Melanie Phillips had always been a big fan of Ed Husain, the former Hizb-ut-Tahrir activist turned critic of Islamism. Ed has never been a fan of Mad Mel buts she was nevertheles a cheerleader. Now that Ed has done the shocking act of expressing sympathy with Gazans, Melanie Phillips the Spectator blogger, whose freely peddled conspiracy theories on Barack Obama were a great source of embarrassment to the magazine, has declared that she is no longer a fan. I doubt Ed will shed a tear.
Both Steve M and bananabrain keep saying rather than taking sides we should talk about how peace can be achieved. I agree. But the starting point for peace has to be be the agreement that bombing the hell out of civilians in Gaza, whilst starving them thanks to blockades, is not a starting point. The New York Times reports:
Israeli officials are coming under increasing pressure to ease conditions for civilians, with tight supplies of electricity, water, food and medicine worsening shortages in an area already largely sealed off from the outside world. While Israel on Wednesday refused a 48-hour cease-fire suggested by the French to allow critical supplies into Gaza, it has been sensitive enough to the ever-louder complaints to say it will do all it can to allow in supplies.
The FT’s Gideon Rachman wrote an article. It got ‘Drudged’. He writes about the experience on his blog. In it, he says:
1) There is an unbelievable amount of anger and hatred out there - directed at everything from the UN to big business to Barack Obama. These people can read, but they cannot think.
…
3) There are a lot of people who believe not only that global warming is a hoax - but that it is actually a conspiracy. The fact that the most influential reports on climate change have been produced by an intergovernmental panel (IPCC) - sponsored by the UN - fuels this theory. The idea is that the UN is perpetuating a climate-change hoax, to provide an excuse to impose a world government on America. I’m all part of it apparently.
Earlier, I’d be annoyed. But now I think that despite their hysteria, the global warming deniers have lost all political support. They probably revel in the view that no serious politician in the major English speaking world: UK, USA and Canada even Australia, subscribes to this bullshit anymore, but the fact is the battle is over. The war is won, and I’m happy. These people are politically irrelevant. Soon they’ll be as regarded with as much contempt at the 9/11 ‘troofers’, as the case should be.
“Film-style age ratings could be applied to websites to protect children from harmful and offensive material, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has said.”
I asked you lot last week to suggest counter-intuitive subjects for an article I should write about. Trying to avoid anything political and important was difficult, so I came up with: How I grew up on the Nancy Drew series. Oh and Hardy Boys. And… *sob* Jeffrey Archer.
You don’t even have to say it…
So, nutjob President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad will be delivering Channel 4’s alternative Christmas message and a whole bunch of people are upset. So far so predictable.
I don’t burn a candle for Ahmedinejad - he is clearly a tyrant and a racist. But there’s two fronts on which I find arguments against this C4 stunt a bit hypocritical.
1) The first is this threat that Channel 4’s funding should be cut or curtailed because of this. BBC News reports:
Conservative MP Mark Pritchard, a member of the all-party media group, said: “Channel Four has given a platform to a man who wants to annihilate Israel and continues to persecute Christians at Christmas time. “This raises serious questions about whether Channel 4 should receive an increased public subsidy for their programmes.”
Criticise Channel 4 all you like, but I find it fundamentally undemocratic that a broadcaster should be threatened financially for doing things the majority don’t like.
Dave Hill asks some good questions of the decision by Boris advisor Anthony Browne’s to change his mind on issues around immigrants:
This leaves me in much the same place as I already was with Browne. If he really wrote those pieces - under Boris Johnson’s editorship - simply to wind people up, what does that say about his integrity? Furthermore, articles like those do not really “provoke debate” at all. Rather, they polarise opinion, raise the temperature and lend intellectual respectability to a poisonous and ignorant strand of public sentiment that is fostered by hard right newspapers like the Daily Mail and from which the far right profits gleefully. And this affair has yet to touch on other works by Browne that have had the same effect.
If, on the other hand, Browne really did go through a sort of crazy but temporary phase in which he felt a powerful urge to loudly disavow his former liberal-leftism, it doesn’t say much for his consistency. And his point about The Observer doesn’t follow: under the editorship of Roger Alton - now running the increasingly Tory-friendly Independent - such trashing of supposed “PC” orthodoxies was commonplace. Browne was part of a sort of coven of Observer writers who “saw the light” in similar ways, some aiming particular ire at one Ken Livingstone.
All in all, a very odd business. Browne’s regrets may be genuine and his apology sincere. He may have a great deal to offer. But is he, shall we say, reliable?
Not really good for his reputation is it? What will Nick Cohen say, who recently praised him for his no-nonsense attitude towards political correctness, not long after criticising him for holding the same attitudes. It’s all getting a bit confusing around here.
Shministim means “twelfth-graders” in Hebrew. Military service is mandatory after high school for young Jewish Israelis. The Shministim are Israeli youth who refuse to serve in the army because it enforces Israel’s 40-year occupation of the Palestinians.
While a number of Shministim letters have been written in the past (read about the first letter sent to Prime Minister Golda Meir here ), about one hundred youth have signed the current 2008 Shministim letter which articulates the basis for refusal.
Because of their principled refusal to serve in an occupying army, youth who sign the letter face jail terms in Israeli military prisons. Terms range from 21 to 28 days; those who refuse to wear a military uniform while in jail are sent to solitary confinement for the duration of their term.
Yes, miracles can happen! Pilger actually managed to write an article about Barack Obama without using a racial slur. This week’s New Statesman carries an article saying the same as what he did a few weeks ago. No mention of a Zionist conspiracy though, this time his object of ire is the appointment of Hillary Clinton. Oh and no usage of ‘Glossy Uncle Tom’ either, like he did in January. On Obama, he’s still talking rubbish, but it’s an improvement I guess.
Anthony Browne, an advisor to Mayor Boris Johnson, has told the Guardian that all the earlier stuff he wrote about immigrants wasn’t really what he meant to say:
Browne told Arnold: “Your concerns about me are understandable but misplaced. Accuse me of bad journalism, but not something that is not in my heart.”
He added: “I want to assure you that my policy advice to the mayor will be based on the following principles: support for diversity, opposition to racism and other forms of discrimination, support for immigrants and immigrant communities and support for equality of opportunity. I invite you to judge me by these standards, not by what I may have written some years in the past.”
Browne started his new £124,364 role as director of policy to the Conservative mayor, who has a duty to promote community cohesion in the capital, in October.
Bullshit. Putting Browne in charge of community cohesion is like putting a snake in charge of looking after babies. What about all the stuff he wrote about Muslims, was that a joke too? Did he not really mean it? Or is it that we shouldn’t believe anything bigots like him write in magazines like The Spectator? Maybe Melanie Phillips is joking too. Maybe she doesn’t really believe what she writes either, and is simply trying to provoke a debate.
Browne doesn’t even have the courage of his convictions to stand by what he wrote earlier. If he ever returned back to journalism, what credibility will he have now?
As Matt Seaton points out, I’m making one of the four initial audio podcast documentaries for Comment is Free/Guardian. It will be about the high instance of suicide rates among British Asian women.
I would have made this into two posts but hey, why not combine them?
1) Tariq Ali says on CIF that Gordon Brown, “should accept Britain’s responsibility for encouraging terror attacks rather than pointing the finger of blame at Pakistan.”
There’s only one problem with this - that even if we didn’t go into Afghanistan and Iraq - 9/11 would have still happened. Furthermore, terrorist attacks in India would still carry on as they have been. So while I agree that the two badly fought wars and occupations exacerbated the terrorist threat, it didn’t create them. Ali’s article is abysmally one-sided for a man who hates the religious nuts as much as me.
So a riot broke out between inmates at Aylesbury young offenders jail, and the police were brought in. Now an investigation is being launched.
There’s no information about the racial makeup of inmates or rioters, but because it was during Eid celebration (which may have been taking place separately), various newspapers have dubbed it an ‘Asian riot’. That’s what you call a smart press eh? But The Scum newspaper gets top prize for headlining it: ‘Prison cops in five-hour Muslim riot‘, without much evidence on the assertions. More at 5cc on this story.
Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a “federal cap and trade system”, a massive “carbon tax”, designed to reduce America’s CO2 emissions “to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050″. Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.
Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage “clean energy” sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing “18 gigawatts of installed capacity”, only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.
Thank god that Obama is an environmentalist. George Bush, as Newsweek wonderfully pointed out once he was elected, was not only a nutjob denier but actively obfuscated the data to suit his own fantasy-world and oil interests. In the Guardian last week, Chris Goodall nailed these 10 big energy myths around green technologies - it’s worth reading.
It’s amusing that while in America the climate change denialists are being killed off thanks to active rebuttals by scientists, here we still have attempts by right-wing rags like the Daily Mail and Telegraph to keep screaming denial. When will it end?
Press TV, a 24-hour English language news channel, is set to give British viewers a genuine alternative to the western establishment consensus when it launches on Sky on December 1. The broadcaster, whose headquarters is in Tehran but which has bureaux in all major world capitals, will go out on Sky Channel 515 adding to its global footprint via a dozen other satellites and its website. Press TV offers in-depth analysis of news and current affairs especially focusing on the Middle East.
…
Press TV has signed a number of politically diverse and high-profile presenters including MPs George Galloway and Derek Conway, broadcast personalities Nick Ferrari and James Whale, and political journalists Andrew Gilligan, Yvonne Ridley and Lauren Booth.
I’ve been asked to come on Al-Jazeera English tonight at 9:30pm to talk about the Mumbai bombings (they want a British perspective)… which is in advance of a Question Time Extra debate at 11:30pm on BBC News 24, which I suspect might also focus on the Mumbai bombings now.
I’m going to try and pull together some thoughts on what this means for India and Pakistan, having written about their approach to terrorism recently for CIF while I was travelling through those countries.
Obama has barely been elected, and John Pilger can reliably be called upon to throw out the first far-left article accusing him of being an Uncle Tom. Obama is a stooge don’t you know! (via Olly’s Onions)
And isn’t Obama aware that, “the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class.” After all, the guy couldn’t have done it on his own back and defeated two of the most powerful campaign machines. It’s all a Zionist plot see, there’s too many Jews hanging around Obama. Jeez. Bring back George Bush, at least Pilger was happy then.
Good to see the far-left hasn’t lost any of its stupidity. I think what really annoys the hell out of Pilger is that Obama has built the largest grass-roots movement in modern American political history, one more led by the people than the far left has ever managed to create. Marxists claim to speak for the masses but it must surely be a bit annoying that they’ve never managed to find so many volunteers or be so democratic as political movements.
The Independent wrote an editorial on Monday arguing that ‘Censorship is not the answer’, in response to the news, highlighted by Rumbold below, that: “news outlets should be prevented by law from reporting stories the Government judges to be against national security interests.” The paper even went as far as comparing it to 42 days legislation.
Let me explain what is actually going on here. The secret service, police and Home Office are supposed to have established a protocol in publicly talking about terrorism related raids and arrests. This came after criticism that various agencies were leaking information about raids to the media to further their own agenda. Anyone remember the idiotic rumours in the national press when Forest Gate raids took place? There have been more since, “terror in the skies” etc, and the alleged plot to kill a Muslim soldier. Various papers including the Telegraph and Sun have even had to pay out for calling people terrorists when they weren’t.
“Britain’s security agencies and police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall.
The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national security.”
The existing, voluntary system works pretty well. Nor would such stringent rules necessarily make Britain safer, as surely the security services benefit from scrutiny. Oh, and does anyone believe that these powers would only be used for national security matters, when we have seem how anti-terrorism acts have been used?
The Washington Post has a brilliant article about Rashid Khalidi, the US professor that McCain has used to try and smear Barack Obama. McCain has now taken to playing the anti-semitism card further by calling him a ‘neo-nazi’, which will no doubt play well with the base but is an example of how deranged McCain actually is. If the US elects this man in 48 hours, we are even more screwed.
According to his biggest cheerleader Melanie Phillips of course, the “mass hysteria” surrounding Obama has apparently not taken into account the polls, because: “Insofar as the American public has managed to obtain some of this suppressed information, it has been delivered by the Western Resistance comprising internet journalists, Fox News and talk radio.” — ahh yes, the conspiracy of the free media to help Barack Obama. The lunacy is in full flow. It’s also nice to note that Harry’s Place has finally decided to remove their link to Mad Mel’s blog. About time.
The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.
This is only days after an endorsement by the Financial Times. And yet the Republicans are hilariously trying to tag him ’socialist’. Anyway - 5 days to go!
There’s no doubt that the current witchunt against BBC presenters was in part exacerbated by the right-wing press seizing this morsel of bad BBC press like a rabid pack of hounds. The rest of it is just the general public’s hankering for a good old self-righteous lynching. But what was the crime that ignited this moral rage? Joking about an old man’s suicide? Talking of one’s sexual partner in pejorative and sexist terms (and making a point that it was consensual. And here’s us thinking he’d gone and raped her). Or was it the sympathy for a man whose honour had been violated via a sexual encounter with a female relative? What disgusted me about the Brand-Ross prank, but not enough for me to call for their dismissal, was its underlying misogyny. And it seems the complaints were in tandem with this. So many people were outraged because they sympathised not so much with his granddaughter but with Sachs himself.
Worryingly, even the left-wing press has taken this line. Peter Tatchell surprised me when he said in the Guardian:
It is not as if Baille is some innocent convent girl. She admits she slept with Brand and she works as a “burlesque dancer” in a group called Satanic Sluts. Yet she claims Brand’s jokes have damaged her public image and hurt her feelings. Oh please!
So because she’s not ashamed of her sexuality, we can talk about it in pejorative terms, she’s fair game. Had she been an ‘innocent’ virgin, we should presumably call for blood when her honour is violated. I, for one, am outraged.
Whilst many of us deplore the way in which the tabloids act on occasions, we can at least console ourselves with the fact that our press is one of the freest in the world. We have a wide range of newspapers, TV channels and blogs to choose from, and even the BBC, though paid for through tax, is at least independent in the sense that the government does not control its world view (not that it needs to). Yet a new report from Reporters Without Borders ranks the UK only 23rd in the world for press freedom (up one place from last year), behind a number of Eastern European countries and level with Namibia. The USA does even worse, finishing 36th (albeit up from 48th), one place behind France, which traditionally has had an image of a restricted press. India also did worse then I would have thought, finishing only 118th (up from 120th). Looking at the criteria for measurement, I suspect that our restrictive libel laws had something to do with our relatively lowly position:
A strong reason why the right wing media machine (Fox News, Talk Radio, Blogs) developed into a powerful force over the past decade is because they tapped into a feeling that the mainstream media had a liberal bias. I think that especially when it comes to social issues, there was/is at least a grain of truth to the allegation. Despite doing their best to maintain their journalistic integrity, people who have been to top universities and then worked in the big cities are likely to be pro-choice and pro gay-rights to give a couple of examples.
Is this among the most painful interviews in history? BBC West Midlands’ Les Ross attempting to interview writer/broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli. How does the BBC end up employing these chumps?
