Several girls from Birmingham stood on a wall shouting protest chants: “One, two, three, four, occupation no more! Five, six, seven, eight, stop the killing! Stop the hate!”
Indeed.
The full report is even more hilarious.
Former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn said:
“The troops in Iraq have caused devastation. It’s the same in Afghanistan.”
Perhaps the whole thing was just a random act of surrealism or something…
Of much more interest
Matthew Parris writes to David Aaronovitch:
If I thought that the opinions of columnists and commentators in Britain and abroad were of no account, I would cease to write for newspapers. If I thought that arguments between media voices were so much futile babble, going nowhere, I would not contribute to them. If I thought that all necessary lessons had now been learnt from Britain’s colossal blunder in the Middle East, and the implications for future policy agreed, I would be happy to move on, as (echoing a favourite phrase of the instigator of Britain’s part in this war, Tony Blair) you seem to urge.
But I won’t move on. The neocons [Yawn] and their supporters have lost this argument, David, and they have done Britain and Britain’s standing in the world tremendous damage. I do not lay to their discredit the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, as I do not think they envisaged these, and nor am I sure Iraq’s history would in the end have allowed the region to be stabilised by anything other than exhaustion. But there have been British deaths, too, and all to no purpose – or no result.
I can think of at least two results, and that’s before breakfast.
Of course these have to be considered in the light of the appalling costs of the war, but to suggest that a fragile democracy, as a third example, is no result is demeaning to those in Iraq who are struggling to ensure it is a result that pays off in the long term. Oh, and here is a fourth result.
From iPods around the world, a woman of the Mursi tribe, Southern Ethiopia:
The creation of Omo Park in 1966 forced the Mursi people and other tribes away from certain of their homeland areas, but the park has persisted mainly as a figment of cartographers’ imaginations.
In 2004, the park was taken over by the African Parks Foundation of the Netherlands, a project of billionaire Paul van Vlissingen, who acquired his fortune in liquid petroleum gas distribution and a global retail empire. A key foundation benefactor is Rob Walton, the chairman of Wal-Mart. African Parks Foundation refused to agree to a “no evictions” clause in its contracts with the Ethiopian government. They were asked to make their contracts available to tribal people so the tribes could seek legal advice, and to enter into agreements with the tribes, to safeguard the tribes’ rights and secure co-management accords. The foundation refused.
Last December, the foundation walked away from the situation.
Drought bedevils the Mursi and their neighbours. Their subsistence cultivation and cattle herding are further threatened by mechanised cotton farming, by parks, and by hunting concessions. Competition for agricultural and grazing land has exacerbated inter-tribal conflict, and the spread of automatic weapons hasn’t helped matters. Observers say “unsustainable use” and tribal conflicts remain the greatest challenges in the region. Wildlife has been decimated, other than in the “no-man’s land” between the different ethnic groups.
– an 81pp, 7.4MB PDF file to be read and inwardly digested.
Page 35 of the report features a cartoon by Martin Rowson, first published in the Guardian on 19 July 2006, and a reference to the defeated call for members of the Universities and Colleges Union to boycott Israel.
After reading the document thoroughly we may find ourselves niggling over certain points and omissions. But the report is a comprehensive, global overview of current anti-semitism, and for that reason it is most welcome.
