No doubt most of the population of the planet has now seen this crap, and sneered accordingly.

How about this question?
…
“What year did 9/11 occur?” — some of the ‘future leaders’ of the ‘free world’ answer that question here. (Yes — a ‘christian activist’ asked the question but it wasn’t that difficult to fucking answer was it)?

Says Hitchens, giving out of himself here.

“Political blogging has come under fire from some quarters for supposedly debasing expert comment and poisoning intellectual debate. I agree; Oliver Kamm is truly awful.”

The rest can be found here and here.

Viz. the comments here, there’s this:

“The military chain of command must also be totally unified. Since last November, most operations have come under NATO command. However, the development of effective Afghan National Army and police units are under a separate U.S. command structure, as are special operations. This situation is militarily untenable and must be fixed.”

From this.

“The home of greatness.”

See the create your own with photo option.

I already got Big Fat Gadgie to do it! (makes him look a little on the ’spindle-shanked’ to me tho’, so mind yourself).

Via Remember Stalingrad! 

Quality:

Where do I get my anti-imperialist bacon butty from?

Will has commented on John Pilger’s dreadful piece in the New Statesman calling for a boycott of Israel and has linked to lots of good critiques. His own is less delicately phrased than the others, but it is hard to demur from the sentiments expressed.

I do not want to comment on the article itself but to write a very personal take on why I think that this section of the pro-Palestinian left is, in effect, one of the Palestinians’ worst enemies. This is because they are not the partisans of peace, but of conflict.

Let me first get this straight. I come from a position sympathetic to the Palestinians. I was a volunteer English teacher on the West Bank in the early eighties. The establishment of the State of Israel did lead to the dispossession of the Palestinians, a bitter experience and a continuing hardship. This was compounded by the occupation following the war of 1967. The reasons for the Palestinian ‘catastrophe’ was the failure by all parties, including the British and the Arabs, for whatever reasons, to accept and impose the 1947 UN resolution creating both a Jewish and a Palestinian state. This two state solution is still the only practical basis for a just settlement.

However, a one-state settlement remains as a temptation. Far right Zionist nationalism has talked of involuntary population transfers, modelled on the Greek and Turkish population exchanges following on from the Treaty of Lausanne, in order to incorporate the whole of Mandatory Palestine into an enlarged State of Israel. Palestinian rejectionist movements dream of reversing the defeats in successive wars and achieving a final victory over Israel. This has taken several forms from the ’secular democratic state’ to the statement in the Hamas Charter that ‘the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it‘ (not very comforting to the significant Palestinian Christian minority). This rejectionism has invariably been accompanied by bloody violence. The latest excrescence of the suicide murder of civilians is the most sickening, squandering the Palestinians’ moral and political capital - and that is all they have.

So where does the Pilger inspired pro-Palestinian left go? Do they accept the undeniable legitimacy, or at least the permanence, of Israel and argue for a similar legitimacy for Palestinian national self-determination? To do so would mean engaging with, not boycotting, peace activists on both sides, educationalists and artists, trade unionists and human rights activists. No, they try to define the conflict according to their own lexicon. Zionism becomes racism, it is Apartheid, ‘ethnic cleansing’, colonialism and an agent of American imperialism. By implication those that struggle against it are the noble heroes of an anti-colonial struggle, regardless of their motivation, actions and purpose. They act as apologists for the partisans of an unwinnable struggle for a single state. And while the dynamics of conflict worsen, they can continue to feel ever more self-righteous in their advocacy.

The Palestine/Israel conflict is not easily reducible to categories, it has a unique and complex history. However, it is not about what this section of the left says it is. It is a struggle over land, self-determination, security and human rights. It is rooted in trauma - for one people genocide, for the other dispossession - and has been mediated by war and terrorism. The choice of peace means a de-escalation of violence, mutual recognition and continuing political engagement. It is hard to see that coming from the rhetoric of the left, as they act as cheerleaders for one side, rather than for the painful, slow and difficult processes that confront violence and seek reconciliation. By apologising for the worst, they betray the best. The Palestinians are ill served by such friends.

UPDATE

Terry Glavin has linked to this post . He has other links and, in particular, there are two videos that are well worth watching and circulating widely. You can see them here.

Two American Episcopalian priests have been consecrated bishop by the Anglican church in Kenya, even though they have no intention of pastoring an African flock.

Needless to say, the reason why these godbotherers have rejected the authority of the US bishops is that the latter are a bunch of unashamed shirtlifters. And as all decent and orthodox Christian clerics know, such activity should be kept strictly private and/or non-consensual.

“Meanwhile, the Episcopal diocese of Chicago on Tuesday included a lesbian priest among five nominees for bishop.”

Priceless.

Some of you may already have seen the disgusting piece of shit published on the New Statesman site by the Pilger arsehole. Well here’s one rebuttal.

As Gadgie says and the excellent Jim Denham also contributes — fuck off pissants.

One should not utilise critical categories in order to create or teach values — you must teach values by reference to the concrete situation.

Killing Jews is bad. When are the fuckwits who propagandise for killing Jews going to fuck off?

NB: I don’t expect an answer from the ‘killing Jews’ constituency.

Simon Heffer discussing the murder of young Rhys Jones in The Daily Telegraph.

It is easy to justify the compassion and sentimentality that made the mainly middle-class Attlee government pursue a more blanket welfarism than Beveridge intended. In the immediate post-war period, what was then the respectable working class lived in often frightful conditions. Especially in bombed-out urban areas, the accommodation was cramped, primitive and temporary. Things that even the poorest person today takes for granted - mains drainage, proper sanitation, a cheap power supply - were frequently unknown. It was right to want something better. But it was wrong to want it at the price of stripping people of what had always been their responsibilities for themselves and their families, and of removing all incentive to get on in life and to provide for themselves. [My emphasis.]

These choices are indeed terrible. I can just see the moral dilemma in 1945.

“Should we provide mains drainage, proper sanitation and a cheap power supply?”

“But that might mean stripping people of what have always been responsibilities for themselves.”

“I quite see that. We can’t possibly strip them of that, can we? We had better let them rot.”

Simon Heffer is a moral man. At least from his photograph he appears to be a man.

Hat tip David T

My defense of Euston and Nick’s book is now up at Jewcy. Relevant passages for the comrades already acquainted with - and weary of - l’affaire Hari:

Euston was an attempt to end the polarization that’s infected the left since the collapse of the Soviet Union robbed the movement of its sense of historical direction. Without a coherent strategy, liberalism devolved into a balkanized nightmare where liberal precepts were lost to the pressure of radical imperatives. It was a time for unity.

That time was short lived. In the August 5th issue of the New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff represented his support for the intervention as the product of foolish “emotion” for the suffering of the Kurds and Shia of Iraq. But opposition to the slaughter of minorities is no frivolous emotion; it is an essential and non-negotiable feature of leftist politics. Ignatieff is entitled to change his mind, but he should have the self-respect not to mischaracterize his former position and thus suggest there were no compelling reasons for ending a genocidal fascist dictatorship.

Of all those who once backed the war but then recanted, surely none has matched the shamelessness of British journalist Johann Hari, who today denounces Euston with all the hysterical and slanderous zeal of a penitent heretic seeking to return to Holy Mother Church.

Hari’s “eulogy for the pro-war left” was published in the Independent newspaper as an expanded version of his blunt hatchet job for Dissent magazine on the book What’s Left: How the Liberals Lost Their Way, written by the Observer columnist and Euston Manifesto co-author Nick Cohen.

What’s Left is a bitterly candid history of the left’s penchant for betraying its own ideals when they matter most. It’s a tale that begins not with the nutbags of the ANSWER coalition or the Socialist Workers’ Party, or the RESPECT Party ghoul George Galloway, but with Communists who allied with Hitler during his notorious pact with Stalin, a period rightly termed the “midnight of the century.” From here, the left’s plunge into desuetude became easy: Cohen chronicles the radical chic of the sixties and seventies, when celebrities like the Redgraves were in thrall to the “Trotskyist” cult leader Gerry Healy, and when New Left icons like Sartre and Foucault cheered theocratic reactionaries like the Ayatollah Khomeini and sport-killing rebels like Che Guevara.

Today, with the rise of various schools of postmodern theory, a politics of improvisation prevails. Anything goes on the left, including doing the rancid public relations work of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. To glance at some of the slogans of antiwar marches – “Hands Off Iraq” neatly conflated a people with its enslaver – is to see how such fringe thinking has penetrated the liberal mainstream.

Hari’s unlettered and willful misreading of Cohen’s book has been well documented by Euston bloggers, most notably by Oliver Kamm (see here and here) and Norman Geras. But the essence of Hari’s efforts to discredit the Euston Manifesto is his claim that the document is explicitly pro-war.

Here is what the Euston Manifesto actually says about Iraq: “The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against.” One of the figures conspicuously in the “against” camp was Michael Walzer, Hari’s own editor at Dissent! For his part, Cohen supported the military overthrow of the Ba’ath on human rights grounds, but rejected what he called the “false bill of goods” with which the White House and Downing Street sought to scare their constituencies into battle.

Mutiny on the Manifesto | Jewcy.com

Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has declared that she is best equipped to fight terrorists, and that another attack on the US would aid the GOP enemy.

Clinton’s words give new meaning to the word “hilarious”, and if Osama strikes again, we shall no doubt have Robert Fisk explain it away – reluctantly and with heavy heart – as the result of a nefarious Bushite conspiracy.

In true Clark County style I say “Vote Obama!”.

Live From Congress: The Skull Fucking Bill Of 2007

Almost a third of the UK’s 700 biggest businesses paid no corporation tax in the 2005-06 financial year while another 30 per cent paid less than £10m each, an official study has found.

City bonuses have increased by 30% to a record £14bn this year. The rise is twice as big as in 2006 and likely to exacerbate the widening gap between executive and shop-floor pay.

Despite this, there is real suffering out there - ‘The waiting list for a new Rolls-Royce is now five years and there is a shortage of crew members for superyachts’.

“Which Iraq War Do You Want To End?”

Claim:

Russia on Monday announced that 10 people have been arrested in the killing of journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya, including law enforcement officers and a Chechen crime boss accused of organizing the slaying.

Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika said the 10 will soon be charged with the Oct. 7 killing of Politkovskaya, who revealed human rights abuses in war-scarred Chechnya, and he suggested her murder was plotted outside Russia to discredit its leadership.

Counter-claim:

His assertion was likely to be met with disbelief by Kremlin critics, who say Putin and his government are too quick to blame foreign countries and foes abroad—often Berezovsky—for the nation’s problems.

Politkovskaya’s killing came less than two months before the radiation poisoning death in London on Nov. 23 of Berezovsky associate and former KGB counterintelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, which further damaged the Russian leadership’s reputation abroad.

Litvinenko, who had been investigating Politkovskaya’s death, had said Putin was behind her slaying and also blamed the Russian leader for his own poisoning.

Footnote:

The U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists said Politkovskaya was the 13th journalist killed in a contract-style murder in Russia since Putin took office in 2000, and nobody has been convicted in any of the slayings—a record that has led to doubts about the government’s dedication to freedom of the press.

John Sweeney has been hanging around with people who like to dress up as SS officers for the weekend. And no, he hasn’t been visiting scientologists on the set of their latest movies. While at the same event he saw some fairly odious memorabilia and David Irving who revealed a singularly unpleasant personal record:

Among the show’s 1,000 stalls are some where the public can pick up Nazi knickknacks. One trader, from Belgium, was selling a “concentration camp trolley” from Belsen for £550. When challenged, he said: “That’s just a wooden thing with iron on it. That trolley didn’t kill anybody. It’s not a bomb or a bullet. It’s just a trolley.”

When it was pointed out to him that the trolley was advertised as “a concentration camp trolley marked SS from Belsen”, he replied: “There’s a difference between politics and collecting.I don’t do politics.”

Someone who does is David Irving, the historian who last year finished a jail sentence in Austria for Holocaust denial. He was sporting a slight toothbrush moustache like a white version of Robert Mugabe - a comparison I did not care to mention.

He was at a stall selling his books, believed by many people, including a judge in a High Court case, to deny the Holocaust. He offered a handshake. I hesitated and shook - to be told I had now shaken the hand that had shaken the hands of more people who had shaken the hand of Hitler than anyone else.

Nice.

Irving is now reduced to hawking his books at a stall to nutjobs with a fetish for fascist memorabilia. A reassuring thought, is it not?

Ian Pindar has a review in Saturday’s Guardian of Toby Green’s new book, Inquisition: The Reign of Fear. If I am reading him right, the review seems to be a perfect illustration of both the dangers of historical analogy and the intellectual confusion surrounding the struggle against Islamist terrorism. Pindar focuses on what he sees as the book’s argument that the Inquisition was ‘about power not religion‘ and the need to ‘create a fictitious enemy within to channel the forces of popular unrest away from the throne‘. Then, somewhat speculatively, he writes, 

Just as Arthur Miller used the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 to comment on McCarthyite
America, so in this book Green appears to be using the Inquisition to comment obliquely on the “war on terror”. He makes no explicit comparison, leaving the parallels to speak for themselves. 

I cannot say whether this was the author’s intention or not as I have not read the book, but Pindar seems to have no doubts and uses the rest of his review to draw out what he sees these to be. He quotes Green as writing, 

“Propaganda was winning … Thus soon even reasonable Christians believed in the archetype of the seditious crypto-Muslim and came to believe that these fanatics had to be stopped before they could succeed in their plan of destroying the nation and its way of life.” 

Is Green drawing a parallel between 16th Century Spain and today? If so there is a big distinction. Far from being a ‘fictitious enemy‘, Islamist terrorism is only too real and addicted to the slaughter of innocent people around the globe - this would be a false analogy if ever I have seen one. 

Pindar goes on to write, 

Green argues persuasively that the Inquisition’s vast bureaucratic reach into the private lives of its citizens makes it a forerunner of the modern totalitarian state, while its obsession with limpieza de sangre or “purity of blood” is an awful forewarning of fascism. 

As someone who sees totalitarianism as an historical constant rather than a feature of modernity, I have to agree. However, what is Pindar trying to say? Is he suggesting that the ‘war on terror’ is turning Western governments into precursors of fascist states? If so, I think he has got his analogies in a terrible tangle. 

What the ‘war on terror’ is actually fighting is the attempt to create a new Inquisition. Islamist terrorism embodies Inquisition values. Just look at theocratic rule today; from the arrest of young men for having the wrong haircut to condemning journalists to death for being ‘enemies of God’. Despite some of the egregious aspects - Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, ‘extraordinary rendition’, the threat to some civil liberties, etc. - all of which I unreservedly condemn, the ‘war on terror’ was conceived to defend liberal capitalist society against the establishment of a new totalitarianism rather than being a threat to impose one.  

I am cautious about dragging out the old cliché, ‘the lessons of history’, but if there is one to be learnt here, it is that fascism needs opposing. I am not sure that Ian Pindar has learnt it properly.

“To invoke Vietnam was a blunder too far for Bush”

Hitchens latest here.

LTC John Nagl The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - 23 August 2007

On Counterinsurgency – US Army Field Manual 3-24 / Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 33.3.5

And the second one:

“Petraeus thinks you’re a pussy”

The journal, that is, not the environment.

Sam Harris – neuroscientist, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, and esteemed godbothererbotherer – says scientists should unite against the threat from religion.

Nature recently published a piece by “Professor of Postcolonial Studies” Ziauddin Sardar on Islam’s “intrinsically rational world view”. In his letter of reply Harris concludes:

“At a time when Muslim doctors and engineers stand accused of attempting atrocities in the expectation of supernatural reward, when the Catholic Church still preaches the sinfulness of condom use in villages devastated by AIDS, when the president of the United States repeatedly vetoes the most promising medical research for religious reasons, much depends on the scientific community presenting a united front against the forces of unreason.

“There are bridges and there are gangplanks, and it is the business of journals such as Nature to know the difference.”

Read the rest.