I haven't watched Press TV myself except for the odd clip but what I hear about it is that it is a propaganda channel run from Tehran, and that to appear on it you have to be highly uncritical of the Iranian government. According to the journalist Dave Osler (comment 12):-
I am generally of the ‘bus company’ theory when it comes to media outlets. Who cares who runs the bus, so long as the route takes you where you want to go?
That is why I have in the past written for the Daily Express, and happily appear on rightwing TV and radio shows (Richard Littlejohn, Nick Ferrari etc) if they want a leftie on to spark debate.
If the media offers you a platform, take it, on the sole condition that you get your message across.
But the point is that Press TV doesn’t offer that kind of platform, It carefully selects Brit lefties that will say the sort of thing that complies with its editorial line. That sort of exposure isn’t worth having.
So it's no surprise that Press TV employs islamist and theocracy pimps like the well-known hijabbed sister-in-law Lauren Booth, Yvonne Ridley and, of course, George Galloway.
Radio 4 ran a programme about Press TV on Thursday evening, which is well worth listening to.
I would have liked to have heard more about Press TV's audience. I would guess that it would mostly be islamist sympathisers, and the kind of member of the far left who a few decades ago would have listened to Radio Moscow as their in-depth unbiassed news source. For example, here's a thicko who comments at Shiraz Socialist (comment 5):-
Many Marxists with decades long experience in the movement have contributed to press tv, which in content and form, beats the superficial news churned out by media that Hitchens whored himself to.
George Galloway was invited to appear on the programme but did not take this chance to defend his employer. He's not usually shy about appearing on the BBC. However he might have been asked impertinent questions which is not the kind of thing his heroes eg Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, would have put up with for a minute.
For an example of poor thinking accompanying, as it often does, bad writing have a look at this piece on the New Statesman website by Jonathan Githens-Mazer.
Start off with the by-line:-
There is a slippery slope between deciding who is moderate enough to be politically active, and totalitarianism.
This sums up one of the non-arguments of the piece which is that the Labour Party, by not engaging with Islamists, is somehow stifling their democratic rights. This is like saying that the X-Factor gang, by eliminating Tilly Tuneless after the first round of auditions, is silencing her singing.
At a recent event organised by Progress, a whole evening was dedicated to discussion about whether Labour should ever engage with "Islamists" (which debaters admit was a term never even defined in the debate) – or whether doing so cut against the fundamental grain of Labour itself.
What's striking about these debates is the utopian [why utopian? That makes no sense,] sterility of a position that deigns to dictate to political participants how they may or may not participate in politics in a free and open British democratic system. This is not only an explicit rejection of the "big society", it is a fundamental admission of a lack of faith in British democracy.
[No, oh logically-challenged one. Political participants can join the EDL, the BNP, the SWP or Hitz ut Tahrir if they want to. It doesn’t follow that the Labour party should engage with them. Note the loaded “deign” as well, as if this was the Labour party being snobby and superior.]
The very idea that parties themselves, or those with vested interests in the default position of current party politics, think that they have a unique right to decide which groups may or may not organise themselves within existing political frameworks is a solipsism [does he mean solecism? But that doesn’t make much sense either.] trotted out by those who want to protect their own positions within the political order. [Anyone can stand for election. Some parties like the BNP do. There are significant pressure groups as well outside of party politics eg the haulage industry when faced with a rise in the price of petrol, who can exert significant pressure on politicians.] In fact, this is a well-used expression of an older colonialism – diktats from political elites about how religious, ethnic and racial minorities should act to be more "British", and a complete lack of listening or equal exchange between participants from a range of perspectives who all have a vested interest in making politics in Westminster and beyond work. [A lot of waffle filler there. What’s an “equal exchange” with a groupuscule who thinks all problems in the world would be solved by having theocrats in charge of a greater Caliphate, and laws made with reference to the Qu’ran?]
Read the article, and the comments beneath it, which eviscerate it pretty thoroughly. What astonished me most was this:-
Jonathan Githens-Mazer is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Exeter.
It seems he get paid by the Cordoba Foundation to produce this kind of badly argued and illiterate drivel. I don’t suppose the New Statesman has that excuse for publishing it.
I’d put my name on the waiting list at the library for The Finkler Question and the librarian told me that thirty other people were after it. I read it and thought it was a bit of a dog’s breakfast. The other night I bought The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid from a charity shop as I needed something to read on the bus. This did what a novel should do, that is, made me want go on reading it. If anyone thinks that means I must mostly read thrillers, no, I want to go on reading Trollope, Tolstoy, Thackeray, George Eliot, Orwell. The seductive ability of a novel to make me want to stick around with it is ultimately inexplicable, but as in a love affair, it is the indispensable thing. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a shapely, economical novel about someone who fails to be a rootless cosmopolitan or a happy immigrant to the USA. He is rooted, he finds, in his home (Lahore), his family, his Pakistani patriotism, his religion, even, though that’s not dwelt on.
When I first picked it up it reminded me a bit of a translation of a French novel eg Simenon’s The Man Who Watched Trains Go By or something by Camus (can’t remember which) when the protagonist sits at a table and speaks to someone else who is never quite identified and never speaks himself. So it’s done in the first person but with the street life and food of Lahore brought in, a little, I suppose, like the novel in letters. The feeling of a translation was given by the rather formal English with the occasional Raj leftovers of expressions - “ruffians” for instance. It’s a novel of disenchantment with the USA and globalisation. I found the love affair a bit too romantic to be true - I‘m told it‘s allegorical, the woman Erica is “America“ - but it was far too detailed and her being in a loony bin was reminiscent of 70s novels that dealt with mad girls. But I did like its cleverness and elegance, and the emotion that ran through the book - of a confused anger and resentment, those great bases of fascism - was beautifully conveyed and scary as well because there aren’t practical politics to combat it except of a grand monstrous kind. Give ‘em Kashmir. Let them defeat India in a war. That will make them feel better.
There has been a meme going around on whether Western feminists have been slack at showing solidarity with women oppressed in other countries or even solidarity with women living in the same country but from a different cultural background for fear of being branded as Orientalist, aggressively Western, insensitive, being part of a pro-imperialist agenda etc. (Links to arguments for and against). I can’t give a verdict on the behaviour of Western feminists, but I came across a scene from an allegorical drama, when the king of anti-Orientalism, Edward Said, met the queen of international feminism, Simone de Beauvoir.
Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban, lecturing anyone who would listen about her forthcoming trip to Tehran with Kate Millett, where they were planning to demonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronising and silly, and although I was eager to hear what Beauvoir had to say, I also realised that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing with at that moment. Besides, she left an hour or so later (just before Sartre’s arrival) and was never seen again.
. . .Beauvoir had been a serious disappointment, flouncing out of the room in a cloud of opinionated babble about Islam and the veiling of women.
Beauvoir’s “patronising, “silly“ and “opinionated babbling” on the veiling of women was presumably something like this:-
"We have created the International Committee for Women's Rights (CIDF) in response to calls from a large number of Iranian women, whose situation and whose revolt have greatly moved us…We have appreciated the depth of the utter humiliation into which others wanted to make them fall and we have therefore resolved to struggle for them."
This was in response to events in Tehran on 8 March 1979, International Women’s Day.
On that day, Iranian women activists and their male supporters demonstrated against an order for women to re-veil themselves in the chador worn in more traditional sectors of society. The demonstrations continued for five days. At their height, they grew to fifty thousand in Tehran, women as well as men. Some leftist men formed a cordon around the women, fighting off armed attackers from a newly formed group, the Hezbollah or "Party of God." The demonstrators chanted "No to the Chador," "Down with the Dictatorship," and even the occasional "Down with Khomeini." One banner read, "We made the Revolution for Freedom, But Got Unfreedom," while others proclaimed "At the Dawn of Freedom, There Is No Freedom." For their part, the Hezbollah chanted "You will cover yourselves or be beaten," but their response was mainly nonverbal: stones, knives, and even bullets.
Kate Millett from the U.S. and Claudine Moullard from France attended the demonstration to express their solidarity with the women marching.
I don't suppose Edward Said ever called Westerners showing support for Palestinians “patronising and silly”.
I love Pink Floyd - Shine On You Crazy Diamond is one of my favourite songs - but Another Brick in the Wall really used to piss me off.
I would react like this to the chorus of kids:-
“We don’t need no education.”
ANY you piece of illiteracy.
“We don’t need no thought control.”
And you think “education and “thought control” are the same thing? What kind of vulgar Rousseau idea is this? That the less education you have, the more in control you will be of your “thoughts”? No, you’ll find your thoughts controlled by tabloids and advertisers.
“No dark sarcasm in the class room.”
Yes of course, dark sarcasm in the classroom is the Gulag and concentration camps and every kind of oppression, you spoiled brat.
"Teachers leave us kids alone."
As soon as I can find another job, any job, and get out of this hellhole, I will.
"All in all, it's just another brick in the wall."
"I'll brick you, you..."
One of the demands of fighters for social justice in past years was free education for children, one of the benefits that trade unions offered their members was the opportunity to learn through libraries and educational associations.
This song makes a lot more sense as background music to a video showing youthful protest against a state ruled by oppressive clerics:-
Sohl [one of the band Blurred Vision who produced the song] hopes that the crackdown on last year's protests will help to change perceptions of Iran among westerners from being an Islamic republic bent on acquiring nuclear weapons to a country crying out for change like South Africa once was. "On the surface it may look like the protesters were crushed but they have now opened a gate to the inevitable," he says. "Opinion in the West is changing and I think, in time, people will speak out with Iranians. It's about bridging that gap between east and west. Hopefully this song will help a little with that."
The video is very effective. I’m reminded of Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ’n ’ Roll , where the desire of the young for jeans and rock music is such a strong force that the state finally splinters. The ideology could not compete against the culture it denounced as "decadent". When you look at this video and see the young with the guitars and mobiles, and the old mullah watching from the minaret, you think those young ones must win. It does look inevitable.
You very rarely see a niqab in Edinburgh but today I was in Princes Street and a couple of women walked by who were wearing them, and rather elegant ones, with a neat piece of light grey cloth over the bottom half of the face and a smooth grey scarf covering the forehead. Their clothes weren’t billowy chadors or tent-like but straight and severe, in the same light grey. They looked well-dressed and stylish and I imagine were tourists. They did cause a slight stir though. One young bloke said to another, “They shouldn’t be legal, those clothes.” The publicity that burqa banning is getting is bound to lead to racist attacks.
I saw this comment to an article in the New Statesman, which gives evidence for my theory that the way to get Muslim women to stop wearing burqas is to encourage them to cycle.
I am also a Muslim woman from Pakistan who lives in the ultra Muslim orthodox area of Bow and Mile End in London. I have lived in London for around ten years and this is my first experience of living in a majority Muslim area as I lived in Clapham before. The problem I personally find with these radical talibanised Muslims is that they don’t seem to approve of me going around on my cycle and not adhering to their code by covering myself up. I get all sorts of harassment by the "orthodox" Muslim men even though I am not dressed like a prostitute but I might as well be one in their eyes as I am not covered up from head to toe. But for some reason I just have this feeling that even if I was dressed the way they think is right, they would still find a problem with me because I am a woman. The thing that makes me so angry is their confidence, this being England and not a Muslim country, thank God!
The Muslim men in Mile End have the cheek to spit at me when I am cycling past them on my way back from work if I by mistake just glance at them because either they think I'm making a pass at them, or they feel so degraded because a woman has just glanced at them. But the thing is they are all the same. They are the same in Pakistan and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and even in England!!! So even though it is a bit of a touchy subject, I feel I need to say something as I left that country to escape this kind of constant sexual persecution which is worse than racism as that really hits the roots of your identity.
[Yeah, sister, we’ve all been there. Sexual persecution takes different forms - groping, comments shouted at you as you go about minding your own business. If you’re a cyclist and a woman you will have to put up with a lot of shit, and shake with impotent rage. You, poor thing, just get an extra helping of religious shit on top of it. There are some men who can‘t accept a woman as a fellow citizen, and the righteous and the pure are the worst of all. They are bullies who regard themselves as having a God-given right to be bullies. They'd really like to stone you. "Women," said Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch, "have no idea how men hate them." Now that's not all men, or most men, but it's enough men to make life dangerous and difficult for women. Give that kind of man a holy pretext and see how creative his hatred will become.]
And what about the Muslim women who are covered up? They seem to walk around extremely confidently in Mile End. They don’t seem to need all that burqa /hijab/ niqab because they seem to be able to defend themselves quite well without it. But the problem is that these women are in with the men on this. They are as radical and fundamentalist as the men - they protect their oppressors and wont let anyone question them or even let a woman fight for her rights as long as they are around to say how it is a symbol of their freedom! [Yeah, there were horrible smug cows who opposed women's suffrage, talking about women's place and pure influence and such shit.] It infuriates me everyday. If they behaved like another minority which happened to be quite conservative and religious, it would be okay. But these people are aggressive, uneducated, ignorant and complete bigots and they have a terrible sense of fashion. [I bet they do.] I could say a lot more but this argument is just going to start sounding weak (not to me though). Just wondering if there is any kind of support group I can go to which is not as radical as the other side? I cant go to the police just because Muslim men are spitting at me and calling me names everyday, can I? And believe me I dress quite conservative as it is.
[I do wish this woman could find a group of woman cyclists to pedal along with her shouting “Reclaim the streets!” against harassment as feminists used to go about shouting “reclaim the night”.]
I had anticipated being disappointed by Four Lions, and I was, but not in the way I had expected. I had guessed it might pussyfoot around the anti-woman, anti-kafir, anti-Jew part of jihadism, but it didn’t. The jihadists mouthed off in that strain, but then these jihadists were bumbling buffoons and so they just sounded like dimwits rather than malevolent bigots. It was like hearing Frank Spencer singing BNP songs. You wouldn’t believe he really meant it. So I was disappointed about how unfunny it was, and also how soft.
Four Lions was written by three of the sharpest satirists in the business, Chris Morris, and his co-writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who wrote Peep Show, which as well as being hilarious is cold and cruel about human egocentricity and self-delusion. I would have loved it if they had done something like a Peep Show of the would-be Al-Mujahideen. But instead we were given this comic heist about a band of guys who try to blow things up, and make a different kind of mess from the one they intended. Some of the audience laughed. I didn’t. It was slapstick aimed at twelve year olds. (I never found Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em funny either.)
The film is a comic thriller with enough suspense to keep you watching for an hour and forty minutes but the tone is odd. Like the bombers’ bodies at the end it is all over the place. There were some amusing moments eg when they make martyrdom videos, but that is pretty standard stuff that any competent sketch writer could knock off in an afternoon. The other amusing bits were the debates about whether someone is a martyr if they kill themselves by
accident, the inventive swearing in Urdu, sub-titled in English, and a scene of a discussion at an ISOC with a panel of Guardian types being interrupted by a rapping jihadist. However the film didn’t build. It was just one pratfall after another. Only in the final scenes did it approach actual chilling satire when the devout and blameless brother of one of the jihadists is taken off in a container to Egypt for interrogation.
The writers wanted to make these jihadists “human”, and therefore they didn’t base their characters on the repellent 9/11 bomber Mohammad Atta, or give them the self-righteousness of Mohammad Sidique Khan (that pompous dick lecturing and literally finger wagging at us in his video) or the pontificating Osama Bin Laden. So we got scenes of Omar, (Riz Ahmed) the ringleader at home, a happy family man with his pretty wife telling stories of martyrdom to his cute son. Riz Ahmed has that cocky mischievous look Robert Carlyle had in The Full Monty and came across as a likable wide-boy. Barry, the white convert (Nigel Lindsay) was a kind of Ross Kemp, and the others were The Thick One and The Showy Off one out on a lads‘ spree.
Four Lions puts a human face on people who are usually simply demonised – a way, ultimately, of not having to deal with them. It makes us care about Omar and his crew of wannabe martyrs, but does not condone their actions or ideology.
You don’t have to “care” about characters in a film to follow their actions with interest. You don’t “care” for the characters in The Thick of It, for instance. Is anyone more “human” than the characters in Spinal Tap, who make arses of themselves and haven‘t a lovable bone in their bodies? They aren’t “demons” but they aren’t rather sweet nitwits either.
The writers did not want to take the piss out of Muslims in general or Islam, which is fair enough, but they did miss a satirical trick of, say, having the martyrs combing through the Qu’ran and the rest of the Islamic scriptures to find justification for blowing up random civilians.
I can see why families of the 7/7 victims don’t like this. I wouldn’t if I was them, with murderous bombers presented as hapless clowns in a caper, Laurel and Hardy further confused by ideology. I suppose you could make a bitter comedy about suicide bombers, but this isn’t it.
Chris Morris’s next project:- a jolly jape about delightful ditzy pranksters in the Ku Klux Klan, who keep tripping over their robes and setting their mates’ hoods on fire with their flaming crosses, while they mouth off about Barack Obama being a mud person, Jewish and a Muslim as well. Starring Ben Stiller as the Grand Wizard and Reese Witherspoon as his feisty girlfriend. The well-loved English comic actor Nick Frost has a cameo appearance as Nick Griffin.
Today, 25th April is ANZAC day, which in Australia and New Zealand is the equivalent of Armistice Day. It commemorates the landing of the ANZAC forces in Gallipoli during the First World War, where they were ultimately defeated by the Turks. In Britain this is called the Dardanelles campaign, but in Australia and New Zealand it’s called “Gallipoli.“ This song by Eric Bogle tells the story of a crippled veteran:-
Eric Bogle emigrated to Australia from Peebles in Scotland . He does the odd tour in the UK and I have seen him received rapturously by a Scottish folkie audience. He’s short and a bit tubby, and a young bloke sitting next to me said, “He’s a god, isn’t he?” in a voice of pure worship. I’ve met him a few times and he’s a very nice, unassuming guy.
I find the song heart-breaking but the last verse is wrong:-
And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war And the young people ask, "What are they marching for?" And I ask myself the same question.
The war, the Gallipoli part of it, isn’t forgotten by a long stretch. The young people know about it and on their almost compulsory overseas travels go there to be greatly moved and greatly accusing of the British, especially Winston Churchill (then First Lord of the Admiralty and chief instigator of the campaign) for leading their ancestors into such a mess. In my primary school I was taught it as one of the great cock-ups of history. The film Gallipoli presents the British as tea drinking incompetents and ignores the great numbers of British troops who were also killed in the campaign. Gallipoli, both in historical fact and legend, influences the movement for an Australian republic.
There is no ill feeling towards the Turks because they are seen as defending their own territory. Turks are also friendly and welcoming to travelling strangers, and are generally liked.
I have done the tour of Gallipoli myself, gazing at the beach landing where the invading troops had to scramble up a cliff, and the little hill tops they had captured briefly and then lost. The place smelt of pine, the grass was brown and brittle, the cicadas were chirping, the air was hot, the sea blue and the terrain steep and hilly. It reminded me of Auckland, where some of my family live. The tanned Australians and New Zealanders in shorts and t-shirts were very respectful around the graves and treated the English guide like Jeremy Paxman interviewing a politician. “So who was responsible then?” They told each other stories about dysentery and thirst that had been handed down by grandfathers and great great uncles. “They stood in shit (pronounced “sheet”) all the time and the smells were awful.”
They acknowledge the bravery and endurance of the soldiers, and become terribly emotional about their suffering, without feeling they need to defend the cause for which they fought, just blaming the old imperialist state. Colonial lions led by donkeys sitting around a table in London.
For the Turks their victory was an inspiration for Turkish nationalism. Mestafa Kemal was a divisional commander and his success at repelling the invaders gave him huge prestige, helping him in his later political career which finally culminated in his becoming Ataturk, the Father of Turkey, whose statues and portraits are found all over the country. The tourists look at the many British and Commonwealth graves and memorials to find their family names but they also stop at the slab on which are carved Ataturk’s words of reconciliation:-
Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives. You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours.. You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears. Your sons are now living in our bosom and are in peace. Having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.
Australians and New Zealand English wouldn’t produce such rhetoric but they are touched by it.
The Turks call the campaign after the port Çanakkale where the Turks repulsed the Royal Navy and they have their own beautiful song, Çanakkaleiçinde, which is very popular.
The war is declared. It came down on us like fire. The whole country shed tears. The Anyali Carsi, the market place, in Çanakkale I'm leaving for the enemy Mother And there goes my boyhood. The cypress tree grows tall in Çanakkale Some of us were engaged, Some married, And there goes my boyhood. They've shot me in Çanakkale Put me in a grave, I wasn't dead! And there goes my boyhood.
It is not a victory song but like Bogle's song a lament for lost youth.
While I was looking for a translation of the lyrics of that song, I found an Islamist take on Dardanelles/Gallipoli/Çanakkale.
We have celebrated the annual commemoration of the martyrs of Çanakkale (pronounced Chanakkalé) with a mawlid on Thursday night. The actual day was Wednesday, March 18th.
Sheykh Abdul Kerim Efendi reminded us of the significance of this battle as the last real jihad authorized by the Caliph, the Sultan in Istanbul. This 19th Crusade to destroy Islam failed as a consequence of about 250,000 martyrs, mostly young men aged 18-25. It marked the triumph of spiritual and religious power over state of the art materialistic power.
And on the back of that triumph the atheist Ataturk set up a secular state.
This looks like a balanced article on the Gita Sahgal/Moazzam Begg affair in The Nation.
There are no angels in this story, only human beings. Women have too often been expected to stay silent for the greater good, and Gita Sahgal probably didn't intend her complaints about Amnesty to be taken up by apologists for the "war on terror." But a case based on guilt by association simply isn't good enough to publicly condemn a man, especially one who has already been imprisoned for crimes he did not commit. Moazzam Begg didn't seek out a life in the public eye; it came to him as a consequence of his ordeal. In the current climate he might be forgiven for being protective of his community, but if he is to be taken seriously as an advocate for universal human rights, he needs to clarify his views about fundamentalist clerics his organization embraces. Amnesty needs a more transparent culture to match its principles; women's rights must be integral to all of its campaigns.
The butterfly that set this particular tempest blowing beat its wing decades ago in some British inner city. Islamophobia, antifeminism, the mutual mistrust between Muslims and the secular left have all fanned the breeze. If successive governments had not encouraged minorities to define themselves by religion, if they had answered racism and poverty with justice instead of tokenism, Gita Sahgal and Moazzam Begg might not be on opposite sides of this destructive argument.
