Iraqi resistance dossier. posted by lenin

In no particular order, here is a compilation of Tomb discussions of Iraq and the resistance to the American-led occupation.

Iraqi Resistance dossier (2005): they don't target civilians.

Iraqi resistance dossier (2006): they still don't target civilians.

Iraqi resistance dossier (2007): they still don't target civilians.

Iraqi resistance is "winning".

Nationalist resistance fights Zarqawi

Freelance freedom fighters: the resistance fighters who do contract work

Interview with a resistance consultant: "we quite like Sadr".

Not a command and control operation: why the Americans don't understand the Iraqi resistance.

"Iraqi resistance packs it in": debunking one of the earlier myths about the resistance.

Resistance and representation: the Gulf War did not take place.

"The people of Fallujah love Cindy Sheehan".

A successful three-year psy-op: bigging up Zarqawi.

Iraqis support resistance attacks.

Terrorism and the Lonely Hearts Column: backing the Iraqi resistance since 2003.

Ethnic cleansing in the new Iraq: occupiers try to stir up sectarian tension.

News of US negotiations with resistance fighters.

Culture of genocide: how US ideologists legitimise slaughter.

US fights resistance in Tal Afar, slaughters innocents.

IFTU and the occupation: Iraq's pro-occupation union federation tours America.

"A tiny handful of evildoers": tearing up the PR script.

More to follow.

Spot the difference posted by bat020

Courtesy of cian in the comments boxes...

Exhibit A is a newswire photo from New Orleans:



Caption: "A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday."

Exhibit B is another newswire photo from New Orleans:



Caption: "Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana."

Sunni moves to unite with Shi'ites. posted by lenin

A commenter in the thread below draws my attention to this:

Iraq's disenchanted Sunni Arabs have reached out across the sectarian divide to seek alliances with any ethnic or religious groups opposed to the newly drafted constitution.

After staging demonstrations on Monday, Sunni leaders said they were opening talks with the movement of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and preparing a national conference to generate public support for defeating the charter at a mid-October referendum.

"We would like to cooperate with Muqtada al-Sadr and very soon we will start negotiations with him," said Salih al-Mutlaq, a top Sunni negotiator.

Smart move. There has already been Sunni-Shi'ite unity on the ground in both the armed and unarmed resistance. In the former, Shi'ites helped Sunnis fight occupation forces and Kurdish peshmergas in Tal Afar. In the latter, Sunnis and Shi'ites joined together in Firdos Square against the occupation, two years after Saddam's statue was felled as part of a US psy-op.

One thing the article, from Al Jazeera, doesn't make clear is that there is substantial hostility to federalism among many Shi'ites as evidenced in this mass demonstration. Indeed, the first whisper I heard that any significant Shi'ite group might back a federalist constitution was when Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the sectarian Shi'ite group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an Iran-backed organisation with a secret service developed under Iranian tutelage and a militia known as the Badr Corps which has been killing its opponents, both religious and political. A twist of historical irony is that the Badr Corps were suspected by the occupiers of being potential trouble-makers for them, whereas they immediately declared after the invasion that they would not fight the new government - indeed they may have fought for them in death squads.

It is long past time that pan-Iraqi unity was made official. These nuptials are just the beginning.

Collective punishment in the New Iraq. posted by lenin

Ssssh. Sssssh. Forget 56 civilians killed in a US air strike on Iraqi houses. That shit is collateral damage. The real news, the real headline, is that seven 'insurgents' were killed - yippee!

It gets better. They aren't even insurgents: they're Al Qaeda Fighters. The great thing about this latter report is that the reporters seem confused about what their reports are actually saying. First, "At least 50 people died in the raids, Agence France-Presse reported." Then, " At least 56 people died, Agence France-Presse said". A sub-editor, a fact-checker, anyone?

They even repeat this in the second update. So much for third time lucky.

The politics of weather posted by China

It looks like New Orleans got lucky. Sadly there are bound to be deaths, but considering that people have been talking entirely seriously about the city being turned into a giant cesspool, overall Hurricane Katrina's last-minute shimmy seems to have done the Big Easy a big favour. [update: thanks to 'jook' in the comments for pointing out that, tragically, it seems I spoke too soon.]

Mayor Ray Nagin's press conferences read as surreal combinations of the bureaucratic, the histrionic and the incomprehensible. ('Do all things you normally do for a hurricane but treat this one differently'...?) Given how long it's been known that N.O. is a fucking plaything for hurricanes, you might wonder why he ordered evacuations at the last minute, Saturday afternoon? (In fact, what he said was that he'd 'probably ask people to leave at daybreak Sunday' - so, dude, should we run away or not?) Perhaps it's no surprise that the exodus was a tad sluggish.

And what about those who can't afford to leave, the 100,000 'wretched of New Orleans? The poor, who in New Orleans are disproportionately black, get to stay in what are charmingly glossed as 'special emergency shelters'. Or to put it another way, a noisy, leaking, dangerous, now-roofless football stadium. With a two-mile queue to get in.

According to one elderly resident: 'I know they're saying "Get out of town," but I don't have any way to get out. ... If you don't have no money, you can't go.' But who's taken in by such whining? Certainly not officials who describe themselves as 'pleading with residents to leave'. Yeah, that's the problem: those stubborn locals!

Nagin has form on this aggregation of sudden hysteria and long-term disdain. Almost exactly a year ago the city faced Hurricane Ivan, and like a Monty Python character, Nagin abruptly started shouting 'Run away!'. His advice to the old, the poor, the sick, who couldn't get out? Perform a 'vertical evacuation'. I shit you not. Official advice to impoverished septuaganarians in a killer flood: climb.

It's not as if Katrina's impact hasn't been predictable, and indeed predicted. A couple of days ago, meteorologist Jeff Masters, said:

I'm surprised they haven't ordered an evacuation of the city yet. While the odds of a catastropic hit that would completely flood the city of New Orleans are probably 10%, that is way too high in my opinion to justify leaving the people in the city. If I lived in the city, I would evactuate NOW! There is a very good reason that the Coroner's office in New Orleans keeps 10,000 body bags on hand. The risks are too great from this storm ... GO! New Orleans needs a full 72 hours to evacuate, and landfall is already less than 72 hours away. Get out now and beat the rush. You're not going to have to go to work or school on Monday anyway. If an evacuation is ordered, not everyone who wants to get out may be able to do so--particularly the 60,000 poor people with no cars.

Quite. They did order the evacuation eventually, of course - just 'far too late'.

So why the tardiness, and the failure to learn lessons? Well, you know that thing about capitalism and the free market being the most efficient system available? Want to hear something hilarious? New Orleans' seemingly unintentionally accurately named 'catastrophic hurricane disaster plan' was privatised last year.

IEM, Inc., the Baton Rouge-based emergency management and homeland security consultant, will lead the development of a catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for Southeast Louisiana and the City of New Orleans under a more than half a million dollar contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security/Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Thanks to that, as Dewberry, a partner in this noble venture put it a while back, '[h]ad one of the devastating hurricanes targeted New Orleans and southeast Louisiana, state and local officials would have been ready'. So how's that working out?

IEM stands for Innovative Emergency Management. I guess 'Climb for your life!' and 'Run to the football stadium!' are pretty innovative. To be fair it must be hard to focus when you're so freaked by the impact on insurance, let alone oil prices.

I should confess that no amount of online poking on my part has clarified to me precisely who in this corporate/mayoral thicket gets to decide when to order evacuation, vertical, horizontal or other. It's possible that the buck stops as much or more with Nagin as IEM and Dewberry. I dunno. So maybe we should just share the love.

Terrorism & Western States. posted by lenin

Where we have been encouraged to believe that we are dealing with a pure antagonism between the West and this nebulous thing called 'terrorism', what we are actually dealing with in most cases is a marriage made in hell. The word 'terrorism' itself, Christopher Hitchens used to muse, is an abuse. Just he would not have called the Vietnamese resistance 'terrorist', I won't call the Iraqi resistance 'terrorist'. However, as we're stuck with the term, I'll just have to make best use I can of it.

America, fuck yeah...
Terrorism has frequently formed a cornerstone of US foreign policy, most often through aggressive policies of counter-insurgency. From 1961 onward, initiatives described as Unconventional Warfare (UW) became part of the range of policies officially mandated by the US government. Just ten days after Kennedy's inauguration, the National Security Council started to work on a series of proposals for an "expanded guerilla programme", enhancing Special Forces numbers to 4,000, and an immediate budget allocation of $19 million to set it in motion. (See National Security Action Memorandum 2, most of which remains classified).

There had been some military concerns over some of the guerilla tactics used by Special Forces, who were increasingly insulated from the regular army. This remained the case as the new administration took power. (See Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare, Record Group 319 of the National Security Archives). Kennedy justified these policies in public by referring to the threat of "the free world" being "nibbled away at the periphery ... by forces of subversion, infiltration, intimidation, indirect or nonovert aggression, internal revolution, diplomatic blackmail, guerilla warfare, or a series of limited wars." (Quoted here). But the uses of terror were much broader. In 1962, a memorandum was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff outlining a terrorist campaign that the US could conduct against its own citizens in order to justify war with Cuba:

"We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute [sic] to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."

This was known as Operation Northwoods. It was rejected at the time, and instead a series of attacks focused on Cuba was initiated, known as Operation Mongoose. Since then, a number of attacks orchestrated by the United States have been carried out on Cuban soil, and I don't know that it is altogether coincidental that a number of Cuban nationals being harboured in the US are responsible for some such attacks: explosions in Hotels, airline hi-jackings, the kinds of things that terrorists get up to. (Check out the biography of Luis Posada Carriles).


Luis Posada Carriles

Counterinsurgency terror campaigns were also organised in Vietnam and the Phillipines by the US. "Selected Vietnamese troops were organised into terror squads ... Within a short time, Viet Cong leaders ... began to die mysteriously and violently in their beds." (Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds in Insurgencies). Similar tactics had been used to suppress the Huk rebellion in the Phillipines from 1946 to 1954, while a US-directed counter-insurgency terror campaign in Guatemala killed 8,000 people in two provinces alone in the six months from October 1966. (Michael McClintock, The American Connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador, vol 2, 1984).

There are scores of other well-known examples: the support for right-wing death squads in Colombia, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic is well-documented, particularly in William Blum's Killing Hope: U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995). And I've talked a bit about the use of death squads by the UK and Spanish governments here and here. (Note, in particular, the linked article in the latter post which outlines a Special Branch connection to the explosion in Omagh in 1998).


Victims of Salvadoran death squads.

A couple of other examples, then. Here we come to the use of terrorism by states with the intention of justifying war & repression and discrediting opposition movements. Operation Gladio is correctly pointed to as an instance of just such practise. But where all of the above can be subsumed into a Cold War narrative (or, in the case of Northern Ireland, the closing chapters of the British Empire), the last two examples bear directly on the 'war on terror': and if they don't involve Western states, they at least involve regimes strongly supported by the West.

Russian roulette
Russia has been conducting a war on Chechnya since 1999, following the failure of its first war to recapture the break-away republic between 1994 and 1996 - a war which killed 100,000 people and wounded some 240,000 others. Planning began for a new assault six months before a number of explosions rocked Moscow (in August and September 1999) and Chechnya mounted an invasion of Dagestan. When the explosions hit, a number of apartment buildings were destroyed and 300 people killed. A number of fingers pointed at the FSB, and one whistleblower who claims the FSB were behind the attacks has been evading Russian prosecution ever since. Extraordinary investigations by the Observer and a Channel Four Dispatches programme (both summarised neatly here, also see John Sweeney in The Observer), found that following the first two apartment block explosions, a third building was targeted 100 miles south of Moscow. A bomb was uncovered there by Russian police after a tip-off, and three men arrested. The three men were not Chechens but Russian. And they were not guerilla operatives but FSB agents - and all three were released. The FSB subsequently claimed that it was not a bomb at all, but a reporter for the Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper known for its criticism of Putin's government, uncovered evidence from soldiers guarding the suspected device at a nearby military base that it was in fact a bomb. One soldier "took a sample to a military commander schooled in explosives who said it was hexagen". (Cited here). Of course, this could all be a confection for the overheated imagination, since, as one contribution on wikipedia points out: "As well as the conspiracy thejries about the Zionist Oppressive Government polt to destroy the World Trade Center during the 9/11, this theories have a lot of fans."


After a truck bomb in Volgodonsk.

Not to stop at that pithy judgment, however, it is worth pointing out that there is evidence that the Russian state has a long history of involvement with (and presumably, manipulation of) the Islamist wing of the Chechen resistance. As Patrick Cockburn wrote in The Independent:

Cooperation between Mr Basayev and the Russian army is not so surprising as it sounds. In 1992-93 he is widely believed to have received assistance from the GRU when he and his brother Shirvani fought in Abkhazia, a breakaway part of Georgia. Russia did not want to act overtly against Georgia but covertly supported a battalion of volunteers led by Mr Basayev.

It is now alleged that the cooperation between the GRU and Shirvani Basayev went further. The invasion of Dagestan might be resented in Russia, but it was insufficient to mobilise Russian public opinion. This only occurred when four massive bombs exploded in Russia in September. The first, at a military housing complex at Buinaksk in Dagestan, blew up on 4 September killing 83 people. The next two were targeted at ordinary Russian civilians. On 8 and 13 September explosives demolished two working-class apartment blocks in south Moscow leaving 228 men, women and children dead. Three days later a truck exploded in Volgodonsk.

It was the wave of anger and hatred among Russians against Chechens, universally blamed for the attacks, that gave Mr Putin the backing he needed to invade Chechnya. An unknown figure when appointed, with just 2 per cent support in the polls, he was soon the leading candidate to win the presidency.

The Russian anti-Stalinist left-winger Boris Kagarlitsky claims in the same article that Russian intelligence used their connections with Basayev not only to plant the bombs but also to prompt a quasi-comical invasion of Dagestan - when Basayev's forces were easily beaten off, Russian helicopters had to escort them back to the front line. Incidentally, it bears mention that Basayev's forces are widely believed to be linked to and funded by Osama bin Laden. Russian intelligence in bed with Al Qaeda - whatever next?

The Second Battle of Algiers
This. The story is a relatively simple one: an Islamist party won a democratic election in November 1991, and the ruling class decided that it preferred the bullet to the ballot box. The military nullified the elections and forced President Chadli Benjedid to resign. The story goes that a splinter of the FIS named the GIA broke away and began to start a splodin' shit everywhere, and thus a civil war ensued. That civil war was brought to the Metro system in Paris through several nightmarish explosions. Luckily, the bad guys were mostly caught or killed, and peace was restored for free elections - even if some extremists inexplicably keep wading in blood.

The civil war was certainly bloody. Amnesty International reported in 1997 that:

Men, women and children have been slaughtered, decapitated, mutilated and burned to death in massacres. The large scale of the massacres of civilians of the past year have taken place against a background of increasingly widespread human rights abuses by government security forces, state-armed militias and armed opposition groups. Arbitrary and secret detention, unfair trial, torture and ill-treatment, including rape, ‘disappearances’, extrajudicial executions, deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, hostage-taking and death threats have become routine. As the toll of victims continues to rise, the climate of fear has spread through all sectors of civilian society(Amnesty International, November 1997. Algeria: Civilian Population Caught in a Spiral of Violence).

Algerian grave following massacre.

Indeed, where GIA operatives have been accused of violent attacks - it is beyond doubt that they have committed many - it is also worth noting that the government used this as a handy excuse to commit its own atrocities. Amnesty reported: "[M]ost of the massacres took place near the capital, Algiers, and in the Bilder and Medea regions, in the most heavily militarised part of the country. Often, massacres were committed in villages situated close to army barracks and security forces posts, and in some cases survivors reported that army security forces were stationed nearby". (Cited here). Dr Amirouche, a former FLN fighter (and by no means a friend of the Islamists), wrote in 1998 of how "the military regime is perpetuating itself by fabricating and nourishing a mysterious monster to fight, but it is demonstrating daily its failure to perform its most elementary duty: providing security for the population. In October 1997, troubling reports 73 suggested that a faction of the army, dubbed the "land mafia," might actually be responsible for some of last summer’s massacres, which occured in Islamist strongholds and continued even after the Islamic Salvation Army, the armed wing of the FIS, called for a truce, in effect as of October 1, 1997." (The story about the "land mafia" cleansing land for subsequent privatisation came from the French magazine Paris-Match).

Robert Fisk wrote of "evidence that [massacred villagers] were themselves Islamists", while the Sunday Times noted that a particularly gruesome massacre of over 1,000 villagers in early 1998 took place "within 500 yards of an army base that did not deploy a single soldier, despite the fact that the gunfire and screams would have been clearly audible". (Cited here). Meanwhile, John Sweeney wrote for the Observer of an Algerian military officer who had informed Le Monde that not only were the government's secret services responsible for some of the most grotesque attacks, but the GIA itself was a creature of the government. The officer who blew the whistle on this died shortly afterwards in a helicopter crash.

This had come after an exposé by John Sweeney and Leonard Doyle in The Guardian, in which they were informed by a former career agent in Algeria's secret services that not only was the GIA a product of Algerian intelligence, but that this intelligence service had "organised 'at least' two of the bombs in Paris in the summer of 1995, in which several people were killed. The operation was run by Colonel Souames Mahmoud, alias Habib, head of the secret service at the Algerian embassy in Paris." Similar claims were later made by the former Prime Minister of Algeria, Dr Abdel Hameed al-Ibrahimi. (Cited here).

Coda
Terrorism is often described as a weapon of the weak, and this is true to the extent that the tactic is frequently used by groups that are the weakest in a particular confrontation: the IRA, Palestinians, Farc, Tamil Tigers etc. But it may also be a weapon of the weak in another sense. States which know that they cannot rule through persuasion - ie, are not hegemonic - often resort to such tactics. Penny Green and Tony Ward, authors of State Crimes: Governments, Violence, and Corruption, (Pluto Press, 2003), write that the decision to resort to death squads and other forms of repression directed at civilians is related to their relative ability to fulfil their goals as states and also meet the demands of citizens in other ways. They note that in Latin American countries where it was much more difficult to satisfy peasant demands, the recourse to terror was much more severe. On the other hand, the use of terror by powerful and relatively stable states - the UK, United States, Russia & Spain to name a few - indicates that the tactic of terrorism is an all too familiar tool for the powerful.

Hitchens to bin Laden: 'Thanks' posted by lenin

Well, well. Here's a charming vignette from Hitchens' latest torrent of half-informed drivel for the Weekly Standard:

I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so casually overlooked.)

Quite. The US is forever overlooking threats to its interests. It overlooks here , it overlooks there, it's overlooking everywhere. That's why it needed a helpful nudge from Osama bin Laden and his crack suicide squad. Thanks Osama.

Arise Sir Iqbal posted by Levi9909

I first became aware of some rumblings on the part of Muslims over an edition of BBC's Panarama about the Muslim Council of Britain a couple of weeks ago when the Observer ran a story on its front page (and editorial) on 14/8/2005. It worried me when the editorial said:

It is not right that the Muslim Council of Britain, a group that boycotts a ceremony to honour the multi-faith victims. of the Holocaust and often supports hardline views that are far from universally accepted by all Muslims, should monopolise that function [of community representation].

"Multi-faith victims?" That's interesting. Zionist propaganda has it that the only holocaust victims worthy of note were the Jewish victims. Ask most people to define the holocaust and I am sure they would say something like it being when the nazis killed 6 million Jews. I don't think most people see the holocaust, or its commemoration, as being "multi-faith". Are there any Hollywood movies dealing with Roma, gay, communist or slav experiences during the holocaust? At a zionist demonstration back in 2002, Peter Mandelson told the Trafalgar Square faithful that Israel exists because of the holocaust. No Roma or Jehovah's Witness state exists because of the holocaust. And if Israel exists because of the holocaust and the holocaust is "multi-faith" why is Israel a Jewish state and not a "multi-faith" state? It's particularly annoying that when Israel reopened its holocaust museum, the Guardian reported that

The exhibition for the first time also acknowledges other victims of the Nazis, such as Gypsies and homosexuals, who were ignored in the old museum, established in 1957.

But in spite of that "painful concession"

The Nobel prize laureate and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, told those assembled that the Holocaust was not about man's inhumanity to man, but man's inhumanity to Jews.

And just in case anyone thought that even the zionists would never stoop so low as to use the holocaust for propaganda purposes

Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said the museum was a testament to the need for Israel to exist.

Now since the Guardian is the sister paper of the Observer, how did an Observer leader writer not notice, in just one fairly recent article, that the zionists clearly see the holocaust as a purely Jewish affair? Bizarre isn't it?

Now to Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain and the MCB's media secretary, Inayat Bunglawala. I was going to avoid a post on this because it was covered quite ably at the Tomb, here and here. But then I bought Friday's Jewish Chronicle and I am still shocked at the shrill expressions of delight appearing in this zionist rag at the discomfiture of Sir Iqbal Sacranie over the kind of disrespectful grilling to which the known liar, the Chief Rabbi Jonothan Sacks, will never be subjected in our zionist controlled media. First up was a page 2 opinion piece by Jenni Frazer headed MCB Chief wilts under grilling

By turns looking sick and slick Sacranie writhed and wriggled on Ware's hook

Then there was Alex Brummer, the City Editor of the formerly nazi, now zionist (see if you can spot the difference), Daily Mail. His article is headed The BBC has done the country a favour. Maybe, but which country? This article is truly absurd. Brummer denounces the MCB's boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day and emulates the Observer editorial thus

All the victims of the Holocaust, including gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, Catholic priests - and no doubt some Muslims - were properly memorialised, and not just Jews.

But then he went and put his foot in it by lauding Rod Liddle's denunciation of Sacranie's "anti-semitism".

Liddle notes that critics of Israel's policies are usually at pains to point out they are not being anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist. It is not the Jews they are against, just the Zionists.

If that is the case, Liddle argues, why on earth would they be uncomfortable spending a few moments remembering the six million people murdered by the Nazis?

"Six million people"? Didn't Brummer say that "gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, Catholic priests - and no doubt some Muslims - were properly memorialised, and not just Jews." But the six million figure is only ever used to state the approximate number of Jews. The fact is that the MCB sees, as so many of us do, the memorialisation of the holocaust as being a specifically Jewish affair because the zionists have promoted and used it as such, and that for the purpose of zionist propaganda.

Anyway, unfortunately there's more. Next we have the editorial headed, simply, Panoramic view which concluded that

This Panorama should be compulsory viewing for the bright sparks at the Home Office who chose to appoint Mr Bunglawala to a task force to tackle extremism among young Muslims - a move as sadly laughable as accusing the BBC of a pro-Israel bias

It's still not over, there's still a letter that begins

Thank heavens for last week's Panorama [enough said]

Well, almost enough because finally we have Daniel Finkelstein (no relation of Norman I hope) on the MCB's boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day and their suggestion of zionist control of the media

It's astonishing that they still can't see that that attendance would have been a matter of simple human decency. It wasn't about Israel....I think this incident, while small in itself, is terribly revealing. The MCB, which is regarded by most non-Muslims as the community's leadership, has put its name to an absurd conspiracy theory alleging Zionist control of the media.

So there we have it. The holocaust is always promoted (even by zionists) as a multi-faith affair and to suggest that decades of zionist propaganda emanating from the mainstream media amounts to zionist control is an insane conspiracy theory that only a, well, Muslim would believe.

It Could Have Been Otherwise...Oh No, It Really Couldn't posted by BionOc

cross-posted on Bionic Octopus

Sometimes even the B-team catch a break. The My Lil' Journos at the Observer have come panting up with the scoop that someone in Labour's Foreign Office at some distant historic point was actually possessed of a brain, with functioning eyes connected thereto.

In May 2004, the Foreign Office permanent under-secretary Michael Jay sent this letter to the cabinet secretary, stating baldly that

British foreign policy and the perception of its negative effect on Muslims globally plays a significant role in creating a feeling of anger and impotence among especially the younger generation of British Muslims.
....
This seems to be a key driver behind recruitment by extremist organisations (e.g. recruitment drives by groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir and al Muhajiroon).

Rather an obvious conclusion, one would have thought, but of course we currently inhabit the universe where the official Labour position maintains 'there was no "causal link" between Iraq and the London attacks'.

The interesting thing about this letter, beyond of course the curiosity of its existence in the first place (as opposed to the not-at-all-curiosity of its having subsequently been completely disregarded), is that it goes on to lay out a variety of (lord preserve us) 'work streams' undertaken by the FCO in its 'building bridges with mainstream Islam' program.

Now, some of these are laughably vague and government boondoggly, e.g.: 'One of the key priorities of this new unit is strengthening the relationship with, and consultation of, the Muslim community. We have employed a specialist to assist us in this.' Oooh! A specialist! In relationship-strengthening! Dare one presume to guess who this specialist might have been?

Others, like the 'Islamic Media Unit' and the 'Muslim News Awards for Excellence', are the usual, predictable propaganda measures.

(The 'British Hajj Delegation' of 8 doctors and consular staff to provide aid to hajjis is, I must say, pretty random and kind of batfuck, but I suppose broadly commendable.)

But a few of these measures actually seem, given the parameters of the problem for the actually-existing government, like not bad ideas:

- British Muslim delegations to the Islamic world...to strengthen the links between the British Muslim community and many other countries in the Islamic world

- Regular ministerial briefings for key Muslim representatives

- Ministerial outreach to...grassroots organizations in different UK cities, to engage with people who don't normally have access to government Ministers, in community centres, women's organizations, youth groups, etc.

- Outreach to Muslim youth

OK, so not for a moment to get all starry-eyed about the noble intentions of the Foreign Office as opposed to anyone else in Labour, I would nonetheless characterize these measures as, in general, A Reasonably Good Start at building good, respectful community relations. They presume not only the acceptability but the desirability of connection between British Muslims and worldwide Islam, they seek to incorporate Muslim perspectives, both leadership and grassroots, in governance, and they recognize the specific need to engage with young Muslims. The latter are highlighted for attention in the letter, which notes (in a formulation that comes perilously close to a nuanced analysis of the attractions of extremism) 'many of whom are taking on the burden both of the perceived injustices and of the responsibility of putting them right, but without the legitimate tools to do so.'

And these measures already being instituted by the FCO, it would have been easy enough to strengthen and frontline them in the wake of the July bombings, to make them highly visible, official Labour policy. But apparently even easier was to McCarthyize mainstream British Islam, to require loyalty oaths and disavowals from the MCB, to produce slanderous trash like the Panorama special whose express, open purpose is to tar all of Islam with the brush of extremism.

We know why: because maintaining a suitably terrified, docile population under a security state requires the erection of a straw baddie who is not merely terrifying but insidious, an enemy who could be anyone, who is all around us, lurking behind the seemingly moderate, inoffensive faces of our Pakistani or Iraqi or Jordanian neighbors. It's not enough to locate Al Qaeda cells in every hedgerow: that could just as well serve to bind communities together in fear of an external enemy. To frighten the people sufficiently that they will gladly surrender their individual rights and those of their neighbors for the promise of security, you have to atomize them.

You have to convince them that no one can be trusted, and if anyone certainly not those brown-skinned people up the road who may seem nice, and who may have lived there in harmonious coexistence for generations, but who subscribe to a religion that we all really know, given its head, would have every one of us spitted on jihad's sword for our secular, freedom-loving ways before you can say 'allahu akbar'.

Update: (via particleist) Ah, and here's the Observer doing its bit for today, in the 'person' of Martin Bright.

Johann Hari in Venezuela. posted by lenin

It is hard to believe, but Johann Hari has been blowing the horn for revolutionary socialism down in Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez has been transferring wealth and power to the workers, arming the peasants, thumbing his nose at the US and selling cheap oil to their geopolitical enemies.

Here he defends what he chooses to describe as a "Salsa revolution", and even goes so far as to fight for Hugo Chavez's honour. Chavez? The Venezuelan George Galloway (use your imagination)? The friend and ally of Fidel Castro? Why, yes, the very same...

Here he talks some more about the mountainous inequalities in Venezuela, contextualising them in relation to US imperialism, and also satirises the pretensions of a couple of upper class pillocks he meets while there.

Of course, it is all framed within the purview of European social democracy: the Venezuelans are only fighting for what we Europeans take for granted. Still, as Lenin said "one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.” Reality itself, it would seem, has been biting Johann hard in the ass while he has been visiting downtown Caracas.

Sectarianism by speech act posted by China

Posted by China

More grist to the the-BBC-is-a-pile-of-bollocks mill. The revolts that have shaken Iraq against the Yanqui-chivvied constitution are obviously too big to ignore, so what to do, what to do? Talk them up as a sectarian revolt! That'll discredit them - and by extension the insurgency. And voila the BBC report, 'Sunnis rally against Iraq charter'. Like a theologically obsessive Rain Man, the BBC autistically repeats the terms 'Shia' and 'Sunni' a preposterous number of times to underline just how sectarian the anti-occupation marchers are. 'Thousands of Sunni Muslims have demonstrated in the Iraqi city of Baquba', some carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein, sorry, 'Iraq's Sunni former leader, Saddam Hussein'; '[t]he Sunnis object to several parts of the draft text agreed by Shia and Kurdish parties'; 'the Sunni marchers in Baquba danced and sang chants'; &c.

Hold on, I forget: What kind of Muslims were they...?

On the other side, you didn't know bits of paper could have religious affiliation or ethnic identities, did you? Oh, yes. What's on the table, the BBC explains, is a 'Shia-Kurdish draft'.

Short of sending an underpaid runner round your house to smack you in the face and shout 'Shias and Sunnis hate each other!', the BBC couldn't make its point much less subtle. This kind of essentialism is crass at the best of times. What makes today's little performance so disgraceful is that, even more than usual, it is a gross misrepresentation. As other media outlets have had the decency to make clear, 100,000 Shias marched against the constitution and occupation too. The BBC has to mention these southern protests, so grudgingly mutters about rallies 'to show ... support for the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr and to demand the government improve public services'. That's it. Their opposition to the constitution, let alone the fucking occupation, is written out. In fact, though, as the estimable Channel 4 News shows (wmv file), masked insurgency fighters - you know, the ones constantly described as Sunni extremists - gave a press conference today, specifically to praise Shia leader Sadr for his opposition to the charter.

None of this, of course, is to suggest that there's no sectarianism in Iraq. However, the reduction of all politics to it is i) a crude strategy to discredit the drive for self-determination, and ii) a fucking lie. It's trivially obvious that the entirely legitimate desire to get the US out can and does cut across sectarian boundaries: the question is why does the BBC try to obscure that even when it's so blatant? This report doesn't explain or even describe the situation... so what the fuck is it for, except to consolidate the misrepresentative narrative of sectarianism? And just who does that benefit?

Hurrah For International Worker Solidarity posted by BionOc

Posted, and indeed cross-posted, by Bionic Octopus

Big up to Unite Here, the American hospitality workers' union, which is threatening solidarity action against Gate Gourmet if they don't reinstate all the Heathrow workers recently sacked by megaphone for a strike they were blatantly provoked into by management.

In a letter to Gate Gourmet's chairman and chief executive, David Seigel, Mr Rayner says: "I write to express Unite Here's unyielding support for the Transport & General Workers Union members negotiating with Gate Gourmet in the UK.

"As you know, Unite Here and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have been negotiating with Gate Gourmet on behalf of over 6,000 members working at your US kitchens.

"Let there be no doubt, we consider your assault on the union employees in London to be an assault on union members everywhere. We are outraged by such immoral behaviour and we expect that you will resolve this dispute by reinstating all of the fired workers. Failure to resolve the matter in the UK will certainly cause the unrest to spread across the Atlantic as our members will be forced to take every lawful measure possible to support our fellow union members."

Referring to the London dispute, Mr Rayner said his members "want to make sure Gate Gourmet knows we will not tolerate such actions in the US, the UK, or anywhere else in the world".

Boo, and indeed yah. Lovely to see Americans taking solicitous note of comrades outside our borders once in a while.

Meanwhile, Gate Gourmet and T & G appear to have reached some sort of preliminary agreement to offer voluntary redundancy to all its workers, including all 670 sacked. GG is avowedly hoping the 'troublemakers' it's been holding out against rehiring will take the redundancy offer, but won't say how it will respond should they decline.

And finally, Polly Toynbee has strangely not-half-bad things to say about it all. Go figure.

Oh, one more thing: neither the NYT nor the WaPo makes any mention of Unite Here's action, though both cover the latest in the GG/T&G talks. Unsurprising, to say the least.

Iraq: sending them back. posted by lenin

You remember when Jack Straw was a Saddam apologist? Well now there's a follow-up album out, this time entitled: When this government deported refugees to war zones.

From the Refugee Council:

Iraqi failed asylum seekers are currently being detained in preparation for the first programme of forced removals, the Home Office said on 15 August. The Home Office would not confirm the numbers who have been detained pending their removal. However, the Refugee Council believe that 43 Iraqis had been arrested by the end of last week and the Times has reported that they were told by officials said that the figure had grown to over 100.

There are currently up to 7,000 failed Iraqi asylum seekers in Britain living in Britain. Their removal until now has been on a voluntary basis because of the problems of ensuring their safety on return.

Despite refugee groups and the UNHCR warning that the volatile situation in Iraq means that no-one should be forced home, the Home Office are insisting that some parts of Iraq are not as affected by insurgent action and are therefore safer. This goes against Foreign Office advice which has discouraged non- essential travel to Iraq for Britons and warns of an expected increase in attacks by insurgents.

My advice to those deported is to sign up for one of the many fine resistance outfits in the New Iraq. They pay well, I'm told, and you may even live. Failing that, how about everyone here join the demonstrations planned. For Londoners, you can gather outside the Home Office, Marsham Street, London SW1P 4DF on Friday 26 August 12pm - 2pm.

Tariq Ramadan in Red Pepper. posted by lenin

It isn't yet available on Red Pepper's website, but an interview with Ramadan by Oscar Reyes of Red Pepper is well worth sampling - if only because he has been so falsely maligned, including by those who should bloody well know better. On the London bombings:

When Tony Blair says that there is no relation between the attacks in London and those in Iraq, he is correct on ethical grounds - you cannot justify what was done in London by what is happening in Iraq. But on politicla grounds there is a connection, of course ... As Muslims, we need to stop being defensive and face up to our responsibilities for Islamic education and understanding. But the government and wider society also have a responsibility to look at the kind of education that we are providing in this society, whether it helps Muslims to understand that they are accepted as fellow citizens.

On moving beyond the 'moderate' versus 'fundamentalist' dichotomy:

It is really important not to accept this simplistic division, where Muslims who are saying what we want them to say are the moderates and all the others are fundamentalists. The Muslim community is as complex as, say, the Christian community and we have different voices ... [Muslims should] take a clear stance on the idea that Islam means 'against the West'. We have people, ideologists, using Islam in that way, and they are playing exactly the game of the neo-cons on the other side ... And it's up to us all, Muslims but also others in the West, to understand that we are fighting two extremisms that are nurturing each other.

On a "silent revolution" among young European Muslims:

In the face of the current reaction in Britain, you can feel that the second and third generations are asserting their identities, being British and Muslims at the same time. They are asking for their rights and not remaining on the margins of society. This shows an acceptance of their citizenship, that this society is their home, that they are no longer in dar al-harb (abode of war). Women are more present, more assertive, more aware of their rights against discrimination too ... We have even seen more Muslims getting involved in the European Social Forum too. And in France, we have had the 'Ecole pour tous' - which brought together non-Muslims and, even within feminist groups, saw them working together in the name of common values ... And this is what I call the "silent revolution".

And on the relationship between the Left and Islam:

Some within these movements understand that they have to study, to know more, to decentre themselves from the culturally dominant ideology. But others are totally misled by their perception that they are politically progressive, and fail to understand that they are culturally still very conservative and even backward sometimes, very imbibed with the ideology of colonisation, that 'we know best'. It's very difficult to deal with such people...

We need people who understand that they have to be serious about diversity. We have to deal with people in the name of our common resistance but we come from specific realities, values and histories.

It doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to conceive of who "such people" are. Anyway, also worth reading is this and this.

An interview with a resistance consultant posted by bat020

posted by bat020

There's a fascinating interview in today's Financial Times with Colonel Watban Jassam, who is described as a "consultant" to the armed Iraqi resistance. Colonel Jassam is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and spent 15 years as a prisoner of the Badr Brigade. Unsurprisingly, he is not a big fan of SCIRI, the largely pro-occupation sectarian Shia group that is a major player in the puppet government. But he has little time for Sunni sectarianism either:

He stresses he has nothing against the Shia per se. “We like [anti-American Shia leader] Muqtada al-Sadr. I don't have any problem with Shia, just with the Supreme Council and with Badr.”

In the interview Jassam spells out his views on the future direction of the Iraqi resistance:

The colonel's advice to the insurgents is twofold: hints on how to strike while dodging the marines' devastating firepower, and thoughts on what their political goals should be... To achieve their second goal, turning Americans against the war, the mujahideen need to shape their operations “to support anti-war sentiment in the west”, he says.

Speaking of "anti-war sentiment in the west", the latest SW carries an interwiew with Los Angeles-based activist John Parker who discusses the recent revival of the US anti-war movement. This revival has of course coincided with things getting much bloodier in Iraq, which has in turn stoked up the Troops Out question. A recent Juan Cole post argued against withdrawal... which sparked a swift rebuttal from Gilbert Achcar.

MoveOn Dragged By Membership In The Vague Direction Of Troop Withdrawal posted by BionOc

posted by Bionic Octopus

It seems the MoveOn vigils have achieved a certain effect after all, though surely not the one the organization's leadership intended. MoveOn has just come out in favor of House Joint Resolution 55, the Homeward Bound Act (honestly, whose job is it to crank out these cornball names, and do they also name nailpolish colors for Revlon? I can see serious potential for cross-pollination there: the 'I'm Not Really A Waitress' Welfare Reform Bill, 'Russian Red' Economic Assistance Treaty, 'Shocking Pinko' Resolution To Suppress Leftwing Sedition...but I digress).

The bipartisan bill couldn't possibly be more lilylivered; it requires the President

(1) to announce, not later than December 31, 2005, a plan for the withdrawal of all United States Armed Forces from Iraq;

(2) at the earliest possible date, to turn over all military operations in Iraq to the elected Government of Iraq and provide for the prompt and orderly withdrawal of all United States Armed Forces from Iraq; and

(3) to initiate such a withdrawal as soon as possible but not later than October 1, 2006.

Basically, it's a 'Please someday start vaguely intending to bring troops home and when you do start intending to please try to let us know' bill, designed to exert the minimum possible pressure to action while still appearing to be Taking Seriously the country's growing and evident opposition to the war.

If this is the best MoveOn can do, it's pretty fucking pitiful, and more than that, it amounts to a spit in the face of their beloved 'Cindy' whose sacrifice they so pompously 'honor' while assiduously gutting it of political significance. Cindy Sheehan calls for 'bringing our nation's sons and daughters home from the travesty that is Iraq IMMEDIATELY, since this war is based on horrendous lies and deceptions. Just because our children are dead, why would we want any more families to suffer the same pain and devastation that we are.' How this terminally bollocksless bill can possibly be said to 'honor' or 'support' Sheehan or her campaign is a mystery to me.

Naturally, while completely disregarding her actual position, MoveOn doesn't scruple to garland itself with Sheehan's notoriety, trumpeting that 'Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Texas has put the problems of the Iraq war on TV and in the newspapers—forcing President Bush and congressional leaders to deal with them', and exhorting members to support a bill Sheehan herself (so far as I can find out) has not, by admonishing them that '[i]t is critically important that the momentum created by Cindy Sheehan and last week's vigils continues'.

So how does MoveOn spin its sudden return to an explicitly, if half-assedly, anti-war position?

How did we settle on support for H.J. Res. 55? In June, we asked MoveOn members what they think we should do and more than 85 percent agreed that a plan like this bipartisan resolution was a step in the right direction. It gives the Iraqis some time to get their house in order while making it clear we won't be in Iraq forever. Without real deadlines, there is little incentive for things to improve.

Ah, ok. So back in June their membership polled overwhelmingly against the war (note the extremely wiggle-roomy wording of 'a plan like this... a step in the right direction'), and yet only now, two months later and serendipitously only in the wake of the unignorable evidence of rogue vigils that dared to actually--gasp--protest the war against MoveOn's explicit instructions, do they rouse themselves to even this pitiful expression of opposition.

I don't know what further proof anyone needs that MoveOn is a millstone around the neck of its membership. They hear their members' opinions and ignore them, do their best to tamp down their outrage and scold them into safe, quiet expressions of sympathy for Cindy Sheehan's sacrifice (and not, as several have pointed out, of solidarity for her cause), and then finally, when they can't possibly deny the angry groundswell anymore, they find the most pusillanimous possible measure to back so they can pretend to honor the anti-war position of the--let's be clear--vast majority of their membership, while still playing nice political pattycake with both the Dems and the Republicans. It's a disgraceful abdication of responsibility to its membership, and they mustn't be allowed to get away with it.

American progressives deserve a fuck of a lot better than the sinkhole that is MoveOn, and it's up to us on the left to provide a real alternative.

[Note: MoveOn haven't posted the statement of their support for J.R. 55 on their website yet; if anyone wants a copy of the email they just sent out, drop a line to bionoc at gmail dot com and I'll send it along.]

Iraqi Kurdish leadership and Israel posted by lenin

One of the least noticed but most curious aspects of the current battle for Iraq is the relationship between Kurdish leaders and Israel. There have been a number of reports about the growing closeness between leaders of the two main Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, and Israel, not least by Seymour Hersh. They seem to have struck upon a common interest: Iraq should not survive as a state.

While some will quite reasonably put this down to the particularly supine politics of the KDP and PUK leaders, both of whom have - in the name of an internecine power struggle - sold out their fellow Kurds, one to Saddam, the other to Iran. However, John Cooley traces the history back much farther in his An Alliance Against Babylon: The US, Israel & Iraq (2005). In particular, the relationship may well have began when Israel was busily coercing Iraq's Jews to leave the mainly Arab state and emigrate to the new Jewish state (with the help of the British, and Iraq's pro-British puppet government). Israel, seeking allies in the Middle East and Africa, looked to non-Arab groups like the Kurds and non-Arab nations like Turkey, as well as Iran, following the 1953 coup. Cooley reports that Israel, through Mossad, was supporting SAVAK in Iran and also the Kurds in Iraq for several decades. He writes:

Serious Israeli support for the Iraqi Kurds goes back to 1964 ... Defense Minister Shimon Peres met secretly with an ageing Kurdish leader, Khumran Ali Bedir-Khan, who had spied for Mossad during the early years of Israel's independence. In August 1965, Mossad organised an initial three-month training course - the first of others to follow - for the officers of Barzani's "Pesh Merga" (Kurdish for "those facing death" or sacrificers) fighters. The operation was code-named "Marvad" (carpet).

In the late summer of 1966 ... Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol deputised Aryieh ("Lyova") Eliav, the Labor party general-secretary who was then a member of the Knesset and deputy minister for industrialization and development, to conduct a survey in Iraqi Kurdistan and contact Barzani. An Israeli assistance programme was set up under Haim Levakov, a Palmach veteran and specialist of Arab affairs. An Israeli delegation with a complete Israeli field hospital and a small Israeli staff of doctors and nurses was sent to Barzani’s forces in jeeps and trucks, probably from Iran...

Eliav greeted Barzani in the name of the Israeli government. He presented greetings from the Knesset to Barzani in the form of a special gold medallion, struck to commemorate the opening of the newly elected Knesset. What forms Israeli assistance could take, besides arms and military training, was discussed. The field hospital, described by Eliav as a “big present” to Barzani, was set up.

During this time, which Cooley describes as “the secret Kurdish-Israeli honeymoon”, Barzani made a number of covert trips to Israel, touring the kibbutzim, meeting editors and politicians. Mossad and SAVAK helped the Kurds set up an intelligence outfit called Parastin, and Iranian intelligence arranged for Kurdish insurgents to be trained by Israel on its territory. The Shah made a deal with Saddam in 1975, which lasted right up until the uprising of 1979, and that terminated the Iranian connection (the post-revolutionary government was inclined towards a nationalism reinforced by Shi’ism, and treated the Kurds rather harshly as a result). Much more deserves to be said of the US involvement in this affair, particularly after Iraq’s involvement in the oil-price rises in 1973, and of course in the aftermath of the October 1973 war. However, that would be more work, and neither of us wants that.

What is worth mentioning is that when the Shah decided to drop the Kurds, in return for territorial concessions, so did Israel and the United States. The United States, for its part, took a well-documented turn toward Saddam, assisting his murder of the Kurds, covering up his crimes, with the executive trying to frustrate congressional moves to limit arms sales to the dictator. Only after a joint Kurdish-Shi’ite uprising in 1991 had been crushed with the help of the US did it turn toward support for the Kurds again. Israel, meanwhile, resumed support for the Kurds in the run up to the war on Iraq when it became clear that they might finally break up Iraq. Seymour Hersh was told by a former Israeli intelligence officer that the Israelis were building up the peshmergas so that they could go much farther than the Americans could dream of, and “penetrate, gather intelligence on, and then kill off the leadership of the Shi’ite and Sunni insurgencies in Iraq”.

While none of this diminishes for a second the endless tragedies to which the Kurds have been subjected nor vitiate their legitimate demands, it does help explain a crucial dynamic in the present Iraqi situation. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was advertised, among other things, as a bid to create a unified democracy. If democracy doesn’t look to be doing very well, the centrifugal forces are gaining in the New Iraq. Kurds are demanding nothing short of federal autonomy, some Shi’ites want the same, many don’t, and Sunnis are preparing themselves for civil war over the matter. It is hard to resist the conclusion that one aim of this war was to infirm Iraq as a nation-state. Sunnis and Shi’ites are uniting to prevent that.

Stop the press. Please. posted by China

Posted by China

The rhetorical devices being used by officials in the de Menezes case are so breathtaking you'd expect their purveyors to blush so hard they burst into flames. But with trusting cow-eyes certain sections of the press just nod, or worse.

'Menezes death "cover-up" doubted'. Ah, the trusty passive voice. The existence of a cover-up is not doubted by anyone in particular, you understand, it's just ontologically a doubtable concept. It's dubious, if you will.

Turns out it's the Brazilian officials who, forced by popular pressure to come to London, are quietly giving Blair and Blair a hand. To be fair, their bolstering of the Met is done with with considerably more virtuosity than the 'crass and insensitive' local bobbies themselves can achieve.

Marvel, for example, as the Brazilian minister of justice, Marcio Pereira Pinto Garcia, manages to smuggle praise for the Met into his backing for those charged with keeping watch on it, stressing that one reason he trusts the IPCC 'completely' is that, as the deputy assistant commissioner of the Met John Yates told him, 'one hour after the incident [the police] sent a note to the IPCC - they were informed since the beginning'. See how honourable and helpful the Met is, how little time it wasted? (Those who cavil that the IPCC has seemed, in fact, rather pissed off with the police's obstruction doubtless have sinister agendas.)

Rest assured that Mr Garcia's elegant rescue is not so subtle that it escapes the BBC's attention. Though this section of the story also, perhaps as a sop to whingers, mentions the fact that the initial police statements and briefings were, y'know, total fucking bullshit, the BBC helpfully stresses this more important exculpatory role of the paragraphs, subtitling them 'IPCC "informed"', just in case we're not clear on the main point.

The BBC doesn't even seem to notice when the pabulum it dutifully regurgitates is contradictory. Thus it quotes Mr Garcia quoting Yates that the only reason the inquiry wasn't handed over for 72 hours was 'because of the mistaken suspicion Mr Menezes was connected with terrorism', but that '[f]rom then on, all the evidence is with the IPCC'. However, just up and to the right of this expression of childlike innocence is a link to the BBC's own fuckridden timeline, which points out that it was on the 23rd of July, one day after he was shot, that 'Scotland Yard says the man ... was not connected to the attempted terror attacks on the capital and expresses its regret'.

So even take Yates at his word, that's 24 hours delay accounted for. What about the 48 hours after that? One unnoticed click away, the BBC makes a nonsense of its own credulousness. Not all journalists can be Pilger or Foot, fair enough, but this is just taking the piss. Surely it would save money for the BBC to simply subcontract its website to the Met, so they can upload their own press releases direct?

Burn the witch posted by Meaders

The post-Hutton BBC continues its long march to Murdoch. The main item on the London news yesterday evening was the Jean Charles de Menezes story; not surprising, of course, given SO19's incompetent bloodlust and the scale of the Met's subsequent mendacity. But instead of asking, as even the Evening Standard did, about the "lost" CCTV footage from Stockwell station, or reporting on the compensation offered to de Menezes' family, or of picking up on any number of immediately relevant stories relating to the murder, the BBC chose to focus on the vital question of the family's campaign: who is that sinister squat man answering questions at the press conference? who is that suspicious Iranian sitting next to him? Londoners, tiring of trivial reportage on minor issues like the police shooting random commuters on the tube, were undoubtedly demanding answers.

Fortunately, Brian Coleman was on hand to answer them. Brian Coleman is leader of the Tories on the Greater London Assembly. Brian Coleman can sniff out left-wing plots before they even exist. Brian Coleman's nasal irritations were given almost half of the BBC's prime-time regional news footage for the south-east.

De Menezes' death is being used by those with an "extreme left-wing agenda", says Brian Coleman. The BBC helpfully followed up by profiling Asad Rehman and Yasmin Khan, two spokespeople for the family. Behind Asad, the dread hand of George Galloway; behind Yasmin, the far more sinister "Corporate Pirates".

Thank heavens for Brian Coleman. The last thing any Londoner would want is for those murdered by our brave defenders of the British way of life to be represented by competent or experienced campaigners, pushing their sinister "extreme left-wing agenda" of holding the police to account. No, much better to offer the family £15,000 and hope they shut up for a bit.

But wait. All this talk of "agendas": what's Brian Coleman been up to lately?

He's a busy man. He's long been concerned about racism, for instance:

Of Somalis Mr Coleman has stated: ‘The influx of asylum seekers from countries which have no connection with Britain, such as Somalia, must be halted.’ (Barnet & Whetstone Press, 4 March 2004). Of Irish Travellers he stated: ‘Most of the past few summers, outer London boroughs have been plagued by Irish travellers who have caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage.’ (Daily Telegraph, 19 March 2004). Of foreign students in general he argued: ‘why should the people of north London suffer in order to attract hundreds of foreign students?’ (Barnet and Potters Bar Times, 8 April 2004)

And, of course, he's very concerned about the police. In his own words:

"Conservative members of the GLA proposed an alternative budget which would have provided 1,050 extra police officers and public transport improvements but would have cut expenditure." Evening Standard, 28 February 2001

"Residents who wish to see virtually the entire workforce of the Metropolitan Police Force on parade need only visit the Notting Hill Carnival next weekend.

My sources at Scotland Yard tell me that the rest of London will be denuded of police that weekend in order to prevent a repeat of last year's Carnival mayhem.

Now this coming weekend I shall be at the Friern Barnet Summer Show which manages to attract about 10,000 people and is policed by a handful of local police officers.

I fail to understand why London should suffer the disruption of the Notting Hill Carnival, either put it in Hyde Park or cancel the thing altogether."
Evening Standard, 14 August 2001

Elsewhere, Brian Coleman has suggested the police use water-cannons against May Day protestors; argued for the removal of road humps so the police can drive faster (referring, by-the-by, to Transport for London as "Taliban for London"); and calls for "zero tolerance" policing in London.

Needless to say, Brian Coleman does not have an agenda.

Update: But Gareth Furby, who presented the BBC report, might have:

We were approached by a journalist from the BBC, Gareth Furby. He started by asking us if we were scared to be on the number 30 that day and was non-plussed when we replied that we weren’t.

But what really upset him was when I said that the foreign policies of Tony Blair and George Bush were responsible for making London a target in such a horrendous way.

This was beyond Furby’s comprehension. He abruptly terminated the interview and berated me for being “an apologist for terrorism”.

Death Squads in The New Iraq. posted by lenin

They're not even trying to deny it any more. The CIA-trained Iraqi security forces are working with Kurdish and Shi'ite militias to carry out "abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation" . I know what you're thinking - they're just talking about getting the bad guys, right? Think again:

Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country's divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists and Iraqi officials.

While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, the militias, and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them, are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments, the activists and officials said. In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents have said they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein.

Further:

Since the formation of a government this spring, Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, has witnessed dozens of assassinations, which claimed members of the former ruling Baath Party, Sunni political leaders and officials of competing Shiite parties. Many have been carried out by uniformed men in police vehicles, according to political leaders and families of the victims, with some of the bullet-riddled bodies dumped at night in a trash-strewn parcel known as The Lot.

Fabulous:

Across northern Iraq, Kurdish parties have employed a previously undisclosed network of at least five detention facilities to incarcerate hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and other minorities abducted and secretly transferred from Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and from territories stretching to the Iranian border, according to political leaders and detainees' families. Nominally under the authority of the U.S.-backed Iraqi army, the militias have beaten up and threatened government officials and political leaders deemed to be working against Kurdish interests; one bloodied official was paraded through a town in a pickup truck, witnesses said.

Some parties in the south get to expel a police chief they don't like and instal one they prefer , which certainly puts a stop to any precipitous investigations into what how the Salvadoran Option is panning out on the ground. Try that in London and Ian Blair will scream bloody murder - or, more likely, he'll simper about "a terrible tragedy, er, deep regrets, er, police under terrible pressure, many other deaths, er, no further questions". Meanwhile, the militias are into beating and killing those they take a dislike to.

Sadly, what appears to be happening is that the putative 'civil war', often used to justify troops remaining in Iraq, is actually taking seed under the rubric of the occupation - and with no small amount of help from the occupiers. And, of course, it is no surprise to see how Haditha , having been brutalised by the occupiers , has now gone over to authoritarian Islamist groups , with - if The Guardian is right - the general support and acquiescence of the local population .

On top of which, the invasion looks set to turn Iraq into a state governed by Shari'a law . If Iraqis choose this, it is no one else's business to dictate otherwise, but this is a constitution being drawn up by a puppet government, closely 'advised' by the enormous US embassy.

No, it's all going swimmingly. Iraq is in fine shape. Look at all those schools and hospitals they're rebuilding. Iraqi trade unionists totally dig it . They keep saying how thrilled they are.

Actually, to break with glum cynicism for a moment, the most hopeful sign from Iraq is precisely the recrudescence of grass-roots trade unionism . They are being supported in their struggles - both against the occupiers and the employers - by British and American trade unions. This is particularly important when large parts of the liberal left in both of these countries have been cheering on the occupiers, and when a large part of (what remains of) the Iraqi left has acquiesced in the occupation of their country. Another hopeful sign has been the joint Sunni-Shi'ite demonstrations , and the spectacle of Sunni resistance groups defending Shi'ites . That sort of solidarity is precisely what is most dangerous to the occupiers, who need - and are evidently striving to accomplish - the total fragmentation of Iraq's struggle and identity.

The Prophet Disarmed. posted by lenin

Following 9/11, the Bush & Blair administrations needed to find some respectable, moderate Muslim organisations they could patronise: these, you see, are the good Muslims, whom we are not at war with. We make no crusade – er, war – against Islam; our only enemy is the acephalous international network that struck at the heart of, um, Western civilisation. Why, no other than Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, was knighted for his services to the Crown-in-Parliament. Those good old days are gone, and it now seems that even the moderates are becoming too prickly for the government to deal with: saying bad things about the war on Iraq and Western support for Israel one minute, looking for a cup of tea in Downing Street the next. Who on earth do these Mohammedans think they are?

I say this because there appears to be something programmatic about the ferocity with which moderate Muslims are being attacked and publicly vilified, and it has to do with disarming their criticisms of the government’s foreign policy. Last night’s Panorama documentary, ably dispatched by the MCB themselves, was preceded by a barrage of attacks on the Muslim Council of Britain, a moderate Muslim organisation. There was also the odd scare story about Muslims, particularly this drivel, which claimed that a Muslim crime organisation was funding terrorist attacks – of course it had no evidence whatsoever for such a thesis. On the same day, there was Martin Bright’s rather wet effort for The Observer, which referred to “an extraordinary letter obtained by the Observer”. The letter, addressed by the MCB to the BBC’s director-general, was available on the MCB’s website – the front page, in fact, so hardly a terrific find on the part of the Observer. The article said that the MCB was accused of failing mainstream Britain because it called the upcoming Panorama documentary “pro-Israel”. It noted that the letter would be “used by critics” of the organisation. Who these accusers and critics were, the reader was never told. One astute reader of the piece wrote to Mr Bright, and received an interesting if cursory reply:

Both your objections are valid. I can't say any more: as the article appeared in my name I have to stand by it.

Warned by the sound of so much hand-washing, then, one is inclined to wonder in who else’s name the article might have appeared under had Mr Bright not been so lumbered. Indeed, this wasn’t the only response, as the Observer’s blog notes:

The overwhelming balance of correspondence we have received has been towards defence of the MCB and anger at the tone and content of our story.

That would be, anger at the fact that it’s all tone and zero content. The reference to a “pro-Israeli agenda” arose because the MCB said that almost the entirety of John Ware’s questions toward Iqbal Sacranie were about he and his organisation's attitudes to Israel. Indeed, as Inayat Bungwala rightly notes, it is perfectly correct to describe a pro-Israel bias at the BBC, since “All independent studies show that all the mainstream broadcasters give more coverage to the Israeli official perspective than to Palestinians”. See, in particular, Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s Bad News From Israel, in which their exhaustive studies confirm a bias of several orders and magnitudes in Israel’s favour. Mr Bright’s article managed to claim that the MCB is a “self-appointed organisation” and has “no women prominently involved in the organisation” – except, of course, as Iqbal Sacranie promptly pointed out, there are many Muslims in the organisation, and one of its assistant secretary-generals, Unaiza Malik, is a woman. The entire article was, in fact drivel.

Aside from all of this nonsense have been various charges levelled against Inayat Bungwala. The Financial Times reports that he said Osama bin Laden was a “freedom fighter” when he fought the Russians in the 1980s. “Obviously I don't hold those views now”, he said. He added: “We condemn the killing of innocent civilians. The term mujahid is reserved for those fighting illegal occupation, which Osama bin Laden was doing in the 80s in Afghanistan”. Not good enough for the pink paper, which salivates about how Bungwala’s comments “come at a sensitive time” when everyone is already laying into the MCB. The Telegraph charges him with anti-Semitism, because of a comment made back in 1992, from which Bungawala has already resiled. According to Rod Liddle , both Inayat Bungwala and Iqbal Sacranie must be anti-Semites because they did not attend Holocaust memorial day. It’s political-correctness gone mad, I tell you.

This comes as Normo Tebbs has decided to enlighten the world as to the problem with these Muslims – they hadn’t been asked to pass his “cricket test”. Islam, he said, had made no real advances in art, literature or sciences. Could this be the same former Tory front-bencher who took it upon himself to defend the Sun’s use of page three girls? I think we all know what he means by literature... It follows a series of bigoted articles by some dickhead called Will Cummins, and also a rather nasty stream of Islamophobic vitriol from Anthony Browne , who has recently been paid for a couple of Muslim-baiting articles on a racist website known as V-Dare, in which he complained that Britain was losing its identity “under the weight of Third World colonization”. It is twinned with a similar campaign in the United States against a similar organisation known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations. (Also see this right wing stop-shop and penumbral lair of moonbats: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19140).

And of course it comes amid the epidemic of racist violence toward Muslims, latest among which is an arson attack on a Masjid in Woolwich, where I used to live and study. The place was surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire the last time I was there, so these were some determined arsonists.

Back to the Panorama documentary, and the reporter behind it, John Ware. Ware has form, it seems, as Islamophobia Watch explains. He has previously been behind what even David Blunkett couldn’t help but describe as a programme pursuing a “Powellite anti-immigration agenda”. The documentary, again a Panorama special, relied on unchecked claims from the right-wing anti-immigrant group Migration Watch. It assured viewers that they had every right to feel resentful about these immigrants “jumping the queue” for housing and healthcare. What a surprise to discover that he is behind yet another poorly sourced, badly made programme with a racist message.

The eternal bleat from the Right is that they are being prevented from asking legitimate questions by an hysterical climate of political-correctness. This would be more impressive if they managed to get their facts right from time to time, or if they could even come up with a properly phrased question. As it is, the attacks presently being mounted demonstrate what has previously been indicated in attacks on the MAB and the crusade against the much more extreme Hizb ut-Tahrir: that Muslims are already guilty, and that they must ceaselessly plead their innocence by placing before the courts fresh examples of Muslim deviance, tolerating the odious, announcing the obvious, and otherwise keeping very, very quiet.

Justice for Jean Charles de Menezes posted by Meaders

It's a plug:

Justice 4 Jean Demonstration
Monday 22nd August

- NO MORE COVER UP
- SACK IAN BLAIR
- PUBLIC INQUIRY NOW

6pm
Outside Downing Street (nearest tube Westminster)

It now appears that a catalogue of errors has unfolded regarding Jean Charles’ murder. This includes deliberate and continued misleading of the public and the family by the Metropolitan Police.

The family are very shocked and distressed by the leaked information but it verified what the family already knew, that Jean did nothing wrong, that he was not wearing a bulky jacket or running from the police. The Family campaign is calling for the sacking of Metropolitan Chief Commissioner Sir Ian Blair who continued to mislead the public and for an immediate public inquiry into Jean’s murder.

This Monday marks a month from Jean’s murder. On this evening the family campaign will be calling a demonstration

We need as many people as possible to come along. It is only through continued public support that we can put pressure on the police and government to take responsibility for what they have done. It is in the public interest that justice is done for the Menezes family and that those responsible for his killing are held to account.

The Purloined Footage posted by China

Posted by China

As I've been saying, repeatedly, the conflicting stories about the existence of CCTV footage from Stockwell Station is key to the de Menezes scandal. In part this is because, unlike some of the other police mendacities that have emerged, the cops' claim that there's no such footage is nigh-on impossible to spin, even to the most credulous, as 'misunderstanding' or 'terrible tragedy' etc - it's much worse. There was footage that disproved the police story, then the police said there wasn't. Unsurprisingly, there's been considerable confusion over this, and it's often still repeated (even by Galloway, though with admirable suspicion, in his excellent Guardian letter a few days ago), that there were no CCTV pictures. To repeat - the IPCC documents obtained by ITN contain descriptions of such footage. So someone somewhere saw it at some time.

At last the sinister nature of these discrepancies seems to be occurring to the media. Annoyingly they haven't put the story online (what follows is my transcription), but here are some extracts from the current front page of the Evening Standard.

RIDDLE OF LOST CCTV IN TUBE SHOOTING

Cameras with vital evidence "were working"

The row over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes took a dramatic turn today.

Senior tube sources have challenged police claims that there was no video footage of his final moments on the platform at Stockwell station.

They told the Evening Standard that three CCTV cameras trained on the platform were in full working order. ...

The Tube sources spoke out after it emerged that police had returned tapes taken from the cameras saying: "These are no good to us. They are blank."

A station log book which is kept to record events at the station and anything not working has no reported faults concerning the CCTV cameras at the time of the shooting on 22 July. ...

A senior transport union official said: "At least three out of the four cameras were working. ... Sometimes you may have trouble with one camera but staff cannot understand how none of the four recorded anything. It is most unusual to say the least." ...

Station staff were amazed and furious on later being told by the police that the tapes were useless. They feel they are being unjustly blamed for something which was not their fault.

The CCTV system is maintained by Tube Lines, the private sector consortium in charge of maintaining and improving the Northern Line.

A source there said: "The cameras were in working order. We had no reported faults at the time of the incident."'

So, to recap. Someone's seen footage, and described it, and how it undermines the police story, to the IPCC. The station staff have passed over the tapes to the police. Who, some time later, have handed them back and said 'No good, squire, these fell down the stairs... I mean, these are blank.' And the Standard describes this as a 'mystery'. God, yes, it's worthy of Conan Doyle or Poe's detective stories, isn't it? I mean, what can have happened? It's all so mysterious.

"Britons would trade civil liberties for security" posted by Meaders

(posted by Meaders)

So says the Guardian headline, based on an ICM poll finding 73% of us would give up our civil liberties to "protect against terrorist attacks". Marginally more people are now satisfied with Tony Blair than dissatisfied. Civil liberties be dammned: the British public back their police and their Prime Minister.

Scratch just a little, however, and a different story appears. (The ICM's report is available here, as a PDF file.)

First, the headline question asked: it's biased. "Do you think it is right or wrong to lose some civil liberties to improve our security against terrorist attacks?"

This presupposes that the loss of civil liberties will improve security. That's debatable, and the case still has to be made. The question leads the respondent to answer in a certain way. Ask someone if they would rather lose a few minor rights, or be blown up on the tube, and you can almost guarrantee the answer. The fact that nearly a quarter of respondents saw through the bias is itself impressive.

The apparently rock-solid support for Blair's measures starts to wobble when specific measures are presented.

Forty-five per cent would support the banning of radical Islamist organisations "even if they don't advocate violence". Thirty-one percent oppose, with a great crowd inbetween that are uncertain or unbothered.

Forty per cent want judges to continue to "protect our civil liberty" against fifty-two per cent who think judges "should not overturn" Draconian legislation. That slender majority is within the usual margin of error, as is Blair's positive popularity rating.

Finally, as the Guardian says, "The poll was carried out before this week's revelations about inaccuracies in the initial police account of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes."

The picture is not rosy. The combination of genuine fear, and an overwhelming government and media barrage have eaten away at popular support for democratic rights. But it has not been replaced by a significant support for the government's measures: beneath the headline figures, the situation is fluid, with significant minorities remaining opposed and no clear majorities for the government on the most critical issues.

When ID cards were first announced to, amongst other things, combat terrorism, opinion polls reported majorities in favour. As the costs of the scheme emerged, balanced against its lack of clear benefits, public support dwindled. The same can happen to this clampdown: from declaring themselves to be leading a "different mood" , New Labour can be very rapidly brought low. There is a real political battle on now to defend some of our basic freedoms. Events like the Stop the War demonstration for civil liberties can be decisive in turning public opinion and blocking the government's plans.

Democrat leaders: smart to support Bush. posted by lenin

Amid growing rumours of possible frustration among Democrat Party activists, various leaders have decided to speak out on Iraq. Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden and a number of other political ambulance-chasers, have all explained that they will be continuing to support the occupation of Iraq. One amoeba explained :

"Credit the Democrats for not trying to pour more gasoline on the fire, even if they're not particularly unified in their message," said Michael McCurry, a former Clinton White House press secretary. "Democrats could jump all over them and try to pin Bush down on it, but I'm not sure it would do anything but make things worse. The smartest thing for Democrats to do is be supportive."

That'll work. It certainly worked out fine last time round . From 'Anyone But Bush' to 'No One But Bush' - didn't take long, did it?

The Dispossessed and their moral duty to the oppressors. posted by lenin

With the portentous proclivities of the pseudo-novelist and huckster that he is, Elie Wiesel pronounced his verdict on the withdrawal of Israeli colonists from Palestinian territory:

The images of the evacuation itself are heart-rending. Some of them are unbearable. Angry men, crying women. Children, led away on foot or in the arms of soldiers who are sobbing themselves.

Let's not forget: These men and women lived in Gaza for 38 years.

Successive governments, from the left and the right, encouraged them to settle there. In the eyes of their families, they were pioneers, whose idealism was to be celebrated.

And here they are, obliged to uproot themselves, to take their holy and precious belongings, their memories and their prayers, their dreams and their dead, to go off in search of a bed to sleep in, a table to eat on, a new home, a future among strangers.

Honestly. The poor bastards. Having eulogised the "settlers" (stop using that word), he then goes on to berate the Palestinians for looking so pleased with themselves, adding:

I will perhaps be told that when the Palestinians cried at the loss of their homes, few Israelis were moved. That's possible. But how many Israelis rejoiced?

I don't know that it wasn't all a big laugh for some Israelis: however, is it the same? No. No, it isn't. For instance - and do try to follow this complex reasoning - when Palestinian homes were destroyed, it was to benefit the occupation of their land; when Israelis were removed with kid gloves, it was from land that they had stolen to service Israel's occupation. If someone had nicked my house, I'd be pretty happy to see them kicked out of it by whatever means were necessary. Still not convinced? Consult Jonathan Steele in Friday's Guardian:

There was no "sensitivity training" for Israeli troops, no buses to drive the expellees away, no generous deadlines to get ready, no compensation packages for their homes, and no promise of government-subsidised alternative housing when the bulldozers went into Rafah.

Within sight of the Gush Katif settlements that have been handled with such kid gloves this week, families in Rafah were usually given a maximum of five minutes' warning before their houses, and life savings, were crushed. Many people did not even have time to go upstairs to collect belongings when the barking of loudspeakers ordered them out, sometimes before dawn. Fleeing with their children in the night, they risked being shot if they turned round or delayed.

As many as 13,350 Palestinians were made homeless in the Gaza Strip in the first 10 months of last year by Israel's giant armour-plated Caterpillar bulldozers - a total that easily exceeds the 8,500 leaving Israeli settlements this week. In Rafah alone, according to figures from the UN relief agency Unrwa, the rate of house demolitions rose from 15 per month in 2002 to 77 per month between January and October 2004.
Parts of Rafah now resemble areas of Kabul or Grozny. Facing Israeli army watchtowers and the concrete wall that runs close to the Gaza Strip's boundary, rows of rubble and ruined homes stretch for hundreds of yards.

You see what I mean? There's a slight difference which is not merely academic.

On the other hand, we must never forget what We Must Never Forget. For instance, Elie Wiesel writes:

[L]ast May, at an official dinner offered by King Abdullah II of Jordan, I spoke with the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei. When I asked him what he thought of Sharon's courageous decision regarding Gaza, it was with a wave of the hand that he objected, adding with disdain: "All that is worth nothing, means nothing. If Sharon doesn't begin right away to negotiate definitive borders, a great catastrophe will be the result." He repeated those words: "right away" and "a great catastrophe."

The optimist in me wants very much to believe that those were just words.

The drama of the Nazi holocaust is endlessly replayed in the mind of the apologist for Israel. The Arabs, jack-booted, marching in their military parades, foaming at the mouth, baying for Jewish blood, warn of a "great catastrophe". For whom, they do not say - but they don't need to. Anyone who has seen Schindler's List will know that the Shoah was redeemed in Israel, and its redemption is still not safe with all those barbarians at the gates.

Next year Jerusalem? posted by Levi9909

The Telegraph reports on how George Bush's new appointment to the UN (together with "Jewish groups") has protested about a UN group promoting withdrawal from the rest of the occupied territories in the wake of the so-called disengagement.

Jewish groups reacted with fury to banners, mugs, bumper stickers and T-shirts bearing the slogan "Today Gaza, Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem" which bore the UN Development Programme logo.

Israelis view the slogan, and particularly the reference to Jerusalem, as an aspiration to destroy the Jewish state. [then why didn't they say "tomorrow Tel Aviv"?]

And what about the Jewish groups who claim to want Israel out of the occupied territories? Apparently the Anti-defamation league got in on the act as well, with Abe Foxman saying that it was

inappropriate for the UNDP, as an impartial global development organisation, to fund such a political and provocative message

Without getting into how a UN group echoing many a UN resolution by way of stickers and mugs etc is provocative, what on earth is the head of a group founded to protect Jews from defamation doing linking Jews in general with the occupation? Perhaps this is why some people call the ADL, the Anti-definition league.

Just Come Out And Say It: The Real Crime Is Islam posted by BionOc

posted by Bionic Octopus

The BBC just will not lay off the Muslim-baiting, and it's getting more blatant all the time. The latest installment of the media jihad (cf. last Sunday's outrageous Observer article [via particleist] and the MCB's rebuttal [via bat020]) against the MCB comes today with the gleeful revelation that certain 'prominent British Muslims', including a former member of the MCB's central committee, are represented in today's infamous Panorama special as 'question[ing] the MCB's commitment' to fighting extremism.

The exploitation of sectarian disputes within a movement to discredit its members is time-honored and disreputable. It should be beneath any organization with pretence to journalistic standards. Given that it's pretty obvious by now how little that characterization applies to the BBC anymore, I'm not surprised that they stoop to it.

What does really chew on my mittens, though, is this bit of hard-hitting reportage:

But an investigation by Panorama reporter John Ware found groups affiliated to the MCB promoting anti-Semitic views, the belief that Islam is a superior ideology to secular British values and the view that Christians and Jews are conspiring to undermine Islam.

OK, let's take that apart.

1) promoting anti-Semitic views: Yes, this is undeniably a Bad Thing, and the MCB needs to be harder on this issue. Without for a moment condoning or apologizing for anti-semitism, however, it's also worth wondering to what degree John Ware finds synonymy between anti-zionist views and anti-semitic ones. Since I won't be able to see the show, I'll rely on my Brit friends to be watchful for that all-too-common conflation and report back on the credibility of this claim.

2) the belief that Islam is a superior ideology to secular British values: This is the one that really fucking gets me. Islam is a RELIGION. Of course it believes its ideology is superior to anyone's secular values! DUH! Do you know of a religion that doesn't believe its ideology is superior, not only to secular values, but to everyone else's religious ideologies? Not a worldview I personally find charming, but hardly one exclusive to Islam--about one second's worth of googling furnished me with this handy primer, courtesy of the Christian Information Ministries, on World Religions and why they're all inferior to Christianity.

C. I. M. desires to inform, teach, and equip the body of Christ to define and defend these issues by contrasting Biblical truth with the secular philosophies that seek to destroy this generation.

I don't see the media lining up to condemn Christian groups for their opposition to secularism, in whatever society. And look, here we have the Beeb itself empathizing with the shrinking British Jewish population under 'the increasing pressure of a secular society on a small faith community.'

3) the view that Christians and Jews are conspiring to undermine Islam: Honestly. Given articles like this one, today's effort and the Observer article, programs like Panorama, and any or all of the crimes listed here, is that (alleged) perception so very hard to understand?

While 'Christians and Jews' as a group are in all likelihood not conspiring to undermine Islam (if they are, I didn't get the memo), it is increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the mainstream media, both conservative and liberal, genuinely are. This Muslim-baiting has to be confronted directly, pilloried publicly for the blatant bigotry it is, and shut down. Letters to editors, people, get the lead out. It's not much, but it's a start.

Yell at the Beeb here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/newsid_4030000/newsid_4032600/4032695.stm

The Observer here: Letters to the Editor, The Observer, 3-7 Herbal Hill, London EC1R 5EJ (to be received by 5pm Thursday). Fax: 020 78377817 Email: letters@observer.co.uk (Make 'Letter to the Editor' your subject line.)

The Guardian here: letters@guardian.co.uk

New York Fuckwitted Times here: letters@nytimes.com

Update: Courtesy of WIIIAI, here's the transcript of the Panorama special. As the advance press indicated, it's a truly ugly piece of smear journalism, exploiting intra-community divisions to supply decontextualized quotations that purport to show that even Muslims think Islam is violent, anti-Western and intolerant, a veritable breeding-ground for terrorists. The whole argument of the program is viciously exceptionalist, singling out and demonizing tenets of Islam, or even just opinions of individual Muslims, which with appropriate substitutions of vocabulary are indistinguishable from tenets of Christianity and Judaism.

A handful of these snippets, with about as much context as the program gives them:

Dr Taj Hargey: Ad infinitum and ad nauseum, it's there, it's with us. We see it from the time you're a child, you're given this idea that those people they are Kaafir, they're unbelievers. They are not equal to you, they are different to you. You are superior to them because you have the truth, they don't have the truth. You will go to heaven, they will go to hell. So we have this from a very young age.

Not very neighborly, sure, but how exactly is this different from Christian ministers preaching hellfire for the unbelievers, or Mel Gibson believing that his wife is going to hell because she doesn't partake of his brand of ultra-orthodox Catholicism?

Professor Kurshid Ahmad: Islam is a revolutionary message. Islam wants the whole of mankind to accept God as creator and to live in God's presence, in his grace.
[...]
It's a blessing because what is a revolutionary idea? A revolutionary idea means that let people try to change the world on the basis of values of faith in Allah, justice, service to humanity, peace and solidarity. So revolution is not something to be afraid of."

Again, different from the teachings of Jesus how?

John Ware: The ideologue and founder of the Jamaa'at Islami was Sayid Mawdudi.

He divided the world into believers and non believers.

"God likes Muslims and dislikes Kafirs" he decreed.

Hmm, I have this vague recollection of something in some other religion about a 'Chosen People'...

He said his international revolutionary party should be called simply; "Muslims".

Ohh, this one's vicious. Do you see what he's doing there? Whittling away at the distinction between 'Muslims' and 'radical Islamists', trying to wear us down into believing his subtext, i.e., that Islam really is definitionally anti-Western and terrorist in its attitudes, that Islamism is Islam.

Finally, this baroquely horrific piece of thought-engineering about the difference between Palestinian and Israeli civilian deaths:

John Ware: The Israel-Palestine conflict is over land and holy sites.

It's a rallying cry for young martyrs in the global Ummah.

Islamist groups like Hamas have used terrorist tactics against Israel because they want to destroy it.

Israeli military operations targeting the Islamists have also caused many civilian deaths.

The Islamists have deliberately targeted Israeli civilians in cafes, clubs and buses using suicide bombers.

'Israeli military operations targeting the Islamists have also caused many civilian deaths.'

'The Islamists have deliberately targeted Israeli civilians'

Outrage! Israeli military personnel have deliberately assassinated Palestinian children! In their hundreds! The only way you can call that 'Israeli military operations' is by acknowledging that the entire IDF occupation and administration of the Territories is one long military operation, specifically a relentless, murderous siege.

If anything so overt were needed, this last gives away the outrageous bias of Ware and the entire program. It's a scandalous piece of bigotry, and the MCB were absolutely right to come out fighting.

Update of the Update: Courtesy of Bat, here's the MCB's detailed response to the Panorama program. It's a .doc file.

Synagogue sweep? posted by Levi9909

I just got this report from one of my regular correspondents in the US

During the Gaza "disengagement" saga — Jon Stewart calls it "The Jew Carry Show" — a lot of people are showing their true colors. But as the strange sight of fanatical young acidic Jews fighting other Jews proves, the color orange, for one, means different things in different contexts.[actually in the UK and Ireland orange stands for hard right wing sectarian bigotry as well]

So what is "the Jew Carry Show"? Is it like "supermarket sweep" only where the contestants are Israeli soldiers rushing through synagogues and carrying out as many Jews as they can in the time alloted and amid as much media hype as can be mustered? I must check.

You Tell 'Em, Jenny posted by BionOc

Cross-posted from Bionic Octopus, by, in fact, Bionic Octopus

The Metropolitan Police Authority, 'an independent authority that scrutinises the work of the London police force', has issued a bold indictment of the Met's conduct after the extrajudicial execution of Jean Charles de Menezes:

'Authority member Jenny Jones said it should have been "an immediate priority" for police to clarify the information after the 22 July shooting.'

One suspects Authority member Jenny Sparks might have had something a bit more trenchant to say on the subject, followed by the summary electrocution of Sir Ian Blair and sundry other criminal elements.

Meanwhile, the death-defying mendacity continues apace, Sir Ian (an anagram, btw, for 'raisin'; coincidence? I think not) taking the bit firmly in the teeth he so relishes lying through, after several days of bitchslapping by the media:

'The thing that I would want to say is that of all the allegations made in the last couple of days, the matter I would most want to reject is the concept of a cover-up.'

Well yes, I don't doubt you would very much want to reject that allegation. I don't think anyone's asking if you want to reject it so much as whether or not you have a hope in hell of getting away with rejecting it. Which, sadly, it looks increasingly likely he will; as the Beeb noted yesterday, nobody important is calling for his resignation. Only, you know, the people whose son his boys butchered.

I do love when they lie about the lying. It all takes on a kind of psychedelic hall-of-mirrors effect, like if they nest enough lies around each other, eventually the outermost lie will in fact be a truth, because it double-triple-quadruple-negates the lies inside it. That's just a theory though; I've never seen it pulled off in practice.

Not content with building his personal Mighty Ziggurat of Lies, Sir Ian is shamelessly exploiting the July 7th bombing victims for a classic Look Over There gambit, exhorting people 'not to let the shooting overshadow the deaths of 52 victims of the London bombers.'

'Tragic as the death of Mr Menezes is, and we have apologised for it and we take responsibility for it, it is one death out of 57.

"The context here is the largest criminal inquiry in English history with 52 innocent victims dead, still double figures of people whose lives have been wrecked, four dead bombers and we can't let that one tragic death outweigh all others.'

Leaving aside the fact that he appears to have taken the curious step of including the dead bombers in his sympathy-tally purely for the purpose of boosting his Deaths Which Outweigh Menezes's Death count, he fails to acknowledge the salient differentiating factor. To wit, while the other 56 deaths are all being vigorously pursued in 'the largest criminal inquiry in English history', Lucky 57's death, at the hands of those very inquirers, is the object of a criminal cover-up by same.

It's a detail, but I think it's relevant.

MoveOn, moving on... posted by lenin

There was some controversy over recent criticisms of the tactics of American activist group MoveOn on the Tomb recently. In particular, it was strongly hinted that if any group merited the ubiquitous term "bruschetta brigade" it was them.

Of course, in the United States, MoveOn has been harshly criticised by the radical Left for its tremulousness, and by Bush apologists for its depiction of the President as a neo-Nazi in internet ads. Actually, the demonology of Bush went hand in hand with its support for Kerry and its peon tactics of mobilisation ("hey, let's us liberals have some house parties and eat snacks and drink Chianti and talk about how bad Bush is"). From being an antiwar group, it moved to support for the pro-war candidacy of John Kerry as well as his even more rabid side-kick John Edwards - naturally, their reward was that Kerry rebuked them for being so mean to Mr Bush. They continued, nevertheless, to organise on his behalf.

This March, Norman Solomon was disconcerted to learn that MoveOn had made their peace with the occupation of Iraq . Yesterday, in one of ZNet's e-mail commentaries, Norman Solomon wrote :

The day after Wednesday night's nationwide vigils, the big headline at the top of the MoveOn.org home page said: "Support Cindy Sheehan." But MoveOn does not support Cindy Sheehan's call for swift withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

...

Consider how the MoveOn website summarized the vigils: "Last night, tens of thousands of supporters gathered at 1,625 vigils to acknowledge the sacrifices made by Cindy Sheehan, her son Casey and the more than 1,800 brave American men and women who have given their lives in Iraq -- and their moms and families." Such a gloss excludes a key reason why many people participated in the vigils: They wanted to express clear opposition to any further U.S. involvement in the war.

I love the use of that word "mom". It's so cosy and American and apple-pie. In fact, MoveOn's whole approach from the beginning has been marked by stars n stripes stuff. Their support for Kerry involved distributing a video rebutting the account of Vietnam Swift Boat veterans which said that Kerry was a coward and so on. But no, he really did kill all those people - isn't that great? God bless America, vote Democrat and wave that star-spangled banner.

Some one, with more free time on their hands than I, should bring Rob Newman's advice to the attention of MoveOn: "The rest of the world has a flag too, you know. It's just like yours, except it's on fire."

Golden Willy award. posted by lenin

I'd like to thank the Willesden Herald for kindly awarding the Tomb a joint Overall Winner award for their annual Golden Willies, as well as - for the second year running - the Best Commentary award.



As usual, and before anyone suggests it, we at the Tomb proudly receive our Golden Willies and know exactly where we can stick them.

Thanks.

The logic of the Democratic Police State posted by bat020

posted by bat020

Good piece by John Pilger in today's New Statesman on what he calls the rise of the "democratic police state" (available online at UK Watch).

It covers ground that should be familar to Tomb readers, including Thomas Friedman's chillingly McCarthyite call for an official blacklist of those "just one notch less despicable than the terrorists" - he means those who believe US government actions are the root cause of terrorism.

Pilger also picks up on last month's police raid on a community bookshop in Leeds, where they confiscated anti-war material claiming it would "work people up". He notes how fear of terrorism is being used to justify a repressive police presence in Muslim areas:

Muslim people all over Britain report the presence of police "video vans" cruising their streets, filming everyone. "We have become like ghettoes under siege," said one man too frightened to be named. "Do they know what this is doing to our young people?"

He ends with a quote from Tony Blair from his press conference on 26 July:

We are not having any of this nonsense about [the bombings having anything] to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it. It is nonsense and we have to confront it as that.

... which is itself interesting, because in his press conference on 5 August, Tony Blair was asked "You have said repeatedly that you don't think there's any link between Britain's involvement in the Iraq war and what happened in London", to which he replied:

Well let me first of all correct, I keep being asked this and I keep correcting it but it doesn't seem to make any difference but there it is. I mean I've never said that those people who are engaged in extremism won't use Iraq as a way to recruit or motivate people as they do Afghanistan, as they do the issue of Palestine, as they do, as the video made clear yesterday, what they call the presence of western countries in Islamic countries.

All this underlines that those who deny that imperialism is the root cause of terrorism are logically forced into a racist position, namely that Muslims are the root cause of terrorism. Police repression, ranging from a massive increase in harassment of young Asians all the way to the wanton slaying innocent commuters, all follows from this.

Of course this racism is disavowed - the ideological formula is "There are Good Muslims and there are Bad Muslims, except that there are no Good Muslims." And the fact that even the most timid and respectable Muslim organisations are now targets of the liberal bombers simply confirms this grim logic... which can only be halted if we Stop the War.

Child abuse. posted by lenin

I don't know quite how Gore Vidal ended up in a studio with a Tory MP who happened to be blustering about the need to reintroduce corporal punishment into schools, but when asked what he thought on the matter, Vidal replied: "I am all for corporal punishment, as long as it is between consenting adults."

Quite. I've never understood why anyone beyond sadistic perverts, authoritarian cranks, deluded weirdos, Tory MPs (or, as is more common, all of the above), would want to inflict violence on children. It strikes me that the assumption of a natural parental right to smack kids about derives from the same identification with power that once said it was okay for husbands to beat their wives. Social violence - sexual or physical - is almost always meted out to society's weakest: women and children. This, surely, is a tradition to vilify and fight rather than nostalgically mythopoeticise and yearn for. Which is not to say that I can't understand why people might sometimes get so fucked off with a kid that they want to beat him or her about for a few long minutes: it's just not to be done, that's all.

That said, a Japanese beer company seems to have come up with an excellent way to handle noisy, quarrelsome children: give them a drink . It's a non-alcoholic substitude called Kidsbeer. You see:

The drink started out as Guarana, a cola beverage that used to be sold at the Shitamachi-ya restaurant in Fukuoka, run by 39-year-old Yuichi Asaba.

Asaba renamed the sweet carbonated drink Kidsbeer, a move that made it an instant hit....

..."Even kids cannot stand life unless they have a drink," reads the product's advertising slogan. ( via )

Just what will all the manufacturers of cheap synthetic cider do now?

A tube driver writes... posted by lenin

My RMT correspondent has written an updated piece, as promised:


Heathrow and Stockwell: Practical solidarity

There's a line spun by the media that we should all feel sorry for the sacked workers at Gate Gourmet, but that we should also condemn the solidarity action taken by BA baggage handlers. In other words, we're being told that it's ok to see people as victims, but we mustn't actually do anything about it (except bring our own packed lunches if we're travelling by plane).

One thing that makes this blog different is that it doesn't follow that line. Not only does it comment on what's going on around it, it actively encourages people to do something. Lenin's Tomb has given 100% support to the BA workers who took solidarity action in support of the sacked catering workers.

While we – as blog readers - are not in a position to ground flights from Heathrow, we are in a position to help. We can offer the best form of practical solidarity after striking: We can collect money to help out those workers who've been sacked or are on strike.

Loads of workers have taken collection sheets round their workplaces and have had a fantastic response. People are collecting anything from a few tenners to hundreds of pounds. I’ve just done a quick whip round of 25 tube drivers in my depot and got 200 quid. I’ll be taking it down to a Gate Gourmet workers’ solidarity meeting tonight.

It doesn't have to be organised through union branches, although that's a good start. Download the collection form here (PDF), print it out and take it round your workplace. If you've only heard the media condemnations, you'll be surprised by how much support there is for the Heathrow workers.

It's important to collect what you can and send it to the Gate Gourmet workers ASAP. The address is Gate Gourmet Hardship Fund c/o TGWU, 218 Green Lanes, London N4 2HB. Make cheques out to TGWU and put “Gate Gourmet” on the back.

In the same way, Tomb readers in London are in a position to show solidarity over the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes by police at Stockwell.

Jean Charles' family has organised a protest at Downing Street this coming Monday, 22 August, at 6.30pm.

The protest is supported by the RMT rail union. Be there if you can, tell everyone you know, and bring union banners.

This kind of practical solidarity can really turn blogland into a place that spurs people into action. So many sites have contributors who just want you to sit back and bathe in their bland words. Here, we can make a difference.

Let’s get out and do that

Update: I got the following information via e-mail:

[S]ix representatives of the
Metropolitan Police travelled to the village of Gonzaga in Brazil
to offer the family a substantial sum of money in return for their
silence.

After the police seized Jean Charles' house for investigation his
family were placed in a hotel in Richmond selected by the police.
Here they were held effectively incommunicado and denied phone
calls to Brazil.

Despite this, the Menezes family is determined to seek justice and
have refused to be bought off. The family campaign is several
thousand pounds in debt; all the money thus far has been donated
by a handful of activists and friends. If you can help in any way
please send cheques made payable to Jean Charles de Menezes Family
Campaign, PO Box 273, london, E7 or transfer money to Jean Charles
de Menezes Family Campaign, Account Number: 61455664, sort code:
40-07-12. HSBC bank, 349 Green St, London, E13 PA5. Contact
justice4jean@hotmail.co.uk 07931 337890 or 07956 210332

Sharon's moment of truth posted by Levi9909

Posted by Mark Elf

With "disengagement" finally under way amid the predictable fanfare from western media and equally predictable demonstrations of just how "painful" this "concession" is , this is a consideration of what kind of Palestine Ariel Sharon is offering to the Palestinians.

The Gaza Strip comprises 360 square kilometres of land with a population of about 1.4 million Palestinians and 7,500 Jewish settlers. It is mostly desert and much of the arable land is reserved, at present, for Jewish use only. 75% of its Arab population live below the poverty line and 13% suffer from malnutrition. It has no natural freshwater resources and no control over its telecommunications. It was occupied, together with the West Bank, by Israel during the six days war of June 1967 and has been occupied ever since. It is no stranger to Palestinian resistance or Israeli war crimes. During the ethnic cleansing campaign (1947-1949) that brought Israel into existence with its Jewish majority, Gaza [with an influx of Palestinian refugees] became one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel emerged from that war controlling 78% of what was Palestine.

Gaza and Ariel Sharon have been well acquainted since the 1950s when Ariel Sharon led "reprisal" raids against Palestinian villages that brought shame even to Israeli leaders. Foreign Minister Moshe Sharrett referred to one of Sharon’s atrocities as a "stain [that] would stick to us and not be washed away for many years". Clearly he underestimated the strength of Zionist propaganda in the mass media.

During one of Ariel Sharon’s visits to the White House, President George W. Bush described him as a "man of peace". Leaving aside the fact that Bush often can’t tell one world leader from another, it is possible that he was responding to Ariel Sharon’s stated willingness to make "painful concessions" on the "roadmap" to peace with the Palestinians. To those familiar with Sharon’s history, the description "man of peace" wasn’t one that sprang to mind. Apart from the bloody and disproportionate "reprisals" mentioned above, he was the architect of the Lebanon war that began in 1982 with the slaughter of perhaps 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in a matter of weeks. The Israeli Supreme Court declared Sharon "unfit for office" because of his culpability in some particularly gruesome atrocities by Israel’s Lebanese allies in the refugee camps of Shatila and Sabra. Whenever there have been peaceful overtures by Arab states or the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Sharon’s response has always been, at best, dismissive and usually downright hostile. He has had more Palestinians killed, for example, since the PLO accepted Israel’s right to exist on 78% of Palestine than when their demand was for a "democratic secular state" or the "destruction of Israel" as the Zionists prefer to call it. In 1981, the Rabat plan, whereby the Arab states agreed to normalise relations with Israel in return for Israel withdrawing to its pre-1967 boundaries, was described by Sharon as "a declaration of war". And the recent Saudi peace plan, much the same as Rabat, is now gathering dust.

In addition to the war crimes Sharon has always had a reputation for being dishonest with his political masters. His first patron, David Ben Gurion, recorded in his diary (29/1/1960) that "if he could wean himself from the habit of lying he could be an exemplary military leader." Later, in 1982 he lied to Menachem Begin about his aims in the Lebanon war. He lied to the Kahane Commission (Supreme Court), he lost a libel action against the Israeli liberal daily Ha’aretz and now he tells of painful concessions for peace.

So what does the proposed Gaza withdrawal consist of? We have seen what Gaza itself consists of. It has almost nothing and what it does have has been commandeered by illegal colonial settlers or is provided by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The settlers will, if the plan goes ahead, be withdrawn. Settlers have been known to kill civilians (as recently as yesterday) so this could bring some comfort to the Gazan population. However, if the withdrawal goes ahead, might Israel press for UNRWA to be withdrawn? UNRWA provides housing, healthcare, education, but above all, jobs. This isn’t mere speculation. Last year, Sharon accused an UNRWA ambulance team of loading a Qassam (home made) missile on to an ambulance. He was too hasty in his accusation. Israeli intelligence didn’t have time to doctor their photographic "evidence" and the accusation was exposed as another lie when the "missile" turned out to be a stretcher. But looking at American websites and other media, many commentators have happily run with the Qassam story. This does not simply expose Palestinian ambulances to Israeli attacks. Israel has attacked medical facilities without "pretext" before. It is to undermine the authority and credibility of the Agency in order to hinder all of its work. Taken with the mass campaign of political assassinations, Sharon is creating a Gaza with no viable economy or polity.

Sharon has said that his withdrawal plan is a part of Bush’s much vaunted "road map" to peace and Palestinian statehood. This is curious since his most trusted adviser, Dov Weisglass, is on record as saying that "the significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda". So the idea of following the road map is yet another lie by Sharon, though Weisglass was forced to withdraw his prepared statement.

But how painful is this particular concession? In a way, it represents a step back by Sharon. True, the Jewish population of Gaza is hardly a significant factor as a proportion of Israel’s population as a whole, and indeed of the settler population itself, and Sharon has always said that "Zionism is not about what Israel can do for Jews but what Jews can do for Israel." But his party, the Likud, still sings the anthem Shtei Gadot with its expansionist lyric "one side of the Jordan is ours and so is the other". So relinquishing land, any land, is always painful. The outcry from the far-right, including comparisons of Sharon with Hitler (this on account of his treatment of Jews rather than Palestinians) isn’t just choreography, though that is part of it. But the Israel-free Gaza will be so enfeebled and dependent many Palestinians will have to leave as they have done for decades now. The ethnic cleansing that Israel has failed to fully achieve by war, they have tried to make up for by economic stealth and this will surely continue in an "independent" Gaza. If large sections of the population leave, it is likely that only the most militant would remain. If this happens it wouldn’t take much for Sharon or a successor to manufacture a pretext for reoccupation.

Some commentators are perplexed over the support that Sharon is now garnering from the Zionist "left" for his plan. This is because they fail to see that Zionism doesn’t really have a left. Traditionally, the Likud wanted Jewish rule over Palestine and the Palestinians if needs be. Ethnic cleansing was never an essential part of their policy. They were happy to go the "way of (apartheid) South Africa". This never suited the left. The call for "transfer" (the expulsion of all of the Arabs from all of Palestine) was always a Labourite demand. The strict segregation engendered by the barrier is also a Labourite idea. The fact is that Sharon has a Labour Zionist background and he has made no significant departures from that throughout his career.


So with massive military strength, a reduction in Palestinian attacks, a Palestinian leadership either dead or brought to its knees, the uncritical support of an American President (and Congress and any credible Presidential hopeful) and no viable alternative government of Israel, why is Sharon withdrawing from Gaza? When the disengagement plan was first discussed, Sharon’s extreme right critics argued that he was rewarding the Palestinians. His words in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth (Israel’s most popular daily newspaper) are informative. Of unilateral disengagement from Gaza he said that "this should be seen as a punishment and not a reward for the Palestinians".

For once, he might just have been telling the truth.

This article is a slight update of one first published in October 2004 by Ireland's Sunday Business Post.

Politics a la MoveOn: The Protest Is Coming From Inside The House posted by BionOc

posted by BionOc

Another call to armchairs from MoveOn.org this week: attend a vigil in support of Cindy Sheehan, the American founder of Gold Star Families For Peace, whose son Casey was killed in action in Iraq in 2004, and who's been camped outside the Crawford ranch for the last ten days demanding to meet with Bush.

I can't help noticing that MoveOn only ever calls for political actions that involve either staying in one's own house or going to someone else's house. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'domestic politics'. Are they trying to be considerate and not get in anyone's way? I mean, you know how disruptive those street protests can be when you're trying to get the SUV into the parking garage before it fills up and your butt into the office before the deadline for filing that brief. We've all been there.

Are they trying to maintain Civilized Society? Everyone knows you don't get anywhere shouting at people. If we give up on our good manners, The Terrorists Have Already Won™.

Or are they just scared? Do they think when the jackboots come they won't be so crass as to actually bust down the door and raid a Mojitos For Eventual Troop Drawdown Someday Please Party?

As usual, the email speaks unintended volumes:

Attending a vigil is really easy. All you have to do is grab some candles and show up. If you're an Iraq veteran, or a family member of a soldier, it'd be especially meaningful for you to join us. Bring a photo of your loved one to remind all of us what is at stake. We've also made some downloadable placards you can use.
[...]
These vigils aren't rallies or places to give long-winded speeches. They are moments to solemnly come together and mark the sacrifice of Cindy and other families.

Please find the vigil nearest you today and RSVP.

Thanks for [fuck-]all you do.

–Tom, Nita and MoveOn moms Carrie, Marika and Joan
Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Aren't they so thoughtful to inform veterans and their families of what will be especially meaningful for them? And aren't they adorably careful to interdict rallies and speeches? Such a decorous lot. Because if there's anything American politics sorely needs right now, it's more moments to solemnly come together and light candles. And after all, it's Really Easy!

Thankfully, even the relentless sedative drip of MoveOn couldn't quite trank down grassroots outrage entirely. People did attend these noxious vigils, some 1,600 of them (vigils, not people), but they weren't all the orderly moments-of-ponderous-silence envisaged by Tom 'n' Nita and the MoveOn Moms:

Several hundred people gathered near the White House had the temerity to chant 'Meet with Cindy, tell her the truth' and 'End the war now'.

In West Virginia, for some reason unsatisfied with the downloadable placards provided by MoveOn, protestors made their own 'giant banner bearing the names of all Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan'. Now, I can see where that might have been improved by the inclusion of the names of all the Iraqis and Afghans killed in the same occupations, but then that would have made for a seriously fucking giant banner.

And, best of all, protestors in Washington (DC? State? doesn't say) mixed it up in a 'heated exchange' with a counterdemo organized by a pro-war group. Though my expectations of what constitutes a 'heated exchange' in these debased times are dismally low, the fact remains these people clearly retain some atavistic inkling of the kind of engagement meant by 'political activism', despite the best efforts of MoveOn to lead them down the garden-party path to idle complacency. This gives me hope.

Disengagement & disenchantment. posted by lenin

You must read this wonderfully bilious piece on the Gaza withdrawal by the Bionic Octopus. It has the advantage of being written by a New York Jewish woman (well, Rhode Island these days, but how is London-bound Old European to know the difference?) and also of being fiercely and wittily anti-Zionist. And the capper is this revealing little quote from a Ha'aretz interview with Dov Wiesglass, Ariel Sharon's lawyer:

I still don't see how the disengagement plan helps here. What was the major importance of the plan from your point of view?

"The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president's formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."

Is what you are saying, then, is that you exchanged the strategy of a long-term interim agreement for a strategy of long-term interim situation?

"The American term is to park conveniently. The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians. There is a decision here to do the minimum possible in order to maintain our political situation. The decision is proving itself. It is making it possible for the Americans to go to the seething and simmering international community and say to them, `What do you want.' It also transfers the initiative to our hands. It compels the world to deal with our idea, with the scenario we wrote. It places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a corner that they hate to be in. It thrusts them into a situation in which they have to prove their seriousness.

To the barricades! posted by lenin

An RMT member e-mails to point out that there is to be a protest by the Menezes family on Monday at Downing Street, starting at 6.30pm. I can't find a website with the details, but as he's one of yer union agitators I trust him to know this sort of thing. Someone's head needs to roll for this murder, and I nominate the liar-in-chief . (Check this out by the way). He promises there is an update coming shortly.

Also, regarding the Gate Gourmet workers' strike, which is ongoing , please consider having a collection (PDF file) in your workplace and sending donations to the TGWU . Don't send it to me at any rate: I'll just spend it on drugs.

Speaking of which, another e-mailer forwards a brief missive from British Airways, part of which runs:

As you are a valued customer to British Airways, I would like to provide you with an update on the current problems we are experiencing with our onboard catering, due to unofficial industrial action by our Heathrow catering supplier Gate Gourmet...

Except of course that they aren't on unofficial industrial action, because they have all been fired by megaphone.

Finally, George Galloway and Popinjay Hitchens are to debate the Iraq war on Wednesday September 14th, at the following address in New York:

Mason Hall, Baruch Performing Arts Center
17 Lexington Avenue at 23rd Street
6, N, R, F to 23rd Street

Tickets are $12, which should leave you with enough change for a supersize Maccy Ds if you're over the pond. Apparently, this is all part of Galloway's tour of the US, but these two pugilists are among the few operators in politics today to have egos capacious enough for America. Should be fun.

White is the new Orange posted by bat020

posted by bat020

One of the more curious weapons in the arsenal of contemporary imperialism is the so called "democratic revolution" - a simulacrum of revolution, funded and backed by the US, that removes a regime that is no longer conducive to its interests: witness Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon and (to a lesser extent) Kyrgyzstan.

These simulacra pose a problem for revolutionaries. By definition they resemble real revolutions, and moreover there can be a genuinuely revolutionary dynamic within them, albeit one overdetermined by the interests of capital. Simply dismissing them as "CIA operations" won't do - but gushing liberal babble about People Power won't do either.

These problems aside (which incidentally are brilliantly dealt with in a recent article by Chris Harman), there are certain features that can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. One is that genuine revolutions are unpredictable and unexpected - they necessarily involve an Augenblick, a passing moment that gets seized by revolutionary forces.

The pseudo-revolutions promoted by the US State Department are, in contrast, entirely predictable. For instance - we know in advance that there will be a "democratic revolution" in Belarus shortly. The neocons are already talking it up.

The amusing thing about the forthcoming events in Belarus is the branding. The State Department has a habit of labelling these "revolutions" with colours (Velvet, Rose, Orange). And with the colour they have chosen for Belarus is... White. Ponder the historical resonances of that, if you will.

PS more musings on politico-chromatics over at Infinite Thought, including the delightful news that Viktor Yushchenko's son has copyrighted the Orange Revolution.

Rumsfeld in Paraguay posted by bat020

posted by bat020

As if the American Imperium hasn't got enough on its hands already, Donald Rumsfeld has today been making belligerent noises about Bolivia during his official visit to neighbouring Paraguay.

Commenting on the recent mass uprising that toppled Bolivia's president, Rumsfeld claimed that Cuba and Venezuela had been "involved in the situation in Bolivia in unhelpful ways". He added, apparently without irony: "Countries like Paraguay and other neighbors are all interested in being able to grow and function in a manner that's free of external influence."

Is this just the usual sabre rattling talk from the US? Possibly. But there have been persistent rumours that the US is planning to step up its military presence in Paraguay (a long time ally). This recent article by radical journalist Benjamin Dangl offers a good briefing on the situation:

The U.S. military is conducting secretive operations in Paraguay and reportedly building a new base there. Human rights groups and military analysts in the region believe trouble is brewing... With Bolivia’s recent uprisings, their enormous gas reserves, and a presidential election on the way, this questionable activity could pave the way for a U.S. intervention.

On May 26, 2005 the Paraguayan senate approved the entrance of the troops, granting them total immunity, free from Paraguayan and International Criminal Court jurisdiction... Since December 2004, the U.S. has been pressuring Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Paraguay into signing a deal which would grant immunity to US military. The Bush administration threatened to deny the countries up to $24.5 million in economic and military aid if they refused to sign the deal. Paraguay was the only country to accept the offer.

One final and somewhat tangential point - from 1954 to 1989 Paraguay was ruled by the rabidly anti-communist right-wing dictator Alfredo Stroessner. His regime, as Zizek noted three years ago, exemplified the paradoxical "state of emergency" now being rolled out across the globe whereby political rights are suppressed but formal "democracy" remains in place:

Under Stroessner, Paraguay was - with regard to its Constitutional order - a 'normal' parliamentary democracy with all freedoms guaranteed; however, since, as Stroessner claimed, we were all living in a state of emergency because of the worldwide struggle between freedom and Communism, the full implementation of the Constitution was forever postponed and a permanent state of emergency obtained.

This state of emergency was suspended every four years for one day only, election day, to legitimise the rule of Stroessner's Colorado Party with a 90 per cent majority worthy of his Communist opponents. The paradox is that the state of emergency was the normal state, while 'normal' democratic freedom was the briefly enacted exception.

More on ITV revelations. posted by lenin

Well, I'm having a hard time believing some of this. Let me give you a run-down on what's on the ITN News Channel:

1) On the day, a senior firearms officer had said that if they had the opportunity to challenge anyone emerging from the block of flats, and there was non-compliance, it would be appropriate to intervene with a fatal shot.

2) No subject coming out of the address should be allowed to run. (Incidentally, the only reason the address was identified was because one of the would-be bombers of 21/7 had the address of a gymnasium there in his bag).

3) De Menezes was observed, after the intelligence officer had finished taking his piss, walking to the bus station in his blue denim jacket, carrying no bags. His description and demeanour were noted, and it was agreed that he matched the profile of an alleged suicide bomber. How? ("Mongolian eyes", I suppose).

4) Gold Command, on the basis of this, gave the okay to shoot-to-kill.

5) Having taken the bus from Tulse Hill to Stockwell, he walked to the tube station, entered at "walking pace", picked up a Metro, and walked through the ticket gates with his Oyster card. He walked across the concourse and began "slowly descending" the escalator steps.

6) He only ran to catch the tube as it arrived, entered the carriage, looked right and left, then took a seat facing the platform.

7) Here is where it gets strange. He is supposed to have been shot after having been chased and wrestled to the floor. But an intelligence officer's statement says he followed Menezes down the stairs and onto the tube. He was apparently beckoned by police, who did at that point identify themselves. "He stood, and walked towards me", the intelligence officer said. He grabbed Menezes, pulled his arms behind his back and pushed him back into the seat. "I heard a shot in my left ear". The intelligence officer said he was pushed to the floor at that point. A number of officers shot him in the head, seven times. Three bullets missed. One went into his shoulder.

Split-second decision? That is murder in cold blood, following the procedures laid out in the shoot-to-kill policy.

What was also disgusting was the performance of a former Metropolitan Police officer, some kind of bigwig named Peter Powers. That fucking animal of a man did everything he could to justify the killing, saying how terrible it was for the police, a decision made in the space of a few minutes etc. Then he said "I don't know for sure whether we can say that Mr Menezes was totally innocent". Probed about this by a bemused news anchor who noted that the police had already admitted that he was totally innocent, Powers said, "I just find it difficult to believe that he would be shot for ad hoc or whimsical reasons. And I, er, don't want to prejudice the enquiry that is ongoing."

It isn't enough that the police have consistently and persistently lied about Menezes with the effect of smearing him - first as a suicide bomber, then as someone whose behaviour made him a likely one. This prat has to add to it by implying, baselessly, that he might be guilty of some suicide-bombing-related-activity after all.

If there was any justice, the shoot-to-kill policy would have died with Mr Menezes on that tube. But no. You have to "destroy the brain instantly, utterly". They did that alright.

Stop Press: It Isn't Often You'll Hear Me Say This posted by China

Posted by China

...but watch ITV news tonight, Tuesday 16 August, 10:30pm. Just seen their early evening news. They've got hold of witness statements and confidential police briefing documents about the de Menezes shootings that the Independent Police Complaints Commission have been looking at. No surprises for readers of this blog - he was only wearing a denim jacket, no bag, didn't vault the barrier, no warnings given, etc. But in the words of Simon Israel three minutes ago on Channel 4 news, 'we now know for certain that the CCTV in the station was working'.

But wait: surely the 'police now say most of the cameras were not working'? That 'there are no CCTV pictures to reveal the truth'? Yes. Yes they do.

Infuriatingly I didn't have my pen and paper to hand when I was watching, but ITV news read an extract from a police statement which minutely describes de Menezes's innocent saunterto the train by referring to the CCTV pictures. In other words, there is a smoking gun that the cops lied about the CCTV. Two days ago they told us there were no such pictures: now their own documents prove not only that they knew there were, but that they knew the footage absolutely demolishes the police story.

Neither C4 nor ITV news seem to have quite clocked that this particular detail - the sheer existence of CCTV footage - proves that there was, let's say this clearly, an attempt at a cover-up.

I'll be watching in three hours, pen and paper poised, to get the CCTV citations in the cops' own words.

lenin adds:

ITN has documents which show some of the lies the police have been telling to justify their shooting of Menezes. As I already pointed out , he wasn't wearing a bulky coat. The photo (a CCTV catch, I think) on ITN shows him lying dead on the floor of the carriage, wearing a thin blue denim jacket. The jacket is ridden up around his waist. No suicide belt. Further:

He was behaving normally, and did not vault the barriers, even stopping to pick up a free newspaper.

He started running when we saw a tube at the platform. Police HAD agreed they would shoot a suspect if he ran.

On the television, it is being reported that a surveillance officer who was supposed to be watching the block of flats on Scotia Road, was "relieving himself" when Menezes emerged. Unable to identify Menezes, it was nevertheless agreed at some level that he should be followed. Gold Command gave clearance to the officers to shoot-to-kill, and instructed that he was not to be allowed to enter the tube system.

CCTV footage, which the police said wasn't working on the day, shows him entering the tube station, walking along normally, picking up a Metro (I imagine), using his Oyster card to go through the gates, walking across the concourse, walking down the stairs. If he ran, they decided, he would be shot. It is reported, again, that they did not identify themselves. He saw a tube arriving, and ran to catch it - as everyone does - and was shot. He didn't even know he was being pursued.

One other detail. One of the officers, justifying the decision to pursue him, said he had "Mongolian eyes". Uh huh. Mongolian.

Update: I didn't see this, but I'm told that one officer said that Menezes had sat down in the tube, was called toward the officers and then grabbed and shot.

Normality/emergency. posted by lenin

An Israeli commander stakes out the rules for handling normal situations, versus emergencies:

“Normally we would storm a house killing everyone inside, whereas here we have to storm the house and keep everyone alive,” said one commander. “It’s not an easy job.” ( via )

Normality: Killing Arabs.

Emergency: Evicting Israelis from Occupied Territories without shedding blood.

They Shall Not Parse posted by China

Posted by China.

Charles Clarke, that man-shaped coagulum of viciousness and mediocrity, named two main candidates for Blair's new muscular Keep Britain Tolerant on Pain of Expulsion and Torture campaign: Omar Bakri Mohammed and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Now Bakri does possess certain (if absurd) boo-hiss qualities, as even those of us fundamentally opposed to this whole sorry policy will grant. He's a bit camp and overdetermined for my taste, but if you're trolling for bogeymen, I can see why you might give Bakri a second look.

Qaradawi is very different, as the government knows. Their naming him signals a ratcheting up of the ideological assault on Islam - and, I suspect, a wrist-slap for Ken Livingstone, who (in)famously hosted Qaradawi a little while back. The stiff exchange of dossiers by Livingstone and his opponents that followed (J'Accuse followed by Tu Can't M'Accuse Because Je T'Accuse First) was all over the blogosphere. The point here is that while, duh, those of us on the left have huge, sometimes fundamental disagreements with Qaradawi (etc etc - tedious to point that out but given the bad faith of our opponents (of which more below), it's as well to dot is and cross ts), he's an influential, mainstream Islamic cleric, who even took flak from some 'jihadis' (how I loathe that term) for his condemnation of 9/11. In ostentatiously flaunting Qaradawi as an enemy, the government moves beyond saying '"Jihadis" not welcome here' (which is, of course, hardly unproblematic anyway) and says instead 'Devout Muslims not welcome here.'

Now on the bad faith question. There's no doubt that Qaradawi's views on homosexuality are highly reactionary and thoroughly objectionable. (A bit like the Pope's. (Or the Dalai Lama's, depending on his mood).) But as banning Ratzinger's not really on anyone's agenda, the Send 'Em Bak crowd needs more of a smoking gun, and OutRage! - an organisation the degeneration of which I sincerely mourn - has been energetically pistol-hunting, to prove that Qaradawi advocates the murder of gays. And it's found what arguably looks like, literally, a killer quote.

For the full job of excavation, which you will see proves the vital political importance of punctuation, we have to thank Tempestua, Bionic Octopus's guest blogger. The snippet below starts with an OutRage! press release, before Tempy pipes in.

Aljazeera quotes Dr Qaradawi as saying:
"The scholars of Islam, such as Malik, Ash-Shafi`i, Ahmad and Ishaaq said that (the person guilty of this crime [homosexual activity]) should be stoned, whether he is married or unmarried."

This news is an absolute gift for Mr Tatchell, who has been squabbling endlessly with Mr Livingstone over whether or not the good doctor actually throws his weight behind stoning to death as an appropriate sanction for gay men (far more severe, certainly, as OutRage! notes, than the current legal penalty in Qatar, 5-10 years imprisonment). Previously, the best direct quote from Sheikh Qaradawi that he could find on the subject was this rather equivocal waffle [...]

Muslim jurists hold different opinions concerning the punishment for this abominable practice. Should it be the same as the punishment for fornication, or should both the active and passive participants be put to death? While such punishments may seem cruel, they have been suggested to maintain the purity of the Islamic society and to keep it clean of perverted elements.

Now, when that was all OutRage! had, they certainly did their level best to milk the stone for all it was worth:

The death penalty only seems cruel, he argues, until we understand that it is actually necessary “to keep [Islamic society] clean of perverted elements”

But all of that fun sophistry is now rendered happily redundant by the Aljazeera (a magazine, not the TV channel) article upon which OutRage! bases its press release. After all the article itself clearly says, as Mr Tatchell relates:

The eminent Qatari based scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi also quoted:
"The scholars of Islam, such as Malik, Ash-Shafi`i, Ahmad and Ishaaq said that (the person guilty of this crime) should be stoned, whether he is married or unmarried.”

At last: no more beating about the bush. The double-tongued doctor, so elusive in conversations with Western media, has gone and said what he really thinks to an Arabic newspaper. (Actually, he's apparently gone and said what some other people think, the named 'scholars of Islam', think, and even here voiced no clear opinion himself. But hey-ho.) [...] Well, that's all sorted out then. Naughty Ken. Evil, duplicitous Doctor. Vindicated OutRage!

Except Dr Qaradawi never said it.

As a fan of Pulp Fiction, I'll leave you with that cliffhanger. To find out how the deed was done, I urge you to check out Tempestua's full story. There may be those who find her, um, rather languid and louche delivery startling - she's quite the refugee from Absolute Beginners. But stick with it and count your blessings: she could have performed her investigative journalism in Polari. As it is, believe me, it's a bonaroo piece of screeve, so go and have a varda.

Zizek on counterfactuals posted by bat020

Exhibit A: witless reactionaries desperately trying to justify the summary execution of an innocent man in London last month by armed plain clothes police officers. Their strategy? Constant hysterical invocation of an absurd counterfactual scenario: "What if he actually had been a suicide bomber?"

Exhibit B: witless warmongers desperately trying to justify the embarrassing lack of WMD that were the supposed motivation for the invasion of Iraq. Their strategy? Constant hysterical invocation of an absurd counterfactual scenario: "What if he actually was planning to nuke us in 45 minutes?"

What both these examples (and there are countless others) demonstrate is the preponderance of counterfactual scenarios in the arsenal of reactionary ideologues. This phenomenon is neatly dissected by Slavoj Zizek in his latest essay for the London Review of Books, ostensibly a review of a volume of "what if?" essays by "leading" historians.

The conservative sympathies of the 'what if?' volumes become clear as soon as you look at their contents pages. The topics tend to concern how much better history would have been if some revolutionary or 'radical' event had been avoided (if Charles I had won the Civil War; if the English had won the war against the American colonies; if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War; if Germany had won the Great War) or, less often, how much worse history would have been if it had taken a more progressive turn.

Zizek also notes how conservative historians justify their parlour games by negative reference to "historically determinist" caricature of Marxism, and asks "what should the Marxist's answer be?" His initial strategy is to debunk the notion that Marxists are "dumb determinists who can't entertain alternative scenarios".

Since the non-occurrence of the October Revolution is a favourite topic of 'what if?' historians, it's worth looking at how Lenin himself related to counterfactuality. He was as far as he could be from any reliance on 'historical necessity'. On the contrary, it was his Menshevik opponents who emphasised the impossibility of omitting one of the stages prescribed by historical determinism: first bourgeois-democratic, then proletarian revolution...

There is a much deeper commitment to alternative histories in the radical Marxist view. For a radical Marxist, the actual history that we live is itself the realisation of an alternative history: we have to live in it because, in the past, we failed to seize the moment...

In the revolutionary explosion, another utopian dimension shines through, that of universal emancipation, which is in fact the 'excess' betrayed by the market reality that takes over on the morning after. This excess is not simply abolished or dismissed as irrelevant, but is, as it were, transposed into the virtual state, as a dream waiting to be realised.

This all very well and good, but I feel it doesn't address the thorny issue of how to distinguish the "good" Leninist approach to counterfactuality from the "bad" reactionary one. I suspect the critical factor here involves the temporality of the "counterfactual" – Lenin's "what if we don't act now?" is an urgent demand addressed in and to the present, a call for a decision over emergent possibilities. The conservative version, in contrast, involves no such sense of urgency or presence – it is a retrospective justification of a series of events that have already taken place.

This suggests that the Leninist "counterfactual" is not a counterfactual in the strict sense of the term. The notion of a counterfactual only makes sense within the analytic conception of "possible worlds" (cf Kripke), where all the possible worlds are "realistic", but only one of them happens to be actual. The laws of the worlds are all the same, all that differs is the contingent quality of actuality (its "modality"). That is why something that happens in an alternative world is counterfactual, ie both factual and not factual.

The Leninist position owes nothing to this Kripkean picture – instead it involves a much deeper conception of intertwined potentiality and actualisation in this world, with time and subjective decision somehow wrapping the two together. I guess this is what Benjamin was getting at with his "theses on the philosophy of history" (which Zizek namechecks)... something I confess I've never entirely understood.

Clowns for jihad posted by Meaders

(Posted by Meaders)

It might be easy, in the midst of SEND HIM BAK hysteria, to forget what ridiculous figures both Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza are. Hamza especially: from the improbable Finsbury Park/Tora Bora accent in which he delivered his MESSAGE OF HATE ("dem suicide bombers is ok, innit") to the oh-so-practical pirate hook, Hamza was less al-Qaida hero than a pantomime villain, apparently invented for the benefit of the Daily Mail cartoonist. Together with his small posse of bored north London teenagers, the "Sons of Sharia", Hamza's one-eyed grimace and notoriety were just ideal for lazy editors keen on Muslim-bashing copy - but somewhat less than ideal for anyone actually planning on blowing up the tube.

Bakri never quite managed the unique Hamza style, but the thick specs, portliness and a dopey grin at least showed he was making the effort. Most of Bakri's public pronouncements had a certain dopiness about them, too: I could be wrong, but one of the things you would not do, if you really fancied restaging 9/11 in London, would be to organise a widely-publicised conference in celebration of this fact. Jon Ronson performs a great service in reminding us all of Bakri's innate clownishness:

The documentary I made about him - Tottenham Ayatollah - has come in for a bit of a hammering of late, the Daily Mail writing, "The message [that he shouldn't be taken seriously] was wrong."

But, really? Some of the recent Timeline Of Hate newspaper profiles refer to events I witnessed. Yes, it sounds horrendous that Omar booked the London Arena for a rally to play videotaped messages from Osama Bin Laden. What isn't mentioned is that the rally was cancelled because Omar only sold a handful of tickets and the Bin Laden tape didn't arrive. Plus he never managed to negotiate car parking facilities with the Arena.

Another Rally of Hate - outside the Israeli embassy - was cancelled because Omar accidentally gave his followers the wrong address. He explained to me that when he telephoned directory enquiries, they deliberately gave him a false address in Knightsbridge. By the time Omar discovered the correct address it was too late. Many of his followers were already on their way and they didn't have mobile phones. This, Omar said, was proof that Scotland Yard's Muslim monitoring unit was in league with British Telecom's directory enquiries service.

"It cannot be a coincidence," he said.

The sophisticated New Labour line, developed within hours of the London bombings, was that we were facing a menacing ideology, not menacing individuals. Why, then, all the fuss about Hamza and Bakri? At least part of the reason is to play on the thought that though I, and perhaps you, wouldn't take these people seriously, those poor, childlike Muslims would. Except, of course, they don't.

You won't challenge an ideology by deporting or detaining a few individuals who express it - and express it badly, by the way, inarticulacy being an essential weapon in the Bakri-Hamza Axis of Evil. You might do something about it if you address its material roots - if you start to drain the swamp from which the ideas draw their nourishment. New Labour, for one reason or another, is not keen on looking too directly at the invasion of Iraq; so Hamza and Bakri play their allotted parts, and the pantomime continues. He's behind yooouuu...

Gate Gourmet planned to provoke strikes. posted by lenin

Well, well :

The catering firm at the centre of the Heathrow travel chaos considered provoking strikes last year to replace staff with cheaper labour, a leaked memo reveals.

A secret briefing presented to bosses at Gate Gourmet outlined plans to trigger a dispute.

It reads: "Recruit, train and security check drivers. Announce intention to trade union, provoking unofficial industrial action from staff. Dismiss current workforce. Replace with new staff."

The draft document, prepared in 2004 and now obtained by the Daily Mirror, sets out a 15-week timetable for goading employees into striking so they could be replaced with lower-paid Eastern European labour trained in secret.

But of course, there's a denial:

"Current management discarded the plan and its recommendations as entirely inappropriate and undesirable."

Oh, sure...

Original Mirror story here .

Why I Hate Liberals* posted by lenin

I'm sick to death of liberal commentators waffling on their opposition to the war. It's all like "Well, just because we think the war was wrong doesn't mean we want the other side to win. We do support the troops, we just think this is wrong war. We care as much about opposing fundamentalism as you guys do, it's just the wrong war." Here's a typical gutless bunny :

Who, may I ask, are all the “Westerners who side with the ‘Iraqi resistance’ against America and its allies”? Generally speaking, the “Iraqi resistance” is killing our troops in the interest of a fundamentalist ideology that liberals find appalling. If our countrymen are actually taking their side as they try to kill coalition troops, that seems like a (conversational, if not legal) accusation of treason.

Hey, just say it. Just say it. The troops are murdering Iraqis, and the sooner the last soldier and diplomat is chased out on the last helicopter the better. What are you so fucking scared of? Why hide behind official misrepresentations about the Iraqi resistance working for a "fundamentalist ideology" when you know damned well they're fighting a guerilla war against an occupying enemy? And what's with this "treason" shit? Treason involves disloyalty to one's nation - if the nation is involved in mass murder, is there not ample reason to be disloyal? Would not US citizens resist such a brutal occupier, regardless of how they felt about their government? Since when did liberalism entail abandoning universalism for loyalty to the nation-state? Since when have liberals been so cowardly and corruptible that they dared not face the glaringly apparent for fear of offending reactionaries? Since when ?

*The more accurate title would read "Why I Hate Some Liberals Sometimes, But Then Forgive Them and Offer Cuddles". But that would be a bit wet, wouldn't it?

Iraq resistance battles "Zarqawi"; Sunni fighters defend Shiites. posted by lenin

Someone e-mailed this to me. It's a story from the Washington Post about how Iraqi Sunni resistance fighters are taking up arms against a group described as "Al Qaeda in Iraq", allegedly the new name of Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, a group associated with the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Here's a passage or two:

Rising up against insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Iraqi Sunni Muslims in Ramadi fought with grenade launchers and automatic weapons Saturday to defend their Shiite neighbors against a bid to drive them from the western city, Sunni leaders and Shiite residents said. The fighting came as the U.S. military announced the deaths of six American soldiers.

Dozens of Sunni members of the Dulaimi tribe established cordons around Shiite homes, and Sunni men battled followers of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, for an hour Saturday morning. The clashes killed five of Zarqawi's guerrillas and two tribal fighters, residents and hospital workers said. Zarqawi loyalists pulled out of two contested neighborhoods in pickup trucks stripped of license plates, witnesses said.

...

Statements posted on walls declared in the name of the Iraqi-led Mohammed's Army group that "Zarqawi has lost his direction" and strayed "from the line of true resistance against the occupation."

A grateful Shiite resident of Ramadi said he was not surprised at the threats by Zarqawi's followers or the defiance of them. "So many ties of friendship, marriage and compassion" bind Shiites and Sunnis in Ramadi, said Ali Hussein Lifta, a 50-year-old air-conditioning repairman and a resident of Tameem.

This is not the first such story I've posted. Patrick Cockburn has written about how the resistance is cracking down on the extreme Wahabbis, while the Telegraph featured a story about it which said the US were "delighted" by it.

This story in the Washington Post, however, manages to exhibit almost every tic that Chomsky would identify as corporate propaganda. For instance, "Zarqawi" is identified as the "insurgent leader", which he is not; "the insurgency" is conflated with the activities of "Al Qaeda in Iraq", which it should not be; as "the insurgency" is so narrow and extreme, Washington can be described as hoping to break "mainstream Sunnis" from it, as if most Sunnis are not already fully behind the resistance; we are not told that it is resistance fighters who are taking on "Zarqawi" until the second page of the story; the article seriously suggests that it was threats from Zarqawi's tiny outfit that cause Sunnis to boycott the January elections etc etc.

All of these - let's be kind and call them factual errors - have been introduced casually into the story as framing devices. They fix the narrative as one of Sunnis being wooed by nutters, failing to realise the essential good that the occupiers intend, then slowly realising that they must fight the extremists etc.

Not so much Manufacturing Consent as Manufacturing Acquiescence.

Bring Back the Guillotine posted by bat020

Posted by Bat

This filthy class traitor deserves a haircut, Jacobin style:

A senior Labour MP condemned the Transport and General Workers Union for being "spineless" in failing to confront militants who cause regular summer travel misery at Heathrow.

Barry Sheerman, chairman of the Commons Education Select Committee, said a "malign influence" was at work in the airport, which has been hit by disruption three years in a row. It is "no accident" the rows flare up in August as "they are pre-planned and plotted", according to the Huddersfield MP.

"There is some malign influence at Heathrow that is putting these things on in August," Mr Sheerman said. "There is no doubt about it, we have a leadership out of control at Heathrow, the T&G particularly has no backbone. It is spineless union leadership." [source]

The real "malign influence" at Heathrow that the T&G leadership should stand up to is, of course, the management of BA and Gate Gourmet. But our glorious Business Leaders can do no wrong in the eyes of deferential cretins like Sheerman (who, incidentally, lists "political entrepreneurship" as one of his interests on his website). Hence his dismal recourse to paranoid fantasies about "militants" pulling the strings.

Socialist Worker's latest update on Heathrow notes the following:

An insidious line of questioning from some sections of the media was that the solidarity action was the result of Asian family ties. In fact, the BA baggage handlers and ground crew who took action are overwhelmingly white.

Gate Gourmet worker Jonathan Gardener had a clear explanation for the solidarity, "Look, I'm Cornish and a lot of my workmates here are Punjabi. But we're brothers. We are in the same union branch as the BA workers. So that makes them our brothers too. You can call that a family connection if you like."

Fellow worker Michael Allen added, "People have worked for this company for a long time. Some of them were here when it was part of BA, before it was tendered out. There are lots of connections between different groups of workers at the airport. There's nothing sinister about it. It's called solidarity."

Of course, this hasn't stopped the bourgeois media from dropping plenty of hints that there is some kind of "family" reason for the secondary action. The racism at work here is truly stupefying - militant strike action is painted as a foreign custom practised by immigrants that have failed to adopt the British Way Of Life...

Joint Chiefs Wriggle Like A Detainee On A Wire posted by BionOc

[crossposted from Bionic Octopus]
(As WIIIAI has also noted), the Bush Administration was revealed yesterday in its, by my count, third desperate and wholly discontinuous attempt to resist releasing the torture images from Abu Ghraib, as ordered by a federal judge in early June.

(Attempt #1 was of course my favorite for sheer barefaced gall: they argued that to release recognizable images of the men, women and children being tortured, raped, sodomized, set on by dogs and beaten to bloody mincemeat by US forces would constitute unacceptable humiliation and therefore violate the victims' rights under the Geneva Conventions. This gambit of truly epic chutzpah was swiftly dispatched with reference to the miracle of modern photographic redaction technology.)

This latest effort, revealed in arguments submitted to the US District Court by General Richard B. Myers on July 22nd, claims that to release the images would 'pose a clear and grave risk of inciting violence and riots against American troops and coalition forces.'

[Myers] said it was "probable that al-Qaida and other groups will seize upon these images and videos as grist for their propaganda mill," leading to violent attacks, increased terrorist recruitment, continued financial support and a worsening of tensions between the Iraqi and Afghani populaces and U.S. and coalition forces.

[....]

Myers said the United States has documented situations in which insurgents have falsely claimed that U.S. actions in Iraq caused suffering to women and children when the damage was actually done by violence and sabotage by the insurgents.

He said the insurgents rely on doctored photographs and images to support their calls to violence.

This is absolutely extraordinary. The logic of this argument is twofold and utterly, fatally bankrupt. It posits that:

i) If the consequences of revealing crimes which we fully acknowledge having committed threaten to prove harmful to our cause, we have no obligation to reveal them. I.e., the way to avoid harmful consequences is not to avoid committing the crimes, but to refuse to reveal them later, even when we've admitted to them.

ii) The fact that our enemies allegedly fabricate similar evidence of wrongdoing on our part absolves us of responsibility to reveal true, unfabricated evidence. This is completely fallacious; the one accusation, even if true, has exactly no bearing on the other assertion. If we didn't want to hand our opponents propaganda-on-a-platter, we might have considered not issuing orders abrogating international conventions on prisoner abuse. But tough luck, we did, and now we have to belly up to the fallout. The fact that it gives Iraqis more reason to loathe and resist us is not some unfortunate collateral effect, it is precisely the point.

The government's obligation to reveal the Abu Ghraib images is an obligation not particularly to Iraqi insurgents who may indeed use it for 'propaganda' purposes (wouldn't you?), but to its own citizens, to the abuse victims and Iraqi citizens who suffer under the jackboot of this depravedly human-rights-indifferent occupation, and in fact to the entire world, which has every moral right to demand accountability from the hyperpower that claims the quasi-divine prerogative of enforcing global Freeman Moxie at the point of a gun.

A tiny handful of evildoers. posted by lenin

Here is an excellent article on the Iraqi resistance. The author pugnaciously takes apart the media mythologies about this being driven by a few confederates of Al Qaeda, one of the illusions animating much of the discussion even on a part of the left:

"Gen. George Casey, the U.S. commander of the multinational coalition in Iraq, told reporters on [June 27] that the worst-case estimate of the size of the Iraqi insurgency is less than one-10th of 1 percent of the country's population -- that is, a top end of 26,000 people supporting the insurgency." -- The Guardian

If you've been following guerrilla wars as long as I have, you have to laugh when you hear Army PR guys say that the Iraqi insurgents are just a teeny-tiny bad apple in a big barrel of shiny Red Delicious Iraqis. One bad apple -- that little beady-eyed Al Qaeda operative Zarqawi -- is supposedly responsible for the whole mess. Sorry, folks, but insurgencies just don't work that way.

Of course, you can't blame US Army guys for doing their job -- lying to the press. But you sure can blame the press for buying it.

...

Guerrilla war depends on two "obvious" facts -- so "obvious" nobody in the press even mentions them:

1. The people who live in a place care more about it than the foreign occupiers, and so they'll outlast them in a long guerrilla war.

2. So the only way to defeat the guerrillas is to wipe out or displace the population.


It's been done. The Brits did it in the Boer War a century ago. They were stuck in a losing war against an insurgency by the Boers, so they dragged the Boers' women and kids into the concentration camps to die of every horrible disease in Africa. It worked. A quarter of the civilian population was wiped out, and the Boers lost heart and surrendered, giving the Brits access to the gold and diamond mines. Even now the Boers still burn with hatred over what the Brits did to them, and you can't blame the poor bastards.

...

Nobody in Iraq was going to risk their lives just for Saddam. Guerrilla warfare is terrifying for the guerrilla as well as the occupier. The occupying army has all the tanks, heavy weapons, aircraft, communications, media control and funding. Air power is what would scare me the most. It's almost impossible to hide from a helicopter equipped with infrared sensors. If you've watched those reality cop-chase shows, where they track suspects fleeing in total darkness, you have an idea of what the urban guerrilla is up against.

The Iraqis are fighting for one simple reason: because we invaded and occupy their cities.

...

The poster boy for the "foreign agitator" theory these days is Zarqawi. I admit, he's a better candidate than Saddam was. He's a real guerrilla operator, with a solid mujahedeen resume: Born in Jordan, probably to Palestinian refugee parents, grew up in the town of Zarqa (his alias means "The Guy from Zarqa"), went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and got radicalized.

But there's no sign he's anything more than a small-time recruiter for suicide-bomber volunteers. Zarqawi's face has been all over the Net for years now, and there's a $25 million bounty on him. Like they say in spy movies, his cover is blown. No way he can be really useful as a guerrilla leader. That job puts you out on the street all day, moving through checkpoints, changing your identity non-stop.

The reason that both sides in the war -- the Pentagon PR corps and these Jihadi websites -- keep making such a big fuss about Zarqawi's every move is that he's good PR for both of them. The Al Qaeda fundraisers need a Mr. Big for their propaganda as much as we do. Except their version is a hero, Zarqawi as Robin Hood in a greasy skullcap, always outsmarting the big, dumb American crusaders. He's a great gimmick, a cross-eyed poster boy, for Al Q.

The Pentagon wants to put an outside agitator's face on the insurgency. America will do anything to avoid having to face the most obvious fact about Iraq: They hate our guts, all of them.

...

And behind is the real insurgency: the Iraqis. All of them, in the Sunni zones, and a damn big slice of the Shi'ite population as well. Yeah, the Shi'ites are cooperating with us now because their 62 percent slice of the Iraqi population guarantees they'll win any election, but if we cross them again we'll face the same insurgency profile we face now in the Sunni Triangle. Which is, to put it bluntly, everybody. Every-damn-body in the place.

I've rarely seen it put that bluntly and in an American accent.

Police intelligence: reassuring, isn't it? posted by Meaders

Posted by Meaders

Kotaji has forwarded me this piece in the South London Advertiser:

A MUSLIM leader has revealed he warned police about a suspected suicide bomber.

Toaha Qureshi wrote to Lambeth police about Hussain Osman in July 2003, telling them how the 27-year-old had stormed Stockwell mosque and made death threats against Mr Qureshi's family.

Osman is a suspect for the Shepherd's Bush terror attack on July 21 and is fighting extradition in Italy...

Mr Qureshi, a trustee at the mosque, said: "We had a very nasty experience with him. He was a very angry young man who led a group of extremely violent men."

At the time, the police were busily eyeballing a clown with a comedy pirate-hook, and detaining a mentally ill refugee and a man without hands as "major threats here and across the world". More recently in Stockwell, they've managed to murder an innocent Brazilian on the tube. No wonder they're keeping so tight-lipped about Qureshi's revelations.

Unofficial Heathrow Walk-out. posted by lenin

From the BBC :

All British Airways flights from Heathrow have been suspended after some staff walked out in support of sacked catering workers.
The sacked staff were not employed by BA, but for flight meals supply firm Gate Gourmet.

BA baggage handlers, loaders and bus drivers have walked out in sympathy with the catering workers.

The Gate Gourmet company apparently sacked 500 workers at a stroke for taking industrial action. BA workers sympathised and spontaneously joined in. That's solidarity in action: an injury to one is an injury to all.

Update: "A magnificent show of solidarity" .

Additionally, there's some good news on Jerry Hicks :

The Second Major Blow for Rolls-Royce Within a Week
After the remarkable victory in the Interim Relief Hearing at the Tribunal in Bristol, which found in Jerry's favour and called for Rolls-Royce to reinstate him, today we have the result of the Test Ballot, which is almost two to one in favour of strike action! This is a MARVELLOUS decision by people who have said with the loudest voice that they are prepared to defend the Union and demand to have their Convenor back! The first strike day is likely to be Monday, 22 August 2005.

The priority now is SOLIDARITY! MESSAGES! SUPPORT! FINANCE! and ... JOIN THE DEMONSTRATION IN BRISTOL ON FRIDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2005(details to follow).

Further update: See the readers comments on the Daily Mail story. Quite a few are supporting the strikers. Meanwhile, the Mirror reports that a number of workers were fired while on sick leave. And the Telegraph waxes sardonic: "You can tell that the holiday season has begun because the staff of British Airways, smelling their opportunity, have called a strike."

Monthly Review Zine article. posted by lenin

Monthly Review Zine have seen fit to publish an article by me about the slaying of Jean Charles de Menezes. A little preview for you:

There was a remarkable moment in London last month when the Israeli Defence Force looked more restrained than the Metropolitan Police. Having shot an unarmed civilian in the head seven times (and once in the shoulder), the Metropolitan Police was suddenly obliged to explain to the public a policy that had been decided on in secret. The guidelines of Operation Kratos, designed in response to 9/11, said that suspected suicide bombers must be shot in the head. This was necessary, the police said, in order to stop hand movement. If an officer is reasonably certain he is faced with a suicide bomber, he must destroy the brain "instantly, utterly," as former Met Police commissioner Lord Stevens explained to the News of the World tabloid. That weekend, the IDF -- who helped train UK police in handling suicide bombers -- managed to intercept a would-be suicide bomber and prevent him from detonating himself. No shots were fired; a man with an explosives belt strapped to him left the scene alive.

Much of it you will have read in some fashion at the Tomb, but it's still worth a look.

The American Tendency & New Labour. posted by lenin

The post-war settlement was a more precarious affair than retrospection would appear to grant. European capitalism was in ruins, left-wing sympathies ran high, and there was a serious threat that a number of European countries would either align with Stalin or form independent socialist majorities - particularly in France, Greece and Italy . Sustained interventions in all three countries resulted, with election fixing in Italy, the employment of gangs to break strikes and split the labour movement in France, and an attempt by the British to impose a corrupt regime on Greece followed by a civil war in which the US helped crush pro-communist dissidents. Marshall Aid reconstituted European capitalism, confluently providing substantial markets for American goods, and Operation Gladio was set in place, involving clandestine 'stay-behind' forces which ended up becoming involved in right-wing terrorism across Europe as part of a 'strategy of tension' which allowed states to crack down on the radical left.

Another front in this offensive on the socialist left was the Congress for Cultural Freedom , a CIA-funded organisation that was set up to win liberals and left-wingers to the American side in the Cold War. (See Frances Stonor Saunders' excellent book Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, 1999, for an excellent account of the way leading intellectuals and artists were duped into working for this organisation). The CCF published various magazines for left-wing audiences, most notoriously Encounter, which involved figures of some standing like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode & Conor Cruise O'Brien, as well as those of lesser standing, like Isaiah Berlin. The Congress was involved in sponsoring the social-democratic wing of the Labour Party from the 1950s onward, while US Embassies each produced a 'Labour Attaché' which would monitor and try to influence labour movements across the world .

Since 1985, we have had the British American Project among whose luminaries were many of New Labour's milieu, from front-benchers like Mo Mowlam and George Robertson to sympathisers like Jeremy Paxman. It has been funded by multinationals as various as Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Unilever, BP, Cadbury - all the bad guys, in fact. Frances Stonor Saunders sees it as an inheritor of the cultural Cold War: "All that's changed is that BAP are much more sophisticated." John Pilger calls it "casual freemasonry". Personally, I call it a bunch of simpering liberals and hard-right Tories locked in a cluster-fuck with American capital.

Well, that's just a summary of some of the background. The role of what Robin Ramsay calls 'The American Tendency' in the rise of New Labour is a more parochial affair, even if it involves the same political alignments. As Ramsay explains in his invaluable booklet The Rise of New Labour (2002), the CCF and its publications were a familiar locus for right-wing figures in the Labour Party, including Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, Roy Jenkins (who would join the SDP), Peter Jay (who would convert to monetarism and become a BBC economics editor) and Tony Crosland. The US Labour Attaché exerted considerable influence on British foreign policy, according to Denis Healy, while also helping Gaitskell design policies and mount campaigns against the left.

It was this tendency in the Labour Party which led the campaign for British entry into the European Economic Community or ('Common Market'), a project the US looked favourably on with the CIA funding and organising the European Movement. Roy Jenkins co-founded the Labour Common Market Committee in 1962 with another future SDP supporter Jack Diamond , which then became the Labour Committee for Europe in the mid-1960s. The campaign kicked off in 1971, of course, when 69 Labour MPs voted with the Conservative government for entry into the EEC. One of its main supporters and organisers was Bill Rodgers, previously known for waging pitch battles against the CND through his Campaign for Democratic Socialism. From then on, says Ramsay, the group acted as "a party within a party". Roy Jenkins was approached several times by members of the American Tendency who wanted him to leave Labour and form a new party with them: each time he declined.

Following Roy Jenkins' defeat in his 1976 bid for the Labour leadership, he was offered a job as President of the EEC, which he took. His supporters in the Labour Party formed a group called the Campaign for a Labour Victory, and later a campaign was formed by a number of academics called the Social Democratic Alliance (SDA) to fight the Labour left. It attracted support from the trade union right, as well as Brian Crozier, a CIA and MI6 asset. In 1981, two years after Labour's loss to a hard right Tory party, Roy Jenkins and a number of activists from the SDA and the Campaign for a Labour Victory moved to ensure that a Labour Victory would be the last thing they'd see any time soon. They formed the Social Democrat Party (SDP), and were joined by a number of MPs who had voted for Michael Foot and against Denis Healey in the Labour leadership election - presumably to consolidate and ensure the right-wing break from Labour, which would have been more difficult under Healey.

I'm just tracing some institutional movements that lie behind various ideological contours, but focusing on what Ramsay's Lobster magazine would call 'parapolitics' has its drawbacks. Namely, it shifts attention away from ordinary politics - why did the SDP gain such support so quickly? Members, media plaudits and supporters can't be arranged by any CIA front, no matter how sophisticated and well-funded. Paul Foot gave the best answer to the question at the time: Labourism was dead in the water. Having pursued an unavailing reformist road to socialism, it had shifted to a managerialist approach to capitalism, and had finally presided over wage cuts, strike-breaking, cuts in public-spending and spiralling prices.

Anyway, one last question remains for me in this article (there's a lot more to be covered, but I'll leave that for another post, or another Tombster): why didn't Tony Blair join the SDP when he might have? One answer, again supplied by Paul Foot in a recorded speech made in 2003, is that Blair may well have been advised by his friend, the future Lord Irvine, that this would be unnecessary. The SDP's politics could prevail within the Labour Party, given enough batterings at the polls. Whether such advice was ever dispensed, the fact is that the SDP merged with the Liberals, and New Labour emerged to fight a 1997 election on a platform barely distinguishable from that of the Liberal Democrats, except that on some issues the Lib Dems seemed more to the left. The entire defense team under the first New Labour administration was drawn from the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Unity (TUCETU), which had been set up in 1976 by former Labour Attaché, Joseph Godson. As noted, New Labour's front-bench included a swathe of BAP veterans. Trevor Philips, a Labour rival to Ken Livingstone for the London mayoral bid back in the day, is also a BAP member, and describes how "Five years before I joined BAP, I thought wealth creation and progressive politics were completely incompatible ... BAP was one of the things that made me think that was absurd." New Labour's Philo-Americanism is one of its outstanding hallmarks, from the cozy relationship with Clinton to the frazzled one with Bush. New Labour came after the New Democrats, and Blair's Third Way rhetoric closely matched that of Clinton.

The American Tendency has come a long way in the Labour Party - from warning of the evils of the wrong kind of socialism, it now affirms that neoliberalism is, always was, the best way, the only way. What once portrayed itself as an anti-Stalinist movement, aimed at saving good reformist socialism, is now openly what it always was in private: a collection of fellow-travellers with the American Empire.

Blairite Bricolage posted by bat020

A few months ago I had the dubious pleasure of transcribing the George Galloway v Oona King debate during the general election. What struck me was that Galloway actually speaks in full sentences - his fiery rhetoric is undergirded by a cold political logic (which is where its real strength comes from). King, in contrast, spoke gibberish, a weird melange of New Labourisms, marketing speak and wounded amour-propre.

I was reminded of this today when someone drew my attention to this slab of stream-of-consciousness dreck from our prime minister last Friday. Note the complete absence of any kind of political argument - instead we get a bricolage of Cold War ideologemes, one demonaic resemblance chained to the next with a handy all purpose comma. We all know about Bush's intellectual limitations, but we should not forget that the urbane Oxford educated Blair is just as pig-shit stupid.

And I think that the more I think about this type of phenomenon which we are dealing with and it is why I see this as a global threat that has to be handled at a number of different levels, including the level of ideas and ideology, as well as security measures, is that I think it has got some of the same characteristics as revolutionary communism, you know, in the sense that it has got an ideology, it is very extreme, that it can be used to engage young people at a certain level and in a certain way, it has got often the cells of it of a loose association with one another, but on the other hand they have got this ideology that binds them together, they know the types of places that they can go to to get the information and to try and stimulate this type of extremism and we have got to deal with it in a way that recognises that its roots are very deep, very extensive around the world, and you need to pull them up at the same time as dealing with all the rest of it.

Despair. posted by lenin

They just won't be stopped . American GIs are dropping like flies . Of course, the United States government openly boasts that it has killed almost 50,000 resistance fighters since September 2004 (why the scepticism over Lancet, then?), which reflects the obvious disparity in military power between the Iraqi resistance and US forces.

The curious thing about this is, allowing for the possibility that the US is inflating its kill rate, or that it includes civilian casualties with the resistance, if they are killing such a large number of resistance fighters, why isn't it collapsing? Time Magazine , despite advertising an explanation, doesn't know. US Marine's explanation: "they just got lucky". It's spreading to the Shi'a south , and they just don't get why.

The answer? Bomb Fallujah again!

Modern "liberalism" posted by Meaders

John Lloyd, editor of Financial Times magazine, presents in today’s Guardian five reasons why "liberals" should "support the measures proposed by Tony Blair last Friday to limit the freedom of those who speak up for terrorism." It is the most atrociously poor set of arguments; if this is what now passes for "liberalism", the principle doctrine of modern capitalism has degenerated beyond recovery. Says Lloyd:

First, the proposed measures are clearly aimed at those who preach violence. The objection that such legislation would be unable to discriminate between those in the Muslim community who strongly object to British policy in Iraq and Afghanistan and those who encourage mass murder is disingenuous. It is clearly not the government's intention (nor is it in its interest) to do so - and in so far as there would be, in practice, confusion, then that should form part of the normal arguments between the state and the courts.

This is simply untrue. Hizb’ut-Tahrir, though highly obnoxious, are explicitly non-violent. Yet they are being threatened with a ban. It would be hard to think of a more stupid policy: it grants H-T an instant martyrdom and a glamour they do not warrant, whilst simultaneously making openly challenging and defeating their politics all but impossible. The experience of the antiwar movement in East London is instructive; H-T made a serious attempt, after 9/11, to argue for a separate, Muslim-only antiwar movement: “Don’t stop the war, except through Islamic politics”. The Stop the War Coalition, there as elsewhere, argued for unity – Muslim and non-Muslim – against the war. It won that argument, and defeated the Islamists, because it was able to have that argument.

If H-T is banned, the largest radical Islamist group in the country will be driven underground, out of sight and beyond any normal political process, where exhortations against violence, and condemnations of the attacks on civilians, are worthless and will be discarded. Even in the utilitarian terms Lloyd attempts to use, this extraordinarily foolish. (I will also note, in passing, the refusal of Hazel Blears to clearly answer a simple question as to whether these laws would apply to George Galloway.)

Second, legislation to screen more carefully those who enter the UK and expel those who abuse their welcome by advocating violence against it, or against other democratic governments, sets boundaries on the permissible - in a way similar to that already existing in race relations legislation. Both the existing legislation on racism, and that adumbrated by the prime minister on the "preachers of hate", have an illiberal potential - that is, they do restrict freedom of expression. But they do so on considerations of public safety and good community relations. No democracy, or any system of human and civil rights, can be absolute and beyond amendment.

Take Omar Bakri. An offensive prat, given to making offensive statements, certainly. But to ban him from the UK is to leave him at liberty elsewhere, still broadcasting the same message but now – as with H-T – beyond any reasonable possibility of restraint or confrontation.

Third, the experience of this country, faced with a terrorist threat, has not been to use a restriction of civil and human rights as a ratchet whereby these rights, once lost, are never reinstated. The history of the challenge to the state of IRA terrorism over nearly four decades has told the opposite story. There are dark pages, but the measures taken to restrict rights of movement and expression, and to limit trials by jury, have not remained, while a series of reforms to end discriminatory practices have. Indeed, a much better argument can be made against over-optimism and an over-"liberal" reaction to the IRA's ambiguous call for an end to hostilities than can be made for the view that IRA terrorism, with a mountain of corpses at its back, revealed the British system as irredeemably brutal.

If John Lloyd looks closely, he will see that the "temporary" Prevention of Terrorism Act remained on the statutes from 1974 to 2000, when it was superseded by the permanent Terrorism Act. A repressive law that materially contributed to some of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history was replaced by a still more repressive law, under which very serious attacks on civil liberties and democratic freedoms have already been made. In neither case does the argument that repression "prevented" terrorism hold water; Lloyd carefully forgets to mention the beneficial contribution that, say, internment without trial made to the IRA’s recruitment. The "measures taken to restrict rights of movement and expression, and limit trials by jury, have not remained" because they did not work. Only political engagement has.

Fourth, many people - judging by the polls - are fearful of a terrorism springing from an extreme version of Islam; and they could become, in large numbers, hateful and fearful. Blair's description last Friday of a popular reaction of unity and dignity seems right, but it was a reaction at a point in time, not a fixed sentiment. There's no reason why it cannot change - and it will change, faced with further attempts at mass murder. Constant and violent imprecations against the British government and people will cause anger to grow. Anger and fear require outlets: and we have already seen, in the so-far relatively minor attacks on mosques and innocent Muslims, what outlets these would be.

It is a shock to read this in a liberal newspaper from the pen of an alleged liberal. At best, Lloyd is suggesting we pander to racism. At worst, it bears comparison to Enoch Powell: if the Tiber is "foaming with much blood", Muslims and an "extremist version of Islam" will have brought it upon themselves. If racists decide to, say, murder an Asian man in Nottingham, they were gulled into it by "constant and violent imprecations against the British government". The British government itself is, of course, beyond reproach: its entire post-9/11 policy, for example, four years of baiting and illiberalism combined with awe-inspiring foreign policy disasters, have absolutely nothing to do with a pervasive Islamophobia. Truly revolting.

There's a further consideration. Leaders and opinion formers among Muslims who oppose extremism require a firm base on which to stand. If they are to support democratic politics - including protest and opposition - they need to see that bolstered by the state. To see instead the state extend a welcome and benefits to those whose main aim is to call down violence on the population is to give the moderates little help: it is to signal an indifference between their opinion and that of the extremists.

Muslims are, obviously, somewhat like children and require the firm, paternal hand of the state if they are not to fill their silly little heads with bad thoughts. Condemnation of the attacks in London has been all but universal from British Muslims: a few idiots and self-publicists, given exhorbitant attention by the media, have dissented - but they have quite clearly been overwhelmingly rejected by Muslims in Britain, without any help from Blair.

Finally, support for a liberal polity, whether led by a party of the left or right, together with support for civil and human rights, ultimately comes from the electorate. From where else, in a democracy, could it proceed? Politicians must give a lead, and must support and defend liberalism in law and action, and in the month since the July 7 murders Blair has done so. But no government can remain liberal if support for its liberalism wanes; and support for a government that seeks assent to a society undergoing relatively rapid change as a consequence of immigration can be counted on only through a strong reassurance that limits observed naturally by the majority will be imposed by law on the extremist minority.

We had to destroy the village in order to save it. Ever logical, Lloyd is arguing that an "extremist minority" necessitate restrictions placed on all our rights, thus turning a tiny group of headbangers into arbiters of our democracy.

These pages have been host to several pieces arguing, in essence, that we British had it coming (it being terrorist attacks by those acting in the name of extreme Islamism). Such arguments blur, at the very least, the essential nature of democratic societies. That is, that opposition is necessary to their health and it is that which must carry the burden of anger and protest. As long as that is the case, we don't have to accept terrorism as our guilty due; we have to entertain argument as our responsibility, our privilege and our patrimony.

"We British" did not have it coming. No-one, in the comments pages of the Guardian, has argued that commuters in London should be somehow made responsible for the crimes of their government. No-one has said the innocent should be made to suffer because of the guilty. It is a dirty, rotten trick of an argument, a variant on “explanation=justification”, but it is the closest that Lloyd, or any other apologist for authoritarianism, can come to admitting the dirty, rotten truth: the Iraq war is slowly poisoning everything in British society, whether it is the inability to ride a tube train in safety, or the callousness of a government that prefers destroying civil liberties to admitting its own mistakes.

Defend civil liberties - Stop the War Coalition demonstration, central London, 24 September.

Detention without trial. posted by lenin

Michael Howard is back - and he's pissed off. He's got the hump that the courts are doing their job by refusing to allow the government to run roughshod over the law: what he calls "judicial activism" .

The issue revolves around some curious idea that the government have got into their heads about detaining people without trial. As Gary Younge notes , present and past versions of such policies have not been terribly successful at catching terrorists or even inconveniencing them: quite the contrary. But what they have done is ensured a lot of innocent people spent time locked up, some of whom were subjected to the various old-fashioned tortures that made Britain great before the yanks came with their S & M shit.

And there's the usual axe-grinding about the Human Rights Act. All because it obliges the courts to give serious consideration to whether proposed laws are actually proportionate to their intended effect. Because a sense of proportion is the last thing you want in politics, isn't it?

Yet one more episode in which the Tories act as a junior branch of the present government while the judiciary seems to be functioning as the official opposition.

Translator faces jail for "aiding terrorism" posted by bat020

Mohamed Yousry has worked for almost 10 years as an Arabic translator for a New York defence lawyer, Lynne Stewart. He was born in Egypt but is now a naturalised American citizen, having lived in the country for 30 years. He is not an Islamist radical - in fact he isn't even a practising Muslim.

But now he faces up to 20 years in jail. Why? Because he worked on the defence team of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the cleric convicted for the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing). That was enough to get him convicted of "providing material aid to terrorism".

Read the full story in the New York Times

Oh, what a lovely war! posted by lenin

First news of the day, CIA commander confirms that the US deliberately let Osama bin Laden get away in the mountains at Tora Bora . Why, I wonder, would they do that?

Additionally, I've found a new holiday destination for Gary Glitter. Yes sir, Mr Glitter, Iraq has now joined Cuba as a choice terminus for those seeking sex with young boys . The irony is that this is facilitated in part by the homophobic violence condoned by a number of Iraqi religious leaders.

Discontent continues to brew against Bush's occupation of Iraq among Americans.

The occupation of Afghanistan (remember that?) is set to last twenty years .

Blair's snubbing of Cook's funeral is unsurprising in light of this :

Blair arranged Robin Cook’s defeat at Cabinet when Cook wanted to stop the export of British Aerospace Hawk jets to the Suharto regime of Indonesia, which has a strong history of vicious repression of its disparate peoples. I was told by a Cabinet Minister who sided with Cook, that Blair managed Cook’s cabinet defeat in as confrontational and humiliating a manner as possible.

Meanwhile, The Economist takes a long hard look at the Prime Minister's reaction to the London bombings: "Tony Blair this week vowed that his government would yield 'not one inch' to the terrorists. It just has." ( Via ).

Meanwhile, to all of this, Iraqi academics, journalists professionals and religious leaders issue a call for a united resistance to the occupation :

We aspire to a front that is inclusive of all the patriotic, Islamic and Leftist movements, groups, and individuals in their full spectrum; a front that covers the whole of Iraq’s territory: north, centre and south; a front that represents all the strata and components of our people: Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, and minorities, and aims to guarantee their legitimate aspirations.

...

We strive for the unity of our people's patriotic factions, both in content and methods of struggle. Some patriotic forces have resorted to armed struggle, and some others to non-violent and public resistance methods but do, nonetheless, support the armed resistance against the occupation.

Therefore, it should be acknowledged that the two strands of the struggle, the armed and the political, do complement and strengthen each other, and do need each other. An atmosphere of mutual understanding, and coordination between both types of resistance should prevail. At a later stage, we should aim for a single front for liberation, construction and democratization, encompassing all.

We also believe that the unity of our people mandates extending the dialogue to include factions and personalities whose positions have not yet solidified behind the resistance. We need to bring them closer to actively oppose the occupation and to support the armed resistance. ( Via ).

Nice and nasty. posted by lenin

I can't remember who first pointed out that 'characters' like John McCririck, Jimmy Saville and Boris Johnson adopt a veneer of whackiness and loveable hilarity to conceal what are basically nasty, sometimes broodingly sociopathic personalities. But consider this :

We've all got to be as British as Carry On films and scotch eggs and falling over on the beach while trying to change into your swimming trunks with a towel on. We should all feel the same mysterious pang at the sight of the Queen. We do indeed need to inculcate this Britishness, especially into young Muslims, and the problem is how. ( Via )

I can imagine the raffish glow that comes to Boris Johnson's cheek when he thinks up such things. The Telegraph's reader's eye must moisten to think of it: "Britain, eh? Where else could be so strange, snug, funny and wonderful. Gawd save the Queen." Johnson hasn't a chance, of course, since no one is British in the way that he would like them to be. I hate Carry On films, scotch eggs and the beach. I especially hate the fucking Queen.

But what is interesting is just how a deeply corrupt cultural authoritarianism is sugar-coated and sold as quirky cuteness. Wild-haired Boris, umming and aaahing, yawning, dropping a bollock from time to time. Dontcha just love him? Er, no. I forgot to mention - I hate that fucking pillock most of all.

St Oona: Pearly King posted by Meaders

Posted by Meaders at Dead Men Left

Bat's reproduction of the Times' paen over defeated New Labour lickspittle, St Oona of Bethnal Green, reminded me of the days when King herself was leading the parade of lovable cockneys in mourning for the "last Empress":

I speak in this debate to represent the people of the east end who, as the whole country knows, held the Queen Mother in great affection. I shall speak not about what the Queen Mother inherited or passed on, but what the Queen Mother merited. She merited respect, and nowhere is that respect greater than in my constituency—land of the pearly kings and queens who were inspired by the sparkling monarch who picked her way through the rubble...

The century the Queen Mother spanned has closed. She was the last Empress. Although the world in which she was born and in which she moved has vanished, the characteristics with which she is associated endure, and we in the east end give thanks for them.

"She only ever hurt her own kind," you might add, except (of course) the Queen Mother's immense reserves of bile and bigotry are a matter of record.

It ought to be easy to dismiss King, and her achievement-free time in Parliament, as the unpleasant by-product of New Labour's ascent to power: stripped of anything worth fighting for, the last vestiges of radicalism burned away and replaced with a pappy mash of platitudes and warmed-over Thatcherism, to be a foot-soldier for New Labour under the Tories only really presented itself as an attractive option to a particularly desperate sort of careerist. Those with principles and with talent went elsewhere, where the rewards - spiritual or financial - would be immensely greater, leaving behind a mediocre army with little but its clawing ambition to offer. Hence King in Parliament, and a whole grubby crowd of dozy bumsuckers and habitual crawlers bowing and scraping alongside her on the green benches. Her defeat was the blowback from her own foolishness, or incredible arrogance, in supporting the Iraq war.

For New Labour, however, the blow was perhaps greater. This career politician was forced, during the campaign, to do something almost unheard of: to find her principles, and parade them, loudly, for the benefit of the greater good. New Labour demanded the ultimate sacrifice: rather than - as if by magic - discovering some previously unknown doubts about the Iraq war, King oversaw the delivery of thousands of leaflets, repeated the same message in her public appearances, and fought a whole campaign on the premise that the Iraq war was worth fighting on the best possible "progressive" grounds. This was a high risk strategy for New Labour: to remove the possibility of hurriedly looking a bit concerned about dead Iraqis was to fight the electoral battle on the worst possible terrain.

Had the gamble paid off, New Labour would have been some way towards reclaiming the invasion of Iraq for the "left". A rag-tag army of columnists and bloggers have tried the same, but to have bagged Galloway's scalp for the pro-war "left" would have counted rather more than the (increasingly dishonest) rantings of Nick Cohen. To ideologically reclaim the invasion of Iraq would have made the whole sorry mess so much more digestible: Labour could have swallowed the poison, have steadily continued on its smooth course towards the Right, and no major convulsions or crises would threaten themselves over the issue. No doubt New Labour were confident of victory; Alastair Campbell, a few days before the ballot, declared off the record that Labour would win by 700 votes. As usual with Campbell, the more inaccurate his predictions are, the better for the Left. King's defeat has made opposing the new imperialism so much the easier.

Iraqi resistance: freelance freedom fighters. posted by lenin

That headline is both descriptive and an attempt to annoy the right people.

The news, ever since those fourteen Marines copped it in Iraq, has been packed with stories of how the Iraqi resistance is changing its tactics, becoming more deadly etc. Here's the BBC , for instance:

They suggest that the insurgents have developed new ways of penetrating the armour of military vehicles and now appear to have more sophisticated firing mechanisms.

Not much more specific info than that. However, it does go on to say:

And Mr Jaafari said that, in the course of tackling the insurgency, everyone - including detainees - should be treated humanely and according to the law.

Well, how about that ?

Anyway, Blood & Treasure has some terribly good material on the resistance, how it is organised and how it fights. As I have indicated before, the fighters are decentralised, disarticulated and cellular. However, it goes deeper than that. To summarise, they are capable of regrouping or joining other cells in the event that the cell's "leader" is captured; many advertise for freelance work on a per-job basis, often via the internet; resistance cells carefully monitor their targets for about five days, checking how and why American patrols use which routes; they videotape attacks so that they can watch and learn from mistakes etc; they are becoming more technologically sophisticated, using "platter charges" which are, it seems, capable of penetrating the heavy armour on US army vehicles; as the bombs are on their way to target, more parts are collected at various sites along the way, thus making it difficult to find a 'bomb-making factory'.

As Posthegemonic Musings puts it:

The Iraqi resistance is, we learn, characterized by flat management structure, portfolio careers, free agency, continuous improvement, delivery cycles, learning organizations, skill set development, and outsourcing. The very model of a modern multinational.

He goes on with some considerations about whether 'black globalisation' is truly separable from run-of-the-mill 'globalisation', to which the answer is a firm no (although I'm not sure about all that Hardt & Negri stuff). For example, ee Loretta Napoleani's The New Economy of Terror for an account of how terrorist networks, often sponsored by the West, have benefited from the deregulation of international finance.

Anyway, as Bush is floundering in Iraq - which a delicious irony of history has him transforming into an Islamic Republic - various efforts have been made to split Iraqis, since the overwhelming majority of them despise the occupation, with evident reason. One tactic is to demonise the resistance as a Zarqawi-led outfit of psychos. Dahr Jamail despatches the Zarqawi myth here , but for the rest see here . Another is to portray it as a Sunni assault on Shi'ites. Popular Shi'ite leader Moqtada al-Sadr disagrees .

In short, it looks as if the occupation is fucked.

Shoot to kill. posted by lenin

A commenter at Direland draws my attention to some recent essays by Bruce Schneier, here and here .

In addition to the problems with shoot-to-kill (or, to borrow what I hope are tautologies from the Met Police Commissioner, shoot-to-kill-to-protect, or shoot-to-kill-when-necessary) that I mentioned, Schneier notes:

This policy is based on the extremely short-sighted assumption that a terrorist needs to push buttons to make a bomb explode. In fact, ever since World War I, the most common type of bomb carried by a person has been the hand grenade. It is entirely conceivable, especially when a shoot-to-kill policy is known to be in effect, that suicide bombers will use the same kind of dead-man's trigger on their bombs: a detonate that is activated when a button is released, rather than when it is pushed.
This is a difficult one. Whatever policy you choose, the terrorists will adapt to make that policy the wrong one.

He also refers to a couple of reports (PDF files) by the International Association of Chiefs of Police which recommend shoot-to-kill on the basis of the following suspicious behaviour:

[A] person might exhibit "multiple anomalies," including wearing a heavy coat or jacket in warm weather or carrying a briefcase, duffel bag or backpack with protrusions or visible wires. The person might display nervousness, an unwillingness to make eye contact or excessive sweating. There might be chemical burns on the clothing or stains on the hands. The person might mumble prayers or be "pacing back and forth in front of a venue."

I see people acting like in London every day, a good number of them apparently without homes.

Another, perhaps telling point is that if these reports were compiled before Mr Menezes was shot, they provided the Met with their red herring about their 'suspect' wearing an unusually bulky coat.

Letter from London posted by lenin

At Doug Ireland's request, I knocked together a 'Letter from London', which he has kindly posted on his website along with one from an American journalist based in London who prefers to be known as 'Sir Thames'. In the interests of something called "Sartrean transparency", Doug has accompanied the piece with my name and photograph, but I'm afraid anyone wanting my telephone number or address will have to e-mail the Tomb directly.

The letter, in which I turn Alistair Cooke for a couple of thousand words, describes the happenings in London, post-bombings. It is copiously illustrated with the assistance of Google images. Read it here... .

The CIA's unofficial guide to stopping suicide terror. posted by lenin

Robert Baer, an ex-CIA agent whose arguments have been discussed by K-punk before, has a guide for the perplexed today. First of all, stop obsessing over Ayman al-Zawahiri's finger-wagging - this is entirely homegrown:

The youngest 7 July suicide bomber, Hasib Hussain, was just 18 when he blew himself up on the Number 30 bus in Tavistock Square. At 18, Hussain was simply too young to have been indoctrinated in some Al-Qaeda camp in the wilds of Afghanistan or to have met bin Laden - who went on the run in November 2001 as US forces invaded.

The fourth July 7 bomber Germaine Lindsay, again just 19, was not even born Muslim. His family were Jamaican Christians who converted to Islam when he was in his teens.

How long will it be before we see the first white Muslim convert suicide bomber?

Chillingly, both Hussain and Lindsay, British citizens, were indoctrinated into becoming suicide bombers on British soil undoubtedly by another British citizen. Perhaps the oldest bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan. Again, I am not surprised.

You are fighting an enemy within. An enemy that can spring up like a virus from nowhere without reference to any far-flung leader or foreign terrorist organisation.

Next, don't think you can stop the problem by targeting Muslims:

The worst possible mistake the British authorities could make is the one they are making right now; targeting and stopping and searching young Muslim-looking males catching trains or tubes. It is stupid and counterproductive.

Such blanket searches are supposed to intimidate the bombers. But how can you intimidate someone who wants to die?

Finally, drop the idea that you're going to waste a bunch of suicide bombers as they're about to detonate themselves:

As Peri Golan, a major-general in Israel's feared Shin Bet intelligence, told me: 'By the time the suicider has his belt on and is approaching the target, it is already a terrible failure. I have smelt the bodies, the burnt bodies after an attack and it is an awful feeling because I know I have failed.'

To stop suicide bombers you have to intercept them in the planning stage.

There's a bunch of other stuff in there that reeks of mythology - suicide bombing is now a "cult" rather than a tactic of war etc. But this is a former CIA agent after all, and that organisation is known for creating received opinion rather than challenging it...

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

If your favourite stop at the funfair as a child was hurling wet sponges at a clown in stockades, Nick Cohen's column this morning is for you. It's a hoot, it's a giggle, it's more fun than you ever deserved to have at someone else's expense. In an attempt to defend himself against charges of apostasy, he decides to highlight some contradictions of the Left:

I'm sure that any halfway competent political philosopher could rip the assumptions of modern middle-class left-wingery apart. Why is it right to support a free market in sexual relationships but oppose free-market economics, for instance?

Go ahead and check the link: I'm not making it up, and I haven't taken it out of context. Nick Cohen cannot tell the difference between the state telling you what must never happen in your bed, and the state regulating industry. Anyway, to support for imperialism, an increasingly uncritical attitude to New Labour, and support for grammar schools, we can now add addled arguments for the free market to the list of items characterising Cohen's rightward lurch.

The rest of the article consists of the usual accusations of crimes and complicities on the Left, the ritual denunciation of "postmodernism", and the compulsive and caricaturistic understanding of "Islamism" as a "fascistic cult of murder and self-murder". Every word of it - every single word - has been taken apart so many times that it would be a dreadful bore and a waste of time to go through it all again. It is time to simply diagnose the illness and move on: Cohen is becoming Colonel Blimp. Cheeks empurpled, spit launching in all directions, eyes afire with outraged vanity, the Colonel will have none of your treachery. Gad, sir, he won't.


Colonel Blimp and pet.

Robin Cook posted by bat020

Just a few thoughts in reaction to the sad news of Robin Cook's sudden and untimely death, in lieu of a proper political obituary which I am sure will be forthcoming from mine host.

Cook was one of the very few Labour politicians to command any kind of popular respect among the wider public. The primary reason for this, of course, was his resignation in March 2003 from Tony Blair's cabinet over the decision to invade Iraq.

Whatever the actual reasons behind his falling out with New Labour, Cook's actions – above all, his resignation speech – symbolised the possibility that a politician could put principle over careerism and truth over spin. In a parliament dominated by cretins and creeps, this was no mean achievement.

Over the next few days there will no doubt be a torrent of hypocritical tributes from Cook's erstwhile colleagues praising his integrity, intellect etc. His serious political weaknesses – the humiliation of his "ethical foreign policy", his support for bombing of Belgrade, his support for the invasion of Afghanistan – will be glossed over.

But his record notwithstanding, for most people Cook was "one of the good guys" (as a friend of mine put it), someone who stood for a different vision of Labour party, one that didn't invade foreign countries and lie to its own people. That vision was always a mirage, but Cook's passing also marks the passing of that mirage.

On that note, one final point. Cook's untimely death leaves a gaping hole in the Labour party. He was the only anti-war Labour MP of sufficient stature to make a credible bid for the leadership. Now that he's gone, there is no way that Labour can "draw a line under Iraq" after Blair's departure. The party is now wedded to its war – and the political ramifications of that brute fact will be Cook's real legacy.

The martyrdom of St Oona posted by bat020

[service announcement: the Tomb now has a resident bat]

This particular fly is worth preserving in amber before it disappears into the Times's subscription-only archives. Read it and weep/laugh/puke:

The Times, July 26, 2005

King: may be offered peerage

Oona King, the Labour rose who wilted under the onslaught of George Galloway at the election, may be returning to Parliament sooner than anticipated.

King’s loss to the Respect founder in one of the bloodiest election battles was mourned by leading Labour ministers such as Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary. Now she may be offered a peerage to soften the blow.

It is an option being canvassed at Labour’s headquarters in Old Queen Street and at Downing Street. King, a Labour loyalist, lost her seat because of her support for the war in Iraq.

While King has pledged to fight the constituency, a peerage, with the promise of a ministerial post, would be a convenient way to liberate herself from her commitment.

After the election King carried on as an unpaid social worker on her constituency casebook. But local Labour activists are convinced that Galloway, whose The Mother of all One-Man Shows will go to Edinburgh next month, will quit within a couple of years and trigger a by-election.

A friend of King, who is on holiday, said: “Some constituents used to call her their guardian angel. When she is back from holiday she will have to decide whether to carry on or go to the Lords.”

Wilted Rose. Unpaid Social Worker. Guardian Angel. Lady King. Oh. My. God.

Respect opposes Blair's attack on civil liberties. posted by lenin

Respect statement on Blair's outrageous new laws announced today:

Terrorist organisations can kill and maim but they cannot alter our laws or deny us our civil liberties, only our own government can do that.Tony Blair says that he is concerned to 'defend our way of life' but his new raft of police powers takes away more practical freedom than any terrorist organisation has yet managed.

Tony Blair's new security laws, which will require the suspension of provisions in the Human Rights Act, will strike at our freedoms without bringing an end to terrorism.

Taking powers to close places of worship, extending powers of deportation, proscribing bookshops, making it an offence to 'justify' terrorism and banning organisations will not make us safer but it will make us all less free.

The government has tried to ignore the deeper causes of terrorism and is therefore trying to excuse its foriegn policy by demonising the Muslim community and severly restricting the civil liberties of all the people of Britain.

"How will these powers be used? Will Liberal MP Jenny Tongue or indeed Cherie Blair fall foul of the new laws if they repeat their view that they 'understand' why people become suicide bombers in Palestine? Will police now vet the remarks of Imams in their mosques? Will the police seize books in Islamic bookshops?", said Respect MP George Galloway.

Respect opposes the banning of the Hizb ut Tahrir organisation, despite the fact that Respect profoundly disagrees with this organisations politics. Indeed Respect has been verbally attacked in the most provocative terms by Hizb ut Tahrir but such measures will only drive Muslims into the ghetto where extreme politics breads.

One innocent man has already paid with his life for 'increased police powers'. If this policy is allowed to stand more injustice will be visited on us all.

"British values" and the Left posted by Meaders

(a cross-posting from Dead Men Left, somewhat updated)

Lenin comments here on Kilroy Davies' thuggish remarks about "British values":

Will I ever learn what "Britishness" and "British values" are? Will someone please illuminate me? And what exactly are "the values of the suicide bomber"? And what will dispensing with multiculturalism mean in the concrete, aside from demanding that Muslims interrogate themselves and "integrate" (translation: do as they're told), and scrapping the Human Rights Act?

Behind appeals to "British values" is a expansively mythologised version of English - not British, but English - culture: Orwell's notorious warm beer and little old ladies, gummed together with platitudes about "tolerance", "fair play" and "stoicism". Even relative to other national mythologies, it is peculiarly foolish. It says nothing at all about any England that actually now exists; it says extraodinarily little about any that once did; but it owes its existence to the exceptional modernity of English society.

There is little, or no, long-standing popular tradition in England: the English peasantry, that great repository of folk ritual and collective customs, was torn off the land decades - if not whole centuries - before its counterparts throughout Europe. An unusually successful and aggressive class of agrarian capitalists broke apart both the institutions of the "moral economy", and the cultural practices it sustained.

By the close of this process, some two hundred years or more after it began in the sixteenth century, such folk-rituals as had survived were wretched shadows of their former selves. Some were maintained around collective institutions like the local pub, or the local church; some - those more unsettling to the established order of things - were driven underground, reappearing in the mummeries and rituals of the early trade unions and friendly societies. Most withered and died, victims of an increasingly privatised culture of consumption.

The reconstruction of an "English" culture only began to take place in the later nineteenth century. David Cannadine noted how the monarchy was brought from a reviled and penny-pinching insitution in the 1810s, to the heights of imperial grandeur under Queen Victoria. The process was contested; Royden Harrison, in Before the Socialists, gives some indication of widely-held republican views in the 1870s, and the popularity of the republican movement under its charismatic leader, Charles Bradlaugh. The identifiably proletarian cultural institutions began to coalesce in the same period: with rising real wages and a decades-long slide in food prices, the space in which a cheap, accesible popular culture could flourish was reopened.

The traditional proletarian cultural environment, dissected most astutely by Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy grew not as the autochthonous expression of long-repressed radical urges, but as the slender flowers sprouting from recently-planted seeds: bright, gaudy, but lacking substantial roots. Summarised in Hobsbawm's depiction of the ubiquitous cloth-cap - uniformly visible in photographs of working-class crowds from the early 1900s to some way beyond the Second World War - this new culture combined a vehement contempt for bourgeois norms, with a pronounced deference towards them.

Perry Anderson's brilliant 1965 essay, "The Origins of the Present Crisis", developed this peculiar, contradictory combination into an historical theory to account for the dominance of Labourism: a relatively settled bourgeoisie produced a "supine, subordinate proletariat", myopically unable to see beyond its own parochial concerns: whether the inveterate economism of the British trade union movement, or the pronounced resistance to new cultural forms, Anderson holds that the British working class was perhaps uniquely, obstinately attached to a Victorian condition of life.

It is peculiar, perhaps, that as committed a Marxist as Anderson then was should attach such autonomy to the specifically cultural aspects of Britain’s malady. The theme is adopted in Martin Wiener’s thorough survey of "English ambivalence towards industry", English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980. It is noticeable that both models implicitly presume a whole series of half-counterfactuals, half-prescriptions: in Wiener’s case, the new English industrial elite should have adopted the "Northern metaphor" when thinking of England ("Pragmatic, empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific, serious, and [believing] in struggle."); should have espied its dark, Satanic mills and declared in proudly flattened Manchester vowels that where there was muck, there was brass. Instead, it sent its sons to the archaic public schools (a particular villain in Wiener’s drama), its daughters to the altar beside foppish aristocrats, and contented itself with a dream of green and pleasant lands; the "Southern metaphor" triumphant: "romantic, illogical, muddled, divinely lucky, Anglican, aristocratic, traditional, frivolous and [believing] in order and tradition."

It is the modernity of both that stands out: a fug of half-remembered, supposed "traditions" hides the truth of a radically (and uncomfortably) modern society of atomised individuals. Latter-day appeals to "British [sic] values" have this same double-sided quality: confronted with a Britain that looks dramatically unlike its own grand myth, an imaginary description of England turns rapidly into an agressive prescription: if we find our little old ladies, not cycling to communion, but attending mosque, we should close the mosques. The redundancy of appeals to "British values" are what gives them their bite. There is little to be gained, for the Left, in an argument over "English culture": we will be fighting with a will o' the wisp, a formless spectre still able to cause much harm.

Yet for too long, the Left has conspired to prioritise "cultural" questions far, far above the economic, with the absurd result that a supposed "anti-capitalist" like Paul Kingsnorth complained, in the New Statesman last year, of GAP's "American" advertising, ahead of its actual exploitation of its sweated workforce; or, in a similar vein, that prominent liberals could claim cluster bombs would bring liberation, ignoring the US military's role in the economic structures of imperialism.

"Culture" here dominates to the extent that a bloody reality is simply wished out of existence. A critical part of rebuilding the Left internationally is the construction of credible economic alternatives to neoliberalism; part of that effort is the reclamation of economic questions from the grip of the cultural. It is completely debilitating to do otherwise. Tom Dispatch has provided a useful summary of Thomas Frank’s essential What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.. Frank sees the loss of once-progressive Kansas to the Republicans as a synecdoche for the collapse of the left’s working-class base across the whole country:

Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Wichita and Shawnee, Kansas with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues… Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. [emphasis added]

This is, indeed, "criminally stupid". For the British Left, a similar stupidity would be for an allegedly "progressive" government to be seriously talking about loyalty tests, or reinforcing "Britishness", whilst making quiet mewling noises about "tolerance": New Labour does not want to ask hard, economic questions of itself, beyond a few easy soundbites about the New Deal and the housing market, and so it is left with a platitudinous authoritarianism. Decoupling the cultural from the economic allows the Right to seize the political reins; David Davis and his bootboys, like Bob Spink and Gerald Howarth, have already grasped the opportunity. The real Left, whilst defending the idea and the principle of "multiculturalism" from the Right, needs to move beyond liberal quietism, to asking those hard, economic questions: about discrimination, about poverty, about exploitation, about – above all – class. To do so is to win back the idea of a society that has been immensely enriched by immigration, and to tie support for it to onto the firm base of class interests.

Speaking in code posted by Meaders

David Davis:

Britain has pursued a policy of multiculturalism - allowing people of different cultures to settle without expecting them to integrate into society. Often the authorities have seemed more concerned with encouraging distinctive identities than with promoting common values of nationhood.

More succinctly,

What bit of 'send them back' don't you understand Mr Blair?

Zelig/Blair. posted by lenin

Just fancy this:

Tony Blair wants to cage suspects for up to 90 days without trial. Good. (The Sun Says, July 27th 2005)

Mr Blair is rightly resisting police calls to hold terrorist suspects for up to three months instead of 14 days. (Independent editorial, July 27th 2005)

This is how two tabloids, one liberal and one reactionary, are united in their support for New Labour: each coy prey of the spin doctor is loved up differently.

Tolerance. posted by lenin

You could time them with a retirement clock: the Tories' drearily predictable attempt to fire up the grass roots membership (or at least, the few who will make it through the winter without popping their clogs) with some stern language about Britishness and sending "them" "back", has been quickly met by a nicer version of bigotry from Jack Straw .

All of which leads me to the conclusion that Muslims and gays of the world must unite. Non-sequitur? Bear with me. I've already staked my territory on "multiculturalism" . Here's a word or two about "tolerance" from a gay fantasia that may just as well have been written by and for Muslims today.

"That's just liberalism, the worst kind of liberalism, really, bourgeois tolerance. And what I think is that what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it's not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is worth. Nothing. And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred." (Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Part One).

"British way of life" posted by lenin

The Tories may finally manage to punch their way out of that paper bag. Shadow Home Secretary, and contender for leadership of the Conservative Party, David Davis has announced that multiculturalism is over, an "outdated" idea. It is time to return to, what - monoculturalism? No, to Britishness. It is time for Britons to "assert a core of Britishness":

"Searching questions now have to be asked about what has been happening inside Britain's Muslim communities and how the perverted values of the suicide bomber have been allowed to take root.

"Britain has pursued a policy of multiculturalism - allowing people of different cultures to settle without expecting them to integrate into society.

"Often the authorities have seemed more concerned with encouraging distinctive identities than with promoting common cultural values of nationhood."

Will I ever learn what "Britishness" and "British values" are? Will someone please illuminate me? And what exactly are "the values of the suicide bomber"? And what will dispensing with multiculturalism mean in the concrete, aside from demanding that Muslims interrogate themselves and "integrate" (translation: do as they're told), and scrapping the Human Rights Act?

Gerald Howarth MP offered a partial clue yesterday when he expostulated that those Muslims who saw the Iraq war as a conflict against Islam were just as treacherous as those who supported the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they should "get out" . And of those who were born here?

"Tough. If you don't give allegiance to this country, then leave.
"There are plenty of other countries whose way of life would appear to be more conducive to what they aspire to. They would be happy and we would be happy."

This xenophobic outburst comes as the police report a 566% increase in attacks on London Muslims - this in a period in which other kinds of racist attacks fell. There have been arson attacks on mosques, racist killings , threats and violence. Howarth, in dabbling with this hateful language, is not merely exhibiting cold indifference to the fate of Muslims: in preparing the excuse of every racist thug in the country, he is building a political base on blood.

In a perverse way, he may get his wish. The Guardian reports that two-thirds of British Muslims have considered leaving the UK - not because they condone suicide attacks (the overwhelming majority do not) but because they are sick of bigots like Mr Howarth, and the canine brethren who take comfort in his words.

Punk, wood adhesive, capitalism posted by Meaders

Ed at International Rooksbyism flags up Ben Watson's piece on "post-punk" in Radical Philosophy.

...Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up has been flying off the shelves. With 126 fresh interviews with the protagonists, pictures researched by Jon Savage, and 550 dense pages written by a blogger ‘too young’ to have witnessed the Pistols, it promises to register what things felt like for the groundlings – those excluded from the scene-setting events in London, ‘too late’ but fully participating in punk as a mass phenomenon nonetheless. Those who cite 1976–77 as the ‘real’ moment of punk are those for whom it was a springboard to TV celebrity. Genuine punks – ‘losers’ from the spectacular point of view – actually lived punk between 1978 and 1984.

Jon Savage's own, excellent England's Dreaming: the Sex Pistols and Punk Rock does touch, in its closing chapters, on the localism and DIY attitude punk fostered: closet punks in faraway lands like Northampton clipping together fanzines; their braver comrades in Grimsby, hair spiked with PVA glue, braving the NF. But being focused on the Pistols, and taking the pro-McLaren line also pushed by Julian Temple's The Filth and the Fury,[*] Savage left these sadly misplaced and belated punks as a footnote to the main event. That they are being rescued from the enormous condescension of posterity is to be lauded; culturally, the history of punk cannot be understood without looking at the scatterings from its wildly freewheeling, centrifugal force.

Considered as a business history, however, what punk shows us is the enormous rapidity with which even allegedly oppositional, allegedly subversive moments in pop music are swallowed and ingested whole by the industry: far from breaking the corporate hold upon pop music, punk was a crucial factor in strengthening its domination: even the sharpest of safety-pins could be safely ingested; even the most confrontational of postures could contribute to the bottom line. Punk, once safely accomodated, paved the way for the staggering concentration of capital needed to reproduce, globally, endless Coldplay singles, and the domination of pop music by four or five giant firms.

The technological breakthrough of the music video, and behind it, MTV, combined with the extremely tight interrelationships between mass media, the PR people, and the music labels turned "authenticity" into a reliable, and conventional product. (Of course, the McLarenesque/Situationist reading of punk would claim this was all part of the original "scam": Cash From Chaos, The Great Rock And Roll Swindle. Those more directly involved would beg to differ.)

Watson's review points up some of this, and touches on some the less digestible elements of the punk mix: specifically, the political battles fought on this cultural terrain: the National Front versus Rock Against Racism; and the irreducibility of the live performance. To grasp both is to break out of a weak and watery post-modernism that now passes for cultural studies:

Convinced that there is nothing relevant outside the text of the recorded product, Reynolds cannot explain the forces acting on the records he examines. In fact, he cannot interpret the records at all, and – paradoxically for someone who rarely acknowledges quirky, unofficial responses – emerges with something as arbitrary and subjective as ‘taste’. This is because he remains obedient to the priorities and perspectives of the capitalist pop industry, allowing the commodity to dictate what constitutes musical culture.

[*] John Lydon/Johnny Rotten's typically self-aggrandaising response is provided by his autobiography, Rotten: no blacks, no dogs, no Irish, which devotes an immense amount of time to McLaren's many "crimes" and misdemeanours.

Are Your Proofs Of Identity Shabby? posted by BionOc

(cross-post from Bionic Octopus)

The British Home Office minister in charge of the ID cards boondoggle has come out and snuffled that the government hasn't exactly put its best foot forward in selling the concept to the public (though contrary to the headline's implication, he insists the plan will still go forward):

Perhaps we ran away with it in our enthusiasm. I apologise for our overselling the case for ID cards ...

We have been arguing what the state can get out of it rather than what it can do for the individual in providing a gold standard in proving your identity. There are now so many almost daily occasions when we have to stand up and verify our identity.

And really, on how many of those occasions do we find that we just can't verify it to our exacting standards? The answer is clearly the National Identity Gold™ Card: Non-Membership Has Its Penalties.

In and Out in London & Washington. posted by lenin

The crucial question: will the guys now raping Baghdad withdraw or keep jabbing away like a priapic Woody Woodpecker?

According to Juan Cole , Jack Straw’s recent half-hearted admission that UK troops are “part of the problem” in Iraq is a signal that a belated and bloodied withdrawal is imminent. News reports repeatedly back up this theme. For instance, > this AP report , repeated in the Marine Corp Times , suggests that preparations are well underway. It suggests that, while this strategy relies on the insurgency not getting any worse, for Rumsfeld it does not appear to depend on a defeat for the insurgency. (In fact, the article surreptitiously berates the Bush team for being too eager to depart when “the Iraqis” may not yet be ready).

In an increasingly familiar vein, USA Today reports the deaths of 14 Marines this week (nudging total coalition fatalities up to 2000), as yet more evidence that the Iraqi resistance is becoming deadlier and more professional by the day:

Iraqi insurgents using increasingly sophisticated tactics struck a blow to the American heartland Wednesday, killing 14 U.S. Marines in a roadside bombing. It was one of the single deadliest attacks of the war.

...

President Bush called the deaths of the 14 Marines a "grim reminder" that America is at war.
"These terrorists and insurgents will use brutal tactics because they're trying to shake the will of the United States of America," he said in Grapevine, Texas.
The back-to-back attacks make this one of the costliest three-day periods of the war for U.S. forces and came in an area of western Iraq that has become a crossroads between Baghdad and fighters coming across the Syrian border.

...

Military analysts say the deaths this week speak to the mounting tactical skill of the insurgency. Marginal or less committed insurgents have either been killed by U.S.-led forces or have abandoned the cause, says Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Those who remain are battle-honed veterans. "The hard-core insurgents who remain have essentially been at an Iraqi version of our National Training Center since 2003," Krepinevich says.

And yet, for all that, it looks essentially as though it’s going to pan out exactly as I anticipated , for the New York Times reports that plans are under way to “keep large numbers of support troops and supplies in Iraq or in nearby countries, ready to assist Iraqi units fighting insurgents” with the pretext that the Iraqi Ministry of Defence “is riddled with crippling problems that have raised concerns about its ability to keep Iraqi units paid, fed and equipped once it assumes full responsibility for the army”.

Norman Solomon suggested the other day that all the talk of withdrawal on Bush’s part was a sop to public opinion in the run up to an election. I daresay Straw’s words were similarly intended, particularly after his bruising experience at the hands of the “egregious” MPAC. But it is significant in and of itself that both the US & UK governments feel obliged to make some concession to the growing crises at home. I say Blair has never looked weaker, and is desperate to make some gesture to the antiwar voters without losing any more face. Bush’s poll ratings are plummeting, and American support for the war is skydiving. So, we are assured, the boys and girls are coming back home. It’s crucial to strike now, I’d suggest. The StWC’s immediate reaction to the murder of Mr Menezes showed it is aware of just how much of a crisis the government is in. The next national demonstration against the occupation is on September 24th.

"Frankly unforgiveable rhetoric" posted by lenin

George Galloway has irked the pro-war Left again - which is frankly all too predictable and all too tedious and hardly ever worth discussing. One can't be forever giggling at the antics of those sliding into a second childhood. What is quite odd, however, is that the antiwar Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber, known to Blogger comments as "dsquared", has decided to make an absolute pratt of himself . Never exactly a fan of Galloway, he has appreciated the fun-filled carnival that the old rassler brings to town. No more.

The trouble, it seems, arises from the following comments Galloway made on Syrian television:

Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it.

Dsquared does a backflip (moonsault?):

[M]y reaction was that this is on the absolute cusp of being the sort of thing that a decent, liberal society ought to be chucking people in jail for.

Not 'might' or 'would' - 'ought to'. It is astonishing to then add, as a reasonable (if uncharitable) judgement on Galloway's comments:

[L]ike Enoch Powell with his River Tiber, he knows exactly what he’s fucking doing and doesn’t care.

And then:

If this was said in the UK, I would guess it would be exactly the sort of thing that would be captured by the incitement to hatred laws (either racial or religious depending on whether he’s going on about Islam or specifically Arabs).

Irony seems forever lost on this flyweight jobber. Feigning outrage at the heelish antics of his opponent, miming agony at the rhetorical jabs, histrionically reeling and spitting, he gets his tights in such a twist! Afire with babyface moralism, he declares that Powell targetting spleen at the exploited and oppressed immigrants that he actually encouraged to come to Britain is on the same moral level as targetting it at the warmongers who have siezed Iraq, and the occupiers of Gaza and the West Bank. The US and Israel are just like Muslims and Arabs, poor things.

Far be it from me to play day care assistant. I am not in the habit of apprising the helpless and clueless of the basically obvious. But a few things need pointing out. Galloway is not targeting "the foreigner" as an ethnic, religious or racial group. He is attacking imperialism. The other thing is, whether or not you think Galloway's rhetoric is overblown, what counts in such matters is whether they are designed as strategies of oppression. Powell was attempting to mobilise racists and the far right against people who had been robbed and oppressed by colonialism for centuries, and who were then being exploited and oppressed as a pool of surplus labour in the colonialist mother country. Galloway is attempting to mobilise the Middle East against people who are murdering them.

Anyone dumb enough to venture such a comparison is therefore beyond the pale, intellectually and morally - an embarrassment, even, to the antiwar movement, which dsquared occasionally links himself to. And anyone who starts to extemporise on "unforgivable rhetoric" and then utters a series of fatuities that would mantle Melanie Phillips' cheek with a blush of shame, may as well immediately lie flat on the mat and await the three count.

Announcement. posted by lenin

Ladies and gentlemen, the Lenin Show is expanding: I'm delighted to announce that some new writers are joining Lenin's Tomb™. A number of very talented individuals have already agreed to contribute, and others are pending (I'll resort to blackmail if necessary).

So, if you don't see my cognomen at the bottom of the post, you'll know why.

Pop Life: It's Gr8! posted by lenin

A while ago, I mentioned that the Telegraph's pop critic had decided to release a single called "People I Don't Know Are Trying to Kill Me". Private Eye brings the latest news from this epic pop journey:

Across the land on Sunday night, Daily Telegraph readers were hunched
over their trannies, hoping for news of the chart position of People I
Don't Know Are Trying To Kill Me, the eloquent reaction to the London
bombings which also happens to be the debut single by the paper's pop
critic Neil McCormick.

Would it be number one? Top ten? Top 40? Would it even scrape the top
150? Sadly, no. After nearly a full week on sale, and despite no fewer
than three lengthy pieces in the Telegraph plugging his opus (one
pointing out that "in the terrible void left by the bombing, people
were eager in some way to respond), the download-only track had sold a
grand total of... eight copies.

Never mind. As Prince explains in 'Pop Life', "Everybody can't be on top". Quite. But my brother's pub-touring heavy metal band has sold more than eight fucking singles. Pack it in, mate.

Unite Against Timber. posted by lenin

There was I thinking that Crooked Timber was so much dead wood, and it goes and produces something like this :

Just a few weeks after collecting signatures, signatories [to the Unite Against Terror declaration] might be interested to know that your name is apparently to be used for a campaign against the BBC for apparently not “framing” the debate in a suitably congenial way.

The question of whether the BBC was right or wrong on this issue is irrelevant here. I didn’t watch the BBC tonight so I can’t say whether they were or they weren’t. The facts are though, that this was ostensibly the “Unite Against Terror” petition, not “Unite Against People Who We Consider To Be Insufficiently Cooperative In The War On Terror”. Anyone who has no particular views about BBC bias, but who out of goodwill and solidarity signed up to a nonspecific statement of opposition to terrorism in the belief that the people behind UAT ... had too many scruples to start using them for an entirely unrelated political agenda, has the right to be bloody angry at this little shenanigan. I for one am glad I didn’t.

Postscript: Bat reminds me of a call to witch-hunt reminiscent of those from the midnight of last century. His words appear to have got through to the police who now consider antiwar material subversive. They're right. Bianca Jagger should be thrown in the hoosegow and made to swallow the key.

Stalinism v Nazism posted by lenin

In lieu of a proper post*, and in deference to an extraordinary hangover that knows no respect for my suffering body, here's a quick musing for you. Last night at a pub, I was finally apprised of the fundamental ethical difference between Stalinism and Nazism: there is no Stalinist porn , whereas ...

Never mind all that stuff from Primo Levi about how the former represents the tragic outcome of a great project gone wrong, whereas the latter represents the catastrophic fulfilment of a project that went altogether too right. The swastika, as used by the Nazis, was a sexual symbol, a symbol of domination, whereas the hammer and sickle was high camp under Stalinism, a kitschy mockery of socialism's liberatory impulse, its workerism and so on. Try and imagine it: a pair of Stakhanovite workers gently stirring to action with the words "Long live the glorious Five Year Plan!" It's just not happening.


*There's no such thing, of course, as a "proper post". Blogging is supposed to be errant, gamesome, frivolous etc. But this is just taking the piss.

Niger: starved by neoliberal dogma. posted by lenin

The BBC this morning once more wears its tear-ducts firmly on its sleeve. Niger is desperate, starving, in need. What is more, these are the deserving poor - this is not a crisis brought on by government corruption or war. It is simply a result of a terrible crop failure and a blast of locusts. And yet, not one of the millions facing starvation in Niger need be in that position. This isn't just because of the usual reasons( we spend enough on arms globally to end poverty in Africa for good, many times over, aid is a low priority for Western states etc). There has been a harvest failure. There have been locusts. But some of the locusts walked on two legs.

As early as April this year, there were protests in Niger against the government's decision to increase tax to 19% on staple goods such as milk and flour, which forced the government to reduce them slightly. The food that is available now is too costly. Medicin Sans Frontieres explain :

Johanne Sekkenes, the mission head of MSF which is mounting the biggest emergency exercise in its history in Niger, says the current emergency could have been avoided. 'This is not a famine, in the Somalian way,' she said. 'The harvest was bad in 2004 and the millet granaries are empty. Yet there is food on the markets. The trouble is that the price of the food is beyond anyone's reach.

'Given this situation, it was criminal of the UN this year to tackle the emergency in a gingerly way, putting 'moderately priced' cereals on the market. The UN should have immediately organised free food distribution.'

Ms Sekkenes said the International Monetary Fund and the European Union had pressed Niger too hard to implement a structural adjustment programme. 'No sooner had the government been re-elected [this year] than it was obliged to introduce 19 per cent VAT on basic foodstuffs. At the same time, as part of the policy, emergency grain reserves were abolished.'

Further:

Some aid specialists blamed the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Their economic programmes have contributed to sharp rises in the prices of staples such as sorghum and millet. Others said the Niamey government had downplayed the emergency to protect local food traders who are resistant to free aid because it undermines markets.

Or, as The Guardian wrote yesterday, "Plenty of food, yet the poor are starving":

The starvation in Niger is not the inevitable consequence of poverty, or simply the fault of locusts or drought. It is also the result of a belief that the free market can solve the problems of one of the world's poorest countries.

The price of grain has skyrocketed; a 100kg bag of millet, the staple grain, costs around 8,000 to 12,000 West African francs (around ?13) last year but now costs more than 22,000 francs (?25). According to Washington-based analysts the Famine Early Warning System Network (Fewsnet), drought and pests have only had a "modest impact" on grain production in Niger.

So the main causes of the famine in this case are not natural but man-made. The reason for the tax rise, says the Niger government, was that it helped meet the conditions an IMF-imposed 'reform' programme. The President was re-elected in December 2004, and the recently appointed Finance minister committed himself immediately to enforcing the IMF's structural adjustment programme, warning the unions and social movements of the necessary "sacrifices" ahead. Similarly, the G8 'debt relief' programme for Highly Indebted Poor Countries also stipulates that recipients must remove subsidies for food, reduce subsidies for food production and increase the intake of tax, all as part of a programme for 'free market reform'. Until recently 44% of the government's revenue went to repaying debt, and the tax raises were anticipated to account for a $14 million increase in government revenue.

Everyone from ABC News to the New York Times is describing how the Niger government is blameless in this crisis, how it raised the alarm back in November, and how the "international community" has simply failed to respond. Aid, they cry, and much more of it. The humanitarian in every neoliberal demands no less. One assumes that this is because they can't see that Niger's government did anything wrong in fulfilling IMF and G8 stipulations. But it is wrong to imagine that Western aid is anything but a useful plug for a gap which it has helped create. UK aid policy has, as Mark Curtis points out , the crucial function of opening up markets for British business. Eventually, the root causes - dear me, yes - of these endemic crises must be dealt with. And part of that task will be answered when Western narcissism and its attendant discourse of philanthropy is finally dispensed with, and a consensus emerges that our governments and banks owe Africa a debt, not the other way round: a debt which they are by no means close to discharging. This is about justice, not charity.

Almost everything they said was a lie. posted by lenin

I've just found this via Shot By Both Sides :

The Independent Police Complaints Commission is studying CCTV footage that caught de Menezes’s last moments. What is already clear is that the initial accounts of his death on July 22 were wrong.

...

He was not wearing what witnesses called a “black bomber jacket”, but a denim jacket. It was about 17C and his clothing would not have been out of the ordinary.

He did not vault a ticket barrier, as claimed. He used a travelcard to pass through the station in the normal way. His family believes that he may have started to run simply because he heard the train pulling in — something Londoners do every day. Indeed, a train was at the platform when he got there.

So, let me get this straight. Several witnesses say he received no warning - about the one thing there is any unanimity among the witnesses about. He did not jump the ticket gates. He was not wearing a big bulky coat, nor was there anything about his person that could be construed as a 'bomb belt'.

The story also notes, as many people here suspected, that when the shooting first happened "a senior police source told reporters, off the record, that they had killed one of the would-be suicide bombers who was on the run after the failed July 21 bombings". In other words, from the very beginning there has been a farrago of lies, from the assertion that a bomber had been shot when all they knew about him was that he emerged from a block of flats they were watching, through the claims that he had been followed from Stockwell and not Tulse Hill, to the entire tale about how he tried to buy a tube ticket, was challenged, and ended up vaulting over the ticket gates and dashing down the stairs in a big bulky 'bomber jacket'. (Anyone who has passed through a tube ticket gate knows that it would take extraordinary athleticism to vault over them, and you would need a good run up, which the distance from the ticket window to the gates doesn't provide in Stockwell Station.)

Incidentally, Justin Horton has written an excellent letter to the Evening Standard about their disgraceful billboard posters. I doubt they'll reply, but it sums up something rather important about that fetid rag that 'chirpy' fat blokes feel compelled to yell about from their little stalls outside the tube stations.

"British values". posted by lenin

I've had a tough time figuring out what "British values" are, and it looks like most commentators are finding the same task equally difficult. One solution is to define it negatively. For instance, according to Henry Porter in yesterday's Observer, wearing a hijab, supporting Palestine and hanging out with your homies is anti-British .

Porter's gripes include an opinion poll published in the Telegraph which suggests that among Muslims, about 6% thought the terrorist attacks were justified, and 56% could understand why such people carried out such acts whether or not they sympathised with them. He detects a growing "voluntary segregation" among Muslims, who have a "proud disdain" for Western civilisation. He worries about 31% of British Muslims who assented to the position that Western democracy is immoral and decadent.

I fail to see what the problem is. So, a tiny minority of Muslims are pissed off enough that they'll support such a venture? Pfft. It's like acne - they'll get over it. Anyone with half a brain can 'understand' why such attacks take place. MI5 can understand it, and they aren't the brightest fellows in the world. And Western democracy is immoral and decadent, which is one reason why many people think that. Our governing class is psychotically violent overseas and ridiculously authoritarian and mean-spirited at home. The ruling class is obnoxiously greedy, despoiling our planet and exploiting the people on it with a few bare restraints provided by popular pressure over the last century. Far better to have a socialist revolution and get it over with.

If in the meantime, I choose to strap myself into a burqa, scare pedestrians with sudden loud pseudo-Koranic imprecations, support the Palestinians and Iraqi resistance, and reject Western capitalism, what is Mr Porter going to do about it? Tell his slipper-wearing Observer colleagues about me? Denounce me from the parish pulpit? Oooh, I'm so scared.