Quote Of The Day

Something for anyone burnt out by the focus on politics for the last week, from 'Scraggs' in the comments under this article at Comment is Free:

Typical that, out of the three of them, Clegg appears as the deep-thinking but slightly bewildered underdog who haplessly allows events to overtake him. Anyway, I'm not even sure why I'm watching Last Of The Summer Wine.

Root Causes Update

India looks likely to execute the surviving culprit of the Bombay massacre, Priyamvada Gopal is upset:

Questions must be asked about the unwillingness of both the Indian and Pakistani states to address the root problems of poverty, expropriation and disaffection that propel mere boys like Kasab into the arms of militias against their own interests.

The root causes that drove the highly educated and well off terrorists to attack the World Trade Center are unspecified. Coincidentally the root causes of terrorism appear to be things that women like Gopal didn't like anyway- Americans, multinationals etc- what a surprise.

Something Rotten.

Who is at fault for the attempt on the life of the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard? Insensitive Danes that's who:

His cartoon depicted the prophet Muhammad in a turban with a stick of dynamite protruding from the top. Muslims failed to see Westergaard's cartoon as satire. Instead, they saw in it a defamatory and humiliating message: Muslims are terrorists.

So naturally terrorism was the only response.

Humiliation is a devastating feeling. But most people who are insulted will accept an apology. If an apology had been forthcoming from the then prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, that probably would have been the end to it – but none came, and the humiliation was compounded.

Why should the Prime Minister of Denmark apologise for someone exercising their freedom to express themselves? Salman Rushdie apologised for the Satanic Verses but fanatics still want him dead.

Three months later several imams packed their briefcases and laptops and booked flights to the Middle East. They carried with them a 43-page document, created by a group of Danish Muslim clerics from multiple organisations. This so-called Akkari-Laban dossier was designed to present their case and solicit support for their outrage. Denmark became an "enemy of Islam" and this resulted in the nation's worst foreign policy crisis since the second world war.

She is missing one important point about the dossier, they included bogus defamatory images of Mohammed that never appeared in any Danish newspaper. In other words the people who made the dossier implicitly acknowledged that the original Mo-toons weren't actually very offensive at all.

Why did the editors of Jyllands-Posten want to mock Islam in this way?

To make a point about freedom of expression.

Danes fail to perceive the fact that they have developed a society deeply suspicious of religion. This is the real issue between Denmark and Muslim extremists, not freedom of speech

!?

The free society precept is merely an attempt to give the perpetrators the moral high ground when actually it is a smokescreen for a deeply rooted prejudice, not against Muslims, but against religion per se. Muslims are in love with their faith. And many Danes are suspicious of anyone who loves religion.

When the people who love their religion use it as an excuse to attempt murder the suspicions don't seem to be unreasonable.

Where exactly does the Guardian manage to find all these Danish citizens and residents who are such complete doormats?

How Hard Can Driving A Red Truck & Pointing A Hose Be?

This seems rather patronising:

It is (to put it mildly) far from clear that fire departments are compelled by necessity to place a heavy weight on multiple-choice exams when making promotion decisions.

Yeah because unlike journalists ( or whatever it is you call someone who rewrites political propaganda so it can appear in newspapers) fire fighters never have any cause to have to make tough decisions under pressure.

This is the principle expressed in the Dilbert cartoons by the pointy haired boss that anything he doesn't understand must be easy.

The Horror Of Racism In Modern Britain.

The bonds of racial oppression vary from country to country, in South Africa it was Apartheid where black people were officially second class citizens, in antebellum South black citizens were denied the vote and subjected to mob violence.

In the UK today there is also vicious oppression against the black population as Joseph Harker explains:

The struggle to find greeting cards with black faces on them is a reminder that discrimination is still rife in the UK

Truly he is the Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela of our times.


Update: What makes the article even funnier is that Harker's mother is white! One commentator, "Beaton the Donis" pictures the scene:

Joe: Here you go mum, happy mother's day!

Ma Harker: Thanks son. What a lovely card. Who's this on the front?

Joe: It's supposed to represent you mum.

Ma Harker: But she's... black?

Joe: And so are you mum.

Ma Harker: Um, no, Joe, I'm white. Your father is black.

Joe: Sorry mum, but I'm a black man, and you're my mum, so therefore you must be black.

Ma Harker: Um, okay Joe... you got me a present as well!

Joe: Sure did. Afro hair products.

Ma Harker: Oh for fu...

Nutters.

The Guardian features a piece by Ian Buruma about Asian anti-semitism, a strange phenomena seeing as there aren't any major Jewish populations in East Asia and there are no historic religious antagonisms towards Jews.

Such conspiracy theories are not rare in Asia. Japanese readers have shown a healthy appetite over the years for books such as To Watch Jews Is To See the World Clearly, The Next Ten Years: How to Get an Inside View of the Jewish Protocols, and I'd Like to Apologise To the Japanese – A Jewish Elder's Confession (written by a Japanese author, of course, under the made-up name of Mordecai Mose). All these books are variations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian forgery first published in 1903, which Japanese came across after defeating the Czar's army in 1905.

The article itself is interesting enough but the comments are something else:

• JohnMalkovich4

  09 Feb 09, 9:41am (about 1 hour ago)

  Ian

  Why do you think Asian people are antisemitic, is it genetic ?

  This is the second article in a week that insists there is no such thing as a Jewish conspiracy. It must be true then.

• Elhaam

09 Feb 09, 9:52am (about 1 hour ago)

So what explains the remarkable appeal of Jewish conspiracy theories in Asia?

Conspiracy theories in Asia? Where are Palestine, Israel, almost all Arab countries are located? In Asia and not Europe or America! There is no need for conspiracy theories any more, the world is not as blind and ignorant as it was 10 years ago.

The answer must be partly political. Conspiracy theories thrive in relatively closed societies

Thanks to the Internet, there is no more closed societies. The whole world can see and hear what is going on around all the corners of this world. The Gaza onslaught was brought into everyone's living room after the Christmas/boxing day holidays. Nice way to start the Christians New Year, Thank you Israel.

• Randywade

  09 Feb 09, 10:06am (54 minutes ago)

  When Dr. Mohammed was Prime Minister of Malaysia, a person holding an Israeli passport could not legally enter Malaysia. Israel, along with South Africa, N. Korea, and others, was considered a rogue state. Too bad other governments didn't follow Malaysia's example. To despise injustice is not to be antisemitic.

BoredWith119

09 Feb 09, 10:17am (43 minutes ago)

SpursSupporter 09 Feb 09, 9:54am

Do you mean "Some of the people at the highest levels of government and business happen to be Jewish"?

Yes and they facilitate Israel's aims very effectively - look at the impunity this thuggish state can attack its neighbours and slaughter thousands without a peep from the US. Look also at the massive flow of funds from the US to Israel to keep that country's basket case economy afloat.

• MilesSmiles

  09 Feb 09, 10:28am (32 minutes ago)

  And a recent article in a leading Filipino business magazine explained how Jews had always controlled the countries they lived in, including the United States today.

  Maybe they saw the shameful vote in Congress in support of the Gaza massacre. Or maybe they read about Olmert's phone call to Bush. Or maybe they just picked up a copy of Mearsheimer and Walt's book.

  Point is, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to explain this. It's all out in the open, but no less distasteful for all that.

Shameless Bilge.

Shameless Milne decides to apply his vast intellect and deep understanding of world affairs to Latin America. Joy.

I would have just commented at the Grauniad's site but as is traditional they are furiously censoring criticism of Milne but instead I'll do a partial fisking here.

On 9 October 1967, Che Guevara faced a shaking sergeant Mario Teran, ordered to murder him by the Bolivian president and CIA, and declared: "Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man." The climax of Stephen Soderbergh's two-part epic, Che, in real life this final act of heroic defiance marked the defeat of multiple attempts to spread the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America.

Actually his last words were "Don't shoot. I am Che Guevara. I am worth more to you alive than dead"

But 40 years later, the long-retired executioner, now a reviled old man

Reviled by whom? Certainly not the Bolivian peasants who were only too glad to help get rid of the T-Shirt salesman.

Teran was treated as part of a programme which has seen 1.4 million free eye operations carried out by Cuban doctors in 33 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. It is an emblem both of the humanity of Fidel Castro and Guevara's legacy, but also of the transformation of Latin America which has made such extraordinary co-operation possible.

You know if I wanted to highlight the "humanity of Fidel Castro" I'd keep quiet about his involvement in Africa.

The seeds of this Latin American rebirth were sown half a century ago in Cuba. But it is also more directly rooted in the region's disastrous experience of neoliberalism, first implemented by the bloody Pinochet regime in the 1970s

The Pinochet regime was bloody, although considerably less so than Castro's regime. Secondly if 'neoliberalism' is so disastrous how come Chile is so much wealthier than the rest of Latin America now? Back in the 1950s Cuba was richer than Chile so if you want to compare their current status we can see which philosophy works best.

Cuba, famous for first world health and education standards - with better infant mortality rates than the US - in an economically blockaded developing country.

Cuba's literacy rates and infant mortality figures were always very good long before the arrival of Castro. In fact before Castro Cuba's infant mortality figures were the 12th best in the world compared to around 30th best today. Does Shameless want to guess as to who established Cuba's education system?

Less well known is the country's success in diversifying its economy since the collapse of the Soviet Union

That's a nice euphemism for promoting child sex tourism.

I must admit I'm a little bit surprised that Seamus Milne is such a avid fan of 'Che'. What on earth can he see to admire in an over privileged and somewhat dim radical who used the poor as an excuse for promoting his extremist ideas....

Not A Fanatic.

Inayet Bunglawala complains in the Guardian about being slandered by the Daily Express. He has won a libel case against them and it is clear that the Express did not report his words accurately so that is fair enough. However the subtitle makes a more general complaint that he was unfairly portrayed as a 'fanatic'. This isn't libellous, this is a statement of the obvious, as his wiki page says:

In January 1993 Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, a satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman "courageous." After Abdel-Rahman's arrest on charges of masterminding the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in July that year, Mr Bunglawala guessed that it was only because of his "calling on Muslims to fulfill their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere". Five months before the September 11, 2001 attacks, Bunglawala also circulated writings of Osama bin Laden, whom he called a "freedom fighter", to hundreds of Muslims in Britain.^[7]

Whilst his praise for Bin Laden was before the World Trade Center attack it was after Al Qaeda had carried out many other attacks including the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which left hundreds of people dead. This doesn't seem like the sort of stuff that a moderate would say.

Viking Rampagers Not Good Law & Order Role Models.

why is it that Finland, Sweden and Norway in particular, have much lower rates of imprisonment than other European countries?

Don't know, probably because they are populated by earnest Nordic types who believe criminals need to be understood. I'm not sure why we should consider them to be role models in crime prevention though, Finland has the highest murder rate in Western Europe, Sweden has the most crimes per capita in Western Europe. Norway is arguably a low crime country but a one out of three success rate suggests that the Nordic model isn't better than the system we already have.

Life Imitates Art.

Liberal Larry at Blame Bush a couple of weeks ago:

With the economy collapsing all around us, I decided to give my dear, sweet Grandmother a call today to see how she was holding up.

"HOW YA DOIN, YA OL' BAT? HOW'S YOUR RETIREMENT NEST EGG HOLDING UP?"

There was no reply, but I could hear the dried up ol' hag wheezing like an asthmatic terrier.

"I GUESS JOHN MCSAME REALLY DID A NUMBER ON YOU, DIDN'T HE?" I pressed her.

"How does John McCain have anything to do with what's going on with the banking system?" Grandma finally spoke up. Too bad it was just another stupid Repug talking point.

"JOHN MCSAME VOTED WITH BUSH 90% OF THE TIME!!!!" I politely reminded her.

"And exactly which bills did he vote with Bush on that are responsible for the current economic downturn?"

You can always tell when the cons have been pre-programmed by their talk radio masters, because they'll question everything you say as if they actually have the ability (and the right) to debate you on your intellectually superior level.

Victoria Floethe at Comment is Free today:

Dealing with one's parents' troglodyte political views can be an exasperating business. But this campaign, perhaps because of its endlessness or because of its increasingly high stakes — the economy melting down or the prospect of Sarah Palin a heart beat away from the presidency — may have made many families more than ordinarily testy about the race.

"I get enough spam as it is, without having to weed through additional emails from family members to determine whether or not they are worth my time. The jokes and cute kittens emails are OK, but please discontinue the forwarding of political and religious emails," my brother wrote my mother earlier this year, precipitating several rounds of back-and-forth recrimination in our family.

......

What if you find yourself having to decide: my politics or my family? And having to conclude that these people who I've mostly cherished are cretins?
......
"Is your mother a complete moron?" Asked my New York boyfriend as a I tried to describe my frustrating and confounding conversations. Family pride briefly won out over political sense, rousing me suddenly to attack the boyfriend and defend my moronic mother.

Her article is subtitled "My mother loves Sarah Palin more than she loves me". To be honest I'd imagine she would like syphillis more than her obnoxious daughter.

How Aboot Those Canucks?

As has been noted elsewhere, the right has won at least one of the big North American elections. Canada is just as important as the USA honest. Anyway, the Canadian left appears to have learnt the art of graciousness in defeat from Ken Livingstone's supporters earlier this year:

Our prime minister, Stephen Harper, a strange man with an awkward gait, an absence of social skills, and the dress sense of that guy at the back of the hardware store who sorts nails for a living

I wonder what it is she doesn't like about him though:

Harper, the Conservative PM, is a rightwing extremist, although he doesn't suck up like Cameron. He is an anti-choice, pro-prison, poverty-ignoring, food-safety-privatising, arts-ridiculing, Afghanistan war-loving, cowboy hat-wearing guy.

Fantastic, can we have him over here too?

Sorry Mrs Blakelock, Your Husband Has Been Attending An Uprising.

Marc Wadsworth writes at Comment is Free about some fringe political movement he was involved with in the 1980s:

None of the movement's achievements would have been possible without protest and agitation. The uprisings that occurred in the early 1980s in Brixton, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere acted as a wake-up call to a society that was either indifferent or hostile to the demands of disenfranchised and disadvantaged black people.

"Uprisings", nice!

I must remember that word the next time I want to excuse racially inspired violence.

Update: Wadsworth also says:

Furthermore, racial inequality in education, employment and the justice system still exists.

This is very true, the hindu, chinese & sikh cimmunities are all far less likely to unqualified, unemployed or in prison. Go and let Wadsworth know what you think about him.

Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!

Over at CiF, Robert Reiner uncovers the person who is really responsible for Ian Blair's downfall.

So yet another thing to thank the Iron Lady for.

'The prime culprit is the neoliberalism launched by Reaganomics and Thatcherism. This generated enormous criminogenic pressures, because of the social tsunami flowing from unemployment and inequality, and the egoistic amoral culture with which it went hand-in-hand: economic and moral laissez-faire'.

??????

Verbally Raping A Nutter.

There is a new* femiloon on the prowl at the hallowed pages of Comment is Free, a woman with just one name, Bidisha. She's impressive and if she keeps up this consistency of writing she may surpass Cath Elliott or even Julie Bindel.

She claims to have witnessed four examples of men harassing women in public in the last three days and that this is typical. I haven't seen any examples of this is three months and I frequently follow women surreptitiously, as my many restraining orders demonstrate, so I would have spotted any weirdos out and about. Her claims stretch credibility but can't be disproved. After all if the oppression of Julia Bindel's imaginary friends demonstrates society's misogyny then why should it be different for Bidisha's?

If your going to make up bollocks it is best to present it in the form of personal anecdotes that cannot be verified, so you can make statements like:

This endemic harassment of women is verbal rape.

In the sense that 'verbal' means 'not'. Trivialising rape by redefining it to mean something else is another common theme of people like her. When she does produce facts that can be verified they are obviously untrue:

We live in a country in which domestic violence is the single biggest killer of women

How can anyone not see that this is absurd? Is there some school where you get to learn feminist mathematics, where what matters is not whether the numbers add up but how strongly one believes in them? How does she respond to the critics of her ideas?

Yet any woman who points out that misogyny is the world's driving force is ripped down in a way that is itself transparently misogynistic.

Of course.

* New in the sense that I hadn't spotted her before.

Disagreeing With Moonbat Violates International Law.

George Moonbat claims that former American ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton should be arrested for breaking international law when he visits the Hay-on-Wye book festival. About 6- comments in one of the commentators asks:

"John Bolton was not an elected politician - his most senior position was 18 months (or so) as UN ambassador. What did he do there that was illegal ?".

Good question, because even if you accept that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime perpetrated by Chimp-McHitlerburton in order to steal oil then it is still hard to see what crime John Bolton has committed, he did not plan ot execute the invasion. All the specific examples of Bolton's perfidy that Monbiot gives come down to John Bolton having different opinions to George Monbiot. For instance he cites Bolton's negotiation of the end of an arms control treaty with Russia, the treaties themselves were never signed on the basis that the could never be repealed, but in the hands of the far left this is a violation of international law.

Laws are supposed to be an agreed set of rules and principles by which people can adjust their behaviour to stay legal, in the hands of the far left 'law' is a series of elephant traps by which political opponents can be ensnared and silenced for doing things that nobody was aware was illegal. These people seriously wonder why the United States doesn't sign up to the International Criminal Court.

Martin Jacques

Is Martin Jacques the most pompous, ignorant and degenerate writer in Britain today? Based on his latest column sucking up the Burmese Junta I would have to say that he is a contender.

A Race Nut Watches Match Of The Day.

Dumbjon is unimpressed with the latest Martin Jacques racism-in-sport article that he churns out regularly. This time it's about Ian Wright's resignation from Match of the Day complaining that he was being treated like a 'comedy jester' for reasons that escape me. There's not much to add about this particular one.

So how does he manage to detect racism so frequently? Normally he will find a relatively small number of non whites in a particular field and then expand from there. Sometimes his methods of doing this are a tad unscientific.

In a column about Lewis Hamilton he observes:

Apart from the Japanese, virtually every face in the paddock, let alone on the starting grid, was, until recently, white. This is hardly surprising. The more expensive and/or exclusive a sport, the whiter it tends to be: the fact almost has the force of a law. That is the main reason why the Rugby World Cup, the Pacific islands excepted, was so desperately white, the Springboks included.

If you ignore the non white participants then the ethnic make up of the participants does indeed seem overwhelmingly white. Who knew?

War What's It Good For?

Whilst I'm on the subject of western leftists who have man crushes on Latin American demagogues, there is this article about US involvement in Latin America particularly Colombia and Ecuador, by someone called Hugh O'Shaugnessy. He asks:

The incident, in which at least 21 members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) were killed, has had international repercussions. What use are armies in a region like Latin America?

The answer is in the question, killing marxist terrorists is a pretty good use of an army.

Racist Traffic Accidents.

In a tract on racial inequality in London, Cif contributer Claudia Webbe writes:

Recent research highlights that BME groups make up a significant proportion of the 51% inner London children living in poverty. For Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups, this reaches 69%, and 33% of people accepted as homeless in London were from BME groups.

Black African and black Caribbean children are still twice as likely to be casualties in road traffic accidents as their white counterparts.

Let's run over more white kids! OK let's not, but I'm struggling to see what point she is making, is she seriously suggesting that drivers are hitting more black kids because they are racist?

Quote of the Day.

Inayat Bunglawala writes:

An alcohol-fuelled attack on a Christian priest in east London has stirred up more Islamophobia

You see who the real victims are here!

Via