Marie Colvin was a self-confessed risk-taker. Such people are often difficult to be around, totally dogmatic about their own views and ready to erase others in their path.
But as with Steve Jobs in his field, she did have an unremitting dedication to excellence,so that the risk-taking was never applied to what she wrote (Johann Hari and Jayson Blair being examples of morally despicable journalistic risk-taking.) On the contrary, she learned to mould and channel it into delivering news from beyond the edge of possible, and that’s an awesome achievement.
I’m glad to see that all the mainstream news sources are giving her the headline tribute she deserves, and that Cameron & Miliband stopped the Punch n Judy show to pay tribute to her. It’s of course awful to think of all those lives being wilfully crushed and snuffed out just to keep that murderous dictator, his goons and cronies and his couture-clad wife in security and comfort. And she did as much as anyone to put some of those painfully and pitifully stamped out lives before us.
But it is so very sad to try and take in that we will never be reading or hearing from her again.
Turns out I spent most of today unknowingly queueing alongside the idiotic attention seeker anarchist who threw a shaving foam custard pie at Rupert Murdoch in this afternoon's Parliamentary Select Committee hearing.
He calls himself Johnnie Marbles, though he's clearly lost his. His real name is something rather posher--Jonathan May-Bowles. It seems he's both an anarchist and a peddler of small-time attention-seeking art and comedy stunts which reveal all too little talent at either. He was one of The Guardian's Top Ten Plinthers rated for their act on the Fourth Plinth "One and Other" project of Antony Gormley. His performance consisted of reading out texts of their secrets sent him by the audience. What on earth must the not so Top Plinthers have been like? Great Art, oh, yes.....
Funnily enough,The Guardian's write up on him this evening doesn't mention his being on their list of Top Plinthers. How odd. But it does tell us that he's a founder member of UKUncut, which is issuing vigorous denials that they had any foreknowledge of his stunt, although they seem to know he pulled another stunt incident in a BHS store and got into the Fortnum and Mason invasion.
I first learnt what great political theatre Select Committees can be years ago-- I used to go and hear Sir Keith Joseph being done over by the Education Select Committee when he was Minister for Education in the seventies. And I recently went to one of the best in the new Parliament-- Hague, Liam Fox, Oliver Letwin, Andrew WhatisisName i/c Overseas Aid being questioned by the Foreign Affairs SC, where we learnt that the new Defence Strategy consists of tiny forces barely able to cope with their existing commitments, so our overseas influence is now to be built by lots of overseas trips making friends and informal alliances with groups and countries we used to ignore or keep at arm's length. Like the Arab League and Bahrein.
So I decided that today's hearing by the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, calling Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, might just be worth an enormously long wait, hopefully on the nice green benches outside the Committee Room in Portcullis House, whilst I got on with some paperwork or reading. I got there at around 9:25, was pointed to a queue outside Portcullis House of about thirty people and found myself behind four rather alternativey looking people-two youngish couples- with a tall very smartly dressed ginger-headed man, neat trench coat and leather satchel, who seemed to be in some sort of organizational role in relation to them.
I got into small talk with them and said I'd go and see if it was possible to sit and queue inside. "If I'm not back in twenty minutes, you'll know you can queue inside-- and will you keep my place?". And Mr Ginger talked about needing to ensure that he designated one of them to queue for him. Well, it didn't work-- they weren't letting anyone queue inside (which they usually do), but soon enough the amiable Mr Ginger turned up, tried to reinforce my request to include himself, but we ended going back to the queue, where he briefed his friends and disappeared.
So in front of me through the four hour wait on the pavement outside Portcullis House were Jonathan May-Bowles (though I didn't know his or any of their names till after the event, his girl friend (that's her in the picture above, a stereotypical anarchist-looking guy, with a Tolstoyan hair and beard-- all very amiable. We exchanged bits of chit chat from time to time. Mr Ginger appeared some hours later and waved aimiably from the other side of the press queue, but he didn't rejoin us.
They let just over 30 of us into the Select Committee Hearing room, all seated on the wooden bench at the back. The security was the usual letting us into Portcullis House. Bags put through an airport type scanner. Photos taken and an electronic arch to go through. And until May-Bowles pulled his stunt, I'd never have guessed.
Reading the online reports and the tweets after we got turned out of the hearing, they don't really convey how very poorly Rupert Murdoch performed. Long, long pauses almost every time he was asked a question. Sometimes had no idea what to say. More than once I had the strong impression he'd forgotten the sentence he'd started saying. Banging the table as he spoke was weirdly out of synch with the relatively anodyne things he was saying. He often said he didn't remember, and I didn't get the impression from his tone of voice that he was covering up. I remembered his television interview clip last week when they asked him what his priority was now he'd arrived in England to sort the News International mess. "This one", he said, putting his arm round Rebekah Brooks' shoulders. It seems to me quite likely that he couldn't remember her name at that moment. James Murdoch repeatedly butted in to try to answer for him, but was batted away by the Committee members.
If I were a News Corp shareholder (a laughable concept, but still..) I'd be calling for Rupert Murdoch to have to undergo a brain scan and in depth neurological report. Seriously. I've been around dementia and mental impairment sufferers long enough to recognise the very early stages of permanent cognitive decline when I see them. I'm gobsmacked to think of him playing such a key role in a global corporation. Tellingly, he did mention that his underlings often tell him he's talking rubbish when he tries to give them ideas.
And James Murdoch? He came across like a typical organizational suit, full of the usual obfuscation and evasiveness I'm regularly encountering in my current dealings with NHS PCT bureaucrats. Paul Waugh tweeted one of his prize lines of organizational gobbledygook:
There are thresholds of materiality where something has to be moved upstream.
This was one of the few times when Rupert outstripped his son, in this case by translating the verbiage into plain English:
Anything seen as a crisis comes to me.
So this pair are supposed to be the Evil Empire, controlling the politicians and institutions of the UK? On the basis of this performance, utterly laughable. One of the few worthwhile and revealing answers from Murdoch Senior was when he responded to a rolling dramatic question about how come he'd entered 10 Downing Street via the back door when he visited Cameron after the election: "Because I was asked to. I did what I was told." And in passing he managed to list the many times he'd visited Blair and Brown and talked about Brown's and his kids playing together. And pointed out that it was people like Blair, Brown and Cameron who travelled across continents to see him at their request, not his.
But I never got to see the end of the questioning, including Louise Mensch's questions, because that's when Mr Attention Seeker Prat Jonathan May-Bowles threw his pie stunt. I must say it was startling (but not surprising) to see Wendi Deng, Murdoch's grim-looking wife, springing furiously into action, socking him and covering him with his own shaving foam. I looked back at May-Bowles' girl friend. She was sitting quietly watching, keeping her head down, so to speak. A girl, supposedly his ex girl friend, has tweeted to say she's dumped him because of the attack. All I can say is the very pleasant and affectionate girl friend he spent the day with didn't look at all shocked or surprised. She just seemed to want to avoid drawing attention to herself. The friendly Mr Tolstoyan Beard was already being held. I told the policeman steering us out that the girlfriend had been with May-Bowles all day, and they pulled her back. I also tried to tell one policeman after another that I'd spent the day sitting alongside them, that there was a group of four of them, and another, smartly dressed man who appeared to have been involved with them and organizing them, but they weren't interested. Just wanted us all out.
I told Nick Robinson. I told Nick Davies. I told as many of the other journos I could see what I knew. You should tell the police, they said. But they don't want to know, I said. I went back and had another try. No dice. The police just wanted the public out of the area. I went into the room where the journos where being allowed to wait to re-enter the meeting-- the public were excluded after the attack.
And there was Mr Ginger, who hadn't been in the Select Committee Hearing. I pointed him out to a couple of the journos I told the story to. Too busy. And then I went home.
Thanks to Mr Attention Seeking Prat May-Bowles, it'll probably mean fewer chances for the public to get into hearings like today's. And he's even managed to get sympathy for Rupert Murdoch, who may deserve some concerned focus on his health and fitness, but not for becoming a victim of an attack.
But what sort of security is it that lets a man into one of the most open buildings of Parliament with shaving foam in his bag? That could have been caustic soda, paint stripper, poison, acid....The security apparatus is showy but totally ineffective because the contents of bags aren't searched properly. These people didn't get in through having insider help, they just queued to get in, same as I did. And I've no idea what exactly was Mr Ginger's role, but this was clearly no spontaneous attack
And as for the police turning away witnesses after an attack....Met Police, there's an email at the top of my blog if you want to contact me.
MacMaster, who is presently studying and working in Scotland, and is very active in Edinburgh University's Students for Justice in Palestine, has admitted having written every one of the posts supposedly written by an out lesbian in Damascus. This is a hoax which he has been running since 2007.
It's yet to emerge how he got hold of the photos of the young woman, Jelena Lecic, featured in the YouTube video above, whose image was appropriated by him and presented as that of Amina. The Guardian used those images, and went on using others of Jelena, even after she protested about her identity theft.
Froelicher, according to today's Harry's Place post, has a deep interest in Syria.
The external perception of Syria’s economy is relatively negative. Most scholars find that Syria is moving into a Russian-style ‘crony capitalism’, in which well-connected individuals have de-facto monopolies with the government’s blessing. [...] My research hypothesizes that the reasons for this course of development have little to do with culture and religion or that – as the ‘transition paradigm’ tried to claim – any particular form of development is ‘natural’. Rather, the negative external perceptions of Syria’s economy also impact the desire and ability of western governments to interact positively with Syria, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of mistrust and suspicion. Furthermore, security concerns deepen an existing conservatism towards reform internally.
Froelicher is an associate fellow at the University of St. Andrews. She is researching the topic ”Economic Reform and the Syrian Textile Industry“. The University of St Andrews has been taking money from dubious Syrian sources for promoting research which happens to burnish the cultural credentials of Syria.
Some of the posts from "Amina Arraf" tried to paint the Syrian regime as not as repressive as the western publicity suggested. Maybe MacMaster was planning to resolve her apparent abduction with a sudden release with her proclaiming how kindly she'd been treated by Assad's regime.
I am not the blogger in question. Whomever that person ‘really’ is, I have doubtless interacted with her at some point. I do not know further than that about her. When I first read the news story, I momentarily thought I had an idea who she was. As time has progressed that seems much less likely. I understand there are a number of unusual coincidences regarding the blogger and either me or my wife. Those are, as far as I am aware, simply unusual. I am not going to make more of that.
MacMaster deserves to be sanctioned for creating and promoting this particular bit of “hoaxing”– he’s shown himself to be a hardened liar and deceiver who shouldn’t be allowed to use a University IP.
Not only is he pretty well unrepentant about what he’s done, but he uses his admission of the hoax to try and get on a moral high horse about the supposed “liberal orientalism” of the people he deceived:
I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone -- I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.
I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.
This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.
Some of the posts from "Amina Arraf" tried to paint the Syrian regime as not as repressive as the western publicity suggested. Maybe MacMaster was planning to resolve her apparent abduction with a sudden release with her proclaiming how kindly she'd been treated by Assad's regime.
But the supposed beautiful lipstick lesbian had quite a turn of phrase when it came to characterizing the people of Israel and the actions of its governments and people. Quite something to know that every word of this supposedly authentic Syrian Arab voice came from Mr Tom MacMaster, sometime of Georgia USA, now of Scotland and Edinnburgh University's Students for Justice in Palestine.
As soon as I post this, I know, the defenders of the Holy Nation will come and denounce me, will ask why it is that I do not see their cause as holy and my own people, my own heritage, my own history, as nothing more than the squawkings of baboons.
Don’t laugh; I am sure they will come. And they will again and again demonstrate their arrogance and their ignorance. When not claiming that their innate superiority in all things means that democracy is not for the likes of me (after all, how else to justify their state?) or that we are all needing just a firm, pale hand to guide us, they will show their ignorance of history.
I for one know my own history. And I know my own country. I know that Jaulan was lost after the Syrians had agreed to cease fire. I know who started that war; it wasn’t us. I know that the Israelis hold Jaulan because they would steal our water and need a nice platform to keep Damascus in their gunsights. I know that there is no difference between what keeps them there and what took Saddam to Kuwait … I know of American sailors who died to keep the world from knowing … I know that their own generals admitted that all the ‘vicious wicked Syrian attacks’ were provoked by them, not us …
I know also of the ethnic cleansing that they undertook up there; 131,000 people made homeless so that Russian migrants might have a place to illegally live.
And whatever happens in Palestine, no Syrian can forget that they stole our land and made our people homeless.
And we also know who here was guilty of collusion; we know who worked closest with the Soviets then to start the war, who it was who gave the orders to pull back troops from impregnable strongholds on the Jaulan, who it was who would surrender our patrimony without a shot;
The one who gave those orders, the order that, for what it’s worth, meant the death of my father’s older brother, now has a son. And that son is called the President.
Every Syrian knows that; every Syrian knows that Traitor of the Naksa’s second son is President and that another runs his squads of killers. Every Syrian knows that Bashar has never lifted a finger to redeem Jaulan.
So when the lying liars and propagandists, the makers of hasbara and singers of paeans to the so-called Chosen claims that “Bashar tricked us into killing people (if you can call mere Arabs humans and not two-legged dogs) so as to distract fromhis own crimes”, tell them to stuff it. They lie.
Listening to the amazing explanations of how the British SAS team came to be caught, handcuffed, publicly humiliated and booted out by the very Libyan opposition groups they'd come to make contact with, I'm not the only one to be marvelling at the incredible series of blunders and Chelm-worthy reasoning behind the debacle.
There has to be some sort of explanation for how an operation came to be approved by a whole chain of operational and political command which involved the use of a helicopter as a supposedly stealthy way to deliver a clandestine team of special forces carrying sensitive transmitting equipment and fake passports.
Anyone who's ever had a night disturbed by a police helicopter pursuing crims or coming airlift accident victims will be in no doubt that arriving via helicopter is one of the least stealthy methods imaginable of turning up for a clandestine rendezvous. What could they have been thinking?
My guess is that the unconscious pull of the romance of the James Bond ethos still impacts on real life secret service and political calculations. Especially where you have someone in charge like William Hague who seems to want to display his macho credentials when demonstrating that he's the Foreign Secretary now. And I bet they all watched the Milk Tray commercials when they were kids....
Here's Shami Chakrabharti, Director of Liberty, the leading human rights advocacy group in the UK, working herself unapologetically into a state of outrage in 2009 in front of a national TV audience about what she insists are human rights violations and acquiescence to torture by the UK government.
But since then, it's emerged that in the same year, she sat through a meeting of the Council of the London School of Economics, of which she is a member, when they refused to listen to the objections of the late Professor Fred Halliday, in a letter specifically addressed to them, about LSE taking money from the Gaddafi regime, inter alia on the grounds of Libya's continuing appalling human rights record. Needless to say, the use of torture is central to the regime's achievement in staying in power for 42 years.
Professor Halliday's letter referred to the continuing brutality and kleptocracy of Gaddafi’s regime and its disregard for human rights.Her failure to act or resign makes her complicity in LSE’s shameless cosmetification of the Gaddafi regime and Gaddafi's son Saif al-Google Gaddafi clear.
In 2009, the LSE was warned against accepting the donation from Libya by Fred Halliday, an emeritus professor of international relations, who has since died. He wrote to the council criticising Libya’s human rights record and the unrestrained celebrations in Tripoli that followed the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber. Here are some of the highly restrained and unemotional but still convincing reasons Professor Halliday gave the LSE Council for not taking Gaddafi money:
While it is formally the case that the QF is not part of the Libyan state, and is registered in Switzerland as an NGO, this is, in all practical senses, a legal fiction. The monies paid into the QF come from foreign businesses wishing to do business, i.e. receive contracts, for work in Libya, most evidently in the oil and gas industries. These monies are, in effect, a form of down payment, indeed of taxation, paid to the Libyan state, in anticipation of the award of contracts. The funds of the QF are, for this reason, to all intents and purposes, part of the Libyan state budget. ‘NGO status’, and recognition of such by UN bodies, means, in real terms, absolutely nothing.
Mention has been made, in verbal and written submissions to the School and in correspondence to myself, of the membership of the QF’s advisory board: a somewhat closer examination of the most prominent politicians involved, and of their reputations and business dealings, should also give cause for some concern.
(ii) That the President of the QF, and its effective director, is himself the son of the ruler, and, for all the informality of the Libyan political system (even the ‘Leader’, Colonel Qaddafi, has no formal position), in effect a senior official of that regime, confirms this analysis. In Arab states many of the most important positions have no official title, and kinship, and informal links, are more important than state function – and this, above all, in Libya.
(iii) Much is made by supporters of the QF grant of the fact that Libya is changing internally. This may or may not be the case – it is simply much too early to say. Certainly, the overwhelming balance of informed press conference, and the reports of human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, is that while some of the worst excesses have, for the moment ceased, Libya has made no significant progress in protecting the rights of citizens, or migrant workers and refugees, and remains a country run by a secretive, erratic and corrupt elite. Perhaps part of the problem here is a misunderstanding by colleagues of the role of the ‘liberal’ wing within such states. It is not a question of whether or not they are ‘sincere’ – they may well be – but of what their function is: in Libya, as in such states as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran the primary function of such liberal elements is not to produce change, but to reach compromises with internal hard-liners that serve to lessen external pressure. So it has been, since 2002, with the various Libyan initiatives affecting LSE and the UK/US foreign policy establishment in general.
(iv) Much is made of Libya’s altered position in international relations. For sure, and for reasons of its own, the Libyan government has, above all since 9/11, negotiated compromises with the west on a number of issues, notably Lockerbie and nuclear weapons. Its leaders have met a number of politicians and diplomats from foreign countries. This is all to the good. But it is worth being cautious here. First, because tactical changes in foreign policy are not, for the purposes of evaluating political and academic links, sufficient. Secondly, because, although in some areas of foreign policy the country has changed, in others it has not: it continues to call for solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute that in effect, involves the abolition of both the Israeli and Palestinian states; it is using its money and influence to provoke extremism in southern Africa; its leader has recently called for the abolition of a sovereign European state – Switzerland. Among the guests of honour at the 1 September 2009 celebrations in Tripoli was the leader of the Somali pirates, operating and menacing international shipping in the Horn of Africa. I will not dwell here on the summer’s events surrounding Lockerbie: suffice it to say that Libya’s handling of this has not been characterised by either consistency or clarity.
(v) The most important issue of all is that of reputational risk to LSE. I have myself defended acceptance by the School of grants from some authoritarian countries (e.g. Arab Gulf states): but there should be clear limits on this, depending on the degree of political and human rights abuses perpetrated with them and on their ongoing foreign policy conduct. Here I would draw attention not just to the prevailing consensus in Whitehall and the City, which are now happy, for their own legitimate reasons, to do business with Libya, but to broader reputational concerns in regard to British and American public opinion, particularly with regard to Lockerbie. For these and other reason the same concern applies across the Middle East, in the Arab world as much as in Israel, where reserve about this state, and about its more prominent ‘liberal’ representatives, remains high. And for good reason.
"Leaked minutes of [the] Council meeting which considered [Professor Halliday's letter] reveal that senior officials feared embarrassing Saif Gaddafi, chairman of the foundation, by rejecting the cash. They also claimed there was “no evidence” that LSE’s links with Libya had attracted controversy.
According to the document, Prof David Held, co-director of the university’s Centre for the Study of Global Governance, said that a “public signing ceremony had been undertaken and a U-turn at this juncture might affect the school’s relations with Libya and cause personal embarrassment to the chairman of the foundation”.
Prof Held, who taught Gaddafi during his time at LSE, added: “The views espoused by Professor Halliday were not necessarily shared by all in the academic community; that, having trawled traditional media and the blogosphere, no evidence had been found that LSE’s links with Libya had attracted criticism, despite the ‘storm’ created by the Al-Megrahi affair.”
Chakrabharti not only sat through the meeting listening to this garbage, but she must have got the minutes and read through them without considering them incompatible with her human rights credentials.
She seems to be in it up to her neck as going along with the key assumptions of Professor Held and his fellow shills for Saif al Google Gaddafi and his dad- that it was more important to avoid embarrassing Saif al-Google Gaddafi and ruining LSE’s relationship with Libya than to acknowledge the reality of what brand of lipstick they were applying to the face of this particular monster and his dad.
In The Times (££) last week, she’s reported as saying that
The Director has been completely straight about his embarrassment. The council has been completely united in its regret. As a human rights campaigner I can only share bucketloads of both.
Clearly her bucketloads of embarrassment and regret aren’t going to prevent her from staying on as a member of the Council. At least Howard Davies never made any claim to be a national champion of human rights. I suppose some months from now, we’ll be hearing her do an “On the Ropes” broadcast on BBC Radio 4 reflecting on how she bravely overcame this little blip in her career by stonewalling her way through it and looking penitent on “Question Time”.
The Sandmonkey is probably Egypt's best known blogger in the West. He's certainly the most interesting and insightful of the Egyptian bloggers I've read.
He'd let his blog lie fallow for quite a time, but there was never any doubt that he was a long term opponent of the Mubarak regime who didn't buy into the Islamist dream and who didn't regard Israel as the source of all evil.
So it's come as no surprise to hear that he was arrested this morning as he took medical supplies into Tahrir Square for the anti-Mubarak protesters. They may well have been following his renewed blogging and tweets.And they've suspended his blog. The best hope for him is to show how his arrest has started up world wide protests against this act of repression. So please publicize this post, link to it and tweet
UPDATE: The Sandmonkey has been released: but here's his tweet about what happened to him:
I am ok. I got out. I was ambushed & beaten by the police, my phone confiscated , my car ripped apar& supplies taken (follow him on Twitter on @Sandmonkey for updates)
Here's the last blog post he wrote -- written today, just before he left for Tahrir Square. It's inter alia a witness view of the events in the YouTube clip:
Sandmonkey at Thursday, 3 Feb 2011
Egypt, right now!
I don't know how to start writing this. I have been battling fatigue for not sleeping properly for the past 10 days, moving from one's friend house to another friend's house, almost never spending a night in my home, facing a very well funded and well organized ruthless regime that views me as nothing but an annoying bug that its time to squash will come.
The situation here is bleak to say the least. It didn't start out that way. On Tuesday Jan 25 it all started peacefully, and against all odds, we succeeded to gather hundreds of thousands and get them into Tahrir Square, despite being attacked by Anti-Riot Police who are using sticks, tear gas and rubber bullets against us. We managed to break all of their barricades and situated ourselves in Tahrir.
The government responded by shutting down all cell communication in Tahrir square, a move which purpose was understood later when after midnight they went in with all of their might and attacked the protesters and evacuated the Square.
The next day we were back at it again, and the day after. Then came Friday and we braved their communication blackout, their thugs, their tear gas and their bullets and we retook the square. We have been fighting to keep it ever since.
That night the government announced a military curfew, which kept getting shorter by the day, until it became from 8 am to 3 pm. People couldn't go to work, gas was running out quickly and so were essential goods and money, since the banks were not allowed to operate and people were not able to collect their salary. The internet continued to be blocked, which affected all businesses in Egypt and will cause an economic meltdown the moment they allow the banks to operate again.
We were being collectively punished for daring to say that we deserve democracy and rights, and to keep it up, they withdrew the police, and then sent them out dressed as civilians to terrorize our neighborhoods. I was shot at twice that day, one of which with a semi-automatic by a dude in a car that we the people took joy in pummeling.
The government announced that all prisons were breached, and that the prisoners somehow managed to get weapons and do nothing but randomly attack people. One day we had organized thugs in uniforms firing at us and the next day they disappeared and were replaced by organized thugs without uniforms firing at us. Somehow the people never made the connection.
Despite it all, we braved it. We believed we are doing what's right and were encouraged by all those around us who couldn't believe what was happening to their country. What he did galvanized the people, and on Tuesday, despite shutting down all major roads leading into Cairo, we managed to get over 2 million protesters in Cairo alone and 3 million all over Egypt to come out and demand Mubarak's departure.
Those are people who stood up to the regime's ruthlessness and anger and declared that they were free, and were refusing to live in the Mubarak dictatorship for one more day. That night, he showed up on TV, and gave a very emotional speech about how he intends to step down at the end of his term and how he wants to die in Egypt, the country he loved and served.
To me, and to everyone else at the protests this wasn't nearly enough, for we wanted him gone now. Others started asking that we give him a chance, and that change takes time and other such poppycock. Hell, some people and family members cried when they saw his speech. People felt sorry for him for failing to be our dictator for the rest of his life and inheriting us to his Son. It was an amalgam of Stockholm syndrome coupled with slave mentality in a malevolent combination that we never saw before. And the Regime capitalized on it today.
Today, they brought back the internet, and started having people calling on TV and writing on facebook on how they support Mubarak and his call for stability and peacefull change in 8 months. They hung on to the words of the newly appointed government would never harm the protesters, whom they believe to be good patriotic youth who have a few bad apples amongst them.
We started getting calls asking people to stop protesting because "we got what we wanted" and "we need the country to start working again". People were complaining that they miss their lives. That they miss going out at night, and ordering Home Delivery. That they need us to stop so they can resume whatever existence they had before all of this. All was forgiven, the past week never happened and it's time for Unity under Mubarak's rule right now.
To all of those people I say: NEVER! I am sorry that your lives and businesses are disrupted, but this wasn't caused by the Protesters. The Protesters aren't the ones who shut down the internet that has paralyzed your businesses and banks: The government did. The Protesters weren't the ones who initiated the military curfew that limited your movement and allowed goods to disappear off market shelves and gas to disappear: The government did. The Protesters weren't the ones who ordered the police to withdraw and claimed the prisons were breached and unleashed thugs that terrorized your neighborhoods: The government did.
The same government that you wish to give a second chance to, as if 30 years of dictatorship and utter failure in every sector of government wasn't enough for you. The Slaves were ready to forgive their master, and blame his cruelty on those who dared to defy him in order to ensure a better Egypt for all of its citizens and their children. After all, he gave us his word, and it's not like he ever broke his promises for reform before or anything. Then Mubarak made his move and showed them what useful idiots they all were.
You watched on TV as "Pro-Mubarak Protesters" – thugs who were paid money by NDP members [1] by admission of High NDP officials- started attacking the peaceful unarmed protesters in Tahrir square. They attacked them with sticks, threw stones at them, brought in men riding horses and camels- in what must be the most surreal scene ever shown on TV- and carrying whips to beat up the protesters.
And then the Bullets started getting fired and Molotov cocktails started getting thrown at the Anti-Mubarak Protesters as the Army standing idly by, allowing it all to happen and not doing anything about it. Dozens were killed, hundreds injured, and there was no help sent by ambulances. The Police never showed up to stop those attacking because the ones who were captured by the Anti-mubarak people had police ID's on them. They were the police and they were there to shoot and kill people and even tried to set the Egyptian Museum on Fire.
The Aim was clear: Use the clashes as pretext to ban such demonstrations under pretexts of concern for public safety and order, and to prevent disunity amongst the people of Egypt. But their plans ultimately failed, by those resilient brave souls who wouldn't give up the ground they freed of Egypt, no matter how many live bullets or firebombs were hurled at them. They know, like we all do, that this regime no longer cares to put on a moderate mask. That they have shown their true nature. That Mubarak will never step down, and that he would rather burn Egypt to the ground than even contemplate that possibility.
In the meantime, State-owned and affiliated TV channels were showing coverage of Peaceful Mubarak Protests all over Egypt and showing recorded footage of Tahrir Square protest from the night before and claiming it's the situation there at the moment. Hundreds of calls by public figures and actors started calling the channels saying that they are with Mubarak, and that he is our Father and we should support him on the road to democracy. A veiled girl with a blurred face went on Mehwer TV claiming to have received funding by Americans to go to the US and took courses on how to bring down the Egyptian government through protests which were taught by Jews. She claimed that AlJazeera is lying, and that the only people in Tahrir square now were Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. State TV started issuing statements on how the people arrested Israelis all over Cairo engaged in creating mayhem and causing chaos. For those of you who are counting this is an American-Israeli-Qatari-Muslim Brotherhood-Iranian-Hamas conspiracy. Imagine that. And MANY PEOPLE BOUGHT IT.
I recall telling a friend of mine that the only good thing about what happened today was that it made clear to us who were the idiots amongst our friends. Now we know. Now, just in case this isn't clear: This protest is not one made or sustained by the Muslim Brotherhood, it's one that had people from all social classes and religious background in Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood only showed up on Tuesday, and even then they were not the majority of people there by a long shot. We tolerated them there since we won't say no to fellow Egyptians who wanted to stand with us, but neither the Muslims Brotherhood not any of the Opposition leaders have the ability to turn out one tenth of the numbers of Protesters that were in Tahrir on Tuesday.
This is a revolution without leaders. Three Million individuals choosing hope instead of fear and braving death on hourly basis to keep their dream of freedom alive. Imagine that. The End is near. I have no illusions about this regime or its leader, and how he will pluck us and hunt us down one by one till we are over and done with and 8 months from now will pay people to stage fake protests urging him not to leave power, and he will stay "because he has to acquiesce to the voice of the people".
This is a losing battle and they have all the weapons, but we will continue fighting until we can't. I am heading to Tahrir right now with supplies for the hundreds injured, knowing that today the attacks will intensify, because they can't allow us to stay there come Friday, which is supposed to be the game changer. We are bringing everybody out, and we will refuse to be anything else than peaceful.
If you are in Egypt, I am calling on all of you to head down to Tahrir today and Friday. It is imperative to show them that the battle for the soul of Egypt isn't over and done with. I am calling you to bring your friends, to bring medical supplies, to go and see what Mubarak's gurantees look like in real life. Egypt needs you. Be Heroes. [1]:
Is there no end to the revelations of Israeli inhumanity and cruelty the Guardian bravely publishes day after day? Tuesday's story, by Harriet Sherwood, is truly shocking. Prisoners, huge numbers of them, kept in tiny cages in Israel, barely able move, and forced to seek out their food through the wire mesh they're caged behind. As usual, it's a small anonymous NGO that's brought the story to the attention of The Guardian. They've had a smuggled in secret camera filming a group of three of the prisoners. The story is so shocking that it's on the front of The Guardian's web page as a World News story, taking precedence over carnage in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechniya and other world trouble spots.
Oh, so it's all about battery hens, not people? Well, yes, but this is Israel! That makes it a major world news story in the eyes of The Guardian. And one which can be used to evoke all those stock phrases of Israel-as-occupier cruelly persecuting and removing from their land defenceless Palestinians who have only activists with hidden cameras to defend them, whilst themselves being hunted down by the ruthless and previously totally secret hen prisoners security branch of Mossad.
There is of course the nightmarish image of rows of caged chickens in these Israeli Gitmos of the poultry world, stretching relentlessly into the distance, reduced to squatting helplessly in their iron hell as a bored guard brings the rations round.
Hang on! Isn't there something not quite right about that picture? Yes, battery hens..clearly taken in...oh, Beijing, China. So that's how the Guardian illustrates its shock horror story...about Israel.
Well, no. Not at all. In fact that home page of Tuesday's web Guardian has not so much as a single link to the Cameron and Chinese prisoners and human rights story, whereas it was the top story on the web site of its ideological soulmate, the BBC News site. The imprisoned Nobel prize winner was the top story on the web site of its other ideological soulmate in the campaign to delegitimize Israel, the Independent.
OK, then. We know that there are political prisoners everywhere. So how could a trivial non event like the plight of an imprisoned Nobel prize winner in China begin to compare with the horrors of Israel's caged battery hens, surely unique in the world?
After all, how many caged battery prisoner hens are around anywhere today?
Ooops! Seems there are a socking 390,000,000 egg laying hens in the European Union, always so ready to tell Israel how to be more humanitarian, of which over two thirds are kept in battery cages. So that's way over 200,000,000 EU battery hens. Of which at least 16,000,000 are imprisoned in Britain today. And not a single Guardian editorial tear being shed for any of them. Tuesday or any other day recently. But the plight of Israeli battery hens? Shocking headline news. Caged prisoners. Guardian front page story.
Well, he's Leader of the Labour Party now. And here he is, setting out his new broom visions in his first speech as Labour leader. How's this for the voice of the "new generation"?
But Israel must accept and recognise in its actions the Palestinian right to statehood.
That is why the attack on the Gaza Flotilla was so wrong.
And that is why the Gaza blockade must be lifted and we must strain every sinew to work to make that happen.
And he thinks it’s an important enough point for him to make that he puts it into his “speech of a lifetime” inaugural speech as the new leader of the Labour Party.
Oh, yes, definitely a brilliant thinker. A man of the Centre, indeed. Red Ed? How could anyone possibly think that?
This week begins the month of Ellul, the month of remembering, which comes before the festivals of Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Succos. It is a month of self-scrutiny, but also a month of visiting the graves of loved ones, and of cherishing their memories, before, next month on Yom Kippur, we say the memorial prayers for them.
And now, this year, I shall be saying those prayers for for my mother, who completed her life and passed to her eternity on the 8th January this year, 23rd Teveth, Shabbos Shemos, the anniversary of my daughter's basmtizvah, and just two days after my daughter's and my son in law's birthdays.
This mourning year for my mother is very different from the one I lived through for my father, whose life was completed in 1983. It seems much less intense and overwhelming, though for most of my life and certainly through my childhood and teenage years, I was much closer to my mother than my father. I'm not sure why that should be; it might have to do with the fact that my mother lived through eleven years of increasingly severe dementia, and so the anticipation that her life could end at any moment was one I lived with for a very long time, whereas my father died after a short but very serious illness. Or maybe it had to do with the different sorts of complicated my relationship was with each of them. Or maybe it is, as I suspect from hearing others' experiences, that the first loss of a parent is very much more intense than the second. Or maybe it's something of all of those.
I expected I would write a lot about my mother in the weeks after her death, when I was closest to the intensity of the bereavement. I did that about my father. But I found myself marking my mother's passing in very different and quite idiosyncratic ways, and particularly by doing many things that marked the void of her absence from my life, after so many years when I was responsible for caring for her. I stopped wearing makeup (which I did for special occasions) but still had my nails done. I stopped buying Vogue. I have covered the television with a sort of improvised installation of a white sheet across which are pinned photos and images which summarize vivid moments of her life from 2 years old--when she and my daughter looked exactly alike-- to my daughter's wedding day in July 2007, when she was 91.
The image that now means most to me is the one here. It was a mere passport photo, taken in 1964, when she was 48 and I was 20; it was taken by the renowned Boris, who had moved his studio from Whitechapel, where he was the central visual biographer of almost every Jewish wedding in the East End, to the West End, where nobody remembered he was still around.
Today, I have been moved to write this post, after all these months, by reading Talia's post on her feelings about holding the last concrete link with her own mother, who also died recently, and far too young, at the age of 56, after a particularly horrifying cancer. Talia's record of living through the period of her mother's illness and death and what came after it, which is on her Daughter of Cancer blog, has astonished and touched me intensely.
Here's what I wrote as a comment on her post. May her mother's memory, and that of my mother, and all of our dear ones, be remembered with love and may we and all who mourn be comforted.
I so much feel for you, not just because I have been moved and enriched by reading your posts about your mother and the time before and since her death, but because I grew up without grandparents, three of whose lives were ended brutally and prematurely by the Nazis, as well as those of a beloved uncle and endless numbers of great aunts and uncles and cousins.
I particularly felt and still feel great regret that I never got a chance to meet them, most of all my mum’s parents and my dad’s mum, after whom I named my daughter.
But the lives and personalities of my mother’s parents were almost as real to me as if they had been alive, thanks to the stories my mother constantly told me of them, and of course through the wonderful food we had all through my childhood, all of which was from my grandmother’s methods and recipes which my mother learnt and served up, always perfectly, without a single written recipe.
So successful was my mother in evoking their presence and their loving care in me, that I seriously thought as a kid that their souls were living in our cat, who watched over me so benignly and so unjudgementally, and was always my loving friend and companion when I had none.
When I was 18, I met my surviving great uncle, my grandfather’s brother when I spent six months in Israel, and it was a great joy to meet him and see in person what a wonderful couple he and his wife were throughout the six months, and even experience their Seder.
That gave me a taste of what that generation of my mother’s family was like–a fantastic experience which I treasure to this day and made me feel as near as I could have been to being in the company of my grandparents. I gave my daughter my late great aunt’s name as an additional name in loving memory of her.
And also at that time I met various refugee and Holocaust survivor relatives who told me stories of these wonderful meals they’d had at my grandmother’s table, over sixty years previously when they were passing through Berlin on their way to the USA or on aliyah.
So I think, Talia, that if you are blessed with children, and I hope you will be, your mother and her life and gifts will be as vivid to them as my grandparents are to me through your own wonderful gift of making her live for all of us through the stories you’ve told and tell in your blog. But you will have many thousands more of much smaller and apparently trivial and not-for-sharing outside family stories that they will also hear and love, and ask for time and time again.
That will be one of the many great gifts you will be able to offer them, that will be worth much more to them through life then gold and rubies.
I've no reason to think that British universities' Islamic Societies are in general anything other than a welcome resource for Muslim students and those interested in Islam to meet, study and socialise together, performing exactly the same function as the unversities' many Christian, Jewish and Buddhist societies. With the regrettable difference that many Student Islamic Societies spend a great deal of energy promoting boycott motions against Israel and sometimes campaigning against Jewish societies on the grounds that they are zionist.
During my daughter and son-in-law's time in Cambridge however, I know that the university Jewish Society and the Islamic Society had successful dialogue meetings, and both groups are linked to continuing multifaith projects in Cambridge.
But there is some disturbing evidence that Islamist terrorists have succeeded in getting themselves voted into powerful positions in a small number of university Islamic Societies.
And the latest news about the Detroit Bomber having been President of the UCL Islamic Society during 2006-2007 raises questions about whether the extent to which would-be Islamist terrorists and supporters of Islamist terrorist organizations may have used those societies to spread their message and recruit followers.
Zaman, part of whose "martyrdom" video shown above was released by the police to the jury during one of the two trials he's so far been through on charges related to the aborted "soft drink" bombing conspiracy. So far, he's been found not guilty on the most serious charges of conspiring to cause an aircraft explosion, but in September 2009, the jury failed to reach a verdict on the charge of "conspiracy to murder involving liquid bombs". It's not yet clear whether he will face a further trial.
The line of defence offered by Waheed and the other suspects whose martyrdom videos were shown at the trial was that it was all "just" a make-believe designed to be released as a publicity stunt to bring home to the British public their view of how disastrous British foreign policy was.
The trial verdicts, convicting just three of the eight men on trial on the lesser charge of conspiracy to murder, but acquitting them of conspiring to target aircraft, caused astonishment and dismay amongst the counter-terror authorities and civil servants who knew the vast weight of decisive evidence against them. Having recently been on jury service myself, I'm well aware of how reluctant many jurors are to convict anyone of anything, no matter how strong the evidence, unless they are presented with an action replay. That's because they tend to over-interpret the requirement that a guilty verdict must be based on certainty beyond reasonable doubt. They tend to assume that must mean certainty beyond all possible doubt.
So what's the evidence for any links between Zaman and Detroit Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab? Both have been linked to the East London Mosque. But Abdulmutallab is known to have visited it on just three occasions. It would be interesting to know which those were.
Much more significant is the certainty that as Presidents of their own universities' Islamic Society, they would inevitably regularly have been involved with meetings and networking through the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) and its London regional group in particular. Despite its overall establishment-style self-projection, FOSIS has a track record of supporting the recognition of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which campaigns for the replacement of democracies with a Caliphate to be established worldwide, including in the UK, and it is also closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Gaza offshoot is the Hamas terrorist group. The wider university links between Waheed Zaman's group and other Islamist-dominated Student Islamic Societies are documented here.
The UCL Islamic Society seems to have had particularly strong involvement in FOSIS. Two of FOSIS' current national executive members, the Head of Finance and the Head of Media, are current or former UCL Islamic Society activists whose period of involvement overlaps with that of Abdulmutallab, including the time when he was President.
None of this establishes a clear direct relationship between Zaman and Abdulmuttallab beyond the fact that they are almost certain to have been fellow participants in national Student Islamic Society meetings and to have had links with the East London Mosque. After all, Abdulmutallab was a keen Arsenal supporter, but that's no reason to suppose that he was using Arsenal matches to promote Islamist extremism. It's clear however that both men are linked to Al Qaeda. Indeed, Abdulmuttalab and his failed plane bombing attempt has been claimed by an Al Qaeda website as its own operation. And there are reports that Al Qaeda has been moving its main centre from the Afghan-Pakistan borders and Iraq to Yemen.
I hope that both the British and US anti-terror authorities are involved in jointly investigating these student Islamist extremist networks more thoroughly. Unfortunately, one can't assume any such thing. Just a couple of days ago, the UK's Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, was reassuring about the fact that Abdulmuttallab was on a UK watch list for terror, had been refused re-entry to Britain, and, he was confident, the US authorities would have been informed of this. However, it turns out that they weren't.
Fraser Nelson posted a few days ago on how draconian current UK libel laws stand in the way of investigating and publishing information about Islamist extremist supporters and their activities. There was for example a New York Times block on a link to UK ISPs to an article which spelled out the links between the soft-drinks transatlantic bombers and the additional suspects like Zaman. So far, I've seen almost no press investigation of Abdulmuttallab's time as President of UCL's Islamic Society. And that's a matter for concern.
Stephen Pollard,Harry's Place and Normblog have all drawn attention to a blatantly anti-semitic article by a former Ambassador in today's Independent which objects to the presence of two of the distinguished historians on the panel of the Iraq Enquiry on the grounds that they are Jews. And that's taken by the writer, Oliver Miles, as of itself proof that the panel is unbalanced. Presumably Miles thinks all Jews, and especially all zionists, think alike, and in ways not congenial to him. Here's what he has to say about it:
Rather less attention has been paid to the curious appointment of two historians (which seems a lot, out of a total of five), both strong supporters of Tony Blair and/or the Iraq war. In December 2004 Sir Martin Gilbert, while pointing out that the "war on terror" was not a third world war, wrote that Bush and Blair "may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill" – an eccentric opinion that would se em to rule him out as a member of the committee. Sir Lawrence Freedman is the reputed architect of the "Blair doctrine" of humanitarian intervention, which was invoked in Kosovo and Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism. Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media, but The Jewish Chronicle and the Israeli media have no such inhibitions, and the Arabic media both in London and in the region are usually not far behind.
All five members have outstanding reputations and records, but it is a pity that, if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available. Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced.
Oliver Miles is Chairman of MEC International, a lobbying group which is mainly focused on lobbying on behalf of Arab and other Middle Eastern regimes and of companies which seek to do business with them. Inter alia it offers the services of a group of ambassadors:
MEC International therefore offers a holistic response to these challenges with an Ambassadorial Service run by senior Ambassadors and those with many years of experience in the region. Risk related questions receive a rapid response from a specially selected MEC task force headed in each case by a consultant ambassador.
This service offers a complete tailored response supported by MEC publications, its Analytical Group services and consultancy advice available through a hot line and through a team of selected senior consultants.
The Brief
The first step is for a company to prepare a brief of its requirements to which an initial written response is prepared by MEC offering both the scope of the service and the personnel involved. For example, one company may wish to track key developments and build in risk protection across its operations in the Middle East to include Central Asia and Iran, Turkey, Israel, the Levant, the Gulf and the Maghreb. The MEC ambassadorial response may not be restricted to the company ’s main business sectors but will also look at wider but related developments including politics, economics, energy and technology which will impact the company’s level of political risk and future stability and development of the region.
The ambassadorial service seeks to identify important underlying developments and provide concise analytical insights to allow forward planning. The focus will vary from week to week changing with the issues of the day.
As one example of this "ambassadorial service", Miles organized from an internet cafe in Tripoli the well remembered letter to Tony Blair signed by 52 ex-ambassadors, urging him to change his policies on Palestine and Iraq.
In other words, Oliver Miles is the leader of the "Camel Corps" of bought and paid for former Foreign Office Arab lobbyists. What's the betting that he and his lobbying group gave substantial help to Peter Oborne for the recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme that UK politicians and media were bullied and controlled by a secretive lobby of Israeli government and associated British zionist businessmen?
Just for starters, that programme starred Sir Richard Dalton, the former Director General, now Director of the Libyan British Business Council. The Deputy Chairman of the Libyan British Business Council is none other than Oliver Miles whose MEC has played a major role in setting up and developing the lucrative business contracts that were finally put on offer once Britain agreed to release Abdelbasset El Megrahi to the Libyan regime.
The YouTube clip shows Oliver Miles shilling as a Libyan mouthpiece on the Iranian regime's propaganda channel Press TV, on a panel chaired by Yvonne Ridlley, suggesting that the evidence pointed away from Libya being the organizers of the PanAm 103 bombing.
Much more importantly, Oliver Miles and his MEC consulting lobbyist firm played a major role in setting up a very rosy and enticing portrayal of the trade opportunities in Libya offered to EU businesses. It was a report on the new opportunities following the co-operation contracts finally signed by the Libyans on the release of Megrahi to Libya by the UK. You can download and read the final draft report here. All the facts and data about Libya were supplied by the entirely trustworthy Libyan one-man dictatorship regime and its various wholly controlled agencies. Which means they are as likely to be reliable as were statistics of tractor production in the Urals in the Soviet Union under Stalin. As it was jointly sponsored by the EU, the creators of the report were obliged to consult Libyan "stakeholders". We're not given a very clear picture of how that was done, but back at page 92 of the report, following a good few pages of stupefying macroeconomic modelling equations, we can see a few squeaks of opposition from some brave souls who complained that the proposed Libyan plans would destroy the environment and further impoverish the poorest Libyans. With typical Civil Service finesse, the comments were simply marked "noted" and the report left intact.
What all this suggests is not so much that Miles is an anti-semite, but that he is a paid lobbyist mouthpiece for regimes which subscribe to and propagate anti-semitic conspiracy theories. And that the British government and the EU are partners with the Libyan dictatorship regime, whilst publicly taking a sniffy high moral stance about human rights and the like. In other words, it's evidence for a much more rational and low key version of the grossly exaggerated Eurabia thesis. It's not that Europe is becoming Islamised, as that the EU and member states like the UK trim their morals and their stances on Middle East issues to ensure that lucrative trade deals stay onside.
Meanwhile, both the Independent and the Guardian regularly publish this Arab regime lobbyist's articles, including those which express hostility to Jews, Israel and zionists, as if they were entirely bona fide disinterested analyses written by a man whose only interests have been representing the UK government.
Quite a few ex-Ambassadors take up part time consultancy for dubious regimes after they leave their posts. In most cases, they are awarded knighthoods or at least a certain amount of commemorative regalia. Why has Oliver Miles never been awarded such honours? Or is he just hiding the honours under a bushel?
Separated at birth or previous incarnation? The wooden puppet at the centre of this image went under the name of Archie Andrews during the 1950s. He looks uncannily like a younger incarnation of Nigel Farage, Leader of the UK Independence Party
Regular readers of Adloyada will know that, to put it mildly, I am no fan of UKIP or its way of doing politics. But for anyone who hasn't twigged my views on UKIP and their leader, Nigel Farage, I loathe both of them with a passion. We'll get on to the serious politics in a minute, but whenever I've seen pictures or videos of Farage, into my head has popped the name and image of Archie Andrews, one of the regular Sunday lunch listening experiences of my 1950s childhood. And it's always seemed to me that his political brain was likely to have been made of the same material as Archie Andrews'.
However, fair is fair, and credit where credit is due.
I think Nigel Farage's decision to stand against Speaker John Bercow at the next election is a move of real political brilliance, through which he's seized the initiative and wrong-footed all the main political parties. It's almost the ultimate in decapitation strategies for a party trying to build its base on opposition to the traditional political establishment, and particularly on opposition to the cosy agreements by all the main political parties known as "behind the Speaker's chair".
You see, the tradition is that no political party stands against the Speaker, who stands as "Mr Speaker standing for re-election"-- a platform in which he avers all political affiliation and claims to represent the House of Commons as a whole. And what is the collective public view of the House of Commons' members as a whole? And the fact that Speaker John Bercow presides over the Committees which make the rules on and manage MPs' expenses?
Wonder how Bercow will defend presiding over raising MPs' monthly chit-free expenses from £250 to £400 p/m once he got voted in? And how about the fact that helping him do that on the Committee was the entirely beloved Tory superstar Alan Duncan, he of the garden and now living on slightly larger rations than he was before the two of them, Martin-defender Sir Stuart Bell and H.Harman joined him in voting in this change once he became Speaker and just before Parliament went into recess?
Labour's also hoist with its own petard in having ensured that nominally Tory but actually Labour-leaning John Bercow got voted in to the Speaker's chair over Tory opposition
You can see the combination of utter dismay and huffing and puffing at the Tory fan site Conservativehome (admirably designed and managed by the very savvy Tim Mongtomerie). Almost all the commentary from the punters (as does Cameron) seriously underestimates the way the public feels and will go on feeling as long as the main political parties try to draw a line under the expenses scandal.
All Farage has to do is just keep publicising the huge hike from £250-£400 per month free of chits to win the fight. He's unanswerable on that one and I would love to see Bercow keep having to try and defend it, especially as he'll have to either defend himself as the apolitical rep of the whole Parliament (main evidence the monthly expenses hike), or he'll have to present himself as Mr Nice Guy opposed to nasty old political meddler.
He comes over slightly better than Alan Duncan in the Mr Nice Guy role but not that much--another man deeply in love with himself and who has the greatest difficulty in projecting humility other than in relation to his height. Expect lots of use of his excellent work for disabled children, based on his having a disabled child and pictures of him with lovable kids in his Speaker role (they're already up on his website). The BBC and The Guardian will go into total-worship overdrive to support him and present Farage as the Devil Incarnate. Will that be enough to overcome the "Hiked expenses free rides up from £250 to £400." Which way would you vote?
And, by the way, who will be bankrolling and paying for Mr Bercow's election expenses and publicity? That's a nice one.
Farage has also brilliantly put himself in a position where he will get endless publicity for himself and his party beyond anything his backers could dream of bankrolling. It will be one of the highest profile contests throughout the election, and UKIP will be able to take on the mantle of being on the side of the taxpayers and British fair-mindedness in the face of all the vested interests. It should do quite a bit to boost the UKIP vote in other constituencies, and most particularly those with a trougher or otherwise Inglorious Basterd MP in the safest of safe Tory seats.
Cameron can still outflank Farage by leaving Bercow to his fate and announcing a much more radical approach to his own troughers and troughers in general:
nominate public hero no-expenses Tory MP Philip Hollobone onto the Expenses Committees
promises to bring in a "vote the rascal out" system which can lead to recall and fresh election at national and local level
promise to rescind the free-monthly trough hand out and put it back to £250 with chits required.
Introduction of 100% democracy-- all voters have to vote but have the freedom to write in candidates AND vote for "none of the above"
Combine that plus "vote the rascal out" and the voters will feel at last that they can do something about parties and troughers who depend for their power base on otherwise impregnable seats.
Plus it will give much more legitimacy for whoever gets elected.
And it will send the most powerful of messages to those MPs who feel they're both safe for life and entitled. You know, like Alan Duncan and John Bercow.
Nothing less is going to impress the voters.
Unfortunately, there's not even the remotest chance in hell that the Labour Party will sign up to a programme like that.
And, given what I've said about my views of the nature of Farage's brain composition, I wonder which behind the scenes UKIP-supporting brilliant kid actually thought this one up?
But again, credit where credit is due. Farage deserves huge credit anyway (as I gnash my teeth) for seeing the political genius of it, picking it up and running with it.
Fiyaz Mughal of an organization called "Faith Matters" has written a very moving and interesting account of his visit to Poland, to learn about the Jewish community of the past and present, and of the history of the Holocaust. It has been posted on "Harry's Place" under the title "Most Roads Lead Back to Poland". This post started as a comment on his post, but it turned into an open letter to him:
Dear Fiyaz
Your post is a moving account of your experience. I'm touched that you were motivated to go, that you remain committed to finding out more about what happened to the Jews of Poland, and those of every Jewish community and that you wish to learn more.
I'm very surprised, though, at your underplaying the role played by mainstream Poles--not just those you label "collaborators" and the actual minute numbers, by contrast of those Poles who did anything of any sort to help Jews, and the relatively tiny numbers who were saved were no more than a few thousand out of a nation of many millions.
For every person who saves a life, it is as if they saved a whole world. So says the Jewish religious tradition. So each and every Pole who did try to help deserves honour and gratitude on the level as if they had indeed saved a whole world. Some paid for their humanity with their lives. That is why Yad Vashem has its "Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles" which commemorates those who did act in this way. I am very glad that they are honoured in this way.
Yad Vashem, though, does not recognise as "Righteous Gentiles" those who saved or hid Jews or forged passports for them because they were given money to do so by the desperate Jews they helped. Sometimes the sums of money they were given were huge. Nevertheless, if they saved lives, I believe they earned a right to be recognised. And of course, many of them argued that they wanted the pay for risking their lives--and some of them did pay with their lives. Saving a life or many lives is always a very great achievement, even if it comes with exploitation of the potential victims who were saved.
However, there are many, many historically reliable accounts that show that the number of Poles who took an active part in the roundups and the persecutions, or who actively celebrated and cheered when they saw the Jews persecuted beyond belief, slaughtered before their eyes, and taken away to the death that those Poles knew was coming to them when the Jews did not, is vast -- it is the majority of the Polish population. A huge number of these Poles simply looted the houses and such property of the Jews as was not taken by the Germans, and made them their own. When tiny numbers of those Jews who did survive tried to return to their homes, the overwhelming majority were driven away and threatened. There are numerous documented instances of these Jews then being murdered by the Poles who feared they might have to give back the looted homes. One of my cousins, a woman who had survived the camps, was murdered this way in Kanczuga in 1946.
There were also those who took part in pogroms which murdered en masse Jews who returned to their villages.
Many millions of Poles were terrified bystanders. They rightly feared for their lives. If they were caught helping Jews, they faced almost certain death or at the very least fearsome punishments, which would often include the murder or removal of their children. I can understand what make them bystanders. Who can be sure they would have not acted in the same way? I would like to think I would in such a position have done something. But I can't be sure because I've never had to face such a terror and I hope that none of us ever will. But at the end of the day, out of their very understandable fear, they stood by whilst their neighbours were persecuted, tortured, murdered and dispossessed. There are many people in Iran today who stand in such a position in relation to their neighbours, though they are of the same ethnic and religious group. They of all the people in the world today are closest to those of the Poles in Poland. An act of support or knowing concealing a person who has done no crime other than raising an entirely peaceful voice against a most brutal, lying and ruthless regime can result in hideous torture, death and the dispossession and arrest of their entire families. I wonder if you recognise the parallels.
What you have given here, Fiyaz, is a grossly distorted view of the role of the vast majority of the Poles in relation to the Jews under the German occupation. I would like to think that this is the result of historical ignorance, and that for some reason you have not read the main historically reliable histories of what happened and what the Poles did, as opposed to selective accounts written by apologists for the role of the Poles, the Soviet Union and even the Germans.
You also owe it to yourself if you are going to be committed to exploring the history of Poland in relation to its former Jewish population to exploring the history of Polish anti-semitism in all its depth, as well as such historical evidence as can be found for relationships of tolerance, as well as the rare evidence of genuine and warm appreciation historically by Poles for Jews and particularly for Jews, Judaism and Jewish culture. The role of the Polish Church in all this is something that will reward study.
However, before you do that, and in relation to the rosy picture of many, many Poles resisting the persecution of the Jews and of their being a small minority of collaborators, you will need, if you have not already done so to read the history of democratic Polish politics before World War II, when the newly restored nation first voted for its own representative parliament. You will need to look at the record of democratically elected majority parties which either had or voted for anti-semitic policies which pauperized religious Jews by insisting that all businesses had to open on Saturdays or Jewish religious holidays or close down. You will need to read how the Polish post Word War I democratically elected government refused to carry out the obligation laid on them to provide the full range of political rights and faciiities promised to the linguistic, religious and ethnic minorities of what became Poland, of which Yiddish-speaking Jews and Ukrainians were the main groups failed by the Poles.
You will also need to read the history of the Polish legislation, passed by the democratically elected parties of the Polish people in 1938 that proposed to strip Poles living for extended periods abroad of their Polish nationality. The vast majority of the Poles thus affected were Yiddish-speaking Jews, and it was done for the express purpose of ridding themselves of Yiddish speakers, as the debates and justifications of this law analysed by historians will show.
The notorious mass deportation by the Nazis of the Polish Jews of Germany which took place at the end of October 1938 was an action taken by the Nazis to ensure that they were not left with hundreds of thousands of hated stateless Polish Jews. My grandfather and uncle were amongst those taken--they were rounded up by the Gestapo in their Berlin home at 3:00am. My father escaped being rounded up by sheer luck and chance but had to spend the rest of his six months in Berlin in hiding.
And what did the Poles do about all these terrified and destitute Jews dumped by the Germans at their border? Why, their new law had come into force. They refused to take them in. They were left in a miserable camp in the no-man's land between the borders. Did these Jews threaten them in any way or say that they wanted to drive the Poles out of Poland and make a Jewish state in Poland? Of course not. But, unless they could find relatives or friends from amongst the Poles prepared to take them in, they were left in misery at the border camp--till the war came and they were taken off to their deaths?
Are the Poles responsible for the evils the Nazis did? No. But they bear some responsibility for their attempts to strip the diaspora Polish-born Jews of their nationalities (my grandfather and uncle had proudly chosen Polish nationality after WWI, although they lived in Berlin--they could have taken Austrian or German nationality.) They were both very proud to be Polish Jews. But in October 1938 it was only because they had cousins in Krakow who came out to help them that they were able to get away from the misery of the camp and live in the cousins' house in Krakow.
The action of the Poles in leaving in misery, destitution and terror those Polish Jews who had become stateless through Polish legislation which was aimed at getting rid of them is an abiding shame, and absolutely inexcusable.
It comes out of a very long history of Polish anti-semitism besides which the help given to Jews by a tiny but noble minority ceases to have all but token significance. The Poles still have some difficulty in dealing with this dreadful history. I hope you do not.
So, Fiyaz, it seems that you do have much further learning to do.But perhaps it is wiser to make sure you are better informed before you post an article which seems so historically under-informed that one could suspect it's biased in favour of a rosy view of the Poles.
And lastly, you conclude in your last sentence with the formula "as a Muslim", which seems gratuitously introduced, and with no further explanation. You may not be aware that on Harry's Place and other internet forums, Jews have come to recognise that this "As A" is a marker of false authenticity or representativeness which is not merited by the quaifications it would need to be representative.
I am a Jew. As it happens I am a proud Galitzianer (southern Polish) Jew whose father was born and lived till he was 22 in a shtetl there. As you may imagine, I have many, many relatives who were murdered (not perished, as if they were so much old rubber) by the German Nazis with the assistance of enthusiastic allies.
I know also that many innocent Poles were persecuted, starved and murdered too. Some had their children stolen. But a great many of those Poles were not innocent in relation to the persecution of the Jews. There are very large numbers, historically authenticated, who betrayed Jews to the Nazi regime. They sadly vastly outnumber those who helped the Jews.
In fact a number of bands of Jews were murdered by Polish Resistance fighters, and the majority of Polish resistance fighters did not help the Jews. That's why the heroic fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto had only tiny numbers of arms at their disposal. The Poles who rose against the Nazis when duped by Stalin and the Soviets into doing so had many, many more arms. There was one specific Polish gentile organization for the aid of the Jews. It included many women amongst its numbers. It is rightly remembered by love and gratitude by Jewish people for its heroic and selfless acts. But they were but a tiny minority who had to do as much to hide their acts from their fellow Poles as they did from the Germans.
But if I wrote "as a Jew" it would not give me authority. Nor would my murdered relatives. I will therefore never use the phrase "as a Jew", because it smacks of claiming something beyond being one individual who should not be taken to be in any way informative about Jewish opinion at large. I could write "as one, possibly unrepresentative Jew". Or I could write, because I think I can demonstrate it beyond doubt, "like most Jews who know their own history and religious tradition".
I write because I have taken the trouble to spend a great deal of time researching this history. That's why I claim the authority to write in as challenging a spirit as I have of what you write here. And I currently do my best to learn of the range and the dominant and minority trends in Muslim opinion in this country and elsewhere. If you care to look up my Twitterfeed "judyk113' you will see that I have greened my portrait. That of itself did not give me authority to write what I did above about the people of Iran, but I did feel that doing my best to follow both the official and the unofficial accounts of what came out of Iran after the election gives me at least the basis on which to claim some reliability for what I wrote.
So, Fiyaz, I'm just as suspicious and sceptical about anyone using the formulation "as a Muslim" as I am of someone saying "as a Jew". It has all to often been a marker of quite a different agenda, and one based on attempts to pass off unrepresentative views as typical or as having an importance beyond their own speaker's presence.
And one other piece of history intervenes in my response to your post. It is the history of the PLO under Arafat setting up some sort of ceremony where they would go and place wreaths at either Auschwitz or the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in mourning for the victims of the Holocaust. It was done at the time when they insisted that they had been made the victims of European guilt for the Holocaust, that European Jews have no connection to Israel or to Jerusalem. I am glad they did not as far as I am aware, invoke Islam in this ceremony, which utterly disgusted me, and I believe the vast majority of the Jews of the world. Of course they had and continue to have a retinue of some thousands of Jews (who would invariably invoke the As A Jew formula) who supported and continue to support those of them who wish to see an end to the State of Israel, and who wish to see all Jews removed from living in the occupied territories.
I hope, Fiyaz, you are sincere in your learning. But for the Jews of Islamic lands, most roads do not lead back to Poland. They lead back to the history of Jewish settlement and migration in those lands and in Israel, going back centuries. And although their relations with their Muslim neighbours were often cordial and rich, and were incomparably greater than those of Jews with the Christians of Europe, they nevertheless faced institutionalized discrimination and humiliation, and sometimes forcible exclusion expulsion and murderous attacks imposed by the Islamic laws under which they lived.
Never forget, indeed. It would be helpful to ensure first that we know every relevant thing we need to remember.
Now Adloyada is proud to publish the first full text of the second, which is believed to predate the first by some years.
The Book of Old Guardian Chronicles
Chapter 1
And was it not told, that in the days of the mighty CyrusPScott, he that succoured those of the Exile of the Tribe of Judah that sojourned in the City of Man-chesta in the land of the Mighty Imperial Empire of the Guardian, that he chose as a wise counsellor the Man of Scientific Renown and Learning, the sage Counsellor of the Hebrews of Man-chesta, Chaim ben Weitzman?
And did he not procure a meeting with the troubled King George the Fifth and his ministers and generals, of the land of England, which paid tribute to the Mighty Imperial Empire of the Guardian, saying, Lo, I have heard that ye lack the precious oil of acetone, without which your brave warriors die day upon day in the Wars of the European Nations, even unto the last man?
Now, lo, here is a mighty and wise man of the tribe of the Hebrews, named Chaim ben Weitzman. If it pleaseth the King, send for him, for surely he will give the King and his household true counsel even in the matter of the precious oil of acetone, which no man hath yet found a way to procure, except by the arts of the cursed Germanim with whom ye are at war?
And King George and his counsellors sent for Chaim ben Weitzman, and spake unto him, saying, our brave warriors die day upon day on the battlefield, for we have no precious oil of acetone to make mighty thunder against the war engines of the Germanim.
And Chaim ben Weitzman said unto them: I am the King's true servant, and also the Lord has spoken through the Emperor CyrusPScott, who hath sent me to you in your time of need, because he is the Guardian of Israel and knoweth that the hearts of we of the Tribe of Hebrews yearn to return to our Promised Land, which is Israel, and not Palestine.
And I will depart and return unto your King's majesty when I have taken counsel of the Lord and made through His guidance precious oil of acetone which needeth not the arts of the Germanim.
And lo! He returned many months later to the Emperor CyrusPScott, and said, the Lord hath blessed my endeavours and I have cruses without number of the precious oil of acetone which I will give to King George. And now, will not the Guardian put in a word for us with the King that he vouchsafe his help unto us in the matter of making a decree that the Hebrews and all the children of Israel that are scattered to all corners of the earth be gathered back into Israel?
For is not the Sultan of the Turkish Lands not now vanquished in battle by the mighty warrior Al-Enby of the Brits of King George who hath taken Jerusalem and standeth at the walls of Zion?
And the Emperor CyrusPScott spake and said, the matter that thou saidest is good. And I shall write letters unto the King and his Counsellors and speak with all who may aid ye in this endeavour, for the Guardian labours to see ye and all of the Tribe of Hebrews return rejoicing to the land of Israel and not Palestine.
For of this, will come good for the Empire of the Guardian, which will wax mightily, and make good profits, and who knows that we might not yet become the Guardian of the Land of England, even in London, and our Chronicles be read by all the sages and wise men, and the soothsayers of the whole land?
And lo, he wrote letters and spake with the counsellors of the wise King. And Chaim ben Weitzman came to London and presented the King with the cruses of precious oil of acetone. And so the warriors of the King went out and with mighty weapons and a strong arm smote the Germanim. And they were sore defeated.
And the Guardian of Israel and the Emperor CyrusPScott and all the people rejoiced.
And King George spake with his counsellors and said, how may we reward this Chaim ben Weitzman, for he hath aided us mightily in this war, and saved the lives of multitudes of our brave warriors. And the Emperor CyrusPScott hath counselled us that Chaim be Weitzman now wisheth with his people of the Tribe of Hebrews to return unto the Land of Israel not Palestine. And mayhap we have made promises to the Tribe of Ishmael and Abdullah, that cometh from the land of Arabia, but yet wisheth for the Land which they call the Land of the Arabs. But are we not minded to give a decree that permitteth this Chaim ben Weitzman and his Tribe of Hebrews also to return to the Land of Israel not Palestine?
And King George had mighty counsellors, wise in the ways of forking the tongue and doubling the cross, and they said unto him, mighty King, may we not send a letter unto the greatest merchant of the Tribe of the Hebrews with words of favour and blessing for the return of them unto the Land of Israel not Palestine and yet also make promises unto Abdullah and Faisal that also they shall have the Land of the Arabs? For are we of the Empire not wise in the ways of making promises that bind all unto us, but delivering them into strife amongst themselves that enables us to extract their precious oils and much else that doeth good unto us?
And the King saw that their words were wise. And lo! A letter was sent unto the great Prince Rothschild, the mighty merchant of the Tribe of the Hebrews that set out what the counsellors had said, and is it not known unto this day as the great Letter of Balfour, which is read with great rejoicing by the Hebrews of the Land of Israel not Palestine, and cursed by the Land of the Arabs, and the Tribe of the Palestinians, and all that are of their camp?
Chapter 2
And after many years and sore troubles, there arose new Emperors at the Guardian that knew not the heart and mind of Emperor CyrusPScott albeit they knew his name, and spoke of being his true inheritors, though in truth they were sworn in heart and mind unto the Empire of the Marxistim, the Sovietim and the Egyptians and all that paid the Sovietim tribute. And of these Emperors, are not the deeds of the Emperor Pet-er-Preston and his counsellors told in the Second Book of the Chronicles of the Guardian?
And now arose the Emperor Rus-Bridga who spoke with careful counsel of great craft, but knew the Guardian of the Sovietim sent out mighty tributes of gold which were sent out to counsellors and scribes, even unto counsellors that were of the Scribes of the Guardian of London, that they might win the hearts of the people of the Kingdom of the Wise Queen Elizabeth unto the cause of the Palestinians not Arabs, for there was much oil to be gained for the Sovietim and also influence on the hearts of the peoples of the world.
And the Emperor Rus-Bridga said, our conscience troubleth us sadly. For do we not feel that we have made this sad thing come to pass, that the Letter of Balfour was given unto the Hebrews through the counsel of the old Emperor CyrusPScott, and we are cursed sorely for it by the Sovietim and all that follow the God of the Marxistim, the BaalMarx?
Now let us therefore deal wisely with these Hebrews that say they are of the Land of Israel, and let us seek the favour of the Marxistim and the losers of the vanquished tribe of Marxistim, for the tributes of the land of the Sovietim are passed, but there is much tribute and may good things that come from the new Empires of the Arabs and of the Tribe of Ishmael.
And he took Seamus, and Ben Whitaker and many others that were skilled at selecting very craftily and with twisted intent from the Chronicles and they and their scribes wrote much evil about the Land of Israel. And the Guardian of London began to prosper with the tribes of the Marxistim and the Princes of the Funds of the Sovereign Wealth were mightily pleased.
But the Tribe of Hebrews in the Land of Israel were sore vexed, and sent many letters and sent scribes that wrote, behold, in the Chronicles is not the truth written of this matter? And lo, you cause our name to stink amongst the Nations of the World. And thou surely knowest that thou publishest vile lies that cause the name of the Guardian, which was once proud, to stink in the land with the curse of anti-semitism?
And the Emperor Rus-bridga and all his scribes said unto the Tribe of Hebrews, now surely we are not cursed with anti-semitism, which is a fearful curse. For we speak only of the evils of the accursed zionism which is not anti-semitism. And lo, have we not appointed the Hebrew Jonathan ben Freedland, the son of a scribe of the Jewish Chronicles, who led the Habonim in his youth, who is a prophet who knoweth and proclaimeth his own genius, and sayeth that our Chronicle of the Guardian publisheth not anti-semitism? And hath not he proclaimed freely that the Guardian is not anti-semitic?
And all of the Guardian were of that counsel, and the hearts of much of the Hebrews of the Kingdom of the Wise Queen Elizabeth, and of the Land of Israel were mightily troubled, and said, what may we do against these slanders and evil decrees that are written against us by these false scribes of the Guardian of London?
Yet, mayhap, there were amongst the Hebrews them that had followed the ways of the Soviets and bowed before the BaalMarx, and some who had received gold, rich praise, chairs in the great academies of renown, and fine robes from the Marxistim, and the coffers of the Arabs and the Marxistim-Palestinian Warriors and their allied warriors of the Marxistim-ANC, even their mighty heroes Man-Dela and Joe, son of Slovo, of the warriors of Unkonto na Sizwe.
And there were also some of them that believed that they had mighty consciences, and were seers, some had not not got over the days of their bar-mitzvah celebrations, and some saw themselves as courageous speakers and warriors, lone voices crying in the wilderness, even though they stood verily amongst thousands that daily uttered the same words in their mouths and wrote them in their letters, which had been written for them first by the Soviets in the Chronicles of the accursed Emperor Stalin and the exiled Prince Trot-ski and their fathers, even unto the days of the Huntsmen of the Okhrana, even the AsAJews of Old of the Band of Yevsekstia and the Bundistim.
And these Hebrews formed Tribes, and they called it them the Tribe of the AsAJews, the Tribe of Jay-Street and the Guardians of the Conscience of the Jews of Independent Voices. And there was a very small tribe that called themselves Neturei Karta, that were but a few hundred in number, that said, all these Hebrews of the Land of Israel are not Jews, but we alone are the true Jews
But in truth, the numbers of all the AsAJews were sore small, and most that were of the Tribe of AsAJews were also enrolled on the list of the Tribe of Jay-Street, and the Guardians of the Conscience of the Jews of Independent Voices.
And they spoke mightily and often in the halls of the Nations and their scribes wrote weekly and even daily in the Chronicle of the Guardian, proclaiming, Lo As A Jew, I say that the Land of Israel is not a true Land of the Hebrews but a Land of Zionists, and it is a thing of the Imperialists, and it hath done and doeth daily vile evil unto the Palestinians, who sit in peace under their fig trees, and trouble the Hebrews not.
And the doings of the Zionists are evil, even as the ways of the accursed Nazim and the dogs of Botha, of the vanquished tribe of the Apartheidites. And, lo, the Land of Israel must be wiped from the map of the nations, and he that sayeth not so shall be accursed.
And the hearts of the many true Hebrews that knew the truth were troubled, and they knew not what to do.
The Duke of Omnium has denied top level NHS management changes are imminent on the day a shocking report has been published about National HaulAir Services flight provision for the elderly.
Omnium is the National HaulAir Service's Second Chief Executive, Executive for Servicing Passsengers, Director of Passenger Announcements, Chief of Grooming Facilities, Director of Public Airport Customer Relations, Master of In-Flight Entertainment, Head of Chief Executive Management, Manager of Aircraft Trading and Director of After-Dark Arts Programmes.
He was interviewed this morning, responding to previous speculation about his repeated flights to Flying Boats based in Corfu owned by Derria Spivchap, the Chief Executive of the Russian Executive Flying Boat Service.
He has angrily denied that he is seeking to obtain Flying Boat privileges from Mr Spivchap for the Executive Board of the National Haulair Service and related secret negotiations about joint Flying Boat privileges for the executives of the Eton Touring Company and the exclusive Bullingdon Flying Company subsidiary, the Bullingdon Very Private Flying Club.
"Mr Spivchap and I share a long-standing common interest in collecting old brass, he said, which we discovered during the time when he was seeking entry for his Russian Private Executive Flight Service to the United European Air Service Brokerage market during the time when I was Commissioning Executive for Trans-European Air Flights.
"While, in line with current flight standards for our passengers, we no longer install brass in our latest National Haulair Service passenger aircraft, the very best old brass in the International Air Haul market is that to be seen in Flying Boats, of which Mr Spivchap has a remarkable collection. We even have a friendly rivalry in presenting brassneck displays.
"Mr Matt Richkid, who has one of the largest collections of family old brass in the world, and has added several outstanding examples of Flying Boats through his shrewd Private Haul Air deals always meets up with us on Spivchap's Corfu Flying Boat to compare and swap our old brass collections.
"He happens to be an old school chum of George Newborn, Finance Executive of the Bullingdon Flying Company, who has a growing interest in collecting and managing old brass and joins us when Mr Richkid visits. But frankly, he's not in our league. And he ruffled a lot of feathers last year by misquoting my praise of Gordon Macavity as "an incomparable flightmaster" to the press as "an incomparable disaster".
The Duke has also brushed aside the speculation that has resulted from his recent move from the Senior Executive Suite in the VIP Arrival Lounge of Heathrow Airport, where he has been sited during the relatively short time since he was granted his Dukedom, to the Senior Executive Suite in the VIP Departure Lounge.
He dismissed speculation that provisions in the new Executive guidelines for members of the VIP lounge to be allowed to renounce their membership of the Lounge and move into the Senior Executive Suites in the Security Lounges are of any significance.
"I have no intention whatsoever of becoming Chief Executive of the National Haulair Service, he said. I am devoting myself in my current roles to improving the flying experiences of hard working passengers, supporting our outstanding Chief Executive Gordon Macavity and making sure the planes fly on time.
Our National Haulair Service is the envy of the world.
We have met our target, a record for the National Haulair Service, of holding fatal air crashes down to just five percent of the total. Our thoughts of course are with the families, and we are constantly setting up new enquiries to identify ways to improve our service. The number of passenger infections arising from inadequately serviced plane seats and undercooked in-flight meals is now below that of any Third World Haul Air Service. The recent survey of disappointing results from our special free flights programme for the elderly has spurred us to improve further. We are today setting up an urgent enquiry which is expected to report in three years' time. We do not rest on our laurels. Our record is the envy of the world.
"Flights are always free from the point of the Passengers' Departure Lounge, and no-one will ever be asked to pay for a ticket at the point of boarding the plane.
"Gordon Macavity is doing a superb job, constantly investing in our National Haulair Service by printing money to buy more planes, employ more pilots and flight attendants and cut down waiting times for free flights.
"Donald Poltroon and his Eton Touring Club Company and their pathetic and privileged premium class passenger cartel at the Bullingdon Flying Company have no alternatives to offer whatsoever, and are trying to keep their plan to make 20% cuts in free flights carefully hidden from passengers. But our passengers aren't taken in by their ruses. And they know that the number of fatal crashes would soar if they were to succeed in securing the new contract for the National Haulair Service.
"We are not surprised that the Eton Touring Club Company's Strasbourg Executive Mr Hardman, who constantly carps about our low 5% fatal crash record, has turned out to be a admirer of discredited West Midlands Conservative Air Race Executive, the late Mr Egot Badsmell, on the very day that another scurrilous report has come out which seeks to smear the proud record of our much-loved National Haul Air Service.
"The continuing huge enthusiasm for our Twitter Microflights #welovethenhs free mini-flights service proves that our passengers know that we at HardLabour are the natural Executive of the National Haulair Service."
Gordon Macavity, leader of the UK National Haulair Service has at last broken his surprising silence on the Libyan transfer issue.
"The decision to upgrade Mr Al-Legman onto an exclusive private jet flight commissioned by the Libyan Al Jamahirya Air Service run by its owner Captain Muamar Al-CrimeLord was the responsibility of the Scottish Haulair Service", he said.
"The decision will have been made by the Scottish Haulair Service in line with their local Primary Charter Tariff guidelines. You will know that the Primary Charter Tariff Director Mr MacPoorskill has identified compassionate grounds on which Libyan passengers found guilty of sabotaging flights, leading to unfortunate fatal plane crashes may be upgraded onto exclusive private jet flights commissioned by Captain Al-CrimeLord.
"This is a matter for the Scottish Haulair Service. I have no further comments to make."
Questioned by hordes of reporters on the significance for Mr Al-Legman's upgrade of the exclusive Flight Passenger Exchange Provision Contract between the UK National Haul Air Service-Libyan Al Jamahirya Air Service for private jet flight upgrades for passengers found guilty of sabotaging flights, Mr Macavity stated, "The decision to upgrade Mr Al-Legman onto an exclusive private jet flight commissioned by the Libyan Al Jamahirya Air Service run by its owner Captain Muamar Al-CrimeLord was the responsibility of the Scottish Haulair Service. It was a decision made by the Scottish Haulair Service. I have no further comments to make."
Pressed further by reporters on the fact that the exclusive UK-Libyan Flight Passenger Exchange Provision Contract is one which covers the Scottish Haulair Service, which is in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of the UK National Haulair Service, so must have involved Mr Macavity in agreeing the upgrade under its terms, Macavity said, "It was a decision made by the Scottish Haulair Service. It falls within their area of responsibility. I have no further comments to make."
Questioned on whether the decision to upgrade Mr Al-Legman had been influenced by the recently signed Aircraft Fuel Contract signed by the UK National Haulair Service with the Libyan Aircraft Fuelwell service owned by Captain Muamar Al-CrimeLord, Mr Macavity said, "That is a most deplorable suggestion. The decision to upgrade Mr Al-Legman was a matter for the Scottish Haulair Service.
"The Aircraft Fuel Contract will enable us to continue to offer all our UK passengers flights which are free at the point of boarding the plane. Our National Haulair Service is the envy of the world. Our passengers will never be asked to pay for a flight at the door of a plane. We have improved our service enormously through huge investment. Flight waiting times are now down to a maximum of eighteen weeks. The emergency air flight service has improved even more. Passengers now have a maximum waiting time of five hours before they board an emergency flight. We have reduced the number of flights which result in fatal crashes to just five per cent, a reduction of seventeen percent since 1997. Our hearts go out to the families. We are working very hard to reduce that further.
"The recent US controversies about the Obama Flight Plan service have resulted in a huge outpouring of spontaneous support from thousands of our passengers, organised by Mrs Macavity, who have taken up the #welovethenhs campaign. So huge has been this spontaneously organized campaign that it even led to an unfortunate fatal crash in the Twitter Microflight Service a week ago. Our hearts go out to the families. However, our passengers continue to flood the Twitter Microflight Service, now back to normal service levels, with their #welovethenhs mini-flights. I have spent many hours with Mrs Macavity reading through the ecstatic comments of the #welovethenhs passengers. Here's an example from a Mrs Trellis of South Wales. It says, "I had a free flight to Paris. My elderly dad is just back from a free flight to Oslo. #welovethenhs." And I can tell you that's absolutely typical of our passengers. We in the UK love our National Haulair Service, financed by careful but ever-increasing spending from our equitably priced progressive direct and indirect tax budget. Even the very poorest in the land will never have to wait more than eighteen weeks for a long-haul flight. Every single flight is free at the point of boarding the plane.
"By contrast, passengers in the US have to pay out in full for tickets before they can board a plane. They will not even be allowed onto an emergency flight unless they can show they have paid in full for a ticket. Families can find themselves faced with bills of thousands of pounds for routine overseas flights. Can you imagine that? What's more they have to choose between dozens of different Haulair Services without knowing that they have a National Haulair Service to fall back on which will never charge for a flight at the plane door. No wonder millions of Americans have never made an overseas flight."
Mr Macavity announced that he would today be meeting Captain Notknowyou, head of the Israel Haulair Service, in a bid to help negotiations over the long standing flight slot disputes between the IHS and the newly formed Palestinian Radical HostAir Service. Despite the continuing internal splits between the RadicalMarxistArmedStruggle and the RadicalIslamistHostageandBomb executive wings of the emerging Palestinian Radical HostAir Service, we are confident that a future flight management plan can be agreed. However, the IHS must first agree to stop taking flight slots which we consider have been internationally allocated to the Palestinian Radical HostAir Service. We are also aware of Captain Notknowyou's concerns about the regrettable threats of the Iranian Islamic PeacefulNuclear Haul Air Service to close down the Israel Haulair Service. However, we insist that this is not a reason for considering a pre-emptive closedown by the Israel Haulair Service of the Iranian Islamic PeacefulNuclear Haul Air Service.
By working together in the International Haulair Quartet, we are working on solving these problems under the inspirational leadership of Obama Flight Plan President Barak Obama and myself. I shall be getting on with the job. I know that hard-working families going through difficult times expect nothing less than that"
Mr Donald Poltroon, the fresh-faced and eager candidate to replace Mr Macavity when the five year contract renewal comes up next year said, "The decision to upgrade Mr Al-Legman was a disgrace. It should not have been done.
"The National Haulair Service is absolutely safe with us. We shall spend just as much money as Mr Macavity and his executives. We will find ways to ensure that we reduce the number of fatal crashes below five percent. And passengers will never have to pay for a ticket at the door of the plane. Our National Haulair Service is a great national treasure which we all love.
"I am confident but not complacent that our Eton Touring Company and its subsidiary Bullingdon Private Touring Flights will be selected by the passengers of the UK when the National Haulair Service contract comes up for renewal. Passengers everywhere have realised that the HardLabour Air Plan has failed miserably and that Mr Macavity has lost the confidence of the nation.
"That is why he has been skulking in the Security Class Lounge of the Kirkaldy Airport for the last four weeks."
I'm fascinated by the way in which the Obama administration is playing up to the "Nation on the March--Scotland puts two fingers up to USA" narrative. They have been seeming to seek to outdo each other in expressing various levels of rage and disgust addressed solely at the Scottish administration, as if they really thought that Alex Salmond, MacAskill and the others really were solely responsible for the release of Megrahi and his repatriation to LIbya.
As I've demonstrated irrefutably in my previous post, the repatriation of Megrahi could not possibly have taken place without the express consent of the UK government. That's because it's explicitly required as a provision of the Treaty which enabled the transfer of prisoners between the UK and Libya, a Treaty signed by Gordon Brown's UK government in November 2008 and ratified by Gordon Brown's UK government in May 2009. There was at that time only one Libyan prisoner in any jail in the UK. Now that Megrahi has returned to Libya, there are none
I've been discussing this point on several heated blog posts centred on the supposed ways in which Salmond, MaAskill and Co exercised their supposed power of transfer. One of the most excited posters (he has a book about to come out) pointed out that the preamble of the Treaty stated that the Scottish government is responsible for the transfer of prisoners in Scotland.
Alas. A preamble in a Treaty has no force whatsoever. Only the specific provisions in the Treaty itself have legal force. A preamble is a political gloss, a statement of intent. And in the world of Treaty-making, it is usually put there to satisfy the political needs of the constituency or constituencies. It is more or less the political equivalent of stating" We believe in Motherhood and Apple Pie.
Whatever the preamble said, the relevant provision required the express agreement of the UK government, and thus Gordon Brown to agree the return of Megrahi.
The Obama administration are not of course either fools or naives. That Obama himself should be unaware of the real powers of a provincial administration and the requirements of Treaties when he's the former editor of the Harvard Law Review and a law professor at the University of Chicago streches credibility beyond belief. Hillary Clinton is equally a woman with a stellar record at Harvard Law School, besides having spent many years as a Senate Legislator.
So why have they not condemned and deplored Gordon Brown's central and decisive role part in a transfer Treaty that only applied to Megrahi? Why have they overlooked the key clause in the Treaty which shows the UK had to agree to the transfer. After all, even if we care to accept the ludicrous notion that the Salmond administration could decided to release Megrahi against the wishes of the UK government, Brown had the power under the Treaty to refuse to agree to Megrahi being repatriated. He could have, for example, insisted that Megrahi was transferred to a UK hospital where he would be kept in secure conditions equivalent to jailing, as was done in the case of such notorious prisoners as Ian Brady, Myra Hindley and the Yorkshire Ripper.
Why has the Obama administration not fulminated against Brown's failure to do this?
Why have they been venting their fury at the dancing monkeys on the organ of Mr Gordon "Macavity" Brown, who's so very conveninently away on his longest holiday ever, and remaining silent about the organ grinder who presided over the made-to-measure for Megrahi Treaty, ratified it and agreed to the transfer provided for in it?
Is this some mysterious form of conspiracy designed to protect Brown? Some unknown quid pro quo involving a chunk of the oil and gas contracts just signed with British companies? I very much doubt it, though such things are not unknown.
But look at the politics of Obama's image, and his administration's image. His carefully constructed halo as the defender of the oppressed. And of course the Head of State of the largest group of the bereaved families and loved ones of the terorist\s victims, the great majority of whom are known to have been bitter opponents of Megrahi's release. The leader of the nation that suffered the murderous attacks of the terrorists crashing planes who killed more than ten times the toll of Lockerbie has been seen to demand justice for victims of terrorism without actually directing his wrath at either the true enabler. Gordon Brown, or the original man who ordered Megrahi to do his disgusting, murderous work.
Sometimes politics is the discourse designed to divert from certain unpalatable and incompatible-with-your-USP self-branding.
In this case Obama sustains his crown as the eloquent-in-righteous anger leader of his people, the proclaimer of the delivery of justice. He diverts attention conveniently not just from a major ally in the current Afghan conflict, but from the fact that he has also studiously refrained from even the tiniest reflection on the fact that Megrahi was the terrorist hit man, but Gaddafi, who sent him, with or without the involvement of other pariah states, has never paid for his role as the instigator, financier and begetter of this horrendous crime. The worst he's got out of all this is a public deploring of the hero's welcome he carefully prepared for Megrahi. That's been called "disgusting". But then how can that be squared with the matching total silence on Gaddafi's role in ordering and setting up the crime in the first place?
Crocodiles everywhere may well be envious of the weeping abilities of Obama and his fellow administration senior media superstars over this tragic and disgusting business.
As for Salmond, MacAskill and the Scottish nationalists, perhaps one could think of what it's like to be a quiet little blogger who's used to around a hundred hits a day. Suddenly, they get an Instalanche and the hit rates go up to 5,000 a day. Then the rest of the internet takes them on, and suddlenly the hits are in the millions. Yes, that's just a tiny glimpse of what it's like to be mice on the political stage who the greatest power in the world chooses to express apparently impotent rage at doings for which you did not actually exercise the real decisions, anyway.
It seemed to start with some normally astute UK political journos and commentators appearing baffled. Paul Waugh of the Evening Standard, one of the sharpest of all, was of all a-Twitter last week about it's being bizarre that the British government chose to deplore the hero's welcome the Libyan government gave to returning released convict Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, whilst remaining silent on the fact that the Scottish government released him to be repatriated in the first place.
Alex Massie, the equally astute Spectator CoffeeHouse resident blogger had run a couple of posts over the previous week in "calm down, dear" mode, ridiculing a range of articles and blogger posts suggesting that the real reason for the release has been the result of the machinations of the UK government, including Lord Mandelson. He has been emphatic that the Scottish government alone had the power to take any decision about releasing Megrahi.
Both the Guardian and The Telegraph ran headlines on 21st August based stating that David Milliband denied that the UK government had been involved in the decision to release Megrahi. Actually, he did no such thing. He said the accusation was "a slur". A slur is actually an accusation of a discreditable or disreputable act. It does not itself make any judgement as to whether the slur is true or not.
Most of the London press this week and weekend has been huffing and puffing at the posturing (or alternatively the moral deficiency) of the Scottish government, as if it had really been able to make the decision on its very own, regardless of whether the UK government agreed or not.
This is absolute nonsense.
For the transfer to happen, there had to be a Treaty between the two national states where the prisoners are incarcerated in place to enable any prisoner to be transferred.
Scotland is a devolved regional government. But it is not an independent nation. It is an internally governing province of the United Kingdom, with the equivalent status of Bavaria in Germany. It does not have a Foreign Minister, even if it does have independent courts, as it had long before the devolved Scottish Parliament came into being. It has no power to make Treaties or agree provisions which are assigned to the nation states which sign them. In other words, it is more of a jumped up Local Authority than a nation-state, however much the titles of First Minister and the posturing about Scotland's quasi independence are played to the galleries on both sides of the border.
So where is the Treaty that allowed Megrahi to be freed and returned to Libya?
It was signed between the UK and Libyan governments on 17th November 2008. Is the number of British prisoners in Libya and the number of Libyan prisoners in Britain so significant as to justify the processes of negotiation and bureaucracy which setting up such a Treaty between states with such radically different conceptions of justice, due process and government must involve? I think not.
Via the link, you can read the Treaty in full on the Foreign and Colonial Office web site. Here's what might be called "the money quote":
A transfer requires the consent of the both States.
The treaty was therefore agreed by the UK government, and the transfer of Megrahi, on the basis of its provisions could only have taken place with the UK government's agreement. It is inconceivable that Gordon Brown would not have been centrally involved in making this decision. He had it in his power to refuse to make the transfer, even if the Scottish Minister agreed to release Megrahi.
Indeed Megrahi's own lawyer is now arguing that it would have been more compassionate, if compassion was the issue, to release him to a hospital facility in the UK, whilst retaining him in custody. This has been done in the past with such high-profile prisoners as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. As several commentators have pointed out, would the Scottish Justice Minister have been so ready to release the Dunblane murderer, Thomas Watt Hamilton, had he not committed suicide and survived to become terminally ill with cancer. I rather doubt it.
What's more, the Treaty did not come into force until it was ratified. This was a process controlled and completed entirely by the UK government. It was ratified by Jack Straw in May 2009.
And we now know that Ian Lewis, a junior minister wrote early in August to the Scottish administration to ask for Megrahi to be released. If you're really into deep Brownian machinations, you might even think it possible that this hapless man, previously sacked by Brown for harassing a civil servant just when he was faiing to show the required loyalty, could be the required sacrificial goat, with Brown denying that he knew of the letter.
There are those who suggest that Blair set it all up back on his lengthy visit to Libya back in 2004. But Brown has never hesitated to overturn Blair decisions where he felt like doing so, including during the time when Blair was still serving as Prime Minister. And all three of the above key decisions, which were really the ones that freed Megrahi, were his responsibility. It is inconceivable that David Milliband or anyone else could have foisted such a decision on him. And we know that he held a substantial meeting with Gaddafi at the G8 Conference. Which happened to be just around the time the Treaty was signed.
Why did the Scottish government play ball? Apart from the fact that they didn't have much choice, why would such a self-aggrandising peacock as Alex Salmond want to pass up the chance to pose as a world statesman? To have gullible or lazy journalists gasp in awe as he postured at putting two fingers up at the USA claiming its legal system allowed for compassion where the US one did not? To save money on keeping Megrahi incarcerated? What was not to like? Unlike Gordon Brown, they may have been too full of the anticipated glory of it to anticipate a backlash that could turn nastier than they anticipated.
For Gordon Brown, it's seemed to be a win-win situation. He gets the lucrative British comanies' oil and gas contracts signed with Libya. Any flak is currently being fired at Salmond and his Justice Minister MacAskill. A typically satisfactory Macavity solution for which Brown is so renowned.
And is it merely coincidental that the release and the resultant flak has started flying just when he has been on his most extended vacation yet? Or could this be yet another manifestation of the Macavity tactic?
Ultimately, as the papers suggest, it could lead to the downfall of Salmond's government In the long term, it will make full Scottish independence more likely. Certainly more was done to present the illusion as reality this week and Salmond and MacAskill played it for all the drama they could wring out of it. MacAskill's speech was read as if he had spent weeks watching YouTube clips of particularly cliff-hanging Oscar awards announcements.
But Brown's potentially got quite an interest in building up an independent Scotland. Tom Bower's scathing and revelatory biography presents him as having a deeply embedded, unshakeable commitment to his native Scotland, and a dislike and distrust of England and London in particular.
He is not so self-deluded as to be convinced that he will still be in power after the next election. It could suit a triumphant Tory party quite well to cut Scotland loose and get rid of a satisfyingly large number of historically Labour and Liberal Democrat seats. One of the highly convenient ways to lose the 10% of seats Cameron has promised to get rid of.
With an independent Scotland and a discredited SNP--even with a coalition of SNP and Labour, what would please the anti-monarchist Brown better than to become the first President of an independent Scotland?
I just hope every politician in Scotland has taken the trouble to read Bower's biography of Gordon Brown very, very attentively.
UPDATE: Reflections on the Obama administration's playing to the Scottish posturing whilst remaining virutally silent on the role of Brown and the specific responsibility of Gaddafii as the organizer and real source of the Lockerbie bombing here.
British journalist and peace activist Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of former British premier Tony Blair who is now an international Middle East peace envoy, shops at a grocery store in Gaza City on September 3, 2008.
Slavoj Zizek is a world-renowned intellectual. He is the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of the Humanities. He was a candidate for and came close to being elected President of Slovenia. Here's the potted bio (I presume it's self-penned) which appears on their web site:
World-renowned public intellectual Professor Slavoj Zizek has published over 50 books (translated into 20 languages) on topics ranging from philosophy and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to theology, film, opera and politics, including Lacan in Hollywood and The Fragile Absolute. He was a candidate for, and nearly won, the Presidency of his native Slovenia in the first democratic elections after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1990. Although courted by many universities in the US, he resisted offers until the International Directorship of Birkbeck's Centre came up. Believing that 'Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians', Zizek aims to promote the role of the public intellectual, to be intellectually active and to address the larger public.
Today, Zizek has published a post on the Guardian's Comment is Free site on the subject of the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The opinions he expresses include anti-semitic lies and recycling of various tropes and evasions routinely used in anti-semitic (as opposed to anti-zionist) discourse on Israel.
Here's the most significant quote which demonstrates the sophisticated way in which he does this:
Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as "the greatest concentration camp in the world".camp in the world". However, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract "prayers for peace" obscene and hypocritical. The state of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact.
He begins apparently innocuously by citing Palestinian references to the Gaza Strip as "the greatest concentration camp in the world" as "a problematic cliche". Zizek's statement can appear to the casual reader to be a rejection of the truth of the term. But of course a "cliche" is not as such a lie. A cliche is usually a particularly hackneyed way of expressing a truth. As such, it is an evasive way of evoking the designation whilst appearing to distance himself from it.
But then look at the next sentence: "in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth".
This statement is a lie. And it is an anti-semitic lie.
Routinely, the words "concentration camp" refer to the concentration camps run by the Nazis either directly or indirectly for the purpose of imprisoning and either preparing for or directly exterminating the Jews and the other designated groups the Nazis set out to murder or otherwise do to death.
Perhaps Professor Zizek meant to say that he is only referring to such concentration camps as are in operation today, such as those of North Korea? He offers no such qualifications or clarifications, but even if he did, it would be a lie even to claim that it is dangerously close to the truth to say that Gaza is a concentration camp of any sort, let alone the greatest in the world.
For a start, let's consider Wikipedia's listing of the characteristics of various forms of Nazi concentration camp:
Labour camps: concentration camps where interned inmates had to do hard physical labour under inhuman conditions and cruel treatment. Some of these camps were sub-camps of bigger camps, or "operational camps", established for a temporary need.
Transit and collection camps: camps where inmates were collected and routed to main camps, or temporarily held.
POW camps: concentration camps where prisoners of war were held after capture. These POW's endured torture and liquidation on a large scale.
Camps for rehabilitation and re-education of Poles: Camps where the intelligentsia of the ethnic Poles were held, and "re-educated" in light of German-Nazi values as slaves.
Hostage camps: camps where hostages were held and killed as reprisals.
Extermination camps: These camps differed from the rest, since not all of them were also concentration-camps. Although none of the categories is independent, and each camp could be classified as a mixture of several of the above, and all camps had some of the elements of an extermination camp, still systematic extermination of new-arrivals occurred in very specific camps. Of these, three were extermination camps, where all new-arrivals were simply killed -- The "Reinhardt Aktion" camps. Three others were concentration and extermination camps altogether. Others were at times classified as "minor extermination camps.
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. defines concentration camp as: a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45.
Similar camps existed earlier, such as in the United States (concentration camps for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s), inCuba (1868–78) and in the Philippines (1898–1901) by Spain under the Restoration and the US respectively[5]. The term finds its roots in the "reconcentration camps" set up in Cuba by Valeriano Weyler in 1897 to quell opposition to Spanish rule in Cuba. During the Second Boer War(1899-1902), the term "concentration camp" was used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa.[6] Ostensibly conceived as a form of humanitarian aid to the families whose farms had been destroyed in the fighting, the camps were used to confine and control large numbers of civilians as part of a scorched earth tactic.
Polish historian Władysław Konopczyński has suggested the first concentration camps were actually created in the 18th century, during Bar Confederation, when Russians organized 3 concentration camps in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for Polish rebel captives, where internees awaited deportation on to Siberia. [7]
Use of the word concentration comes from the idea of concentrating a group of people who are in some way undesirable in one place, where they can be watched by those who incarcerated them. For example, in a time of insurgency, potential supporters of the insurgents are placed where they cannot provide them with supplies or information.
Now, by no stretch of the imagination can Gaza be said to be "dangerously close" to being any sort of concentration camp. Nor even could it be said to be even remotely close to such a designation being legitimate.
For a start, no concentration camp anywhere, ever, at any time has had inmates who are armed with military hardware. Let alone armed with machine guns, grenade launchers and rockets. Let alone regularly having an organised externally independently financed regime which has forces which use those arms to launch attacks on the nation supposedly imprisoning them, as well as on their own opponents. Here's an image taken yesterday of members of the ruling Gazan Hamas regime's fighters engaged in the process of eliminating a rival group of Islamists in Gaza City:
Neither has any concentration camp anywhere in the world ever had a border with another state which includes gates which it is free to open at will. In the case of Gaza, it has a border with Egypt, which it has chosen to either open or shut independently of Israel. On such occasions, Gazans have freely streamed out of Gaza and gone to trade in Egypt.
In any case, it stretches the imagination beyond the credible to suggest that Professor Zizek might have been thinking of the British concentration camps of the Boer War (where women and children starved to death in huge numbers by failures to provide them with food) or any other concentration camp of the past or the present.
Because Professor Zizek then goes on to state that, by what he claims are processes of stealth, the West Bank (not, you note, Gaza) "will become Palestinian-frei". What is this German-derived neologism but an unmistakable analogy to the Nazi policy of eliminating in its entirety the Jewish presence in any area it controlled, which it termed making it "Judenfrei" or "Judenrein"?
Any use of Nazi analogies in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is wholly unjustifiable. Are there any possible circumstances under which the Guardian condones the expression of such views as legitimate or acceptable? Incidentally, I equally deplore and consider unacceptable the use of Nazi analogies and transferred terminology of this kind by either citizens or supporters of Israel or anyone else. That includes the use of the term "Auschwitz borders" in the context of either the 1949 or 1967 borders of Israel (or any other international borders anywhere) and the all too common use of the word "Judenrein" in the context of critiquing Palestinian, Arab and Islamist demands about Jewish residence anywhere in the Middle East. However, one could at least argue that such discourse, deplorable as it is, can be related to explicitly exterminationist/expulsionist discourse as can readily found in the history of certain Palestinian, Arab and Islamist polemics and political programmes about the Jews of Israel or the occupied territories or indeed the wider Middle East. But such advocacy of exterminationism or proposed total ethnic group expulsion is quite appalling enough in its own right not to need the addition of Nazi-specific exterminationist/expulsionist terminology to justify exposing them for what they are.
Accompanying the history of real concentration camps of the past and present is not only unarmed and prisoner status but extreme physical deprivation resulting in huge numbers of deaths through starvation or murder. The image at the head of this post of Lauren Booth, another invoker of the designation of Gaza as a "concentration camp" visiting a very well stocked Gazan shop, staffed by visibly well fed people is just one of a whole series of such images previously featured in this post at Harry's Place.
There are of course many, many other reasons why there is not even remote comparability between Gaza and its continuingly increasing population and the reality of concentration camps, particularly those of the Nazis, but what I've set out so far should be quite enough to demonstrate that the effect of Professor Zizek's discourse is to create a "dangerously close" near equivalence between the policies and practices of the Jewish state of Israel and the Nazi regime which sought to exterminate every last Jew without exception.
Professor Zizek seems to have some form in the matter of using anti-semitic discourse around debates on the Holocaust and Jews as well as on the subject of Israel. In this Guardian post, he appears to have produced a piece of writing which is a disgrace to any academic, let alone a Professor of philosophy proudly claiming "to promote the role of the public intellectual".
Given Israel's unique status as the only Jewish state in the world, and as the home of over forty percent of the world's Jews, and the history of the deliberate mass extermination of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, how can the Guardian have passed for publication a post which so clearly violates these three of its own guidelines?
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