about 'exporting democracy', would mantle a neocon's cheek with a blush of shame. And this man is hailed as antiwar?

"We are now satisfied...": filth shot an innocent man. posted by lenin

It didn't take long for the Evening Standard to have news stands saying 'Bomber Shot Dead on Tube'. Well, that headline will have to read 'Innocent Man Murdered by Police'.

Police admit they shot wrong man :

LONDON (Reuters) - Police admitted on Saturday they had shot dead the wrong man in a tragic error as they combed London for four men after attempted bomb attacks on the capital's transport system.

Plainclothes police chased the man onto an underground train on Friday after he ignored warnings to stop, shooting him five times in the head because they feared he was carrying a bomb and was going to detonate it.

"We are now satisfied that he was not connected with the incidents of Thursday 21st July 2005," police said on Saturday.

Animals.

This poor guy was probably a terrified immigrant who had no tube ticket, and they shot his brains out even when they had him on the ground.

Defend Jerry Hicks. posted by lenin

Life under New Labour is fabulous. The economy is rolling into recession under a mountain of personal debt, PFIs are emptying the public purse, wars are killing people abroad and now at home as well, the income gap is growing, more and more pensioners live in poverty, education is no longer free, the NHS is being run into the ground under a business model of administration that sees the health system as a machine that would work wonderfully if it weren't for patients... oh, and workers are still being shat on.

Jerry Hicks is a popular Amicus shop steward based at Rolls Royce's Bristol factory, known for his uncompromising stand on behalf of his workmates. Or he was. For Rolls Royce have now fired him, charging him with having led unofficial industrial action and "trying to influence an earlier internal disciplinary hearing". The charges are spurious, a blatant attempt at victimising an effective union activist. Union officials say that the charges are only being made because the bosses are angry about Jerry's successful defense of two fitters who were up before a disciplinary hearing five weeks before.

So, on Wednesday 20th July at 5.25pm, Jerry was summarily dismissed. The following day, the Day Shift was leafleted for a meeting. At this meeting it was decided that the workers would withdraw their labour, which they did: they put down their tools and walked out in protest. The Link Shift and the Night Shift did the same. In all, some 600 people joined the protest, which Jerry addressed. At 12.30pm, a full Combine Meeting of all Rolls Royce's sites took place, and it was decided that a) they'd write to the director, informing him that any and every measure deemed necessary to defend Jerry would be taken - including industrial action b) they'd send a delegation to seek a high-level meeting with the bosses and explain that this had set back industrial relations and it was now a 'them' and 'us' situation again, c) a financial levy would be set up at Rolls Royce factories to support the Bristol workers, d) Bristol stewards would be invited to speak off-site at other Rolls Royce factories, and e) letters would be sent to the leader of Amicus and other unions concerned what was taken to be an attack on trade unionism in Rolls Royce factories.

It is by no means obvious that the union leaders will be inclined to defend Mr Hicks in this situation, so he will need all the support he can get. I've got an address to send donations to, but I don't think it's the sort of thing one sticks up on a blog. However, what you can do is send messages of support to Jerry at jw1610@blueyonder.co.uk, and you may as well also copy in Derek Simpson, leader of Amicus at Derek.simpson@amicustheunion.co.uk

Even if, like me, you aren't allowed to have union representation, it is worth bearing in mind that when trade unions are attacked it affects us all. The extraoardinary gap in pay, the increasing casualisation of work, the shitty conditions, the lack of minimal adherence to safety regulations in many workplaces - these are all in large part a result of the way in which the unions have been attacked again and again for decades, particularly under Thatcher. Blair is continuing her regime of anti-union laws, but we can still fight back and win - as the postal workers showed not so long ago. And we can still support those who fight, because it is still our fight.

It's the occupation, stupid! posted by lenin

Excellent article by Scott Horton with the American academic Robert Pape talking about the causes of suicide bombing:

[Robert Pape] said that after 9/11 he assumed the Koran might contain clues toward understanding what motivates a person to commit a suicide bombing. For his book, however, Pape started with the bombings themselves – every documented case between 1980 and 2004 – and noticed some suggestive common threads. Foreign occupation, it seems – not religion – is the core motivating factor behind suicide terrorism. From Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank to Sikhs in India, from the jihadists of 9/11 to the secular Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka – for all of these, it is "a nationalistic response."

Further:

Professor Pape says that while al-Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to be from a country where radical Salafist/Wahhabist Islam is widely practiced, they are 10 times more likely to have come from a country that has U.S. troops stationed in it ... according to a Saudi poll after 9/11, 95 percent of educated Saudi males between the ages of 25 and 41 agreed with bin Laden's goal of driving Americans off their holy land.

Those who think it is simply a result of perverted, poisonous ideologies - by which they mean political Islam - might want to consider that:

No suicide bombers have ever come from Iran, where there are no foreign troops. Iraq had never seen a suicide bombing on its soil before U.S. troops arrived in 2003. While Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980s criticizing American culture, many people agreed, but none resorted to suicide bombing. When bin Laden cited U.S. forces in the land of Mecca and Medina, men hopped on planes with knives.

For the chronologists, forever reminding us that 9/11 and Bali preceded Iraq, a note or two:

As Harry Browne has pointed out, history does not begin on 9/11. In fact, American intervention in the Middle East dates back to 1919, when U.S. participation in World War I helped turn the entire region over to the British and the French, who then drew borders to their own liking for the states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, what was Palestine, etc.

Since the Second World War, the U.S. government has dominated each of the Middle Eastern states at one time or another, and consistently a majority of them. It has supported bloody coups; backed fascist monsters like Shah Reza Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak; armed and financed both sides of wars; propped up puppet kings, sultans, and emirs; and helped the Israeli government kill, steal, and destroy with our money. To top it off, it has now waged a bloody war and a terrible blockade of Iraq – all from bases in the "land of two Holy Places," the Arabian Peninsula.

And finally, a few words for Jack Straw, who asked about the motives of the bombers in London, noted that "[the terrorists] struck in Kenya, in Tanzania, in Indonesia, in the Yemen. They struck this weekend in Turkey, which was not supporting our action in Iraq. It is the terrorists who will seek any excuse whatsoever for their action":

The terrorists struck Americans in Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Yemen. Locals who were also killed were collateral damage, so to speak. As for the attack in Turkey, it was committed by our allies the Kurds. Why didn't Straw go ahead and mention the Mujahedin e-Khalq terrorist cult of Islamo-Marxists that the coalition of the willing sent into Iran to bomb civilians only a few weeks back?

Now, all of this flies directly in the face of the liberal bombers' expectations, who would doubtless take these explanatory models as somehow apologetic. But I haven't been impressed by their attempts to understand suicide bombing. Norman Geras, for instance, when trying to explain Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel [contra Terry Eagleton], approvingly cited Linda Grant :

Some research has been done on the motives of suicide bombers, by interviewing those who failed to pull it off. Amazingly, they reported that they did it because it was cool. Now in prison, their principal request is for hair gel. I kid you not.

Unfortunately, she - well, let's put it kindly and say she misremembered the 'research' she was quoting, as I discovered when I e-mailed her.

The only kind of thesis that such people will allow is one that focuses on narcisstic motives or, ex nihilo, a 'fascistic' ideology. Anything else amounts to apologetics from 'the root causes brigade'. Well, those 'apologists' now include an Israeli think-tank and the Saudi government, whose research has discovered that:

the vast majority of these foreign fighters [in Iraq] are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself.

Further:

The studies, which together constitute the most detailed picture available of foreign fighters, cast serious doubt on President Bush's claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the "central front" in a battle against the United States.

No matter how much evidence mounts in Iraq, Palestine or elsewhere; no matter what intelligence or establishment think-tanks say; no matter what the public may say - the liberal bombers will forever shirk responsibility for the consequences of actions which they supported. Hence, the witch-hunts, the brow-beating, the shrill accusations, the hysterical outbursts, and the insistence on pursuing any line of thought that could potentially lead away from and change the argument.

Disaster triumphant. posted by lenin

Watching BBC News last night, I heard Andrew Marr describe how the Prime Minister had suffered no significant political backlash from the previous attacks and that the only person who blamed him for the attacks had been George Galloway - that is, he claimed that most of "civilised society" was one one side of the argument and George Galloway on the other. Forget for a moment that two-thirds of Britons accepted Galloway's argument. Forget also, if you like, the number of vox populi interviews on the news this morning which make the point about 'the war on terror' as a causal factor in these attacks. And forget that Alan Simpson MP put out a statement saying more or less exactly the same as Galloway, on behalf of Labour Against the War. That's Marr's purview - he is a Blairite, and tends to judge the range of political debate according to what parliamentary politicians are saying: the right kind of parliamentary politicians. This is, after all, the man who suddenly discovered that the Prime Minister had grown a few feet after the 'end' of the war in Iraq.

The next point he made was that this situation might not last, and real questions may emerge in Parliament. Not according to a rather shrill Polly Toynbee :

In the growing fear and anger at what more may be to come, apologists or explainers for these young men can expect short shrift.

I get a kick out of that conflation between apologetics and explanation. Seriously. It makes me want to cut a rug. Makes we want to boogie. For Ms Toynbee, if you read the article, this is about the Enlightenment being under attack. Frankly, I find this unconvincing. Anyone who has read Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment will have a sense of how Englightenment contains its own dehumanising, destructive apparatus. An immanent critique of Baconian science and Cartesian rationality, the book begins by noting, following two World Wars and a stupendous genocide, that "Enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant". How did the Nazis proceed to exterminate their designated opponents, except through the use of science and technology? The justifications for their actions were rationalistic in form if not content: they were, in their own view, 'scientific' racists.

Similarly, the descendants of al-Zawahiri who carry out various attacks on civilians across the globe tend to be educated, and as rationalistic in pursuit of their goals as the early Christian slave-merchants were. William Dalrymple went through a few instances: al-Zawahiri is a former doctor, Mohammed Atta was a town planning expert, Hassan al-Banna was a teacher. These were (are) religious ideologues, but they are not medievalists. That particular brand of Islamism, the one which has worked with the CIA, Mossad and the Pakistani ISI, is as much a part of modernity as the neo-fundamentalism of Bush and many millions of his voters, and the ultra-religious Zionism that Israel Shahak wrote about. Conflagration down-town New York is part of the same world as the destruction of Fallujah or the razing of towns and cities in Palestine.

Toynbee must imagine, as so many do, that ardent religious dedication is incompatible with Enlightenment, rationality and science: Robert Boyle, Descartes, Bacon, the early Jesuits, the Academie des Sciences and the Royal Society would have disagreed. RK Merton did not fabricate the predominance of Puritanism in the sciences, whether or not you accept the problematic thetic relation that he draws such facts into. In fact, rationalism draws from magical and religious convictions (see the invaluable work of Frances Yates).

Part of the game is given away in Polly Toynbee's equation of Omar Bakri Mohammed with Ian Paisley. Neither would be entirely flattered, but this does bring to mind the usual glib liberal gesture of bemoaning the influence of religion in Northern Ireland, Israel-Palestine, Kashmir etc. As if this explained the problem; as if religion was the crucial determining factor. I don't know how many times I have explained to wide-eyed Londoners that the Troubles in Northern Ireland had nothing to do with religion, that Catholic-Protestant axis is merely an incidental inflection on a national conflict. It was not to do with 'the divided communities' 'tribalism', 'sectarianism' or any of the rest of it. Religious themes certainly make themselves felt: on July 12th, it will often be an effigy of the Pope that is burnt on top of the bonfire, although the usual candidate is an 'IRA man'. But the root of the conflict is a legacy of colonialism, and any attempt to reduce it to religion or zealotry or anything else misses the fucking point.

It would be a considerable stretch to say that the lover's tiff between the US and Al Qaeda has nothing to do with religion, since both sides of the 'divided communities' (see how you like it) have use of religious justification. But essentially, this is a fight over the presence of US troops in the Middle East and the repeated wars that the US have launched. No doubt (and by way of mentioning the patently obvious), the bin Ladenists who claim to wage this war on behalf of Muslims are as far from 'liberators' as one can imagine. They are extreme reactionaries, bigots and thugs. They would have nothing to offer anyone, whether in Iraq or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else, were it not for the rising tide of thwarted outrage and anger among Muslims. And that, I'll repeat for the chronologists, did not begin in 2003 - it began with colonialism and Empire, and has continued with repeated imperial subventions in Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt etc etc.

A modest suggestion, then. It would be both just and wise to - as a start - terminate Empire, shut down Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, close the overseas troops bases, replace the CIA and MI6 with modest defensive intelligence forces, disembark from the thermonuclear cruise to global mega-death, cease funding dictators and death squads, cease arming the world, stop manipulating democratic elections and trying to overthrow elected leaders, stop trying to force countries to make their economies ripe for being fucked, and use all the money that otherwise sustains the overbearing national security states to bolster welfare and public services, and pay reparations to Africa for the slave trade and centuries of imperial ravage. In the meantime, as a reasonable corrollary, countries could cooperate globally in a policing operation to catch and try those who plan assaults on civilians. In disengaging from imperial commitments, and ceasing their involvement in the mass murder of civilians themselves, our governments could actually try 'Al Qaeda' suspects without so much of the overbearing stench of hypocrisy. Just a suggestion.

Unite Against Wickedness. posted by lenin

So call me insensitive.

Robin at Perfect.co.uk has explained why he signed the statement by Unite Against Terror , a project that seems to have emanated from the bowels of Labour Friends of Iraq (I'd love to link to their gorgeous website, but some evil person has hacked it at the moment).

Not that anyone gives a flying fuck in a high wind, let me explain why I'm not putting my name to that pile of fucking shit. The first few reasons are only half-serious. 1) My co-signers would be largely, though not exclusively, a pile of hand-wringing warmongers whose signing of such a statement is hypocritical and an attempt at self-exculpation. 2) I hate joining the latest narcissistic "I'm a good guy, really" club. I'm not a good guy. I'll inject your new born baby with smack if someone pays me enough to do it: that's not a rash, that's track marks. 3) When Robin says "There is nothing in their statement any reasonable person can disagree with", my immediate reaction is "I bet I can think of a few things".

And so I can, and did.

Before I go any further, however, I want to make it clear that even if it was true that the statement contained nothing any reasonable person could disagree with, one still wouldn’t necessarily, automatically sign it. The statement has to be worth something politically, not merely a pedantic restatement of what everyone already knows. It has to have some effect: political speech is conative or it is nothing. Robin says:

As I’ve pointed out before, they have a tendency to paint their opponents as ‘fellow travellers’, and this case is no exception. So let’s not fall into their trap. Sign their statement, and let’s carry on the debate.

We are not under obligation to sign their statement. If they want to throw around lies and slanders about the Left, that is their business, and we shouldn’t be affected by a cowardly attempt to force us into pleading innocence. The fact that this is precisely what the statement appears to be is a perfectly excellent reason for not signing it.

I find a number of problems with the statement, as advertised above. Aside from the cringe-worthy lachrymosity and the cloying self-regard (‘hand holding hand’ – there just isn’t enough food in the world to produce enough vomit), there are a number of straightforwardly inaccurate statements. For instance:

The road to a just solution in Israel-Palestine is signposted by 'mutual recognition' and 'political dialogue' not the blind alley of terrorism.

I don’t accept that ‘mutual recognition’ would be a just settlement. Israel is a racist state. Its construction as ‘the Jewish State’ is the problem. It is what lay behind the ethnic cleansing and continual injustice toward the Palestinians: seizure of territory, reducing the Arab population, forming a Jewish majority. It is what lies behind the present entrenchment in the West Bank, even as a great deal of hullabaloo is made about the Gaza ‘withdrawal’. It is what lies behind Israel’s aggressive foreign policy (ie occupation, conquest, the seizure of territory and resources). It is the reason why settlements have been pushed and protected by the Israeli government and military – at the last count, these heavily militarised settlements covered 40% of the West Bank. At every attempt at ‘political dialogue’, Israel has demonstrated its contempt toward the notion of Palestinian statehood and in everything else it has done, it has shown that it doesn’t wish to co-exist with a free Palestine, even within the pre-1967 borders.

Then there’s this:

This terrorist violence is not a response by 'Muslims' to the injustices perpetrated upon them by 'the west'. Western democracies have been responsible for some of the ills of this world but not for the terrorist murders of these deluded Bin-Ladenists.

This is manifest bullshit. The terrorism of which they speak may not be only a response to injustices perpetrated on the Muslim world by the West, but it is partly that. Only the congenitally purblind, or the hand-washing warmongers, could fail to see it.

Frankly, this ridiculous campaign has absolutely nothing to do with uniting against ‘terror’. It is very selective about which terror it opposes. It opposes that carried out by a variety of groups inspired by a reactionary kind of Islamism. It doesn’t oppose that carried out by far right Colombian militias. It doesn’t show any solidarity with trade unionists and peasants being murdered by those terrorists. It doesn’t oppose the terrorism of states against civilian populations: the targeting of civilians by the Russian government in Chechnya; the massacre in Fallujah; the use of death squads in the ‘new Iraq’; the repeated assaults on Palestinians. About these, it is wordless – and culpably so. For a statement that supposedly unites against ‘terror’, it says only what is all too easy to say, and deliberately says nothing that could offend Mr Bush or Mr Blair. Read the statements by those who signed it – most of those who did so are obviously only interested in attacking the Left.

I’m afraid I haven’t gone far enough. The Palestinians are right to fight the Israelis, and I support their being armed with the tanks and helicopters that their opponents have. The Iraqi resistance is right to fight the occupiers, and I support attacks on UK & US troops. The resistance in Chechnya is right to fight the Russians, and I support attacks on the Russian army. I am a supporter – nay, glorifier – of terrorism. Potentially, under new legislation, I could be locked up or deported – if only my skin were brown and my face bearded.

That still isn’t far enough. Those who have signed this statement have largely been apologists for a new wave of imperial aggression. They have militantly and steadfastly avoided studying the intentions and ideology of the self-professed ‘liberators’, a gesture they would never reproduce if the agents had black skin and the President was a fundamentalist in some other style. They have even gone to some lengths to cover up the results of the crimes of imperialism, insisting that we blame anyone but those who launched the war. They are ‘apologists amongst us’. They are complicit in mass murder.

But wait, there’s more. Blair undertook an aggressive war, knowing that it potentially could have dire consequences for citizens here. Given that the war was unjust and given that we were not allowed a say in the decision, I consider him co-responsible for what happened. But those who apologised for the war, supported it in their clamorous, anathematizing fashion, they call us apologists? Eat my fucking mushroom cloud.

To put it briefly, those who have the nerve, having supported this venture in Iraq, to still come out with lies, slander, innuendo and accusations against those who opposed it deserve to have their charges thrown back in their face. Fuck their statements and fuck their whining and griping. I ain’t signing shit.

Don't panic: redux. posted by lenin

Well, this is fucking weird. Three 'dummy' explosions. One bus with its windows blown out on the top deck where no one was sitting. One reported injury at Warren Street but no fatalities as yet. Waterloo Station was temporarily closed, but it's opened up again. A bunch of offices in the City have evacuated, and UCH has been stormed by armed police after some bloke allegedly left a bag near Warren Street and ran off. And :

Police in London say they are not treating the incidents as "a major incident yet".

One report says the guy with the rucksack was 'English' (or, to put it another way, white) - so possibly not an Al Qaeda operative, although you never know what with the 'apologists amongsts us' and all that.

The Guardian says that the bus which allegedly had its windows blown out appeared to be intact on film. In fact, the picture shown on Sky appears to confirm this .

Some interesting updates on The Guardian's newsblog .

Looks like a collection of incidents deliberately intended to cause panic, which would be congruent with the following possibilities: a) some guys 'inspired' by Al Qaeda are trying to stir some more shit up, b) far right racists are trying to create panic and a backlash against Muslims. There are other possibilities, of course, some of which would be poor taste to mention, but my naturally suspicious mind tends me toward the latter at the moment.

Bone China. posted by lenin

In the interests of grabbing my attention and getting traffic from my site, the Bionic Octopus has been accusing your truly of wanting to bone China . It isn't true of course, unless China has a tenner on him, but I'll happily oblige. Ladies and gentlemen, the Bionic Octopus proudly presents an exclusive article from the Evening Standard's 'sexiest man of the year', China Mieville.

Nazi scumbag snuffs it. posted by lenin

Some obvious points about the death of John Tyndall.

The only bad news here is that there were 'no suspicious circumstances'. It should be been prolonged torture followed by beheading a la Tawhid wal Jihad. It won't be good enough to see him buried. He doesn't deserve the peace of the grave, just as he never merited the dirty, disastrous fuck that produced him. It was a wasted effort, and a smart doctor should have tied the umbilical cord around the screaming brat's neck and strangled him upon birth.

One of the most pernicious, revolting individuals in British politics, John Tyndall began his political life in AK Chesterton's 'League of Empire Loyalists'.


Blustering Nazi toff.

It was not quite Nazi enough for him. He left and tried to form a 'National Labour Party', although Labour successfully denied him the privilege of the name. Instead, the group merged with the 'White Defense League' to form the old BNP - meanwhile, he joined a private army called Spearhead, modelled on the SA in Nazi Germany. While he later claimed to regret his involvement in it, he didn't shrink from calling his magazine 'Spearhead'.

He left the old BNP to set up the National Socialist Movement, and wrote a book in 1962 entitled 'The Authoritarian State', which claimed that liberal democracy was a tool of Jewish world domination, which made his later participation in elections all the more bizarre. He founded the 'Great Britain Movement' in 1964, but it did not expand beyond a few apparatchiks and 'intellectuals'. The 'National Front' was founded in 1967, which Tyndall and most GBM members succeeded in joining: and for the first time since the defeat of the Nazis, the far right began to gain a fatal foothold on the streets and, later, in the ballot box. An enormous wave of racist attacks ensued, as politics was increasingly racialised by mainstream politicians - Labour was the first to clamp down in non-white immigration, followed by Heath's administration. Powell made his 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968, and dockers marched in support of his anti-immigration bile.

The initial electoral results for the National Front were strong - they won votes in the thousands. British society was entering a crisis unseen since the end of the war: unemployment began to rise and as profits fell, bosses and the government tried to make ordinary people pay with wage freezes, cuts, and curtailments of trade union rights. Most workers shifted dramatically to the Left, but in the 1974 elections in February, the National Front won almost 77,000 votes. In the October election, they took approximately 114,000 votes. When in 1976 some Malawi Asians arrived in Britain, they were met with front-page vitriol and slander from every filthy national news rag - including the Daily Mirror and the Sun. In the Blackburn council elections, the National Front took 40% of the vote, and later took 15,000 votes in a Leicester bye-election. Racist attacks proliferated, and it wasn't until the Anti-Nazi League was formed in 1977 that the trend began to be reversed.

Serious set-backs in the 1979 election - in which every National Front candidate lost their deposit - resulted in the organisation splitting into several minute sects. In Greater London in 1981, the combined far right vote was just 2.1%, although the tempo of racist violence continued. Tyndall founded the new British National Party in 1982. He maintained the organisation as a neo-Nazi party, a violent outfit which would advance its political agenda, as Nick Griffin later put it, "with well-directed fists and boots". That organisation reacted to years of defeat, with only one brief victory in Poplar in 1993, by deposing Tyndall in 1999 - thereby replacing a formerly jack-booted toff with a country bumpkin who had a glass eye. Griffin made the organisation more media friendly, toned down the Nazi rhetoric - despite himself having built his reputation in the violent margins of the far right movement, and having been given a suspended two-year sentence for incitement to racial hatred when he published a magazine - The Rune - in which he accused Jews of controlling the media and non-too-subtly called for the hanging of non-whites. Tyndall himself was kicked out briefly for being a trouble-maker, although he had been reinstated when he was caught on BBC cameras making anti-Semitic remarks about Michael Howard.

His legacy, if the term can be used without degrading it, has been to contribute to the rehabilitation of a death-dealing movement, one whose motifs are gangs controlling the streets, ghettos, concentration camps and technologically assisted genocide. That movement should be interred with him. In the short run, we can fight it, wherever it emerges. In the long-run, we have to terminate the ruinous, crisis-ridden social system that has been built on the blood of black slaves, that nurtures racism, and that - when seriously challenged - will accomodate and seek the most insane protection racket in history* if it will only restore profits and rein in the workers.

*Cf Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

'Apologists among us': Two thirds of Britons blame Blair. posted by lenin

Well! I sort of expected that this was not a minority view:

Two-thirds of Britons believe there is a link between Tony Blair's decision to invade Iraq and the London bombings despite government claims to the contrary, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today.
The poll makes it clear that voters believe further attacks in Britain by suicide bombers are also inevitable, with 75% of those responding saying there will be more attacks.

The research suggests the government is losing the battle to persuade people that terrorist attacks on the UK have not been made more likely by the invasion of Iraq.

According to the poll, 33% of Britons think the prime minister bears "a lot" of responsibility for the London bombings and a further 31% "a little".

Only 28% of voters agree with the government that Iraq and the London bombings are not connected.

And some light encouragement for those, like myself, who have pledged not to take one of those bloody ID cards:

But the poll also shows that despite the attacks, there is increasingly limited public support for ID cards.

Only 53% of those questioned said they believed ID cards should be brought in to help in the fight against terrorism - a fall on previous findings before and after the bombings.

Compost & carrion. posted by lenin

Via Third Avenue I discovered this clueless effort from Normblog . Norm isn't too happy with those who think the war on Iraq was a contributing cause of the bombings in London. So? Well, he combines this affront to common sense with a rather feeble analogy:

Just as if you were to hear from a distraught friend that her husband (or lover, mother, son) had just been murdered while walking in a 'bad' neighbourhood, and were to respond by saying how upset you were to hear it (or maybe even to give that part a miss) but that it was extremely foolish of the deceased to have been walking there on his or her own.

Honey, please! It's got nothing to do with that. I live in London, you bloody great compost heap, and many of the people I speak to who live here share my sense that the government bears part of the responsibility for this. Do you think we're all sitting here, kicking ourselves for having the foolishness to walk and live here? Maybe I'm silently gloating over my own foolishness and wishing I'd taken that tube from Edgware Road as I'd intended, so that I'd get my just deserts. What silliness on Norm's part. Try another analogy. Wait, Shuggy does (in Third Avenue's comments box):

Other analogies make the same point but here's one I was thinking of: if your house was burgled because you left the window open, people would say, "What do you expect?" but as you say, it's not a zero-sum game and people would still think the house-breaker was wrong. But if you left the window open and the burglar stole all your property and then shat on the carpet, killed your dog and put it's severed head in your bed, people would be so horrified that they would forget the leaving the window open bit. Methinks the bombings are like this. Those of us who maintain Iraq isn't the cause don't think the bombers couldn't have used this as their motivation; it's just that nothing in this world can possibly justify this - so ultimately, the "causes" lie internal to the perpetrator.

Wrong again. It's got nothing to do with justification. The bombings in London had no justification - no one, neither the Socialist Worker, nor The Guardian, nor George Galloway, nor Chatham House has said otherwise. The fact that these people are incapable of understanding the distinction between the government acting in ways that put citizens at risk, and groups of radical Islamists turning that risk into reality, is alarming to say the least.

It is not, as Norm suggests, that we are 'apologists' who simply wish to dissolve or attenuate the responsibility for the atrocities that accrues to those who planned and carried out the bombings. It is simply that we don't care to reduce it to that, ignoring the role that our criminal, barbaric war in Iraq had in this. If in some fantasy world, this war had been just, then arguably we should accept that there would be an increased risk. Isn't this exactly what the apologists for war are saying to us? Our government is responsible to us, and responsible for securing our safety. If it is known that undertaking a particular action is likely to increase the risk of us being blown to bits, then we perhaps deserve to have a say in whether we think it just or wise. And if we don't have a say in that, and the risks materialise, don't expect us to pretend we aren't angry about it - with the bombers, but also with a government that seems impervious to registering our needs.

And let's get this 'chronology' business straight as well while we're at it. Yes, a nightclub in Bali was blown up before the war in Iraq. 9/11 happened before the war on Iraq. But why stop there? Did not the European and particularly the British destruction and usurpation of the Muslim world under the rubric of Empire precede the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood by Hassan al-Banna? Wasn't Mossadegh overthrown and replaced with the Shah before Islamism in Iran was even a twinkle in the Ayatollah's eye? Ideas don't just develop from thin air, and saying so doesn't absolve anyone who has reprehensible ideas of responsibility for them or for implementing them.

Trough of Lard snuffs it. posted by lenin

I have my own personal, glowing memory of the late Ted Heath . At the height of the Stephen Lawrence scandal, I happened to be on Question Time with him - although, curiously enough, I had to sit with the serfs in the audience, while Teddy got his own spot-lit enclave in front of the cameras, next to David Steel, Polly Toynbee and Tony Benn. Asking what I took to be some incendiary questions about 'institutional racism' in the police, I got a 'canteen culture' answer from Ms Toynbee followed by a phlegm-ridden plea from Heath on behalf of the police. They were doing their best - indeed, had been since the Scarman report. Something like that. If I'd been close enough, I'd have jammed a squirrel down his throat. Instead, I worked him over with a few statistics and sat back with a vague feeling of smugness. Then, the bastard, Tony Benn began his contribution by saying "No, Teddy'sh right, you can't blame the p'lice". Fucker.


Bloviating windbag croaks it.

Teddy wasn't right. I don't know if he was ever right. Thatcher describes him, apparently, as 'the first modern Conservative', which is accurate in its barmy little way. He was the first post-war Tory leader to try and substantially reverse the post-war consensus: displacing direct taxation onto indirect tax; attempting - ultimately without success - to seriously bludgeon the unions and legally curtail their scope for resisting wage cuts; being spectacularly, unembarrassedly ugly. But in some ways, he was a very old-fashioned kind of Tory. His government imposed internment in Northern Ireland with his approval - torture was routinely practised at internment camps, a practise still deployed in certain imperialist interventions. His government sent the paras in to murder Catholics - precisely how aware Heath was of the details of the planned assault is difficult to determine, since during his appearance before Saville enquiry he temporised, obfuscated, blustered, contradicted himself and generally found his memory failing him at crucial moments. It is clear that whenever the massacre was done, Heath had no qualms about covering for those responsible. He asked Lord Widgery to chair an inquiry into the events, but warned him that a propaganda war was being fought and that the morale of the army was at stake.

His administration was also old-fashioned enough to allow Home Secretary Reginald Maudling to impose a new law to clamp down on "coloured immigration", a deliberate sop to the Powellites. And his views on Europe would today see him blasted as a Federast and a Europhile by most modern Tories.


One down, one to go.

Still, his history in government now reconciles me to his spit-flecked performance on Question Time. After all, if you've presided over a government that shoots Catholics, imprisons trade unionists and smacks dusky immigrants about, what's a bit of over-zealous racist policing? Heath's dead. In time-honoured Tomb style, I say fuck im.

"Bombings linked to Iraq" posted by lenin

The Royal Institute of International Affairs, known colloquially as Chatham House, has declared its view on the London bombings:

Britain's involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to the terrorist attacks in London, a respected independent thinktank on foreign affairs, the Chatham House organisation, says today.
According to the body, which includes leading academics and former civil servants among its members, the key problem in the UK for preventing terrorism is that the country is "riding as a pillion passenger with the United States in the war against terror".

It says Britain's ability to carry out counter-terrorism measures has also been hampered because the US is always in the driving seat in deciding policy.

...

In the most politically sensitive finding, Chatham House, which used to be known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, concludes there is "no doubt" the invasion of Iraq has "given a boost to the al-Qaida network" in "propaganda, recruitment and fundraising", while providing an ideal targeting and training area for terrorists. "Riding pillion with a powerful ally has proved costly in terms of British and US military lives, Iraqi lives, military expenditure and the damage caused to the counter-terrorism campaign."

The least interesting aspect of this article is where it tautologically notes that Blair is disavowing such a connection. Somewhat more interesting is the fact, not noted in the article, that Chatham House receives a good portion of its funding by the Foreign Office, is thoroughly imbricated with the foreign policy establishment, provides recruits, seminars, interfaces and the rest of it for the FO and security services. In other words, although it does have a certain amount of organisational independence, this view does appear to emanate directly from the upper echelons of the establishment.

Iraq: the bullet and the ballot box, part II. posted by lenin

I've written at some length about this before. New revelations have emerged, which confirm that suspicion that the US intervened to support its preferred candidates in Iraq's demonstration election:

In the months before the Iraqi elections in January, President George W. Bush approved a plan to provide covert support to certain Iraqi candidates and political parties, but he rescinded this because of congressional opposition, current and former government officials said.

In a response to questions about a report on the plan in the next issue of The New Yorker magazine, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, said that "in the final analysis, the president determined and the United States government adopted a policy that we would not try - and did not try - to influence the outcome of the Iraqi election by covertly helping individual candidates for office."

The statement appeared to leave open the question of whether any covert help was provided to parties favored by Washington.

The New Yorker article, by Seymour Hersh, reports that the administration proceeded with the covert plan over the congressional objections. Several senior Bush administration officials disputed this, although they recalled renewed discussions within the administration last fall about how the United States might counter what was seen as extensive Iranian support to pro-Iranian Shiite parties.

Any clandestine U.S. effort to influence the elections or to provide particular support to candidates or parties seen as amenable to working with the United States would have run counter to the Bush administration's assertions that the vote would be free and unfettered.

...

Despite the denials by some Bush administration officials on Saturday, others who took part in or were briefed on the discussion said they could not rule out the possibility that the United States and its allies might have provided secret aid to augment the broad, overt support provided to Iraqi candidates and parties by the State Department, through organizations like the International Democratic Institute.

...

Officials and former officials familiar with the debate inside the White House last year said that after considerable debate, the president's national security team recommended that he sign a secret, formal authorization for covert action to influence the election, called a "finding." They said that Bush either had already signed it or was about to when objections were raised in Congress. Ultimately, he rescinded the decision, the officials said.

...

Time magazine first reported in October 2004 that the administration had encountered congressional opposition over a plan to provide covert support to Iraqi candidates. The New Yorker account detailed more elements of that debate.

The current and former officials interviewed Saturday amplified how Bush had initially approved the covert plan, and how the White House met objections as it notified congressional leaders, as required under the law.

This is war, and this is what is to be expected. Aside from the various things I mention in the linked posts up top, it is worth adding that perhaps the most obvious propaganda war - the Balkans War in the Spring-Summer of 1999, which can be seen as a template for future media wars - involved not only the use of PR agencies, but also the setting up of an International Public Information Group (IPI), whose role was to spin and distort news stories, squelch and suppress uncomplimentary stories about the US, and particularly bludgeon those that may reach an American public.

Similarly, when neoconservative ideologues speak of needing to rebuild an embattled US hegemony and legitimacy, they aren't impotently expatiating. It is a serious problem for the US: however cold, empty and windy the latest avatar of the Founding Fathers is, they are not merely whistling through the breeze and beating their gums together.

What nightmares may come...? posted by lenin

Uri Davis, Ilan Pappe and Tamar Yaaron have issued a warning statement about what may await the Palestinians once the settlers are removed from the Gaza Strip:

We feel that it is urgent and necessary to raise the alarm regarding what may come during and after evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip occupied by Israel in 1967, in the event that the evacuation is implemented.

We held back on getting this statement published and circulated, seeking additional feedback from our peers. The publication in Ha'aretz (22 June 2005) quoting statements by General (Reserves) Eival Giladi, the head of the Coordination and Strategy team of the Prime Minister's Office, motivated us not to delay publication and circulation any further. Confirming our worst fears, General (Res.) Eival Giladi went on record in print and on television to the effect that "Israel will act in a very resolute manner in order to prevent terror attacks and [militant] fire while the disengagement is being implemented" and that "If pinpoint response proves insufficient, we may have to use weaponry that causes major collateral damage, including helicopters and planes, with mounting danger to surrounding people."

We believe that one primary, unstated motive for the determination of the government of the State of Israel to get the Jewish settlers of the Qatif (Katif) settlement block out of the Gaza Strip may be to keep them out of harm's way when the Israeli government and military possibly trigger an intensified mass attack on the approximately one and a half million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, of whom about half are 1948 Palestine refugees.

The scenario could be similar to what has already happened in the past - a tactic that Ariel Sharon has used many times in his military career - i.e., utilizing provocation in order to launch massive attacks.

Following this pattern, we believe that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz are considering to utilize provocation for vicious attacks in the near future on the approximately one and a half million Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip: a possible combination of intensified state terror and mass killing. The Israeli army is not likely to risk the kind of casualties to its soldiers that would be involved in employing ground troops on a large scale in the Gaza Strip. With General Dan Halutz as Chief of Staff they don't need to. It was General Dan Halutz, in his capacity as Commander of the Israeli Air Force, who authorized the bombing of a civilian Gaza City quarter with a bomb weighing one ton, and then went on record as saying that he sleeps well and that the only thing he feels when dropping a bomb is a slight bump of the aircraft.

The initiators of this alarm have been active for many decades in the defence of human rights inside the State of Israel and beyond. We do not have the academic evidence to support our feeling, but given past behavior, ideological leanings and current media spin initiated by the Israeli government and military, we believe that the designs of the State of Israel are clear, and we submit that our educated intuition with matters pertaining to the defence of human rights has been more often correct than otherwise.

We urge all those who share the concern above to add their names to ours and urgently give this alarm as wide a circulation as possible.

Circulating and publishing this text may constitute a significant factor in deterring the Israeli government, thus protecting the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip from this very possible catastrophe and contributing to prevent yet more war crimes from occurring.

Please sign, circulate, and publish this alarm without delay!

Ilan Pappe is a respected Israeli historian, while the other two authors are seasoned activists within Israel.

The ideology of 'evil'. posted by lenin

The Prime Minister has been staking out yet another of his tough but tender, firm but friendly, hard but huggable stances over the past few days. The basic coordinates of his latest idea are as follows: 1) the attacks on London were evil, 2) they were motivated by an evil ideology, 3) the perpetrators were Muslims, 4) Islam is a religion of peace which a small group of individuals have perverted, 5) QED: Muslims have to root out this 'evil' in their community.

Blood and Treasure has already taken such babble apart, but sadly he is not listened to by the BBC, ITV or The Observer. For instance, yesterday morning the Beeb hosted a discussion with a representative from the Muslim Council of Britain and another from the Muslim Public Affairs Committee . The guy from the MCB uttered some vague nonsense affirming that he and others would be seeking to have a dialogue with the young Muslims and so on. The MPAC guy was much more impressive - he excoriated the Muslim leadership for failing to speak up on foreign policy matters and depriving Muslims of a legitimate political voice. Asked if there was any chance of Muslims 'shopping' friends or relatives who started twitching nervously, blasting US imperialism and denouncing the Zionist enemey, he replied [very roughly]: "Not at all. We're all angry, and if you start locking people up, we'll all be in jail. What the Muslim leadership should be doing is speaking up and showing young Muslims a democratic alternative. At the moment, they're saying nothing, and many of them are so scared of hostility that they prefer to hide under the umbrella of the Labour Party. I speak to these young kids, and what they're angry about is the slaughter in Palestine and Iraq. They have to be shown that there is a legitimate way to voice those grievances".

Yet today, I heard something quite different. Kamal Ahmed of The Observer was appearing on the ITV News Channel with some fatuous presenter who asked if the problem was Muslims failing to 'integrate'. This ridiculous point was actually taken seriously. Ahmed said that there should be much more emphasis on 'British values'. Asked if the problem was with the Left, for being far too tolerant of extremism, what with Mayor Ken inviting al-Qaradawi to London, Ahmed replied once more that we should be more open about our 'British values' and there was some sort of suggestion that people graduating from high school should undergo a citizenship ceremony, and this was followed by a word or two in favour of free speech.

Question of the day, then: what the fuck are 'British values'? I'm sure some unctuous berk could generate some glittering generalities about freedom, democracy, human rights and the rest - but what's specifically British about those? Or some sarcastically dextral dickhead could expatiate in a negative fashion about British values not involving killing civilians ( ahem-hem! ) on purpose ( ahem-hem-hem! ) - somehow the words Aden, Oman, Yemen, India, Kenya, Boer, Iraq, Palestine and so on come to mind. But it would be almost impossible to come up with a set of uniquely British 'values' that did not in the end reduce themselves to a series of smug cultural reminiscences: Shakespeare, St George, Agincourt, warm cider, gawd bless, cricket, rolling meadows, stiff upper lip, empiricism, stoicism, Ooo do you think you are kiddin mister 'itler? and all the rest of it. And how to avoid the old conflation between British and English? Far right Tory MP Andrew Rosindell says that every Englishman should have St George's day carved into his heart. As I have repeatedly advised him, I'd be happy to carve those words into his heart the second he gives me the instruction. I'll even throw in an autograph. Answer came there none, I'm afraid.

Back to evil. When David Copeland, the BNP-supporting nail-bomber, killed many in Brixton and the Rainbow District of Soho, did anyone ask the 'white community' to remove this evil, perverted ideology from its ranks? Why not? Isn't the trouble with these white people that they refuse to integrate? What with their belligerent, blank-eyed youths, their Burberry wear and shell suits, their dreary 'pop' music, their annoying taxi drivers and tasteless food, and their unquestioning submission to a zombie-like culture - how could this not produce terrorism? Or perhaps white people don't feel implicated in the actions of a lonely tosser and his minute regiment of violent co-ideologues?

More generally about 'evil' as an ideological horizon, Badiou wrote:

We should be more struck than we usually are by a remark that often recurs in commentaries devoted to the war in the former Yugoslavia: it is pointed out - with a subjective kind of excitement, an ornamental pathos - that these atrocities are taking place 'only two hours by plane from Paris'. The authors of these texts invoke, naturally, the 'rights of man', ethics, humanitarian intervention, the fact that Evil (thought to have been exorcised by the collapse of 'totalitarianisms') is making a terrible comeback.

...

Ethics feeds too much on Evil and the Other not to take silent pleasure in seeing them close up (in a silence that is the abject underside of its prattle). For at the core of mastery internal to ethics is always the power to decide who dies and who does not.

Ethics is nihilist because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death.

Certain commentators who insist on reminding us that Evil really exists in the world, that it is being implemented by the enemies of humanity and so on, rely too much on the notion of Evil to sustain their positions. The ultimate negative point of reference for them is usually the Nazi holocaust - understandably so, since the events and actions designated by this term often bely comprehension. It is a 'warning from history', but what it warns for such commentators (particularly when coupled with Stalinism under the polysemous notion of 'totalitarianism') is that any substantial deviation from the fixtures of liberalism results in Evil. Analysis is therefore eschewed for moral browbeating: can't you tell the difference between Evil and collateral damage? Isn't this moral nihilism? Evil therefore performs a regulative, coercive function in ideology.

So it is today that any Muslim deviating from the secular-liberal consensus is on the royal road to Evil. Even if you don't hold particularly anti-democratic views, merely expressing support for Palestinian or Iraqi violence is enough to get you vilified. And potentially, if you've got a beard and dark skin, it may get you shopped to the filth.

Side note: ironically, the 'Incitement to Religious Hatred' bill, which I have argued against, but which many Muslim organisations support, may now be used to exterminate Evil . That is:

Downing Street said yesterday that the incitement to religious hatred legislation going through parliament would not only protect Muslims "but would also enable the authorities to prosecute extremist Muslims who incited hatred".

The Home Office is allowed to deport a foreign national on grounds of "not being conducive to the public good" but human rights safeguards mean they cannot be sent back if there is a danger they will face torture or inhumane and degrading treatment.

I'm sure the British government would never deport anyone to a state known to use torture . I am equally sure that such laws are desperately needed for 'anti-terrorism', since existing laws do not allow one to prosecute someone for 'preaching hate' .

Friday night: don't make me go upside your head. posted by lenin

That is all.

Iraq: not enough killing. posted by lenin

Well, according to UK generals and such, the British government is placing unfair legal restraints on the behaviour of the British army:

The country's most senior military figures yesterday mounted an unprecedented assault on the Ministry of Defence, accusing it of imposing unacceptable legal constraints on British commanders and their soldiers.
A string of former chiefs of staff attacked the ministry for subjecting British soldiers to litigation - including the prospect of being charged with war crimes under the jurisdiction of the international criminal court (ICC) - which, they said, undermined morale and the crucial relationship between commanding officers and their troops in the field.

Yeah, see, the troops in the field need to know that the commanding officer doesn't mind them engaging in a bit of torture (and presumably rape) from time to time. Otherwise the morale is affected.

Meanwhile, the great Egyptian economist Samir Amin punctures a common myth on the soft left in the new MR Zine, (which some sexy little tyke sent me the link for earlier):

MRZINE: Speaking of Iraq then, there's a problem that's been posed again and again for opponents of the U.S. war on Iraq, even the best-intentioned ones.

They are very frequently intimidated or silenced by the charge that supporting the Iraqi resistance means giving support to the most reactionary elements of political Islam.

What advice would you give to opponents of the U.S. war on Iraq when they're faced with this contradiction?

SAMIR AMIN: Well, I believe just exactly the opposite. It is by not supporting the Iraqi resistance that one is giving more chance to the most reactionary elements, political Islam; because as long as the victims of the U.S. aggression and particularly the Iraqi ones, feel that they are alone, that is that they are not supported, strongly supported by everybody in the world, including by the people of the United States, then that reinforces the reactionary tendencies within Iraq and elsewhere to say: "Look, they are always all against us. There is no chance of being understood and, and, therefore, we must fight on a radical cultural stand."

I hear that every day in the Arab countries. On the other hand, if the support to the Iraqi resistance, as it is, is complete unconditional support; that is condemning and asking the U.S. to go home, asking for the U.S. to leave the country, that would give more chance to the democratic forces which do exist in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world because they would say, look, we are not alone, people are understanding what we are demanding, etc.

So I think that one should not accept this intimidation, in fact it's the opposite, as I just said.

Islamophobia and liberalism. posted by lenin

On Sunday afternoon, a 48 year old Muslim man named Kamal Raza Butt was beaten to death by a gang of racist youths who called him "Taliban" before setting on him. He was taken to the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, and declared dead on arrival. He died of a brain haemhorrage.

This is just one of a series of racist attacks which the newspapers are calling "backlash" or "revenge attacks". Yes, that's right - revenge. An arson attack was carried out on a Sikh temple last weekend, and several Muslims have been assaulted. In the three days following last Thursday, 108 racist incidents were recorded by the police - and that doesn't include those created by the cops themselves. The Muslim Council of Britain has been bombarded with tens of thousands of hate e-mails . The Sun has led the charge against 'Islamic extremism' by attacking Tariq Ramadan , a Muslim academic vilified by such conspiracy theorists as Daniel Pipes, 'terrorism expert' Steven Emerson (the one who insisted that the Oklahoma building was blown up by Muslims) and Caroline Fourest. And in the far right hinterlands of football hooliganism and Hitler-worship, a series of appalling attacks is being readied. The far right would like to march along the Victoria Embankment tomorrow as well. I'd hate to see that, ahem, disrupted somehow.

I've drawn attention to some other instances of bigotry directed at Muslims recently, including the treatment of the Kamara family . But these are only instances of a more general pattern in British society. For instance, the Independent reported on Monday that:

* The UK's 1.6 million Muslims have suffered from increasing Islamophobia since 11 September, figures show. The first big survey of anti-Muslim discrimination in December revealed long-term prejudice had been "perpetuated and normalised" since the 9/11 attacks. Almost 80 per cent of Muslims felt they had been discriminated against because of their faith, a rise from 45 per cent in 2000.

* A study by York academics this year found 43 per cent of non-Muslims admitted they have become noticeably more anti-Islamic since 2001. There was a deepening of anti-Islamic sentiment after the invasion of Iraq: a quarter of young people said they were more prejudiced than before. Hatred of Muslims was particularly prevalent among boys and young men.

* Islamic representatives believe police unfairly target their community. Since 9/11, British anti-terrorist officers have arrested more than 700 people, with more than two thirds thought to be Muslim. But only one in six has been charged with terrorist offences.

Indeed, Islamophobia would appear to have become institutionalised in various ways. We don't need to rummage through the inventory of racist imagery and statements too much to find examples of this. From Kilroy-Silk to Melanie Phillips , and the egregious but obscure 'Will Cummins', the right-wing press have allowed themselves to host the most bilious Islamophobes, thereby demonstrating both a knock for self-publicity and total indifference to the fate of those vilified. In the substance of what these commentators have been allowed to say, they have mimicked Nick Griffin and legitimised his politics.

As Jeremy Seabrook has written , Islamophobia is the one prejudice that remains reputable for those who formally disavow racism. For instance, those who seem at a loss to detect anti-Muslim racism, even when it is blatant, may well share it. Like this fatuous twit , who says that the problem is Muslims failing to recognise all of the fabulous things that Labour has done for them: We liberated Kosovo. Iraq is now an "Islamic democracy". Labour has made 'enormous' rises in public spending for the poor, which will help disadvantaged Muslims. Muslims are too immersed in a "culture of grievance" to see it. Anyway, they don't know what they're talking about - what would they have done with the Taliban, eh? And Muslims are only disadvantaged because they come from Bangladesh and povo places like it. Could these ingrates be any more ungrateful? In short, the screed - by 'liberal' writer David Goodhart, famous for wheedling about the 'progrssive dilemma' created by multiculturalism - barely elevates itself above a bar room rant.

Goodhart, the editor of a coma-inducing magazine called Prospect, draws upon a far more talented, yet over-rated writer named Kenan Malik, who has argued that there is no such thing as Islamophobia on the grounds that a) there has been anti-Muslim bigotry, but it's not serious enough, b) black people get it worse anyway, c) people who talk about Islamophobia secretly want to disarm criticism of Islam, d) the police have been having more of a go at Muslims lately, but see b).

Well, you'd either have to be living in a box, congenitally purblind or maintaining yourself in a state of wilful self-delusion not to spot it. Islamophobia is not in 'competition' with other forms of racism. It is contiguous with, indeed corroborates, other kinds of racism. Precisely the same strategies are deployed. At an official level, the language created to discuss these issues is clotted with such demeaning artefacts as 'integration', 'citizenship', 'cohesion' and 'tolerance'. Instead of the focus being on social justice and human rights for all, it is shifted to a test for non-white immigrants: in order for me to tolerate you, the good liberal says, you will have to pass this citizenship test and integrate yourself properly into British society. And, often enough, precisely the same people who bang on about multiculturalism and Britain being a polyglot society will revert to this hand-wringing anxiety about 'social cohesion' being undermined by an influx of people whose values which are not sufficiently commensurable with those presently persisting in Britain - as if the values of Socialist Worker are compatible with those of Richard Branson.

At the level of casual racism, it is interesting to note just how much of this mandarin argot trickles down to ordinary discourse and commingles with the pub demotic. The more splenetic outbursts, whether in the media or on the street, replicate what was once said about black people and Jews: the insinuation of cultural backwardness, deviousness, hiding devils in their ranks, prone to criminality, getting lots of money off the state etc etc.

But the specificities of liberal Islamophobia are arresting as well. Polly Toynbee thinks that anything called the Islamic Human Rights Commission must be a contradiction in terms, and I am fairly certain I know why she thinks that. Toynbee can't understand the distinction between Islam and Islamism. Johann Hari, in recent articles, can't tell the difference between different kinds of Political Islam - although in his case, I'd make allowances for cluelessness. In other words, Islamophobes don't just see Muslims as culturally backward, they see Islam and any movement it might spawn as necessarily politically retrograde and monolithic. And the tendency by some to celebrate and congratulate 'secular' or 'apostate' Muslims (like the silly sap, Irshad Manji) reminds me of nothing so much as the Christian fundamentalist dictum about homosexuals - love the sinner, hate the sin. We nice liberals love Muslims, and wish to draw them to our breasts if only they'll recant. Anyone familiar with the Tomb will know I am an atheist and won't be arguing for theocracy any time soon, but the way in which blatant racism has been sold under the guise of secularism - for instance, the French hijab ban, is enough to make me deeply sceptical of anyone who fetishises secularism, particularly when they do so especially for Muslims.

SF writer denounces capitalism, defends Zombies. posted by lenin

This wierdo has written all sorts of subversive fiction, inciting readers to do it with insects and overthrow the government:

I think what’s going on here is that there’s something about modernity and capitalism that you simply can’t think about it in “realistic” ways. Instead it keeps coming back as the “return of the repressed” — you can’t conceive of it except in monstrous form.

And I think that on our side there has always been a sneaking sympathy for the monster. The notion of the monster as mere social pathology is put about by people whose ideal is the social status quo.

But there are those of us who, because of our class positions, realise that the status quo is all about violence. So it’s not surprising that we wouldn’t completely buy into the idea that “pathologies” are a bad thing.

I very much want to preserve this critical view of monsters. If we go down the route that they are just “about” social pathology, then it follows that we should just get rid of them. But if there are no monsters after the revolution, I don’t want to play!

Conspiracy Theory posted by lenin

David Horowitz has the goods on us evil lefties and why the antiwar movement needs to be watched (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18712):

"This is the lesson of London: Take the hostile force within your country and within your political coalition seriously. It’s not a game anymore. This is something I learned in my years on the left. All too often, people mean what they say. Make no mistake, those who talk revolution and war against our country are quite capable of acting on their talk -- of aiding and abetting those who are already at war and want to kill us. When the day comes that they step over the line and translate their words into action, they will do it with the best of intentions: to make the world a better place. That is the reason they are so dangerous. Like Mohammed Atta who did it for Allah, they will do it for a noble cause." ( via )

In the interests of national security, I'm now providing a list of these disgraceful revolutionists:

Salma Yaqoob shockingly suggests that the bombing of London is linked to the bombing of Iraq . Disgusting!

Tariq Ali tells peace-botherers the same thing . Outrage!

Bloke on bus tells BBC journo Gareth Furby the same thing . Is there no end to the treason?

Etc.

Blair: Proud. posted by lenin

I received this charming e-mail about the terrorist attacks on London from some Labour Party functionary purporting to be Tony Blair. Inter an awful lot of alia, it urges me to be proud of his government's record:

We can also be proud of the achievements of the G8 summit: The
$50bn uplift in aid, the signal for a new deal on trade, the cancellation of the
debts of the poorest nations, universal access to AIDS treatment, the commitment
to a new peacekeeping force for Africa; the commitment in return by Africa's
leaders to democracy, good governance and the rule of law will all help make our
world a more just, stable and peaceful place. And that's vitally important to
all of us whether we live here in the UK or in Africa.

Political Islam and its discontents, III. posted by lenin

Before I go any further, I just want to bring everyone's attention to the fact that the Prime Minister has "vowed" to "hunt down" those responsible for bombing London . Because that marks a new departure in political rhetoric, doesn't it?

I've written before about some aspects of Political Islam , and these thoughts bear enlarging on a little bit given the twaddle talked by certain hysterical left-wing bombers.

For while it is entirely necessary to give the ideology its own particular weight, Marxists and materialist left-wingers who tend toward a 'deep structure' analysis of social movements need to go a great deal further than this. Actually, everyone needs to go further than this, if only for the sake of some vague desire for survival.

K-Punk makes a number of pertinent points about this:

To talk of al Qaeda in theological (rather than in political, social or economic) terms is to adopt their mode of discourse in an inverted form. It is to return to a pre-Feuerbachian, pre-sociological perspective in which all the lessons of the nineteenth and twentieth century studies of the social psychology of religion - undertaken by figures as diverse as Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche and Freud - are forgotten. If a particular strain of religion is to be understood as, in Cohen's words, 'an autonomous psychopathic force' rather than as a social, economic and psychological phenonenon with complex causes, then all hope of reasoned analysis is a priori ruled out. Unreason is abjected onto the Enemy (even as it is evinced in one's own not even minimally coherent ravings), thus legitimating the idea that 'the only option' is military force.

He then goes on to dissent from the stupid conflation of Islamism with fascism:

The floating of the pseudo-concept of 'Islamofascism' has been central here. There are any number of reasons to consider the idea that there is such a thing as Islamofascism a nonsense. Here are two. First of all, fascism has always been associated with nationalism, but, like global capital, Islamism has no respect for nationality; the first loyalty of the Islamist is to the global Umma. Secondly, fascism is about the State - Islamism has no model of the State, as could be seen in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

There are other good reasons to dissent from such a view, but suffice to say that while there are overlapping features between a certain kind of reactionary Islamism and fascism, this doesn't entitle anyone who isn't an anti-Muslim racist to the term 'Islamofascism'. (Actually, I'd add something to Mark's formulation at the end of that. The only state which can properly be said to have emerged from a popular embrace of Islamism of some kind is Iran. The Taliban was basically a Pakistani foreign policy success, whose peculiar tribal quirks and schooling under the umbrella of the ISI led to them trying to construct a fragile 'Islamic' state in a destroyed country, with a loose confederation of warring groups. Of course, the founders and rulers of Saudi Arabia used Islam more as a tool of legitimation and unification. The interesting thing about the Iranian state is how Western it is. The ideology of the nation-state suffuses its laws, while the 'revolutionary courts' set up by the theocracy are essentially Jacobin in nature. Similarly, the Council of Guardians function as the executive committee for the running of the common affairs of the Iranian bourgeoisie).

However, if the examples of Tariq Ramadan, Hasan Hannafi and the increasingly odd Mujahiden e-Khalq (now being groomed by the neocons for their opposition to the Iranian theocracy) aren't enough to persuade you that not all Islamism need be reactionary, think about this. I listened to Salma Yaqoob speak at a meeting entitled 'Muslims & the Left'. As Respect candidate for Birmingham Sparbrook, she lopped a huge chunk off the Labour candidate's lead and thrust the Tories and Lib Dems into third and fourth place. In the meeting she described how a) she based her politics on a particular reading of Islam, and even went so far as to compare readings from the Quran with statements by Lenin, b) she had been utterly vilified by local Islamists who said that she was no longer a Muslim, because she worked with atheists and this was kufr. As a left-winger, she campaigned on the basis of a manifesto supporting abortion rights, and as a candidate for a party committed to full rights for gays. (Similarly, Abdul Khaliq Mian had taken time during his campaign in the East End to support the mother of a gay man who had been beaten and intimidated by a Muslim gang). Yaqoob justifies her politics in terms of her religion, and as such could be called an Islamist - yet she is a supporter of democracy, human rights and socialism.

The other thing is that one of the main sources of left-wing ideology in Britain - and also elsewhere in the world - has been Catholicism. Yes, that most conservative and reactionary of Christian doctrines. Terry Eagleton, the great Marxist critique, started out as a left Catholic. If anything, the Catholic Church is far more authoritarian and doctrinaire than Islam, which has no formal clergy or hierarchy of believers. Pope John Paul II was given to issuing edicts (on abortion, for instance) that would often be followed by a declaration that his ruling was 'infallible' - Ratzinger was the usual hand-maiden in such procedures. If a ruling is indeed 'infallible', then no Catholic is permitted to question it. Homophobia and misogyny are no less present in Catholicism than they are in other religions. Yet, because Catholicism was often the ideology of some of the most oppressed and stigmatised workers - Irish immigrants - it often formed the basis of left-wing commitment.

In a perfect socialist world, no one would be bothered with religion. This world would be sufficient, for its brief duration. In the meantime, however, any rapport that the Left can develop with Muslims is precious. For one thing, they ought to be part of the Left's natural constituency. Of all social groups in Britain, Muslims are among the most likely to be stuck with poor housing, poor access to amenities, poor healthcare and education. For another, if self-preservation was your only real concern, you couldn't begin to win young Muslims away from more reactionary interpretations of Islam unless you took their beliefs and their needs seriously, and engaged with them in a genuine conversation. And by 'genuine conversation', I mean to exclude lecturing, interrogations and all the rest. Muslims don't need to apologise for who they are, or repeatedly and ostentatiously condemn the actions of groups over whom they have no control. They don't need to be subjected to tests over their personal views about bum-sex or anything else. They need to be taken seriously, engaged with, and treated with the kind of respect that other groups take for granted.

SF writer denounces "nerds" posted by lenin

This is supernaturally funny. If you don't think so, then you're a spotty git in desperate need of sexual gratification.

That is all.

Nick Cohen's brains have turned to slush. posted by lenin

This link may not work at the moment, but it did when I read the article this morning. As usual, it involves a lot of glib insinuations about the Left - yeah yeah, heard it before, move on. But while reading the article, a thought that had been swimming around in my subconscious for some time came to the fore with blinding clarity: the reason Cohen and Hitchens et al resort to facile platitudes and snarling insults is because they haven't the slightest interest in, or facility with, either fact or analysis.

Take this:

Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do.

It is jaw-droppingly stupid to bundle up these three ideological formations, particularly since such a gesture owes itself to the banal and useless discours of 'totalitarianism'. What is even more idiotic is to refer to Islamism tout court as a "messianic cult of death". Sure, some of its manifestations fetishise death, but this doesn't even go the slightest distance toward explaining such a phenonomenon. And Cohen isn't interested in explanation, merely insisting that it "will send you to your grave whatever you do". Well, some forms of Islamism will, and some won't. Shari'a law will kill you in Nigeria, for instance. On the other hand, the Islamists involved in Stop Police Terror are generally peacable in nature: oh yes, they have twitchy beards and evil eyes, but by and large they won't kill you. Similarly, the liberal Islamist Tariq Ramadan would prefer it if 'Al Qaeda'-style groups didn't go round killing civilians, whether Muslim or not. Hassan Hanafi, a leftist Egyptian Islamist, argues for democracy and tends to value human life more than Cohen's insulting epithet would allow.

If Cohen is uninterested in such distinctions, it is partly because he is not interested in viewing Islamism as a diffuse and variegated movement with a history and with causes. The first modern manifestation of political Islam grew out of a number of factors, among them a rejection of British imperialism in Egypt, a revolt against the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, and a conviction that some kind of departure from 'true' Islam had led to the decadence of the Muslim world and its subjection to European colonialism. The solutions it proposed were initially profoundly conservative: certainly those advocated by Hasan al-Banna and the Muslim Brothers took the form of romantic anti-modernism, which involved contempt for parliamentarism and liberalism.

However, since then it has gone in all sorts of directions because - as I have argued before - the texts which it proposes to derive a formula for a new society from are too indeterminate, too open to interpretation, to provide merely one kind of ideology. By denying this, and treating Islamism as a sinisterly homogenous movement, Cohen effectively hands that argument over interpretation to the al-Zawahiris of Islamism: the Quran can produce only a millenarian 'cult of death' in this purview. He also refuses to acknowledge the contribution of Western imperialism to creating support for and recruits to the extreme Wahabbi brand of Islamism, the kind which is very probably behind the attacks on London.

Take this excerpt from a conversation Nick Cohen had with Tawfiq Chahboune for the Socialist Unity network:

NC: The so-called resistance, who you support, are nothing but Baathist fascists and theocratic fascists…

TC: I don’t support them, and, in any case, the Salvador Option wouldn’t be targeting those people. It would target the civilian population…

NC: The fascists.

TC: No…

NC: The difference is that you support fascism…

TC: I don’t know why you keep saying that…

NC: Look…You don’t seem to…We’re not going to agree.

It is not surprising to see Cohen reproduce the usual inaccurate description of the resistance as largely Ba'athist and theocratic ( ABC of resistance here ), but what is notable is that he has to invoke such a notion in order to vilify someone whose arguments he can't deal with and which he is uninterested in, and even repeats the accusation of supporting 'fascists' even when Chahboune has stipulated that he doesn't support them.

Cohen is dribbling from his ears, and the ritual insults, defamations, denunciations and insinuations sit alongside an ignorant and rancorous Orientalism as the chief symptoms of his present delirium. The column inches would be more profitably placed in the hands of Winnie the Pooh.

Lexical explosions. posted by lenin

Following the attacks in London this week, some people will lack words to describe how appalled they are at the heinous antiwar Left. I've therefore rummaged around, and found this on the Mutualist blog:

Moral Relativism. Aka historicism. The denial of any unified, objective standard of value. The diametric opposite of Moral Equivalence (q.v.).

Moral Equivalence. Judgment of the United States government by the same unified, objective standard of value as the governments of other countries. The diametric opposite of Moral Relativism (q.v.).

Moral Clarity. The Zen-like state of mind from which it is possible accuse the same political enemy, simultaneously, of both Moral Relativism and Moral Equivalence.

I hope this helps.

Troop withdrawal? posted by lenin

This is a non-story :

Plans have been drawn up to withdraw thousands of UK and US troops from Iraq by the spring of 2006.
The paper, by Defence Secretary John Reid, suggests the UK's 8,500 troops in Iraq could be cut to 3,000, saving around £500m a year.

The document, leaked to the Mail on Sunday, also sets out US plans to cut its troops from 176,000 to 66,000.

The UK, as I pointed out before , is shifting its troop commitment from Iraq to Afghanistan, where the Karzai regime is crumbling.

Okay, the fact that US troops may be pulled is significant, possibly representing a capitulation to reality which neoconservatives are so hostile to. However, the US has just built a series of massive long-term bases in Iraq, indicating that it intends to maintain a long term presence of troops in the country, running the country by proxy through the behemoth US embassy. In all likelihood, the US will devolve day to day security to the CIA-trained Iraqi forces, (allowing them to get their hands dirty with the torture and so on), while deploying its substantial remaining troop presence mainly for firefighting and larger operations in insurgent areas.

But this doesn't represent the end of the occupation of Iraq, and don't even bet on a reduction of troops without substantial domestic pressure in the UK and US.

Marxism, capitalism and imperialism: from fellow-travellers to evil-doers. posted by lenin

News says thousands of Brummies are casually bolting it out of the city centre on the orders of police. I expect (or hope) it is a false alarm, and that they are merely being over-cautious. In London, meanwhile, sirens are still wailing like startled banshees up and down the roads, and the weekly fireworks show up at Kenwood on Hampstead Heath is punctuating the skein of city-noise with technicolour explosions, neonising the night sky with a full chromatic diapason. Whose idea was it to have that again this week? Would the millionaires up on the hill kindly keep the noise down?

Long post coming.

Yesterday morning, Galloway and Benn did a double-act alongside a Portuguese Left Bloc MP, discussing the bombings and the socialist response to them. Benn took his traditional approach, which was to say that we urgently need to pursue peaceful means of international politics, the threat of terrorism won't subside until we do, and many many people will agree with us if we raise an emphatic campaign. The Portuguese MP was, in many ways, more interesting. Aside from some fairly straightforward points about resisting the escalating cycle of terror and war, she asked why it is that fundamentalism is on the rise - not merely in Asia Minor, the North of Africa and parts of South Asia, but also in North America. And her tentative answer was that there had been a "collapse of the future", and that the stifling persistence of the present was driving people to seek utopian, millenarian answers to their problems. The answer was, in part, to re-open the future as a vision, renew the projects of human emancipation that could see society in its various forms as a human artefact, not natural or inevitable in any of those forms. Galloway said what needed to be said, and a few other things besides, adding that if some of what he was saying appeared to strike a discordant note for some, this was simply because he wasn't prepared to see this tragedy emblazoned any further with Blair's hypocrisy. Quite right too. A BBC interviewer stood at the door, arms folded, in a crisp suit, while a harassed looking camera man took some shots for a news slot.

Jeremy Corbyn MP and Chris Harman conducted an excellent discussion on the recent uprisings in Bolivia, with the former providing the broad brush treatment and the latter hammering out the condensed class analysis. A translator laboured away at a low volume for Spanish speakers at the back of the room. Among many interesting revelations was the fact that when the government offered a deal based on early elections and a constitutional reshuffle of some sort, Evo Morales received calls from various Latin American leaders urging him to accept - including, unfortunately, Hugo Chavez. It struck me as entirely consistent with Chavez's political strategy, in which he sees his wily operations as substituting for, or occasionally convoking, mass action. He, after all, considers himself a political ally to, and student of, Fidel Castro. According to Richard Gott's book about Chavez, Castro advised him not to resist any coup attempt in April 2002, not to sacrifice his life - he was too important. Far better to allow the coup, as 'this does not end here'. That, again, is exemplary substitutionism, and quite predictable coming from a dictator who professes socialism yet prefers the working class to shut their yaps and pimp their kids out to rich tourists (Gary Glitter, it is you I speak of).

Today, David Harvey and Alex Callinicos had a meeting on The New Imperialism, which is the title of Harvey's most recent book. I was very impressed by Harvey's arguments, and gratified to note that Callinicos simply prefaced his contribution by saying "I agree with everything he's just said" - I think a tendency in the old days would have been to locate some totemic disagreement and pick away at it from time to time, although I could be fabulating. What Harvey said was very simple: the United States has from day one tried to be an imperial power, manifest both in its actions and in the quasi-predestinarian ideologies of Manifest Destiny. In the pursuit of this, it initially tried traditional colonial means. For instance, the colonisation of the Phillipines at the start of the century, and the attempt in the 1920s to take Nicaragua. In the Phillipines, they had no difficulties besides having to kill a few tens of thousands of natives, before handing the country over to a junta dominated by hacienda owners. In Nicaragua, they found themselves getting bogged down in a guerilla war against rural rebels, and so they concocted what turned out to be a much more effective means of projecting power over long distances. Basically, they assassinated the Liberal leader Augusto Sandino (hence, Sandinistas), and created a National Guard, which a handsome young Anastasio Somoza (formerly a careerist with the Liberals) was placed in charge of. He took control of the country in 1936, and inaugurated a dynasty that was to rule in the most brutal and corrupt manner until 1979.

This was a template that the US could apply to the world. In the first half of the 20th Century, the US applied the Monroe Doctrine in what it regarded as its hemisphere, while relying on the still mighty British to subdue hostile forces in Eurasia. Following the Second World War, with the red zones of the British Empire receding, the US reconstituted a precarious European capitalism through Marshall Plan aid (unlike those dusky nations, not a cent was ever paid back by whitey, and no one ever asked for it). It also set up some global institutions, which were adapted and meddled with over time, including the UN (which was founded under the direction of Leo Pavolsky, much to the chagrin of the disdainful Dean Acheson).

The US dominated in production, developed a bedazzling cultural hegemony that initially seduced both Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, and deployed its forces to aggressively enlarge its 'sphere of influence'. By the 1970s, Nemesis arrived: as Vietnam became a synonym for 'quagmire', and recession bolted out of the not-quite-blue, a Japanese sun rose over Detroit. The US ceased to dominate productively, and its cultural mass appeal had taken a knock or two. Failing to dominate in terms of production and technical innovation, the US turned toward the financialisation of the global economy, using the IMF, World Bank and various other mechanisms to open up trade barriers and create opportunities for the profitable deployment of surplus value. However, the increasing mobility of capital that this allowed was traumatic for the United States - waves of deindustrialisation hit the country, beginning with textiles, and ending with the crisis that caused Chrysler to be temporarily nationalised, along with a number of banks. The US was, however, able to benefit from its financial dominance, as well as patenting and licensing laws, and the repatriation of profit from offshore production, which alleviated some of the effects of deindustrialisation back home. Meanwhile, debt crises and economic catastrophe for many newly industrialising countries was a boon for the United States. If debt could not be repaid, this was a means by which an economy could be 'restructured' to enable access to resources for US capital. Similarly, when the South East Asian financial collapse occured, the currencies collapsed, and there was a general flight to the dollar: thus creating unemployment and misery on one end of the world, and extraordinary benefits for an affluent middle class on the other.

The Dollar Wall-Street Regime, as Peter Gowan has baptised it, has had its own run of difficulties of late, which would have been perhaps even more entrenched had it not been for 9/11, and the extraordinary nationalist revival as well as the reflation of a despised Republican Party whose executive had a propensity for authoritarian statism. Similarly, the US is now an imperial power in a multipolar world without hegemony. It can no longer rely on 'soft-power'. It will try to maintain Europe under the coercive umbrella of Natoism, which is why NATO has been placed in charge of Afghanistan, and UK troops are being shipped from Iraq to take care of operations in the South Asian protectorate - for the first time since Dr Watson had his arms bandaged.

But the US is in a dangerous predicament. It has to demonstrate its power more and more - just as it wiped out Hiroshima in a terrifying display of technological prowess, so it used 'shock and awe' from 30,000 feet to send a message to the world. The chief recipient of the first message was the USSR; the main receptacle for "shock n awe" is China. Harvey suggested that one of the reasons Rumsfeld was moaning about the lack of good targets in Afghanistan, and pushing an Iraqi venture instead, was that a display of military might would not look so good if you were pounding one of the poorest countries in the world, with the least entrenched state in the world.

And China is a real problem for the United States. On the one hand, US corporations love it. Wal Mart would not exist if it weren't for Chinese slave labour - *cough* - I mean, 'market reforms' and 'liberalisation'. The same can be said for many US corporations. On the other hand, there is a real risk of China expanding to such an extent that it actually represents a substantial threat to US interests. One anecdote that summarised this predicament turned on evidence given by Condoleeza Rice to the 9/11 investigators: she had said that one reason she hadn't been obsessed with terrorism was that China had downed a US spy plane, and there was a serious prospect of the US going to war with China (which sort of defeats the proposition, advanced by thinkers as different as Antonio Negri and Leo Panitch, that there can no longer be serious rivalries among advanced capitalist powers). It was, apparently, the decisive intervention of Wal Mart that prevented any escalation of hostilities.

The consequences are various: according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, US imperialism needs a united European handmaiden or junior partner, as it cannot fight alone (which is why so many 'realists' were disappointed by the EU referendum results); it also needs to demonstrate its power - using, as the Project for the New American Century put it, this "window of opportunity" to extend US influence and deter the rise of a major opposing superpower; but it is weak, and so fissures can be opened up which will weaken it further still and eventually defeat it and what it represents.

Samir Amin, the great Egyptian economist, a man whom I admire immensely, and the author of many great books on Eurocentrism, liberalism, and obsolescent capitalism, made a very interesting suggestion from the floor. He had been reading the text-books absorbed by American business school students, and found a very strange fact: whereas previously, a large corporation needed a customer base of 100 million, they now needed a minimum base of 600 million. This meant that national capitalisms could no longer be self-sufficient, if they ever were. Economies had 'globalised', whether they liked it or not. This meant that to some extent there remained an overlap of interest between the advanced capitalist economies. I think this may explain in part why even relatively 'independent' countries like France and Germany eventually bit the bullet - even if they didn't swallow it - over Iraq. The discourse of globalisation is, aside from being largely portentous shite, totally incapable of accounting for this situation. But this development does conform slightly to one of the expectations of 'globalisation' theorists: namely that nation-states are, whatever their own particular logics and proclivities, being eroded by processes beyond their control.

Galloway, Monbiot on Democracy Now. posted by lenin

Here it is . I'll just draw attention to a few excerpts:

Galloway - "[I]t would be entirely dishonest to pretend that this came out of nowhere, inexcusable, but not inexplicable. Sadly, all too explicable and explained, even before we did it, by the anti-war movement. We said this would not make the world a safer place, it would make the world a more dangerous place. And just like all of the other things we said about the war in Iraq, sadly, we have been proved right again yesterday, as we have been so many times."

Monbiot - "I would broadly endorse what he said about not creating conditions which are likely to stir up more terrorist acts. And there's no doubt that by invading Iraq, we have caused a great deal of resentment and anger within the Muslim world. And if that hasn't come back to haunt us yet, then it may well come back to haunt us in the future. But as I say, we don't yet know (a) who did this, and (b) what their motivation is. So, it really is too early to start saying this is because of a particular policy that we followed.

"As far as its impact on Britain is concerned, I am worried that we are going to see the loss of certain civil liberties as a result of this. We have seen with, for example, the PATRIOT Act in the United States, that there has been quite a curtailment of some fairly basic human rights, including the right to free assembly and the right to free expression and, of course, there has been a great deal of very intrusive surveillance and policing of the Muslim community and indeed parts of the non-white community in general in the U.S., some of which appears to have very little to do with anything which could reasonably be regarded as dealing with terrorism."

Stephen Grey (Sunday Times) - "Can I just come back on what George Galloway and George Monbiot were saying? I don't, as a reporter, don’t want to comment on the rights or wrongs of the Iraq war, but I would just obviously just put that in context. I think a lot of people in London will obviously see a lot in what George Galloway is saying, his remarks will have a lot of resonance with people who have expressed views on the Iraq war, but obviously, there will be others who will take the view that we should, in fact, strengthen our resolve in operating in Iraq for the sake of not giving in to terrorists.

"But I would say one important thing, where I think what George Galloway says resonates with what I have seen. I have spent a lot of time in the Middle East recently and in Iraq, in fact, last year. I think one important thing to understand about the nature of Islamic terrorism is that it's not just about a threat to the way of life of the West. If you talk to people who actually are close to these movements, I mean, they hate, above all, the policies of the West, and what -- you know, I won't comment on those policies, but they extend much -- they're not just invasion of Iraq, they also extend to our policies to the Middle East peace process, our involvement in Afghanistan.

"Many of the people who are drawn to these movements are not people who are looking for some sort of Taliban lifestyle, they're people who are actually motivated because they support some kind of insurgency about the way the West is dealing with the Middle East, and they feel the Middle East is utterly humiliated. The Middle East people are utterly humiliated by the West and the Western policies. And this is the response they seek. It's an appalling response, but I think to understand it, you’ve got to understand it goes a lot further than simply a kind of revulsion against the Western way of life."

London's explosions: interpretations. posted by lenin

One interpretation of the tragedy yesterday is to see it as an extraordinary opportunity for increased profitability. After 9/11, Americans were bombarded with messages urging them to go shopping "otherwise the terrorists win". This morning, the BBC reports that hotels in London are putting their prices up in response to the attacks. Other businesses are seeing it as a moment for staunch resolution: despite advice issued by the Metropolitan police not to travel into the city, some firms are urging their workers to treat it as 'business as usual' and show up for work.

Another interpretation is to see it as a reason for reducing civil liberties. Charles Clarke darkly hinted on the news yesterday of some exceptional measures which may have to be taken to curb the threat to us - these 'exceptional' measures have been accruing and fossilising as permanent law for some years now. Some one suggested to me yesterday that Clarke might lock people up without trial or hand them over to other states for torture. When I pointed out that this is already happening, the response was an exasperated shrug and "Well, you think of something, then!"

We know what the Prime Minister's interpretation was - it was a deliberate attempt to undermine the ersatz credibility he might receive from any minute move toward discharging the debt our governments owe to Africa. Then again, one could interpret it as retroactively providing a cassus belli. Aussie PM John Howard thinks that it's an excellent reason to keep troops in Iraq . And the BBC are taking the opportunity to coopt Londoners for the Olympics - "we were all overjoyed" by winning the Olympics, apparently. News for them: I wasn't.

Ken Livingston's view, in an admirable speech, was that this was not an attack on the leaders, the warmongers or the G8, but on ordinary, working class Londoners going about their day - and that it would never succeed.

The interpretation of Labour Against the War, Socialist Worker, Mike Marqusee and George Galloway was that this is the catastrophic blow-back from Blair's foreign policy, that Londoners are paying the price for a policy that they didn't implement and by and large didn't even support. The difference between this and all previous interpretations, in my view, is that it is manifestly , obviously , the case - which is exactly why the point is being strenuously avoided by most commentators. Charles Clarke insisted on television last night, against his own intelligence services, that this had nothing to do with it. The terrorists were opposed to our freedom, our parliamentary democracy etc etc. How many times do we have to be insulted with this nonsense? Naturally, some feel entitled to appropriate the outrage and grief to browbeat anyone who says otherwise: following Galloway's speech in parliament yesterday, Adam Ingram accused him of having dipped his poisonous tongue in blood: a turn of phrase worthy of Galloway himself, if it weren't deployed by a despicable warmonger with the blood of 100,000 people dripping from his tongue.

It's becoming hackneyed to say so - in fact, it was hackneyed long before anyone said it - but the response of Londoners does indeed appear to have been remarkable. Calm, resolute, taking no shit from anyone. After 9/11, flags popped up everywhere, and credulity swelled. The first thing that was aroused by the murder of approximately 3,000 people was a defiant sense of American nationalism - understandably, but also unfortunately. None of this appears to pertain to Britain, and certainly not to London. People are just getting on with it. This is a perfectly apt response to such a situation. Britons indeed appear to be asking intelligent questions, certainly if last night's Question Time is anything to go by. That's the way: since when was it healthy to simply scuttle behind the government, accept whatever bullshit they come out with, and hope to lawd that they defeat the evil-doers in whatever way they deem necessary? Take shit from no one, I say: neither the bastards who bombed us, nor the bastards who are bombing Iraq. Fuck em.

Finally, this blogger's eye-witness account is well worth a read. It offers no interpretation: it is simply the experience of someone who has been through hell before discussion of it was clotted with media cliché.

Well... posted by lenin

The buses are running again, and quite packed too - a lot of people obviously decided not to be put off. All the tubes are down, but Oxford Street is open. Indeed, the only roads that I saw blocked off were those leading to the US Embassy, which were guarded by armed police. That said, some places are just grid-locked. The DLR is starting to run a few services. There are huge queues awaiting riverboats, running from the City to Victoria Embankment.

Most of the shops round the centre appear to have been closed - Maccy D's and Pret shut down first thing it seems, but lots of other places packed it in for the day as well.

A friend's workplace forebade anyone to look at news bulletins other than those provided by the company's website itself: presumably to keep people thinking about work and not about other human beings. No problem there at any rate, since the place is an investment bank, and everyone was obsessed with the falling markets and rising bonds.

Meanwhile, accounts in the Greek press apparently explain that there are many, many more dead and injured than we are being lead to believe here. The Guardian reports 37 dead, 700 injured , which is already high enough.

Finally, the BBC seems to have turned itself into a mouthpiece for the government .

Socialist Worker statement on bombings. posted by lenin

This was quick :

[1pm Thursday 7 July]
Socialist Worker statement following London bombings
Our thoughts are with all those killed and wounded in this morning’s terrible attacks in London.

London is a centre of peace, the most multiracial city in Europe and a global centre of opposition to the war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. A majority of those killed and wounded will have opposed the war in Iraq; some will have joined the huge marches for peace.

These bombings followed the biggest ever protest in Scotland’s history against world poverty. The anti-war message was everywhere on that magnificent march.

These bombings target ordinary people travelling by bus and underground to work and study; people who oppose Tony Blair’s support for George Bush and their occupation of Iraq. They are in no way a blow against imperialism or the G8 leaders, who are ensconced in a luxury hotel 450 miles north of London.

The British government cannot avoid its responsibility for these terrible attacks, which are a consequence of its support for war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The best way to ensure that there are no more such terrible attacks is for British troops to be withdrawn from there immediately.

As a mark of respect for the dead we have cancelled the opening day of our Marxism 2005 event. We call on the international anti-war movement and the global left to rally round the people of London and, in the face of these terrible attacks, to redouble their work for global peace and justice.

Chris Bambery, editor Socialist Worker
Martin Smith, National Organiser, Socialist Workers Party

And also :

[1.30pm Thursday 7 July]
Press Statement on London bombings by Fausto Bertinotti
“What occurred in London is the atrocity of a barbarism. Peaceful people should mobilise”

Once again violence is upsetting the world. Any place, any city, any country may become a stage for devastation and death. Women and men of any ethnic group, any age, any social condition are seeing their innocent lives destroyed. This is the atrocity of a barbarism. Today terrorism is upsetting London and the world. The spiral of war and terrorism is the terrifying background — both are the enemies of humanity. Last Saturday in Edinburgh a big white-clad march addressed poverty and war in peaceful and nonviolent language. Now the anti-war movement should become a key player in a worldwide mobilisation against terrorism and war. Only the people can stop this horrible violence.

Fausto Bertinotti, Chair of the European Left Party
Rome, 7 July 2005

Blair: already exploiting the terror. posted by lenin

What a fucking scumbag. The bodies aren't even cool yet, and the Prime Minister is already exploiting this series of atrocities for political capital. He said in his speech:

"It is particularly barbaric this has happened on a day when people are meeting to try to help the problems of poverty in Africa and the long term problems of climate change and the environment."

It is no more barbaric today than it would have been yesterday, or tomorrow, or next year. The sole purpose of such a sentence is to try and slip a self-congratulatory word or two past your bullshit detector. I've never thought that Blair had much of a moral compass, but this demonstrates that he doesn't even have much self-awareness these days. What a loathsome man.

Don't panic. posted by lenin

Don't panic, he says, like a reject from Dad's Army. I admit it - I've spent the last hour shitting myself, and contacting people I know - although the networks are naturally pretty busy.

It looks like there are at least six tube stations that have exploded. Four buses have blown up. Suffice to say, there will be no public transport available today - and I reckon you'll be lucky to get a taxi.

An 'expert' of some description has said that these attacks are designed to create maximum disruption with minimum loss of lives. Indeed, the explosions must have been rather weak: I am no more than a couple of hundred yards from Edgeware Road tube, which was the target of an explosion, and I didn't hear a thing. Not even a minute tremor. There is no billowing smoke, and people are still walking up and down Edgeware Road. Plenty of emergency sirens, though.

The news keeps repeating the same snippets of non-information, while the newscasters are probing for the most salacious details. It's actually quite gratuitous. Most of their commentators have fingered 'Al Qaeda' or some confederate organisation with guilt for these attacks. Well, let's face it, the choices are pretty limited - either it's the Real IRA, or it's some group in the fashion of 'Al Qaeda', or it's some far right group - recalling a certain nail-bomber not so long ago. There's no point in jumping to conclusions, however - when the FBI building was blown up in Oklahoma, it was immediately blamed on some dusky Others, and it turned out to be some red neck crackers, one of whom had experience fighting in Iraq.

It is also vitally urgent to bear in mind that Muslims are going to be singled out even more for opprobrium and racist violence in the coming days and weeks. There needs to be an immediate reaction against this, and I hope and expect that Respect will be particularly hard on this in the areas where it is active.

Doubtless, these attacks will be used to justify some war or other, and ID Cards could well be a shoo-in with the public now, despite recent trends for support to fall.

So, yeah, my nose-bleedingly obvious advice is, don't panic, stay safe - and turn off the news, please, because they will tell you practically nothing new, and will offend every shred of decency that you have with their prurient search for gory details.

Right, I'm going to grab something to eat and call some more people.

Gamy Polly. posted by lenin

Just in terms of totally missing the fucking point, I can't fault this headline atop today's Polly Toynbee pabulum:

Now let's take the spirit of Live 8 to middle England .

Live 8 is pure, unadulterated, hyper-concentrated 'Middle England', made with the frozen Daily Mail concentrate. If there was ever an event for the suburban, car-washing, bewildered philanthropists, this was it. What a total fucking idiot.

"The New Anti-Semitism". posted by lenin

Norman Finkelstein describes how everytime Israel loses some moral face, the pro-Israeli lobby in the United States produces another version of 'The New Anti-Semitism' . In the Eighties, the 'new anti-Semitism' thesis was propounded by such neoconservatives as Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Now we have efforts by Daniel Pipes, Phyllis Chesler, Gabriel Schoenfeld, Miriam Greenspan and Abe Foxman, the bespectacled beardie of the World Jewish Congress.

Recently, there have been sustained efforts made by Campus Watch and others to victimise pro-Palestinian academics, resulting in the public defamation and intimidation of Joseph Massad at Columbia University . In Britain, a less organised but no less noxious campaign was mounted against Muslim student, Nasser Amin .

The Pew Research Centre recently cast doubt on claims of a 'new anti-Semitism', stating that:

Despite concerns about rising anti-Semitism in Europe, there are no indications that anti-Jewish sentiment has increased over the past decade. Favorable ratings of Jews are actually higher now in France, Germany and Russia than they were in 1991. Nonetheless, Jews are better liked in the U.S. than in Germany and Russia. As is the case with Americans, Europeans hold much more negative views of Muslims than of Jews.

There are other reports of increasing anti-Semitic attacks in European countries, but the likelihood is that this remains a marginal phenomenon, largely carried out by young white males , and in some cases by Muslims reacting to episodes in the Israeli-Palestine conflict. There is little to justify complaints of a 'new anti-Semitism', unless one expands the concept - as most of its proponents do - to include valid criticism of Israel.

And finally we come to France, where Ariel Sharon recently ruffled some feathers by suggesting that French Jews should move to Israel in order to escape the country's 5 million Muslims.

Direland reports this morning on the victimisation of a French sociologist named Edgar Morin and the newspaper Le Monde, the former for having written, and the latter having published, an article condemning Israeli repression against Palestinians. Direland notes that Morin has received the support of "Paul Ricoeur, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Alain Touraine, the historians Pierre Nora, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and also the former Portugese president Mario Soares, Theo Klein, the former president of CRIF, the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (an alliance of nearly all of France's respectable Jewish organizations which is considered the "voice" of French Jewry), and Jean Daniel". They have signed a petition pointing out that:

[T]he article expresses great distress at the disastrous consequences of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the world, especially in France, where it has provoked both Judeophobia and Arabophobia. The article underlines with indignation and sorrow that the experience by the Jews of persecutions and humiliations for two millenniums have hardly stopped humiliations and persecutions being inflicted on the Palestinians. In the mind of the authors, recognizing this contradiction carries with it respect of the memory of past suffering. It is an elementary principle of knowledge and of judgment that every sentence is given its full meaning by the complete text in which it is written, and that every text is explained by its context. In fact, the rest of the article makes it clear that the criticisms are addressed, not at a people, but at an occupant --indeed, the article itself makes that clear, saying: 'This logic of contempt and humiliation is not the particularity of the Israelis, it is the particularity of all the occupations, in which the conqueror sees himself as superior compared to a people of sub-humans.'

Yet, the France-Israel Association and Lawyers Without Borders took Morin, his co-authors and the editor of Le Monde to court, accusing them of "racial defamation and justifying terrorism". Morin won the initial case, but on appeal a court in Versailles found that the article had included 'anti-Semitic statements'. An English translation of the article is here .

The real tragedy of such efforts is that they obliterate the distinction between genuine anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel and its policies. This obscures a vital difference. It also means that the phrase "anti-Semitism" is associated in many minds with neo-McCarthyism and attempts at suppressing legitimate political speech, whereas it should be associated with perhaps the greatest crime in history, the attempted extermination of Europe's Jews.

Dead Men Protesting. posted by lenin

There is an excellent report back from the Edinburgh protests from Bloggery's very own Paul O'Grady at Dead Men Left :

To condense yesterday's events, there are two important points:
- Stone-throwing, such as it was, was lead, organised and mainly perpertrated by local youths - by their accents and their clothing, they were easily identified. "Outside agitators" were few and far between, melting away shortly after the riot police turned up. Those the police lifted yesterday are very unlikely to be the dreaded (and near-mythological) "Black Block". No stones were thrown until after the riot police appeared.
- The grossly disproportionate response of the police to an initially very minor public order issue - a street carnival - was not just produced by the desire of competing police forces to strut their stuff. As the line being pushed by the BBC indicates, there appears to have been a deliberate attempt to achieve two aims:
a. to pick out as many likely "troublemakers" before Wednesday as possible (which, for the reason above, may be difficult);
b. to intimidate everyone else.
By moving very quickly from blocking a protest with ordinary coppers (as is usual and expected), to baton charges and (in short order) to riot gear, the police deliberately escalated the situation. (On good authority, it seems the police here have been briefed to the effect that four of their number are expected to die over these few days. Ludicrous, of course, but it explains some of their agression.) I do not think I have seen such aggressive policing in Britain before.

The post, title of which proves that Meaders is seriously competing with Mark Elf for the title "King of the Headlines", also draws attention to a tart little comment about Bob Geldof from Bionic Octopus . This animal is extremely dangerous and I urge you to approach with caution. Grrr. Big teeth and everything.

More from Edinburgh protests posted by lenin

A friend of mine forwarded me an account of the protests in Edinburgh that is totally at odds with what the media are reporting - ie, good protesters went home in time for a full eight hours sleep, bad anarchists stayed around to wreak havoc and brick riot police. Here is the BBC's account , in which the only disinterested witnesses they can find are certain that "the protesters started it". And here is the account I received this morning:

Instead, what there was, was a lot of very nervous, twitchy police who were disorganised and seemingly without a proper idea of what they were doing; after blocking of Princes Street - Edinburgh's major thoroughfare - from the east and west, police in full riot gear corralled protestors, passers-by, journalists, photographers, people sitting enjoying the sun around the National Gallery and anyone unlucky enough to be in the area into a small contained area directly in front of the Royal Scottish Academy.

Occasionally making rushes towards the crowd, screaming "Move back! Move back!" the area of containment was gradually reduced in size. Huge steel gates were erected at the entrance to Hanover Street, directly opposite the RSA, and no one was allowed to leave. Shortly before the gates were closed, more people, who had been watching from Hanover Street, were allowed into the containment area.

Once the area was closed off, the police continued to reduce the size of the area, forcing people to jump fences in Princes Street Gardens, where they were pursued by police wielding batons; I saw several people be smacked back by shields, including one man who was deliberately hit full in the face by a riot shied as he tried to get out of the way of the police, but got trapped by a tree. A number of people tried to shelter from the onslaught of police behind a bench - the bench was torn up by the police, and the people were battered back towards the containment area. I watched one boy climb over the Princes Street garden fence in a state of obvious panic and impale his foot on one of the fence spikes.

Once the gardens were emptied, the police began making rushes into the crowd to remove certain individuals; I watched as one bare-chested man who was shouting peacefully at the police, without making any violent gestures, was beaten with riot shields, knocked to the ground, and was stamped on by a riot boot by a policeman, leaving him with a four inch gash in the flesh of his back.

I watched as a 16 or 17 year old youth was battered to the ground by a group of 8 policemen, cuffed and dragged across the ground to an area behind the riot barrier. What had he done? Thrown a piece of plastic at a riot shield.

I watched as one peaceful protestor, sitting singing songs with others on the steps of the gallery was dragged through the crowd for no apparent reason, cuffed and arrested.

After a period of about half an hour of escalating tension and violence from the police, things simmered down. We were left standing watching the police watching us; the photographers and journalists probably matched the genuine protestors in number; most of the people causing trouble were local youths, school kids who had seen an opportunity for a bit of fun.

As the afternoon wore on, and the police drank from the bottles of water denied to the crowd they'd hemmed in, people gradually relaxed and sat down in the road. By about half past five, an announcement was made that people could leave the area, one by one, having been subject to a full search, being photographed, filmed, and giving full personal details to police.

This wasn't a riot - it was an attempt by a group of police to try and justify their presence in the city; if they had not actively provoked an otherwise entirely peaceful crowd, there would have been no trouble at all. Instead they chose to trap and taunt a group of peaceable people; the only trouble I saw was caused by local kids, not by protestors. There was no Black Bloc, there was no Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army - there was just a group of peaceful protestors, passers-by, and kids who wanted to cause trouble.

I left - having photographed scenes you normally only see in the pages of newspapers - absolutely disgusted.

Surely, this is an inversion of natural justice? We pay the police's wages - it's us who should be entitled to knock them about a bit.

Nasser Amin update. posted by lenin

The Muslim student whose name has been dragged through the mud, who has been threatened with arrest in parliament, and who has been given a formal reprimand by his college without warning or explanation - more importantly without justice - has a human rights group on his side. The Islamic Human Rights Commission has taken up his case:

Amin has received death threats on Zionist websites, and calls have been made in parliament for action to be taken against him. This is not only unacceptable but has been fuelled by SOAS’s failure to defend academic freedom and moral discussion.

The incident is also being used by pro Israeli groups to justify a need for incitement to religious hatred legislation, clearly showing how this law, if passed, will be used against those criticizing the aggressive actions of the State Israel.

Instead of defending Amin from this witch hunt SOAS announced they had issued him a public reprimand. They did not follow correct procedure or allow him an opportunity to defend himself; in fact, they did not even bother to contact him.

This is yet another example of Zionists bullying anyone who speaks out against Israeli oppression and institutions buckling for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic

IHRC calls upon campaigners to contact Colin Bundy, principal at SOAS and demand:

1) An explanation as to why Amin was issued a formal reprimand without informing him or giving him a chance to defend himself against the allegations.

2) He retracts this reprimand.

Email: cb3@soas.ac.uk

Write to Colin Bundy at:
School of Oriental and African Studies
Professor Colin Bundy
Director and Principal
Thornhaugh Street
Russell Square
LONDON
WC1H 0XG

Do at the very least send Mr Bundy an e-mail. This is a dreadful way to treat a student, and it amazes me that it has fallen only to this group to defend Mr Amin. Where is Liberty in all of this? Not even a short statement from Amnesty?

Report from Edinburgh. posted by lenin

Guy Taylor of Globalise Resistance sent me this excellent report from the demonstrations and rallies:

We checked into the campsite (the GR Train bringing the first big group to the city) on Friday night. There was so far about 40 or 50 tents set up. We saw our mini marquee, and pitched up around it. “You can’t camp here” we were told by a security guard, “this is an ‘autonomous’ space” he announced with all the conviction of a Seattle veteran. Apparently the small line of plastic tape we’d walked over to get to our marquee was the borderline between the campsite (ordinary) and the campsite (autonomous). Some Autonomists had organised a non-hierarchical meeting, in an anti-authoritarian style, and called the security guards to move us on. After staggering about under this intense thunderclap of irony, we moved. No point in not getting on with the neighbours, and autonomous spaces are notorious for their containing noise polluters when you most want sleep.
The camp is in Niddrie, for anyone who doesn’t know Edinburgh, this place is the poorest area in town. On a bus stop outside is a leaflet calling for a public meeting to stop the camp from happening (failed, obviously). The media had made much of potential tension between locals and protesters, but we were greeted by a good bunch of people from the estate. Next to the field is a couple of tower blocks that were featured in Trainspotting, and the field we are pitched in was the one from the film where they shoot the dog up it’s arse. Lovely. The council had announced they were to charge people £5 per night, but it’s been made free after pressure from campers and organisers.
Getting down to the MPH march the next day, we were again amazed, this time by
Oxfam ineptitude. Make Poverty History? More like spread it around a bit. The food concessions on site were having a laugh at our expense. Expensive crappy food, making London look cheap. And not a deep fried Mars Bar in sight, bollocks. Oxfam themselves were joining in the game. £20 for a souvenir t-shirt, non-ethically produced, made our lovely INSURGENT shirts on organic hemp, loving weaved by well paid workers in the shade at £15 seem the bargain of the century.
But most inept was the protest itself. Whren you’re trying to build a movement, you do have to consider the experience of people coming along to the protests. MPH treated everyone like white band fodder, a series of pens and stewards made progress very slow. We waited to get on the road for over 3 hours with no one coming to tell us what was happening. In fact I sat the march out, exhausted by the previous work in the run up to the event. I staffed the stall and spent the best part of the afternoon getting the shit kicked out of me by two 7 year olds, who found it funny.
The Stop the War stage hosted the radical speakers (W Bello, T Ngwane, G
Galloway, C Lucas, S Ritter, D Brutus, L German, G Monbiot, J Corbyn and J Rees and loads more), with George bringing the whole thing to a hollering climax. The rally repeatedly had the connection between poverty and war rammed across. The hypocrisy of the G8 over corruption was highlighted and Bonio and Gandalf came in for a fair slap of derision.
The evening had most bars in town packed with people staying for a little longer than just the Saturday. Howls of anguish emanated from every bar you walked past as the Live 8 coverage blocked all else from reports.
As Walden Bello said from the stage at the Usher Hall yesterday (Sunday) the mood has changed from meek to militant. No longer dominated by people who want to plead, the activist community here is now ready to expose the G8 for who they are and where their interests stand. And the police and authorities are looking for every chance to drive home the message that “If they’re still here, they must be up to bad shit”. Corralled the Stop the War march last night, briefly, the filming and surveillance has increased. People in Edinburgh have been warned of the Carnival and Clown actions today being potentially violent, to dress down if working and generally be scared like a good citizen until next weekend.
The protest to Gleneagles on wednesday is going ahead, the tickets for the coaches are being sold like hotcakes. The Herald today is trying to exacerbate potential friction in the movement by playing the dissent (blockaders) off against the G8Alternatives (marchers). I can’t see any problems we can’t overcome. There are lines of communication and despite a few instances which might suggest otherwise, there’s been a cordial relationship going on.
The Rally at the end of the G8Alternatives counter summit yesterday was a stormer. Haidi Guiliani (Mother of Carlo), Caroline Lucas, Vittorio Agnoletto, Galloway, Ngwane, Bianca Jagger (fantastic attack on Bono & Geldof) and a Scottish Socialist MEP (crow barred on to the stage, no one outside of Scotland had heard of her). George ended the thing, whipped up an atmosphere, and tickets for Wednesday were flying out to everyone. Two people who had come up from London with us announced they weren’t going home now, but would stay until Thursday.
As I write the foolhardy (?) who woke at 4am are getting dragged off the road at Faslane. I couldn’t make it, have ‘things to organise’ in Edinburgh, and fancied more than 2 hours sleep. I also really don’t want to get arrested before Wednesday, thus jeopardising the Gleneagles demo.
Anyway, more later I hope.
GuyT

Torture, Not Aid. posted by lenin

The Observer seems to be intent on assassinating its own reputation by doing some actual news reporting. Today, it discloses that UK and US aid intended for "Iraq's hard-pressed police service" is actually being diverted toward "paramilitary commando units accused of widespread human rights abuses, including torture and extra-judicial killings":

The Observer has seen photographic evidence of post-mortem and hospital examinations of alleged terror suspects from Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle which demonstrate serious abuse of suspects including burnings, strangulation, the breaking of limbs and - in one case - the apparent use of an electric drill to perform a knee-capping.
The investigation revealed:
· A 'ghost' network of secret detention centres across the country, inaccessible to human rights organisations, where torture is taking place.
· Compelling evidence of widespread use of violent interrogation methods including hanging by the arms, burnings, beatings, the use of electric shocks and sexual abuse.
· Claims that serious abuse has taken place within the walls of the Iraqi government's own Ministry of the Interior.
· Apparent co-operation between unofficial and official detention facilities, and evidence of extra-judicial executions by the police.

This 'aid' comes from the MoD, the Foreign Office, and the Department for International Development, which looks more like government subsidy than charity if you ask me. If I were to take a cynical view - and okay I will - I'd say that this money was intended for the death squads .

As for the torture chambers ? Well:

To add to HRW's allegations of beatings, electric shocks, arbitrary arrest, forced confessions and detention without trial, The Observer can add its own charges These include the most brutal kinds of torture, with methods resurrected from the time of Saddam; of increasingly widespread extra-judicial executions; and of the existence of a 'ghost' network of detention facilities - in parallel with those officially acknowledged - that exist beyond all accountability to international human rights monitors, NGOs and even human rights officials of the new Iraqi government.

What is most shocking is that it is done under the noses of US and UK officials, some of whom admit that they are aware of the abuses being perpetrated by units who are diverting international funding to their dirty war.

They certainly know how to have fun in the New Iraq. In fact, they've got some bottle:

'Abu Ali', a 30-year-old Sunni scooped up in a mosque raid in central Baghdad, was taken to [a torture centre in the Shoula district] for a week in mid-May where he says he was beaten on his feet, subjected to hanging by his arms and, when he angered his guards by refusing to confess, threatened with being sat on 'the bottle' - being anally penetrated.

In Gillo Pontecorvo's film The Battle of Algiers, which was shown to US war planners before the assault on Iraq, the trajectory of occupation and resistance is described - one which has extraordinary resonance today. The National Liberation Front (FLN) begins its campaign against the occupation with a communique that says "People of Algeria, the colonial administration is responsible not only for the misery and enslavement of our people, but also for the brutalization, corruption and degrading vices of many of our brothers and sisters, who have forgotten their dignity.... Starting today, the FLN has assumed responsibility for the physical and moral health of the Algerian people and has therefore decided to forbid the use and sale of all types of drugs and alcoholic beverages, as well as prostitution and pimping. All offenders will be punished and habitual offenders will be executed".

War ensues: French police officers are shot, and retaliate by bombing Arab areas. FLN bombs are planted in bars and residential areas. The French beef up their own operations with tanks, torture, and severe crackdowns on movement. Colonel Matthieu announces that it is just a minority against the occupation, and says that the trick is to isolate these few who rule by terror, and eliminate them.

Then, there is a remarkable moment where Colonel Matthieu addresses a press conference with a captured FLN official. A journalist asks the official: "Isn’t it a dirty thing to use women’s baskets to carry bombs to kill innocent people?" To which the official answers, "And you? Doesn’t it seem even dirtier to you to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages with thousands of innocent victims? It would be a lot easier for us if we had planes. Give us your bombers, and we’ll give you our baskets." When Colonel Matthieu is asked about the allegations of torture against suspected FLN members, he says "I’ll ask you a question myself: Should France stay in Algeria? If the answer is still yes, you’ll have to accept all the necessary consequences."

Shall our foolish, bellicose, fevered rulers continue to have Iraq? Will we allow them to treat the Middle East as a play-thing for their imperial subventions, in which they can 'change the balance of power' in the area, as if it were a game of Risk? If the answer is yes, then kindly ignore the message in that bottle.

Mind them terrorists! posted by lenin

The 120,000 strong protest in Edinburgh yesterday was somewhat occluded by the big Bono beanfeast in Hyde Park yesterday (well into this morning in fact - stragglers were cackling outside the pub opposite until about 5am). One thing that will not have been caught on camera is the fate of this group of protesters :

Among them were three coach loads of people from Belfast who said they were held at Stranraer by police, photographed and had their bags searched.

Elsewhere, campaigners who took trains from Euston said they were not allowed to make the journey until officers had taken their pictures.

I can understand the suspicion about people who arrive from Euston station, but are the cops seriously worried that my fellow countrymen could turn out to be troublemakers? Why? What's the evidence? And who did they beat it out of?

What a crock of shit. posted by lenin

The mind rots, the heart sighs and the stomach revolts. Live 8 is wonderful publicity which socialists can make use of, but it has reduced me to horrible tears. One after another, greasy old hacks, talentless turds and cheese-merchants limp onto stage (a few hundred yards away, but surrounded by buildings and no book depository in sight). Madge whores her rough and ready 47 year old voice and simpers a bit about Bob Geldof. Bono delivers some soothing emmolient unction for the G8 leaders while chatting shit with Jonathan Woss. Chris 'Scab' Moyles can only manage to say how 'amazing' it all is, while some idiot kiddies' television presenter just keeps expostulating "WOW! THAT WAS GREAT!!" after each performance. Snoop Dog was aight, but I don't like his stuff. Beyonce's sole virtue is that she can dance in very difficult high heels and move her hair in interesting formations. The Beckhams look fabulous as always, and their great saving grace is that Posh doesn't try to sing any more.

The issues that are supposed to be the centre of some 'consciousness-raising' are either being suppressed, or merely converted into sighs of woe and hey nonny nonny. It's slightly sickening to see it turned into yet another 'carnival'. Zizek once made a point about charity - its logic was "give so that you will not get too close to the suffering Other". Since, in our postmodern monadic way, we draw a screen between ourselves and the world, creating both an intimate space of emotional sincerity and an Out There, the conservative gesture par excellence is that which allows us to live with what is happening Out There. In this case, it is "listen to music, and raise your voice". The point in many ways is not to effect change, but to say "I raised my voice".

Call me a steaming bucket of piss and vinegar if you will, and if you really must. But I hope the G8 protests form the locus of something much more human and inspiring than this warmed up vat of pig shit. Call Bono and tell him I'm extremely pissed off.

More...

US war crimes in Haditha and Al Qaim posted by lenin

Following recent reports of Iraqi doctors protesting the wholesale destruction of hospitals and medical care in Al Qaim and Haditha, the group Doctors for Iraqi Society have issued a press release :

Eyewitness and medical personnel in the area have described how US soldiers prevented food and medication reaching Hadeetha and Al Qiem and targeted the cities' two main hospitals, medical staff, and ambulances.

US soldiers violated the Geneva Convention and international law by
preventing civilians from accessing healthcare. Eyewitness reported at least one patient being shot dead in his bed on a hospital ward.
Doctors were prevented from assisting patients and civilians in need. A number of doctors and medical personnel were killed in the attack and others were arrested by US forces in the hospital. They were later released, along with the hospital manager who was detained for two days.

The huge military operations in the area has caused widespread damage and an unknown number of civilians were killed and injured during the attack.

Video footage shot by doctors shows a badly damage medical store in the Hadeetha hospital and damaged surgical theatres. The medical store contained medicine and equipment for all hospitals and medical centers in the west of Iraq. Staff and patients say the damage was carried out by by violent and barbaric US soldiers.

This adds to the recent reporting by Dahr Jamail both about these particular atrocities and the general destruction and breakdown of healthcare in the New Iraq.

Expect more on this shortly.

Dissenting crockery. posted by lenin

I profoundly resent these smart guys who read Science Fiction and talk all wordy like :

At a very simple level, genre has 'radical potential' in the same way a hammer has radical potential - it depends what you want to do with it. But of course it's not that simple... Because the cultural baggage of genre is so strong that I'd say *any* even remotely thoughtful, let alone critical, work within a generic tradition, cannot fail to have a self-consciousness of its relationship to that tradition, in some sense, however mediated. In terms of embedded politics, what that means is that *any* examination of/shenanigans with 'traditional' genre gives you this kind of immediate revisionist cred, and as I say, so far as it goes, there's nothing wrong with that. However all these counterclichés cliché very fast. Is it, to take one example, *really* doing a very radical job to point out the brutality and unromanticness of the old west any more? In the era where 'Unforgiven' wins 4 oscars, and Cormac McCarthy is feted as one of the all-time great American novelists, surely you could make a case that it would be far more countercultural these days to have a hero with a straightforward white hat[.]

White hat cowboyism.

Yes, there's a bit of what Slavoj Zizek refers to as kynicism in the heroic idealisation of 'dishcloth-grey' morality. It valorises conduct which happens to be perfectly normal, invites a subtle complicity and enjoyment in spectacular cruelty. The ultimate ethical horizon in Tarantinoite amoralism is "how fucking cool was that?" It arises from an acceptance of the 'lessons' of the 20th Century, foremost among which is the notion that Evil somehow emerges from a supererogatory insistence on Good. This is what bewildered me when Brother K-punk said that:

So it is gratifying that Batman Begins is not about 'shades of grey' at all, but rather shades of white. It is a film not about amorality and Evil, but Good. In many ways, it is the film that Zizek wanted Revenge of the Sith to be: a film, that is to say, which dares to hypothesize that Evil might result from an excess of Good. [Emphasis added]

Dares? How ubiquitous is the notion that behind every goody-goody is a 'totalitarian'? From happy-clappers to paper sellers to the invisible but omnipresent arbiters of political-correctness, it is the do-gooders and would-be do-gooders who cause all the trouble. Why, Genghis Khan probably thought he was a paragon of virtue. Of course, there are good reasons to be suspicious of anyone who treats an insistence on the Good as one of a long list of credentials. The hand of history that occasionally grips the Prime Minister's shoulder disturbs a countenance effusive with passion, belief and vision, and knocks askance a golden gloriole of goodness. Yet Blair's regime relies upon an unstated complicity, an agreement that cynicism, manipulation, sell-out, hypocrisy, crookedness and mendacity are simply among the tools of modern political conduct: one bashes asylum seekers, because it satisfies the right-wing press and takes the sting out of Tory attacks. In other words, Blair, although he evinces all the public signs of decency, rectitude and the rest, is a precise example of the hegemony of neither/nor amorality, of the way in which authoritarianism is sustained by cynical collusion. It is all there in his equivocations: rights, but also responsibilities; firm, but fair; tough, yet tender; butch, but also effete; a pretty straight guy, yet wonderfully twisted...

No, the subversive gesture is sometimes to treat principle as if it was worth more than a few glib platitudinous tributes, to act as if it really mattered.