RosieBell

Burning Issues

Patrick Hayes over at Spiked (12th April) had a closer look at that Observer story:-

Something very odd happened at the weekend. A 40-year-old member of the far-right British National Party (BNP) was arrested for burning a copy of the Koran in his own back garden. Yes, it is apparently now a crime to express your disdain for a certain religious faith in the privacy of your own home. But that’s not the end of it. What makes this case especially odd is that the man in question - Sion Owens - was reported to the police by a broadsheet newspaper that claims to be liberal: the Observer. Since when has it been the job of the respectable, left-leaning press to grass people up to the cops for alleged speech crimes?

It’s worth reading the whole article.  Henry Porter, the freedom of speech campaigner who writes for the Observer, had this to say:-

On the face of it, though, it would seem a doubtful decision because handing over the video, which appears to have been made for private use and was in a sense a private expression of this individual’s views, is likely to inflame feelings more than if the matter was simply ignored. That is the practical aspect.
….

‘If there is evidence that the individual was about to publish the video, then I think there is perhaps cause for police action because of what happened a few days ago in Afghanistan where several people lost their lives. It is a delicate issue and by no means clear cut. However, it is the case that prohibition of an act, whether in public or private, often makes that act more likely to occur. That is why I am against the ban on the burqa in France.’

Spiked is predictably robust on this matter:-

Unlike Porter, I believe that Sion Owens should also have had the freedom to release the film into the public domain, if he so chose. Freedom of speech, the cornerstone of all our freedoms, is too often compromised on the grounds that people might be harmed as a result of it. But people should be trusted to make up their own minds about whether to act upon footage of some idiot burning the Koran, rather than prevented by the state from seeing such footage in case it drives them crazy. To censor is to treat the public as a pogrom-in-waiting, whose eyes must be protected from offensive words and imagery. It is an updated, perhaps slightly more PC version of the same patronising assumptions that were exposed in the Lady Chatterley Trial: ‘Would you let your wife or servant read it?’ The question some are implicitly asking in relation to the BNP Koran video is: ‘Would you let the white working classes watch it?’ or ‘Would you let angry Muslims watch it?’. Perhaps that is what Townsend was getting at when he said the video could have ‘serious violent repercussions’.

Spiked does love leaping on liberals for their patronising assumptions about the violent tendencies of the canaille.  But in this case it’s a reasonable assumption after the reaction to Terry Jones’s burning of the Qu’ran.   These incidents are opportunities that are ramped up by religious and state leaders and violence and deaths are the result.

Arresting people though for acts which if publicised are likely to cause violence and harm somewhere in the world is untenable.  There’s nothing much we can do about it.  The lynch mobs led by the witch denouncers are going to have their days of rampage in the global village. 

McLuhan coined the phrase “global village” to describe the hyper-networked world that was already taking shape. He had no illusions, though, about the nobility of village life. Our newly TV-, telephone-, and radio-enwebbed multiverse could just as easily be ruled by “panic terrors … befitting a world of tribal drums” as by any bright pastoral harmony. And so it was and is.

The latest news I could find about the case against the Qu’ran burner was (12th April):-

Sion Owens, aged 41, was charged with a public order offence on Saturday.

When he appeared at Swansea Magistrates Court the Crown Prosecution Service said it was withdrawing the case against him.

But it said that investigations would continue and that "almost certainly other proceedings will ensue."

And of course I would never have googled this guy if the Observer hadn’t handed his video of the book burning to the police.

The Beaux Gendarmes

Amnesty International condemns the detention of several people, including two women wearing the full-face veil, who were protesting against the law banning the wearing of any form of clothing concealing one's face in public.

The law came into force today. Police said the people were detained for joining an unauthorised protest in central Paris.

Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Programme Director John Dalhuisen said:

“Women in France have the right to freedom of religion and expression. They must also be free to protest when this right is violated.

Amnesty is quite right of course.  This ban is ludicrous, not to mention sinister.  The ludicrousness is what strikes me most.

 

We're public guardians bold yet wary
And of ourselves we take good care
To risk our precious lives we're chary
When danger looms we're never there
But when we meet a helpless woman
Or little boys who do no harm
We run them in, we run them in
We run them in, we run them in
We show them we're the beaux gendarmes.

Actually the women haven't been that helpless and have been flagrantly breaking the law.  Penalty:- a fine and citizenship classes.  If any law was pointlessly bossy, this one is. 

Frenchwomen used to wear veils, e.g. Madame Bovary:-

Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her veil, that fell sideways from her man's hat over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves.

It didn't protect her sexual virtue.

Temperatures running high

A senior member of the BNP who burned a copy of the Qur'an in his garden has been arrested following an investigation by the Observer.

Footage of the burning shows Sion Owens, 40, from south Wales and a candidate for the forthcoming Welsh Assembly elections, soaking the Qur'an in kerosene and setting fire to it.

A video clip of the act, leaked to the Observer and passed immediately to South Wales police, provoked fierce criticism from the government.

[Did the Observer pass this to the POLICE?   The Observer, the home of Henry Porter, the banger on of liberal values?]

A statement from the Home Office said: "The government absolutely condemns the burning of the Qur'an. It is fundamentally offensive to the values of our pluralist and tolerant society.

[J S Mill Stage 1.  The “values of our pluralist and tolerant society” includes the right to burn books you find objectionable.  This guy burned it ins his garden, not outside a mosque.]

"We equally condemn any attempts to create divisions between communities and are committed to ensuring that everyone has the freedom to live their lives free from fear of targeted hostility or harassment on the grounds of a particular characteristic, such as religion."

Or a characteristic such as hostility towards a particular religion.

It’s unclear what Sion Owens was trying to do.  Create controversy and division like the Rev Terry Jones?  Make a daring video for shared viewing among BNP initiants like the beheading of infidels movies that jihadists love to watch? Jones’s act of burning of a Qu’ran was exploited by even nastier theocrats stirring up the devout.   But what was a liberal newspaper like the Observer doing reporting this to the police? and what was a responsible newspaper doing giving an act designed to provoke a violent response any more publicity?

Update:-

I like BenSix's comment:-

what a sad indictment of the media that investigative journalism is now seen as rooting out obscure zealots holding bonfires in their gardens.

Out of his Time

I recently read WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, which is thriller journalism. Kingsley Amis once said, “I’m never going to read another novel that doesn’t begin with the words, ‘A shot rang out."  The authors, David Leigh and Luke Harding give that kind of bang with their opening lines:- “Glimpsed in the half-light of a London evening, the figure just might have passed as female.  She  emerged from the doorway and folded herself into a battered red car.”  It’s a rattling good yarn, a riveting  read, a real page turner and so on.  Julian Assange is definitely someone you couldn’t make up, and what with the cache of secrets, the USA coming down on him, the rape charges and the squabbles, splits and falling outs decent journalists like Leigh and Harding can’t fail but make an exciting story out of it all. 


At the end of last year a zillion words hysterically denounced or adulated Assange.    He was in the running to be Time’s Man of the Year.  The Italian Rolling Stone had him on their cover.  He was as famous as a rock star but famous for doing something serious and important and after all, it’s passe to regard rock stars as rebellious outsiders.  There was a feeling that on this new ocean of the internet which has barely been charted as yet Assange was Master and Commander, but also a pirate.

He was "a symbol of revolutionary action", and “on the way of becoming an equal to Che Guevara, while using the most powerful weapon of the new age - information.”  Also, what put the sparklers on his cake was that he was really pissing off the USA.

Here’s John Wight with a piece on Socialist Unity entitled God‘s Lonely Man:-

The global impact this single individual’s actions have had  . . . may well be one of the most historically significant events of our time. In revealing the machinations of governments, with the US government at the centre of a global network of economic and geopolitical manoeuvring for advantage, Wikileaks has stripped bare democracy, diplomacy and international relations of any pretence to reveal the true nature of how power and empire operates.

One man in effect has rattled the foundations of the most powerful country the world has ever known to an extent no army or rival military power ever has or would dare attempt.

Assange, it seems clear, is a man driven by a messianic anger at how governments operate behind closed doors, how power functions and how society is controlled by that power. Secrecy as practised by the powerful is for him not a shield but a sword, used to conceal state driven and sponsored crimes in pursuit of power or advantage regardless of the social or human cost. Alienated from a world set up by and for the interests of the rich and powerful, Assange may well have arrived on the stage of history as the living example of the maxim of ‘cometh the time, cometh the man.’

Imperial machinations lay hid from sight,/Julian made Wikileaks and then there was light. I read that piece, and thought, that is the kind of paean the comes round to bite you in the bum.   However, John Wight did once have ambitions of being a Hollywood script writer.    It must have been tempting to story-board Assange, with his aura of romance, the man who lives in his laptop, with no material possessions, no fixed abode, a gypsy and a nomad,  like the guy in the Western who sorts out the troubles of the small town which is being menaced by ruthless crooks then rejects the girl and moves on.  The USA took on the role of the corrupt and bullying gang and beset him from all sides.  High up politicians and media mouths called for his arrest or even his assassination, MasterCard, Amazon, PayPal at the American government’s request, tried to cut off his supplies.  So he seemed both the free man, and the responsible man, the outlaw and the saviour, and  ruthless forces were opposing him.

On the left there is a hero gap.  Che is dead, Castro too old, Ortega is compromised, and Chavez is a bit of a buffoon. Enter Assange to fill the space.  His appearance adds to the mystique.  He is pale, and looks slightly alien and that along with his giant computer-like brain gives him the air of someone from a science fiction world, some sister planet of Vulcan where they have not evolved pointed ears.  He came as the man of mystery and enigma.

I’ve been told by chaps that their latest love object was “enigmatic”.  The enigmatic one was always good looking - enigmatic plain women don’t seem to exist, or at least, as in Bishop Berkeley’s riddle of the tree falling in a wood - are not seen to exist.   Her enigma was that she didn’t say an awful lot, and so suggested significance.  Then when she did open her gob you realised that if not very bright she was at least wise enough to keep that gob shut as a rule.

Assange, however, opened his gob and said really annoying things.  I first heard him speak on the Today programme in reply to John Humphrys:-

Q: Are you a sexual predator?

JA: That's ridiculous. Of course not.

Q: How many women have you slept with?

JA: That's a private business. Not only does a gentleman not tell, not only does a gentleman like to talk about his private life, a gentleman certainly doesn't count.

Blehh! to that self-declared chivalry.  However, it is impossible for a bloke to say, “I’m very attractive to women and have slept with lots of them.” without someone wanting to smack him.  Try it in the pub some time if you don’t believe it.

There were other utterances of Assange that diminished his herohood.

On a dating site:-  “WARNING: Want regular, down to earth guy?  Keep moving.  I am not the droid you are looking for.  Save us both while you can.  Passionate, and often pig-headed activist intellectual seeks siren for love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy.”

Assange was 36 when he wrote that, not 16.  He called himself “Harry Harrison”, and his adoption of the name of the inventor of the Stainless Steel Rat says something about his  tendencies to video gaming fantasy.   If he is a hero it is one who visualises to himself at what angle and in what folds his cape falls.

He once quoted from Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle: “To feel that home is the camaraderie of persecuted, and in fact, prosecuted, polymaths in a Stalinist slave labour camp! How close the parallels to my own adventures! … Such prosecution in youth is a defining peak experience. To know the state for what it really is! To see through that veneer the educated swear to disbelieve in but still slavishly follow with their hearts! … Your belief in the mendacity of the state … begins only with a jackboot at the door. True belief forms when led into the dock and referred to in the third person. True belief is when a distant voice booms ‘the prisoner shall now rise’ and no one else in the room stands.”

He sniffed this Gulag when he was fined $2100 for hackery in an Australian court, the judge taking into account his chaotic upbringing and his lack of profit motive.  So going by his own words Assange is a fantasist who regards himself as God’s gift to women.  Given Assange’s view of “scientific journalism”  his own words should be fairly damning.  Out of his own mouth and in his own wwriting he doesn‘t do himself much credit.

However second-hand information- Leigh and Harding‘s book - builds him up again. I got a picture of someone with piles of courage, intense powers of concentration - he can programme for 48 hours on the trot - indifference to material comfort- he barely eats - yes, we lazy telly watching mortgage slaves should feel some awe for this.  As for Wikileaks itself, it’s a huge thing to bite off, those great mounds of data which needs sorting and sifting.  Assange does attract clever energetic activists to his side, but they and the data presumably have to be closely vetted, since I’m willing to believe that there are infiltrating agents and false data dumped on him.  By itself Wikileaks won‘t save the world.  But information is important and it is a great achievement to create a sanctuary where data can be sent protected by encryption and the leaker can stay untraced . 

Assange is meant to be a great brainbox, the avatar of algorithms, a brilliant hacker who thought he’d put his gifts to some kind of humanitarian use.  Hackers often hack just for the sheer schoolboyish pleasure of being one over the headmaster, of outwitting the security guards.  There are some who become criminals and crack open credit card accounts, some become security guards themselves, poachers to gamekeepers, while Assange thought he would turn his exceptional skills to the public good. 

By getting control of the Wikileaks data he becomes a power himself.  His world view, which may be the same as the bloke who programmes at your place of work, then starts to matter.  His fantasies about himself which are no worse than any video gamer’s, start to look a little irresponsible.  Would you trust your data with this guy?  He is prone to think critics are conspirators, and disgruntled colleagues conmen and traitors.  However he has loyal supporters on side and probably keen young idealists dream of being one of his helpers.  He may eventually adjust to living in the kind of publicity he’s been getting, as he moved from the land of programming and small scale activism to the land of celebrity and a piss-taking media.

I can imagine him in another time, say 1942.  He’s in a Nissan hut eating a slice of Spam, his first meal for three days.  He and Alan Turing have been going through rivers of print outs of code, trying to make patterns out of what look like gobbledegook to most of us.  He is with his peers of brilliant analytical brains, the kind of person who relaxes by playing five mental chess games simultaneously.  Assange is an odd fish, but many of these boffins are odd fish.  Some of the nastier public school types take the piss out of his Downunder accent and ways eg treating everyone whatever their rank without deference.  But they all admit he can decrypt with the best of ‘em.

Joan, one of the filing clerks, has nicknamed him “Mr Sponge”, because, she says, of his habit of standing closer than necessary to you as if he was about to wipe you down. But Muriel and Enid have a soft spot for the Aussie Assange, thinking he needs feeding up and offering him bits of their chocolate ration.

That was in other times, when it was clear to what effort a decent person’s energies should be exerted and where their loyalties lay.  Those were secret times, when someone would work for Bletchley Park and never mention this to anyone, not forty years later on, not to their husband or wife. 

Assange though is not apolitical.  He has been shocked by the grey slums he has seen in English cities, and he knows that the world is in a mess, and scientists are the best fitted to sort it out.  He has read the  great scientist, J D Bernal,  who says that there is a country covering one sixth of the earth where justice reigns.  Knowing this is for the ultimate good of mankind as well as making him one up on some of the snotty establishment figures he has met he starts punting a few secrets towards Josef Stalin.

Scientific Journalism aka as Get Your Facts Right

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Julian Assange

Showing how you got your information is what academics do by citing sources with references and footnotes and bloggers do the same by linking.  With digital technology, it is now possible for a journalist to offer drill down routes to some of the sources of his story.  This is sound as far as it goes.  First hand information is generally better than second hand.  We litry critters are taught  to read the original text closely rather than someone else‘s interpretation, and historians who rely on secondary sources instead of coalface research get a pasting.  For myself, I would have called this “drill down journalism“, or “data journalism” rather than the pompous “scientific journalism“. 

However most us absorb the raw data in a handful of subjects only, those that really interest us (in many people that will be football) or that are related to our work, and accept authorities for the rest.   There simply isn’t time to go through all the raw data even if we understood it.  So we choose authorities , whether it’s The Guardian, the BBC or The Sun.  If I see eastern Europe via Timothy Garton Ash, and banking via John Lanchester that’s because I think they know a lot more about them than I could ever know and I regard them as trustworthy.  Most people who have read the Wikileaks stories have read them via outlets they trust. 

Journalism is more than data. Good journalists have to assess the reliability of their sources, which requires judgement and knowledge, attributes that can’t be demonstrated by a heap of documents.  They have instincts of selection and emphasis arising from cultural background which they would not be able to tabulate.

And when it comes to the truth of his own stories, as so often with Assange, it is a case of Physician, heal thyself.  Before a Panorama programme which he guessed would be hostile towards him, he said in an interview with Francesco Piccinin for the French online magazine Agora Vox:-

What relationships did you with other Media UK ? Why do they accuse you of being anti-Semitic?

Our relationships are not looking good. Particularly with the BBC. Today I was verbally attacked a journalist at the exit of the station. It was John Sweeney's Panorama program. The BBC is one of our biggest rivals. . .. They will make a show that will air on Monday (coincidentally during the first day of trial) and try and influence judges. We finally discovered that the wife of producer for this show was part of the Zionist movement in London.

(This interview was in French and translated by the internet and me.  Neither of us is good at French.)

Could he please give us the name and website of this London Zionist movement that the producer’s influential wife belongs to?  Who is this “we” that thinks the BBC tries to influence judges' decisions?

The producer of the Panorama programme was Jim Booth, who is quoted as saying: ". . .he can only be talking about me. I have got no idea why he said that. My wife is not Jewish, has nothing to do with Zionism or the Jewish community. It's absolutely ridiculous and insulting for me as a producer. I do not set out with an agenda and he gave the sense there was a Jewish agenda. Assange is a pioneer and Wikileaks is a tremendous thing but I wish he had got his facts right.”

“Getting your facts right” is the old fashioned expression for “scientific journalism”.

However Assange is inclined to see the Zionist hidden hand.  From the same interview:-

Are you more afraid of Israel or the U.S.?

It is the union of two countries that scares me the most. For an even better reason because they share a number of interests in the Iraqi conflict. Bush has supported Israel since it was surrounded by friends at the head of the oil companies. Israel, meanwhile, has strong ties with the east coast of the United States. Not only because of the presence of many Jews on American soil, but also because many Israeli passports were provided to the Jews of the east coast to strengthen their ties with their homeland. Russia has done the same with South Ossetia, distributing passports to the local population to promote the fight against Georgian nationalism.

He hasn’t used the words “Zionist entity” yet, but that will come.  This kind of Israel controlling every darned thing is a few steps away from explaining media hostility towards you by some people in the media being Jewish, or their brothers-in-law being Jewish, as he said to Ian Hislop of Private Eye.   It’s an infection going round at the moment, so, for instance, a blog conversation about why Seven Jewish Children is a bit dodgy will soon have hints of networks, lobbies, machines and other forces - never explicitly named or with their members listed, but there, somehow. 

Assange has said of this conversation with Hislop that “Hislop has distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase“ but Hislop says in  Private Eye (issue 1284) that he took notes and typed it up immediately.  “The content of the conversation was too bizarre to invent, too surprising to misremember and too weird to need distortion.”    

So in this instance we have conflicting raw data.  I’d go with Hislop myself.

Also in the Vox Agora  interview Assange says:-

This media has accused me of collaborating with the alleged anti-Semitic Israel Shamir who supports us. He is a journalist and writer born in Siberia and settled in Israel. Denying Judaism and becoming pro-Palestinian, he was later converted to Russian Orthodoxy. That is why he is hated in the same proportions as Salman Rushdie.  He now lives in Sweden, and as he helped us for a while, the media accuse us our turn of being  anti-Semitic, of having provided documents to the Russians and having relations with Lukashenka.

It’s easy enough to drill down to where Assange gets the totally off key idea that you can compare the hatred against the “alleged” anti-Semitic Israel Shamir with the hatred against Salman Rushdie- it’s what Shamir says about himself.  (Google "israel shamir" "salman rushdie" if you need to check).

The Panorama programme got hold of an email that Assange had written to Shamir:-

Dear Israel/Adam

Someone wrote saying they refused to associate with an organisation that would work with an anti-Semite like Israel Shamir. . .

From a brief sampling of your writing I did not find the allegation borne out.  I found the samples to be strong and compassionate.

I did a brief sampling of Shamir’s work myself and found stuff like this:-

David Irving was sentenced for denial of Jewish superiority. His doom seals the reign of (albeit limited) freedom that began with the fall of Bastille.  European history went full circle: from rejecting the rule of Church and embracing  free thought, to the new Jewish mind-control on a world scale. Not only is Western Christian civilisation dead, but even its successor, secular European civilisation, has met its demise only a few days after its proud and last celebration by the Danish scribes. It was short-lived: about two hundred years from beginning to the end, the Europeans may once have had the  illusion that they can live without an ideological supremacy. Now this illusion is over; and the Jews came in the stead of the old and tired See of St Peter to rule over the minds and souls of Europeans.

I’m not going to link to the scabby-tailed rat so you can google that for yourself to read the whole thing "in context".

Could Julian Assange quote the “strong and compassionate” writings he came across in Shamir?  Also, if you are assessing someone’s views “a brief sampling” isn’t really enough.  You have to read a fair amount and it isn’t a bad idea to google them and find what other people say about them as well.  Where’s the “scientific journalism” when you need it?

Julian then suggested Shamir write for Wikileaks under another name. 

I would say Assange  had some fellow feeling with Shamir as a bit of a freebooter, what with his way of changing identities (the indulgent Dear Israel/Adam suggests that) and as one who is persecuted, as he sees it.    So he opened his arsenal of data and handed him one of the weapons, which Shamir has been using to support the regime in Belarus against its opposition.

Assange has said that Shamir’s association with Wikileaks was minimal and when asked he didn’t explain that email. He has said that Shamir was merely given access to some of the diplomatic cable data - whereas of course someone like him should not have been given access to any of it.  If Assange stopped avoiding the question and showed himself to be aware of the implications that you can draw from his finding Shamir’s views congenial I would give him a pass.  He could admit his dealings with Shamir were just a big error of judgement.  After all, Assange has been under great pressure and has a huge mountain of data to shift, arrange and distribute.  He may have handled most of it impeccably for all I know.

The feeling you get from Assange is of someone who has moved from a culture of hacking and fantasy into the world of the mainstream media.  So he says and does things that make him seem like an arrogant twit with no notion of how he comes across.  But he has got plenty of friends who know the British media so what was he doing calling up the editor of Private Eye of all magazines with his Jewish conspiracy stuff?  He has left the fortified island of the laptop and moved into the much larger plain of the piss-take, where he will find himself more and more exposed to attack.  

Assange seems to have no idea that when setting up Wikileaks, which was designed to challenge the powerful, he has become powerful himself, and so will be challenged in his turn.  It's a very old story.  The beautiful young guerrilla rides in a tank through the capital city of the state whose old corrupt ruler has just fled.  Then the guerrilla becomes El Presidente and starts chucking dissenters into jail and regards any criticism of himself as betrayal and an international conspiracy formed against him.  Robin Hood the outlaw made his name by undermining the Sheriff of Nottingham, but when Robin Hood got his own earldom in a neighbouring shire, you would find quite a few poachers were manacled in his dungeons.  He still thinks he's an outlaw, though.

 

MediOcs

If you want to read serious and considered analysis about the group formerly known as the Revolutionary Communist Party, have a look at a piece by Bob over here.

The RevCommParty members are band sluts who play in outfits like Libero!, London International Research Exchange, Transport Research Group and a festival line up of others as well as getting together for all stars performances at the Battle of Ideas while being the house band at Spiked (producer, Brendan O‘Neill, the hands-on head of the record company, Frank Furedi). They are the punk rockers of the left, who love to outrage the progressive dinosaurs, and their set list contains numbers like Dead Polar Bears - Who cares?;  Melt the glaciers! and Speech Free, Markets Freer.  After a while their riffs become predictable and their intellectual progression sticks at three chords but with their glossy production they get gigs all over the radio and the press.

One of their favourite themes is Piss off the Liberals (Any Way You can) and how they tackle that is best described here (scroll to August 22 - for some reason can’t do a proper link to it.)

This is the work of the Furedification Machine

1) Open a newspaper; grab the dumbest media spaz-out in it as your subject material, then put pen to paper.

2) Lay out the entire, sorry episode, making it entirely clear that it's an electorally-driven spankathon confected out of bugger all by insane right wing bigots for political purposes, with the support of dupes and cranks.

3) Concede that liberal criticisms of said spankathon are essentially correct in every major aspect.

4) Suddenly announce that the real issue is not the confected right wing spankathon, but is instead the fact that condescending Yankee liberals think they're so bloody clever.

5) Waffle at length about how out of touch with, like, working class concerns and shit the libs are by pretending that belligerent stupidity is a class issue.

6) Round it all off with a spurious declaration about how, if only those godawful libs weren't so obsessed with political correctness, they would somehow magically squash the controversy by focusing instead on some unrelated horseshit.

You can see the above method in action here.  The Tea Party, you understand, is all the liberals‘ fault. 

Liberal activists’ dismissal of the Tea Party as ‘insane’ only shows how cut-off they are from the American masses.

The masses, working class and sturdy proles are useful bricks which Spiked always keep at hand to hurl at the dismissive liberals.  I haven’t yet come across a piece about the liberal fear of and contempt for the EDL only shows how cut off they are from the English masses, but it must be out there somewhere.  The history revisionism wing of Spiked is working on very short monographs with the following sub-headings:-  “Liberal dismissal of lynch parties as “outrageous and murderous bigotry” only show how cut off they are from the Southern states masses” and going back to the nineteenth century, “Abolitionist dismissal of slavery as “vilely unjust” only shows how cut off they are from the secessionist masses.” 

So when I heard about the London Anti-Street Harassment Campaign I was waiting for Spiked to come out with an article that this was just a middle-class attack on sturdy proles.  Sure enough when I was listening to Weekend Women’s Hour a few weeks ago there was an item covering the campaign and the BBC’s obligatory dissenting voice was from Spiked's editor Brendan O’Neill (fast forward 15:41 minutes here).  Brendan O’Neill regards street harassment as a freedom of speech issue and describes guys shouting “Nice tits” as “interchange” or “banter”.  Then the sturdy prole moment came:-

BO: What’s really going on [very Spiked that, the “what’s really going on“] is that a really old style Victorian attitude is being rehabilitated because the idea that women are fragile and easily victimised particularly by working-class men really comes from the Victorian era when women would never go out. .

Women’s Hour presenter - It’s not just working class men

BO: This is the implication.  When you read these discussions, when you read the newspaper reports it is often the implication, dustbin men as we heard in the earlier report.

The answer to that of course is that 1) those are the men who work outside and so the ones you encounter in the streets:- 2) it’s only some men, not all or most; 3) men who work in the City can be total sexist bullying jerks as well but they’re tucked behind their glass walls.

BO goes on:-

Feminism used to be about liberating women and now feminism has become about policing men.  Policing men in the workplace Policing men on the streets.  Policing men’s speech.  Policing men’s thoughts and attitudes. This is actually what you’ve called for.  I think it is a great tragedy that feminism has sunk from demanding liberation and equality for women which I 100% support to demanding the closer policing and the authoritarian control of men. 

As no-one on Women's Hour pointed out a big part of feminism was getting the crime of rape to be taken more seriously and rape victims not to be sorted out into the chaste and unchaste.  Another part of feminism was getting domestic violence to be treated as a crime, not a private family matter.  In short, quite a lot of feminism has been about policing male behaviour when it is criminal. Also, the women on the programme were asking for policing against actual intimidation and for the rest thought education and campaigning were a good idea - which is not “policing thoughts and attitudes” but influencing them.

Anyway, that was the editor of Spiked in action calling for female empowerment, which, for a woman trailed by a gang of blokes in a car shouting remarks at her, could only come if she was armed with a Kalashnikov (something many women would like to have folded in their handbags at such times). Very Spiked, very predictable.  

Spiked are libertarians and lay great stress on not stifling individualism.  You could reasonably expect that this would be shown in the Spiked writers’ quirkiness and sudden, surprising opinions along with a highly idiosyncratic and distinctive expression.  When it comes to wide cultural range, wit, and richness of expression the Spiked stable should out gallop Howard Jacobson, Christopher Hitchens and H L Mencken.  They may of course be producing brilliant prose and original ideas but before any of these are published, they go through the special Spiked software MediOcs.  MediOcs, as well as filtering out any dissension from the Spiked political line, puts the style through a word blender.  Designed with advice from Tony Parsons MediOcs flattens any sparkling cascades into the bright shallowness of the overflow from an air-conditioning unit. and the result is the universal tabloidese that arrives at my in-box every Friday.

I do read Spiked, and find their freedom of speech absolutism meets my mood when the last government was passing its anti free speech laws and when some idiots are arrested for burning Korans. They are a funny lot though - a trained squad of contrarians who march in unison carrying the standard of individual self-development.

Speaking truth to petty powers

Gramsci; imprisoned by the Italian fascist government; Vaclav Havel by the Czech government; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in a labour camp and exile, Walter Benjamin committing suicide in fear that he would not escape the Nazis, Bertolt Brecht in exile in the USA, Karl Popper emigrating from Vienna, living in Christchurch New Zealand.  (I always imagine him wandering sadly round that pleasant, staid city fruitlessly looking for a café). William Cobbett in jail for “criminal libel”.  That’s a tiny percentage of the thousands of writers and intellectuals who have been persecuted by the state.

Many intellectuals like to think they would speak truth to power.  But these days in Europe the state doesn’t much care if you speak truth to it or not. Intellectuals don’t fear the state will clap them into jail or have them executed.  Many of them are employed by the state at universities and write for periodicals that are in part state-funded eg The London Review of Books, even though they write articles heavily critical of their governments. Now when physical danger threatens it comes from elsewhere, those who haven’t got state power, but a roving band of rage boys ready for action,.  According to this review of Paul Berman’s book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, the brainy ones are fleeing their duty to speak on behalf of their fellows who are in such danger from freelance petty persecution:-

the threat of murder, the attempted murder, and the actual murder of dissidents from Islam have all become a regular feature of the intellectual landscape of Europe. The most shocking and dramatic passages in Berman's book are those in which he recounts, often casually, his encounters with the harried and hunted figures who have offended some radical mullah or other.

. . .

It was not healthy for Theo van Gogh to get too close to Hirsi Ali. The Danish cartoonists are still under constant death threats, Berman reports. And Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym of another apostate, reads death threats against himself online*, while Bassam Tibi, who, Berman tells us, "pioneered the concept of Islamism as a modern totalitarianism and pioneered the concept of a liberal 'Euro-Islam' [as well] ... spent two years under twenty four hour police protection in Germany. ... [T]he Egyptian and Italian journalist Magdi Allam ...was travelling with a full complement of five bodyguards. ... The Italian journalist Fiamma Nienstein … was accompanied by her own bodyguard. … Caroline Fourest in France, the author of the first and most important extended criticism of Ramadan, had to go under police protection. ... [T]he French history professor Robert Redkeker had to go into hiding. In 2008 the police in Belgium broke up a terrorist group that had planned on assassinating, among other people Bernard Henri Levy."

He spends an evening in New York "... with Flemming Rose the culture editor of the Danish newspaper who was visiting New York only because at that particular moment it was too dangerous for him to remain in Denmark."

The list continues. Kurt Westergaard, Boulem Sansal. This is cumulatively (and individually) scandalous.

Yes, it is.  Here’s a suggestion for The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, the TLS and every other intellectual periodical.   In every one of your issues please have a “Writer in Danger” feature of about half a page, where you quote the words of one of those who is forced to live in fear because their discourse has so offended some radical mullah or other.

Sue me for calling you an ****

I got this message from the Libel Reform Campaign:-

We need you to come to the Houses of Parliament next Tuesday, 23 March, for a mass meeting with MPs to convince them to commit to libel reform.

The Libel Reform Campaign has booked Committee Room 15 at Parliament, and MPs know that we’re coming. Please, if you can, come and join us. Simon Singh will be joining us to tell MPs about the real effect of our libel laws.

The political parties are on the verge of signing up to once in a generation reform of our libel laws. But we don’t have them signed up yet. This is our last chance to lobby parliamentarians before the general election.

So here’s the plan:

Mass lobby of Parliament

2 – 3pm

We’re trying to get as many campaign champions, press and MPs along as possible for a meeting 2-3 pm in Committee Room 15. You can come to this even if you don’t have an MP appointment. If you can, let us know you are coming by emailing us: news@libelreform.org

3 – 4pm

You can email your MP and ask them to meet you between 3 – 4 pm in Central Lobby. Even if your MP has signed the EDM on libel reform it is still worth doing this.

I don’t know much about the libel laws except that they can operate to silence reasoned debate, as the British Chiropractic Association is trying to do in the case of Simon Singh. The libel laws used as loppers against the pointing fingers of criticism and ridicule have been active again in the last couple of days, this time from the man with a constant itch for litigation, Mr George Galloway, who is in the process of suing David Toube of Harry’s Place for a facetious remark David made on the Socialist Unity blog. (background here).

This differs from the action that Johanna Kaschke brought against Dave Osler for something someone said about her in the comments on Dave Osler’s blog. By the same logic, it should be Andy Newman, the presiding MC over at Socialist Unity who should be sued, not David, who doesn’t even mention Galloway by name. Anyway, we can all agree that if we were to be sued for abuse, jokes, smears, slurs and the general knockabout that happens on blogs we would all be poor, cowed and silent.

In the seventeenth century if a gentleman of standing like Mr Galloway thought that some scribbler had offended him with a squib, a lampoon or satire he would hire thugs to beat him up. These days honourable MPs go to libel lawyers in order to stifle remarks which bring them into disrepute.

My guess is that the Hamas groupie, dictator dick-sucker and eager hireling of the propaganda arm of a repressive regime has been rattled by Harry’s Place and hurt in his most sensitive place, i.e. his vanity. The impression Mr Galloway gives is of a man with a rich fantasy life – the revolutionary hero, the modern Saladin adored by 1.2 billion Muslims, the brave speaker of truth to power. However recently in his guise as the fearless agitator who faces down the tyrannical police state he was made to look like a complete arse.

He was addressing a meeting to denounce police tactics at the Gaza demonstrations. A couple of Iranians began heckling, so he called the police to eject them. A video and pictures of the event was put up with a lot of glee at Harry’s Place.

Now, you can argue that the police have been heavy-handed at demos and that it’s reasonable to get some kind of security to shut up those who prevent a public meeting from carrying on. But even if Galloway had right on his side in this instance he still looks like a complete arse, the straight man in an inspired bit of situationalist comedy. Harry’s Place has evidently got under his skin, and so suing David T is one way of getting at it. (This is speculation on my part. I haven’t got actual entry into Galloway’s mind. There are some places you definitely don’t want to go).

If you want to know more about the libel laws, go and read what the knowledgeable say eg Tracey Brown, Managing Director of Sense About Science:-

Libel laws are not just a Fleet Street issue. We have heard from scientists, campaigners, writers, academics and patients that their discussions and publications are being shut down by the threat of libel action. Critical and open debates are vital in medicine and the public are badly missing out without them.

Reform the libel laws! Piss George Galloway off!

Let A Thousand Conduits Pour

I was very taken with this installation:-

 
  
The artist, Ai Weiwei, sounds like a hero as well.  He uses his position as a famous artist to speak against the Chinese authorities’ abuse of human rights:-

Ai helped to design the "Bird's Nest" national stadium for the 2008 Olympics – then blasted the country's "disgusting" political conditions and the use of the games as propaganda. Since then he has championed a number of sensitive causes, notably internet freedom and justice for children who died when shoddy schools collapsed in the devastating Sichuan earthquake. Others have fallen foul of the government for far less, and supporters fear Ai's position and his father's reputation will only shield him for so long. Certainly, the authorities seem to regard him, increasingly, as a problem. His China-based blog has been closed down, his email account hacked into, and security officials have made inquiries at his bank. In Chengdu last year, police detained him and fellow activists to prevent them attending the trial of a campaigner investigating schoolchildren's deaths. In the furore, a policeman punched him in the head, leaving him with painful headaches; weeks later, while working in Germany, he underwent surgery after doctors spotted internal bleeding.

The internet has made a huge difference to those who once would have had their message slowly trickle out through samizdat publications..  Ai Weiwei can pour out what he has to say through a thousand conduits:-

Around 26,000 people follow his volley of outrage and satire, facts and aphorisms, on Twitter: "No outdoor sports can be more elegant than throwing stones at autocracy; no melees can be more exciting than those in cyber space," read one recent missive.

“People often say I started to become too outspoken after a certain period. It's all because of the internet – if we didn't have this technology I would be same as everybody else; I couldn't really amplify my voice," he says.

Weren’t there some Russian poets who learned forbidden poets’ work off by heart so they wouldn’t be lost when the authors were suppressed?  Now they would post them on friendly blogs hosted in foreign countries.

Eagleton Ducks Out

A while ago I said how much I’d like to see a debate between Terry Eagleton and Christopher Hitchens.   It seems I’m bound for disappointment according to this interview here:-

Interviewer:- One of the leftist Oxford students from the earlier period whom you mention by name in the book is Christopher Hitchens. What do you make of his political trajectory?

Eagleton:- I just turned down the offer of a public debate with him in the States. I've said what I want to say, and we wouldn't have got anywhere - it would only have been a sort of bloodsport.

What’s wrong with a bit of bloodsport?   The growling bulldog Hitchens tearing the throat out of that double-backing fox Eagleton?  I’d pay a tenner to see that in all its bleeding flesh. Hitchens would be the winner, not just on point of argument, but because he’s a hardened veteran of a debater.  

 
 
I would have liked to hear Eagleton defend his use of the word “Islamophobic” in this context:-

What was definitive for him, politically, was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989. I think that was the turning point. The deep Islamophobic impulse he has stems from that. But he's still an idiosyncratic mixture of various political attitudes that don't always go together.

Book burnings and death threats against writers hit the deep liberal impulse or the deep anti-Nazi impulse rather than the deep Islamophobic impulse.  (Hitchens isn’t Islamophobic, simply anti any kind of religion especially when it takes a theocratic and murderous turn).

Eagleton ducked out of debating Martin Amis as well, the old spoilsport.

To do him credit, he does say Hitchens is “very astute” on literary topics, which meets my estimation of Eagleton – very good on literature, which, after all, is his speciality, dodgy on politics.

I'm interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) - the very people you'd have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding - have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I'm very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you'd expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity.

Well, Tel, how about a little dissertation on how to treat with sensitive openness the kind of people who burn books at the behest of clerics with a political agenda and treat with imaginative sympathy those who firebomb publishers on the rumour of some offensive book being printed.  You’re a literary man, for Chrissake.