Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1129
July 17, 2018
July 16, 2018
Social Justice And Ecological Disaster - Red Green Study Group Comments
Writing in People And Nature Gabriel Levy summarises a recent proposal to tackle poverty, inequality and environmental degradation.
In a response to the Labour Party’s National Policy Forum consultation, Environment, Energy and Culture: A Greener Britain, the group says a “combined approach” to tackling poverty, inequality and environmental degradation is vital.
The whole response is attached as a PDF here. Or you can read it on line on the Red Green Labour blog here. Or download it from the Labour party site here.
The group’s summary says:
This response is the result of prolonged discussion among members of the Red-Green Study Group, which has been working since 1992 on bringing together green, socialist and feminist thinking.
Contributors include trade unionists, members of the Labour Party, members of the Green Party and unaffiliated socialists. Our commitment to producing this response arose from the renewal of hope given by the election of Jeremy Corbyn and the new leadership of the Party.
Our response covers a wide range of topics, across transport, industrial production, farming and food, fishing, biodiversity, planning, energy production and conservation, climate change, health, education and others. Our key theme is that the issues of poverty and inequality and environmental degradation must be addressed together across the whole range of public policy.
Without that combined approach, there is the risk of introducing, e.g., environmental measures that unintentionally make life worse for the least well-off. Similarly, poverty alleviation should include as a key aspect, enhancing the environmental living conditions of the poorest.
We note there is a growing and many-dimensional crisis in the relationship between society – essentially, the dynamics of capitalist economic relations – and nature. This is most widely recognised in the form of climate change, but has many other dimensions, such as oceanic pollution, soil degradation, and, we wish to emphasise, loss of biodiversity.
These processes need to be addressed by an integrated framework of policy and will certainly require an extension of public ownership. However, though the state will play a leading role, this should not be a repeat of “classic” nationalisations. We suggest forms of democratic, social ownership, where all those affected by an industry or service (consumers, users, local residents, workers, etc., as appropriate) arrive at decisions through negotiated coordination.
A public body independent of government should be set up to monitor, evaluate and publicly comment on government progress toward achievement of its combined environmental and social justice objectives. This body should itself include representatives of civil society organisations and members of the general public as well as “experts”.
Demonstrators outside a court hearing on coal-fired power regulation in South Africa in 2017. Photo by James Oatway, Centre for Environmental Rights
A key to achieving many of these goals is the ability to allocate land and resources at local levels.
Under the Tory government Local Authorities have lost many of their powers, been starved of resources, and faced with impossible “choices”. This has led to the growth of several sorts of corruption, and general public apathy.
We propose restoration of Local Authority powers and resources, combined with strict measures to ensure a revitalisation of local democratic culture and activism to ensure both transparency and participation. The aim will be to use planning to ensure sustainability and social justice at local levels.
The crisis of loss of wildlife and ecological degradation (“biodiversity”) has rarely been adequately recognised on the left, including even the current Labour leadership. This loss has huge resonance with the public (vis, e.g., current concern over plastics pollution), and Tories are cynically taking the lead on this, having devastated biodiversity protection in practise. We propose the restoration of full powers to a reconstituted Nature Conservancy Council.
We have a very detailed and thoroughly researched section on energy generation and conservation. To address climate change we need to use local planning for sustainable communities, new standards in manufacture and transport, and an urgent programme of refitting homes for energy conservation. We need a shift to renewable energy sources, and associated research, measures to reduce the need for motorised transport, and a modal shift away from meat and dairy consumption.
Finally, we emphasise that to achieve this transformation a Labour government will need to form alliances with sympathetic other groups and parties across civil society.
Let’s hope this serious contribution to political discussion gets the attention it deserves.
In a response to the Labour Party’s National Policy Forum consultation, Environment, Energy and Culture: A Greener Britain, the group says a “combined approach” to tackling poverty, inequality and environmental degradation is vital.
The whole response is attached as a PDF here. Or you can read it on line on the Red Green Labour blog here. Or download it from the Labour party site here.
The group’s summary says:
This response is the result of prolonged discussion among members of the Red-Green Study Group, which has been working since 1992 on bringing together green, socialist and feminist thinking.
Contributors include trade unionists, members of the Labour Party, members of the Green Party and unaffiliated socialists. Our commitment to producing this response arose from the renewal of hope given by the election of Jeremy Corbyn and the new leadership of the Party.
Our response covers a wide range of topics, across transport, industrial production, farming and food, fishing, biodiversity, planning, energy production and conservation, climate change, health, education and others. Our key theme is that the issues of poverty and inequality and environmental degradation must be addressed together across the whole range of public policy.
Without that combined approach, there is the risk of introducing, e.g., environmental measures that unintentionally make life worse for the least well-off. Similarly, poverty alleviation should include as a key aspect, enhancing the environmental living conditions of the poorest.
We note there is a growing and many-dimensional crisis in the relationship between society – essentially, the dynamics of capitalist economic relations – and nature. This is most widely recognised in the form of climate change, but has many other dimensions, such as oceanic pollution, soil degradation, and, we wish to emphasise, loss of biodiversity.
These processes need to be addressed by an integrated framework of policy and will certainly require an extension of public ownership. However, though the state will play a leading role, this should not be a repeat of “classic” nationalisations. We suggest forms of democratic, social ownership, where all those affected by an industry or service (consumers, users, local residents, workers, etc., as appropriate) arrive at decisions through negotiated coordination.
A public body independent of government should be set up to monitor, evaluate and publicly comment on government progress toward achievement of its combined environmental and social justice objectives. This body should itself include representatives of civil society organisations and members of the general public as well as “experts”.
Demonstrators outside a court hearing on coal-fired power regulation in South Africa in 2017. Photo by James Oatway, Centre for Environmental Rights A key to achieving many of these goals is the ability to allocate land and resources at local levels.
Under the Tory government Local Authorities have lost many of their powers, been starved of resources, and faced with impossible “choices”. This has led to the growth of several sorts of corruption, and general public apathy.
We propose restoration of Local Authority powers and resources, combined with strict measures to ensure a revitalisation of local democratic culture and activism to ensure both transparency and participation. The aim will be to use planning to ensure sustainability and social justice at local levels.
The crisis of loss of wildlife and ecological degradation (“biodiversity”) has rarely been adequately recognised on the left, including even the current Labour leadership. This loss has huge resonance with the public (vis, e.g., current concern over plastics pollution), and Tories are cynically taking the lead on this, having devastated biodiversity protection in practise. We propose the restoration of full powers to a reconstituted Nature Conservancy Council.
We have a very detailed and thoroughly researched section on energy generation and conservation. To address climate change we need to use local planning for sustainable communities, new standards in manufacture and transport, and an urgent programme of refitting homes for energy conservation. We need a shift to renewable energy sources, and associated research, measures to reduce the need for motorised transport, and a modal shift away from meat and dairy consumption.
Finally, we emphasise that to achieve this transformation a Labour government will need to form alliances with sympathetic other groups and parties across civil society.
Let’s hope this serious contribution to political discussion gets the attention it deserves.
Christian Evangelicals - The Silent Majority
Speak up please! That’s the stern message which controversial commentator, Dr John Coulter, issues today in his Fearless Flying Column to the vast majority of conservative evangelical Christians across Northern Ireland - the so-called Silent Majority.
The Silent Majority of conservative evangelical Christians in Northern Ireland need to adopt some sound Biblical advice and stop hiding their lights under bushels - in practice, such Christians need to show We Are the majority opinion in this Province.
The same-sex marriage lobby, pro-abortion lobby and LGBTQ+ rights lobby all have a first-rate publicity machine which constantly pumps out their messages across both traditional and social media.
If you took the LGBTQ+ well-oiled propaganda operation at face value, you could conclude that the overwhelming majority of Northern Ireland’s estimated 1.8 million citizens were not heterosexual in their sexual orientation.
At most, the LGBTQ+ community makes up under 3 per cent of the Northern Ireland population - but they sure know how to mobilise public opinion behind their points of view. So why can’t conservative evangelical Christians take a leaf out of the LGBTQ+ campaigning strategy and stop being the Silent Majority who mumble from the comfort of their sitting rooms?
The Liberal Left within mainstream Irish Presbyterianism was defeated democratically in last month’s General Assembly votes on same-sex marriage and relations with the ultra-liberal Church of Scotland. Yet look at the massive publicity drive by just over 200 Presbyterians with their campaign to undo the General Assembly’s position under the banner ‘A Cry from the Heart’.
Do these 200-plus signatories represent the entire mainstream Presbyterian Church in Ireland? If they did, then the ‘Cry from the Heart’ lobby would have won the day in the General Assembly votes, and Irish Presbyterianism would be no better off theologically than the numerically insignificant Non-Subscribing Presbyterian denomination (also known as the Unitarians) or the increasingly ultra-liberal Church of Scotland.
LGBTQ+ Pride parades are steadily becoming as big attendance-wise as St Patrick’s Day and Twelfth parades in Northern Ireland. But if a Heterosexual Pride Day or March for Biblical Marriage was organised in Northern Ireland, how many conservative evangelical Christians would have the courage to stand up for their faith and identity and turn out to march?
I’m not a gambling man, but I’d put heavy money the Silent Majority would win the day again and many conservative evangelical Christians would adopt the same stance as the ‘stay at home’ Garden Centre Prods on polling days in numerous Unionist constituencies.
Even as a commentator, I’ve noticed there are numerous Liberal Left colleagues who can express their honestly held opinions, arguments and criticisms in a very grammatically competent manner - but how many commentators like myself would dare to put our heads above the parapets and openly admit we are Right-wing conservative evangelical Christians?
As a journalist who believes passionately in the concept of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, I fully defend the right of those on the Liberal Left to criticise my work. That’s what having a free Press in a democracy is all about.
If I take a snap-shot of my four decades in journalism - namely the 14 years I wrote the Fearless Flying Column in the Irish Daily Star - I was attacked on an almost weekly basis by bloggers from the Liberal Left. That is their democratic right to express their honestly held opinions on my work - for what they are worth!
I was told on occasions that the attacks were allegedly deliberately organised and orchestrated; names involved in this alleged conspiracy were booted around like a World Cup football.
Again, even if there was legal or ethical substance to these allegations, it is still their right to criticise, even if that criticism is nothing more than a communist-style rant!
Has it also become a case in the modern digital era that conservative evangelical Christians, while quite content to voice their opinions in the whispering safety of the church pew, mid-week Bible study, and their own sitting rooms, are too afraid to stand up for their faith for fear of retribution from social media trolls?
The Achilles’ Heel of the conservative evangelical Christian position is that they cannot cope with a deluge of criticism, hence them being dubbed, The Silent Majority.
In the quietness of the church hall, they will whisper their total opposition to same-sex marriage from a Biblical point of view, but in public - like the disciple Peter denying Christ before the crucifixion, they will adopt a ‘live and let live’ attitude or more commonly, keep quiet.
The same malaise is happening in Unionist politics. Many political representatives and activists have become fixated with the so-called mythical ‘centre ground’. Where is this ‘middle ground’? Or is it a case that traditional Right-wing Unionists have actually begun to swallow the ‘centre ground must prevail’ propaganda of the Alliance Party?
To understand this apparent fixation with the so-called ‘centre ground’, people need to focus on two major changes within the body politic in Northern Ireland.
Firstly, the two main Unionist parties - the DUP and UUP - have edged away from their traditional voters bases within the Protestant community - namely, the Loyal Orders, the marching band scene, and more importantly, the Protestant denominations as well as the Protestant working class.
If you, as a political party, have naturally sneaked away from traditional voter bases, where are you going to get votes from? This has naturally sparked the charm offensive within the DUP towards the Muslim and LGBTQ+ communities, and the UUP trying to suck up to what would be naturally Alliance voters.
Secondly, Unionists have been caught napping by the leadership strategy of Naomi Long of Alliance. During the conflict era and peace process era, the leaderships of John Alderdice and David Ford very much revolved around the concept - let’s all work and live together! Alliance was an aspiration party rather than a movement with a definite agenda.
Naomi Long is putting ideological meat on those party bones created by Alderdice and Ford. She is transforming Alliance into a genuinely unique liberal party with a very clear agenda. More importantly, Long and especially her colleagues within Presbyterianism, have been constantly encouraging their supporters to ‘speak up and speak out’.
Joining, voting and supporting Alliance is now no longer about wanting to be involved with cop-out politics. It is about pushing a clear definite ideology and liberal manifesto.
Just as the 200+ Presbyterians who signed their wee letter of protest do not represent the entire denomination or even the theology of Presbyterianism, so too, Alliance does not represent the majority political thinking of Christians.
But the bottom line is that we conservative evangelical Christians needs to learn from the examples of Long’s Alliance and the 200+ ‘Cry from the Heart’ activists in Presbyterianism - we need to come from behind our safe sofas, leave our comfort zones, mobilise our supporters - and get them out to vote!
Conservative evangelical Christians cannot moan about the secularist, pluralist, and Liberal Left drift in society if they are not prepared to organise themselves.
Dr John Coulter is a former Religious Affairs Correspondent at the Belfast News Letter, a former Director of Operations at Christian Communication Network Television.
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter. @JohnAHCoulter
The Silent Majority of conservative evangelical Christians in Northern Ireland need to adopt some sound Biblical advice and stop hiding their lights under bushels - in practice, such Christians need to show We Are the majority opinion in this Province.
The same-sex marriage lobby, pro-abortion lobby and LGBTQ+ rights lobby all have a first-rate publicity machine which constantly pumps out their messages across both traditional and social media.
If you took the LGBTQ+ well-oiled propaganda operation at face value, you could conclude that the overwhelming majority of Northern Ireland’s estimated 1.8 million citizens were not heterosexual in their sexual orientation.
At most, the LGBTQ+ community makes up under 3 per cent of the Northern Ireland population - but they sure know how to mobilise public opinion behind their points of view. So why can’t conservative evangelical Christians take a leaf out of the LGBTQ+ campaigning strategy and stop being the Silent Majority who mumble from the comfort of their sitting rooms?
The Liberal Left within mainstream Irish Presbyterianism was defeated democratically in last month’s General Assembly votes on same-sex marriage and relations with the ultra-liberal Church of Scotland. Yet look at the massive publicity drive by just over 200 Presbyterians with their campaign to undo the General Assembly’s position under the banner ‘A Cry from the Heart’.
Do these 200-plus signatories represent the entire mainstream Presbyterian Church in Ireland? If they did, then the ‘Cry from the Heart’ lobby would have won the day in the General Assembly votes, and Irish Presbyterianism would be no better off theologically than the numerically insignificant Non-Subscribing Presbyterian denomination (also known as the Unitarians) or the increasingly ultra-liberal Church of Scotland.
LGBTQ+ Pride parades are steadily becoming as big attendance-wise as St Patrick’s Day and Twelfth parades in Northern Ireland. But if a Heterosexual Pride Day or March for Biblical Marriage was organised in Northern Ireland, how many conservative evangelical Christians would have the courage to stand up for their faith and identity and turn out to march?
I’m not a gambling man, but I’d put heavy money the Silent Majority would win the day again and many conservative evangelical Christians would adopt the same stance as the ‘stay at home’ Garden Centre Prods on polling days in numerous Unionist constituencies.
Even as a commentator, I’ve noticed there are numerous Liberal Left colleagues who can express their honestly held opinions, arguments and criticisms in a very grammatically competent manner - but how many commentators like myself would dare to put our heads above the parapets and openly admit we are Right-wing conservative evangelical Christians?
As a journalist who believes passionately in the concept of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, I fully defend the right of those on the Liberal Left to criticise my work. That’s what having a free Press in a democracy is all about.
If I take a snap-shot of my four decades in journalism - namely the 14 years I wrote the Fearless Flying Column in the Irish Daily Star - I was attacked on an almost weekly basis by bloggers from the Liberal Left. That is their democratic right to express their honestly held opinions on my work - for what they are worth!
I was told on occasions that the attacks were allegedly deliberately organised and orchestrated; names involved in this alleged conspiracy were booted around like a World Cup football.
Again, even if there was legal or ethical substance to these allegations, it is still their right to criticise, even if that criticism is nothing more than a communist-style rant!
Has it also become a case in the modern digital era that conservative evangelical Christians, while quite content to voice their opinions in the whispering safety of the church pew, mid-week Bible study, and their own sitting rooms, are too afraid to stand up for their faith for fear of retribution from social media trolls?
The Achilles’ Heel of the conservative evangelical Christian position is that they cannot cope with a deluge of criticism, hence them being dubbed, The Silent Majority.
In the quietness of the church hall, they will whisper their total opposition to same-sex marriage from a Biblical point of view, but in public - like the disciple Peter denying Christ before the crucifixion, they will adopt a ‘live and let live’ attitude or more commonly, keep quiet.
The same malaise is happening in Unionist politics. Many political representatives and activists have become fixated with the so-called mythical ‘centre ground’. Where is this ‘middle ground’? Or is it a case that traditional Right-wing Unionists have actually begun to swallow the ‘centre ground must prevail’ propaganda of the Alliance Party?
To understand this apparent fixation with the so-called ‘centre ground’, people need to focus on two major changes within the body politic in Northern Ireland.
Firstly, the two main Unionist parties - the DUP and UUP - have edged away from their traditional voters bases within the Protestant community - namely, the Loyal Orders, the marching band scene, and more importantly, the Protestant denominations as well as the Protestant working class.
If you, as a political party, have naturally sneaked away from traditional voter bases, where are you going to get votes from? This has naturally sparked the charm offensive within the DUP towards the Muslim and LGBTQ+ communities, and the UUP trying to suck up to what would be naturally Alliance voters.
Secondly, Unionists have been caught napping by the leadership strategy of Naomi Long of Alliance. During the conflict era and peace process era, the leaderships of John Alderdice and David Ford very much revolved around the concept - let’s all work and live together! Alliance was an aspiration party rather than a movement with a definite agenda.
Naomi Long is putting ideological meat on those party bones created by Alderdice and Ford. She is transforming Alliance into a genuinely unique liberal party with a very clear agenda. More importantly, Long and especially her colleagues within Presbyterianism, have been constantly encouraging their supporters to ‘speak up and speak out’.
Joining, voting and supporting Alliance is now no longer about wanting to be involved with cop-out politics. It is about pushing a clear definite ideology and liberal manifesto.
Just as the 200+ Presbyterians who signed their wee letter of protest do not represent the entire denomination or even the theology of Presbyterianism, so too, Alliance does not represent the majority political thinking of Christians.
But the bottom line is that we conservative evangelical Christians needs to learn from the examples of Long’s Alliance and the 200+ ‘Cry from the Heart’ activists in Presbyterianism - we need to come from behind our safe sofas, leave our comfort zones, mobilise our supporters - and get them out to vote!
Conservative evangelical Christians cannot moan about the secularist, pluralist, and Liberal Left drift in society if they are not prepared to organise themselves.
Dr John Coulter is a former Religious Affairs Correspondent at the Belfast News Letter, a former Director of Operations at Christian Communication Network Television. Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter. @JohnAHCoulter
July 15, 2018
The Peace Deal That Is All Israel
Stanley L. Cohen launches a broadside in Counterpunch against Jared Kushner.
Photo by U.S. Embassy Jerusalem | CC BY 2.0
Honor, like integrity, is not a commodity, like a gilded condominium in New York City for sale to the highest bidder. Nor does it license a messenger to whisper through a backdoor that which cannot be said through the front because it’s been closed for want of fairness and respect.
Yet, having been rebuked by Palestinian leadership due to the shameful move of the US Embassy to the capital of Palestine that is precisely what Jared Kushner has tried to do with his deceitful appeal to the Palestinian people in his recent interview with Al Quds.
It would be far too easy to dismiss Kushner as a mere partisan novice who, with his family, has spent a lifetime extolling the primacy of the Jewish state in the chase of personal greed, framed as religious principle. To them, like other Zionists, Palestine is but an impediment in a supremacist reach that began with the blessings of the United States well before the onset of the Nakba.
Jared Kushner, the Kushner family, and its Kushner Companies holdings are deeply tied to the financing of Israeli occupation in Palestine and the exploitation of Palestinians.
Jared Kushner has been a regular visitor to Israel since his childhood. As a 16-year-old, he and thousands of other Jewish teenagers were led on a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Benjamin Netanyahu, himself, waving Israeli flags along the way. At the end, they flew to Israel as part of their “Zionist rebirth.”
The Kushners consider Netanyahu part of the family, and it is often told of how the future Prime Minister was, during Jared’s boyhood, a frequent overnight guest in the Kushner New Jersey home and even slept in his room.
The elder, Charles Kushner, has given steadily to Israeli projects including schools and the IDF, and even to Likud Party campaign coffers. Kushner Companies use Israeli financing extensively… including tens of millions from Israeli banks, insurance firm investment funds, and private Israeli investors… to fund its empire of real estate debt. These financial ties continue to the present day and are inextricably woven through the operations and maintenance of Jared Kushner’s sizable fortune. Kushner cements his family’s long commitment to Zionism in charitable contributions to West Bank settlers (including the notorious, radical settlement Bet-El, built on land confiscated by the IDF in the 1970s from impoverished Palestinian farmers driven off at gunpoint), and even to the IDF itself.
With foreseeable ease, Kushner, in his interview in Al Quds, embraces the standard Zionist blame game which reduces Palestinians to mindless observers of a history over which they have no personal interest, input or participation. To him, it is all about “bad leadership” and not, at all, a 70 year old colonial project long supported and funded by the United States. It continues unabated to date.
Nowhere is this more vivid than in his simple minded… almost childlike… view of life and death in Gaza. To Kushner, two million people are hostage not to the calculated systematic state terror of Israel, but rather to the PA and Hamas who choose, of their own volition, to exploit other Palestinians as mere “pawns [in] a narrative of “victimhood” so as to garner a “feel good” moment of sympathetic press while they bury their own sons and daughters.
That Kushner would speak of headlines in lieu of substance should come as no surprise. He is, after all, the anointed mouthpiece of an administration consumed not with deeds of enlightened, meaningful concern and consequence, but rather the cheap banner of the moment or the mindless tweet of the day.
Nowhere in Kushner’s peek at Gaza does Israel bear any responsibility, whatsoever, for the world’s largest outdoor concentration camp which has grown exponentially more and more sadistic day by day and year by year under its complete occupation.
Predictably, Kushner sees the collective suffer that is Gaza as not the result of Israeli destruction and embargo but, rather, an economy that has been held hostage to a handful of tunnels and some defensive “rockets” that have caused no harm, at all, but to pierce Israel’s geopolitical veneer of invincibility.
Indeed, to speak, as he does, of long term investment and economic growth as the linchpin of Gaza’s immediate need and survival is to blink the reality of its daily anguish. Dramatically absent in his sophomoric cause and effect analysis is any acknowledgment by Kushner of Israel’s complete and punitive check over the flow of food, water, medicine and movement in and out of Gaza.
True to form, he is wholly silent about the Jewish state’s calculated control over Gaza’s broken infrastructure intended to punish and manipulate the fundamental right of Palestinians to obtain clean water and energy to power their homes, hospitals and schools. To argue that these core human rights are somehow contingent upon investment and reconstruction opportunities a decade down the road is little more than a selective rewrite fueled by Kushner’s own feel good denial.
In the partisan preach of the White House, all Gaza need do is to surrender its political will and basic right to self determination and, like the fractured nuclear treaty with Iran and the newly prettied détente with North Korea, all will be well overnight, as if by magic. Elsewhere, the well crafted message of Kushner ranges from sheer naiveté to utter falsehood.
Thus, while he is quick to cast the humanitarian crises in Gaza upon the political winds of prior administrations alone, at the very moment Kushner spoke at the opening pomp at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, thousands of defenseless Palestinian men, women and children were mowed down for the temerity of exercising their right to demonstrate in Gaza. And while Israeli snipers may have worn a uniform that day, decorated with the crest of the Star of David, there can be no doubt that, inside, the label itself said made in America.
Even before Donald Trump took office, his son-in-law was busy trying to illegally intervene on behalf of Israel as he tried to get member states of the UN Security Council to stop a vote on a resolution critical of Israel’s illegal settlement policy.
Following his inauguration, among his first acts, Trump froze the transfer of $221m in discretionary USAID funds for emergency humanitarian aid for Gaza. At other times, he has shown unprecedented unilateral support for Israel ranging from threats to close the PLO office in Washington to freezing $65 million in US funds to UNRWA for critical services for Palestinian refugees . . . to a threat to suspend all money for Palestine “… unless they sit down and negotiate peace.”
Recently, the U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for international protective measures for the people of Gaza that won the backing from 10 of its other member states. Earlier, the U.S. vetoed a resolution that stated “… any decisions and actions which purport to have altered… the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with relevant resolutions of the Security Council.” Just last week the U.S. withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council citing the group’s “political bias” against Israel.
The United States has, for decades, posed as a neutral interlocutor in the so-called “peace process” … claiming to broker a just peace for Palestinians even as it armed Israel and abetted its steady expansion into Palestinian lands. To maintain the fiction of its “referee” role, successive White House administrations of both parties have typically deployed well-meaning, eminent envoys with deep diplomatic pedigree and the appearance of fairness… even sincerity… all the while blocking any international action against Israel’s illegal settlements and bank-rolling the IDF with billions from U.S. taxpayers.
This charade held sway over forty years of the true U.S. Policy… to build its client state, Israel, into a fortress and regional military power capable of furthering American interests… as the Israelis pursued their agenda of dispossessing Palestinians, stealing their land and imprisoning or killing them. It should be clear, now, that the U.S. never intended to support any Palestinian statehood. American bad faith suffuses the wreckage of the two-state solution with the stench of betrayal and death.
Today, there is no longer any need for the charade or even for any diplomats. Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jewish real estate developer, arrives, now, as the latest American Mideast envoy… a man so thoroughly vested in the success of Zionism that no one can seriously accept him as anything but a rank salesman for the Israeli dream.
In this respect, he fits the Trumpian mold of “trolling” the opposition: appoint the most objectionable person to the role for which he is least suited, and watch your enemies foam at the mouth in outrage. Kushner’s job here is to disrupt and shatter the genteel tradition of “middle east peace”… a polite Western-powers parlor game… and finish it. Trump’s intent is to pull American interests completely and irrevocably to Israel’s side and render any future American negotiator position impossible. After Trump, there will be no more “peace process”… just as there will be no American credibility in international relations.
The U.S. State Department is gutted and staffed by amateurs as Trump plays a one-man-band when it comes to his catastrophic style of diplomacy. Why would any Palestinian listen to Jared Kushner? Even if he promised the world with a side of falafel, his father-in-law can, and will, take it away with a single tweet the following day.
Kushner, in his interview, insults Palestinians and offers only economic vassalage in his vision of a high-tech, economic empowerment zone… Silicon Valley on the Med. Palestinians, stripped of sovereignty, civil and human rights, and any political future, can only serve Israelis as a captive labor force with no agency or control. This is the “deal” America’s latest envoy offers… accept plantation slavery or cease to exist. The Trump agenda has succeeded in burying the two-state solution. Palestinians will return to the barricades and prepare for resistance.
To walk down memory lane from Oslo is to take a sure path of broken promises and empty tease accompanied not by good faith but the wail of endless funerals where martyred young women and men have been laid to rest for little more than the courage of their Palestinian voice.
The notion the United States can or will play a role as a fair and honest broker in seeing that justice be had for Palestinians is so much doctored myth and little else.
It is mocked by its own silence as Israel has illegally annexed much of the occupied West Bank since Oslo and imprisoned well over a hundred thousand Palestinians who have simply dared to seek justice and equality. Many hundreds of others have lost their lives to settler violence or at the hands of the IDF. During the same period tens of thousands of civilians have been killed or injured by repeated onslaughts on Gaza.
Like his father-in-law, Jared Kushner is very much the burglar who would break into your home to steal your most precious belongings and then promise to return them in exchange for your child. Filled with hollow promise and little more, make no mistake about it Kushner speaks to Palestine not just as a delivery boy for Donald Trump, but as a rubber stamp for Netanyahu and his age old colonial project. To the lot, the “grand” deal has nothing to do with the ends of justice but is all about personal partisan profit.
Stanley L Cohen is a lawyer and human rightsactivist in New York City.
He has done extensive work in the Middle Eastand Africa.
Follow Stanley Cohen on Twitter @StanleyCohenLaw
Photo by U.S. Embassy Jerusalem | CC BY 2.0 Honor, like integrity, is not a commodity, like a gilded condominium in New York City for sale to the highest bidder. Nor does it license a messenger to whisper through a backdoor that which cannot be said through the front because it’s been closed for want of fairness and respect.
Yet, having been rebuked by Palestinian leadership due to the shameful move of the US Embassy to the capital of Palestine that is precisely what Jared Kushner has tried to do with his deceitful appeal to the Palestinian people in his recent interview with Al Quds.
It would be far too easy to dismiss Kushner as a mere partisan novice who, with his family, has spent a lifetime extolling the primacy of the Jewish state in the chase of personal greed, framed as religious principle. To them, like other Zionists, Palestine is but an impediment in a supremacist reach that began with the blessings of the United States well before the onset of the Nakba.
Jared Kushner, the Kushner family, and its Kushner Companies holdings are deeply tied to the financing of Israeli occupation in Palestine and the exploitation of Palestinians.
Jared Kushner has been a regular visitor to Israel since his childhood. As a 16-year-old, he and thousands of other Jewish teenagers were led on a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Benjamin Netanyahu, himself, waving Israeli flags along the way. At the end, they flew to Israel as part of their “Zionist rebirth.”
The Kushners consider Netanyahu part of the family, and it is often told of how the future Prime Minister was, during Jared’s boyhood, a frequent overnight guest in the Kushner New Jersey home and even slept in his room.
The elder, Charles Kushner, has given steadily to Israeli projects including schools and the IDF, and even to Likud Party campaign coffers. Kushner Companies use Israeli financing extensively… including tens of millions from Israeli banks, insurance firm investment funds, and private Israeli investors… to fund its empire of real estate debt. These financial ties continue to the present day and are inextricably woven through the operations and maintenance of Jared Kushner’s sizable fortune. Kushner cements his family’s long commitment to Zionism in charitable contributions to West Bank settlers (including the notorious, radical settlement Bet-El, built on land confiscated by the IDF in the 1970s from impoverished Palestinian farmers driven off at gunpoint), and even to the IDF itself.
With foreseeable ease, Kushner, in his interview in Al Quds, embraces the standard Zionist blame game which reduces Palestinians to mindless observers of a history over which they have no personal interest, input or participation. To him, it is all about “bad leadership” and not, at all, a 70 year old colonial project long supported and funded by the United States. It continues unabated to date.
Nowhere is this more vivid than in his simple minded… almost childlike… view of life and death in Gaza. To Kushner, two million people are hostage not to the calculated systematic state terror of Israel, but rather to the PA and Hamas who choose, of their own volition, to exploit other Palestinians as mere “pawns [in] a narrative of “victimhood” so as to garner a “feel good” moment of sympathetic press while they bury their own sons and daughters.
That Kushner would speak of headlines in lieu of substance should come as no surprise. He is, after all, the anointed mouthpiece of an administration consumed not with deeds of enlightened, meaningful concern and consequence, but rather the cheap banner of the moment or the mindless tweet of the day.
Nowhere in Kushner’s peek at Gaza does Israel bear any responsibility, whatsoever, for the world’s largest outdoor concentration camp which has grown exponentially more and more sadistic day by day and year by year under its complete occupation.
Predictably, Kushner sees the collective suffer that is Gaza as not the result of Israeli destruction and embargo but, rather, an economy that has been held hostage to a handful of tunnels and some defensive “rockets” that have caused no harm, at all, but to pierce Israel’s geopolitical veneer of invincibility.
Indeed, to speak, as he does, of long term investment and economic growth as the linchpin of Gaza’s immediate need and survival is to blink the reality of its daily anguish. Dramatically absent in his sophomoric cause and effect analysis is any acknowledgment by Kushner of Israel’s complete and punitive check over the flow of food, water, medicine and movement in and out of Gaza.
True to form, he is wholly silent about the Jewish state’s calculated control over Gaza’s broken infrastructure intended to punish and manipulate the fundamental right of Palestinians to obtain clean water and energy to power their homes, hospitals and schools. To argue that these core human rights are somehow contingent upon investment and reconstruction opportunities a decade down the road is little more than a selective rewrite fueled by Kushner’s own feel good denial.
In the partisan preach of the White House, all Gaza need do is to surrender its political will and basic right to self determination and, like the fractured nuclear treaty with Iran and the newly prettied détente with North Korea, all will be well overnight, as if by magic. Elsewhere, the well crafted message of Kushner ranges from sheer naiveté to utter falsehood.
Thus, while he is quick to cast the humanitarian crises in Gaza upon the political winds of prior administrations alone, at the very moment Kushner spoke at the opening pomp at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, thousands of defenseless Palestinian men, women and children were mowed down for the temerity of exercising their right to demonstrate in Gaza. And while Israeli snipers may have worn a uniform that day, decorated with the crest of the Star of David, there can be no doubt that, inside, the label itself said made in America.
Even before Donald Trump took office, his son-in-law was busy trying to illegally intervene on behalf of Israel as he tried to get member states of the UN Security Council to stop a vote on a resolution critical of Israel’s illegal settlement policy.
Following his inauguration, among his first acts, Trump froze the transfer of $221m in discretionary USAID funds for emergency humanitarian aid for Gaza. At other times, he has shown unprecedented unilateral support for Israel ranging from threats to close the PLO office in Washington to freezing $65 million in US funds to UNRWA for critical services for Palestinian refugees . . . to a threat to suspend all money for Palestine “… unless they sit down and negotiate peace.”
Recently, the U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for international protective measures for the people of Gaza that won the backing from 10 of its other member states. Earlier, the U.S. vetoed a resolution that stated “… any decisions and actions which purport to have altered… the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with relevant resolutions of the Security Council.” Just last week the U.S. withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council citing the group’s “political bias” against Israel.
The United States has, for decades, posed as a neutral interlocutor in the so-called “peace process” … claiming to broker a just peace for Palestinians even as it armed Israel and abetted its steady expansion into Palestinian lands. To maintain the fiction of its “referee” role, successive White House administrations of both parties have typically deployed well-meaning, eminent envoys with deep diplomatic pedigree and the appearance of fairness… even sincerity… all the while blocking any international action against Israel’s illegal settlements and bank-rolling the IDF with billions from U.S. taxpayers.
This charade held sway over forty years of the true U.S. Policy… to build its client state, Israel, into a fortress and regional military power capable of furthering American interests… as the Israelis pursued their agenda of dispossessing Palestinians, stealing their land and imprisoning or killing them. It should be clear, now, that the U.S. never intended to support any Palestinian statehood. American bad faith suffuses the wreckage of the two-state solution with the stench of betrayal and death.
Today, there is no longer any need for the charade or even for any diplomats. Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jewish real estate developer, arrives, now, as the latest American Mideast envoy… a man so thoroughly vested in the success of Zionism that no one can seriously accept him as anything but a rank salesman for the Israeli dream.
In this respect, he fits the Trumpian mold of “trolling” the opposition: appoint the most objectionable person to the role for which he is least suited, and watch your enemies foam at the mouth in outrage. Kushner’s job here is to disrupt and shatter the genteel tradition of “middle east peace”… a polite Western-powers parlor game… and finish it. Trump’s intent is to pull American interests completely and irrevocably to Israel’s side and render any future American negotiator position impossible. After Trump, there will be no more “peace process”… just as there will be no American credibility in international relations.
The U.S. State Department is gutted and staffed by amateurs as Trump plays a one-man-band when it comes to his catastrophic style of diplomacy. Why would any Palestinian listen to Jared Kushner? Even if he promised the world with a side of falafel, his father-in-law can, and will, take it away with a single tweet the following day.
Kushner, in his interview, insults Palestinians and offers only economic vassalage in his vision of a high-tech, economic empowerment zone… Silicon Valley on the Med. Palestinians, stripped of sovereignty, civil and human rights, and any political future, can only serve Israelis as a captive labor force with no agency or control. This is the “deal” America’s latest envoy offers… accept plantation slavery or cease to exist. The Trump agenda has succeeded in burying the two-state solution. Palestinians will return to the barricades and prepare for resistance.
To walk down memory lane from Oslo is to take a sure path of broken promises and empty tease accompanied not by good faith but the wail of endless funerals where martyred young women and men have been laid to rest for little more than the courage of their Palestinian voice.
The notion the United States can or will play a role as a fair and honest broker in seeing that justice be had for Palestinians is so much doctored myth and little else.
It is mocked by its own silence as Israel has illegally annexed much of the occupied West Bank since Oslo and imprisoned well over a hundred thousand Palestinians who have simply dared to seek justice and equality. Many hundreds of others have lost their lives to settler violence or at the hands of the IDF. During the same period tens of thousands of civilians have been killed or injured by repeated onslaughts on Gaza.
Like his father-in-law, Jared Kushner is very much the burglar who would break into your home to steal your most precious belongings and then promise to return them in exchange for your child. Filled with hollow promise and little more, make no mistake about it Kushner speaks to Palestine not just as a delivery boy for Donald Trump, but as a rubber stamp for Netanyahu and his age old colonial project. To the lot, the “grand” deal has nothing to do with the ends of justice but is all about personal partisan profit.
Stanley L Cohen is a lawyer and human rightsactivist in New York City.
He has done extensive work in the Middle Eastand Africa.
Follow Stanley Cohen on Twitter @StanleyCohenLaw
Bizarre Purported Punishment From God Because of Abortions
From Atheist Republic a piece on crap made up by a religious whack job in relation to abortion and immigration in the US.
Photo Credits: TruNews
According to Dead State, there was a bizarre claim by Rick Wiles about a “brown invasion” as a punishment from God for abortions in America.
Rick Wiles, a well-known fundamentalist conservative Christian radio host and conspiracy theorist, took on a stance associated in the report with Christian-styled anti-abortion/pro-life position tied to white nationalism.
Wiles runs the show called TruNews, where he holds forth on his fundamentalist and conspiracy theorist ideas. In one short reported-on segment, he spoke on what he characterized as a “brown invasion” from Latin America.
This, he surmised, was a punishment of white people for the sin of abortion. He stated that this was a soil soaked in babies’ blood and so the soil is making a cry for some form of justice.
Wiles opined:
He argued that there needs to be repentance based on these assertions. Otherwise, another people, presumably not white people, will take the land. He is known as an End Times conspiracy theorist who is pro-Trumpism.
He originally considered the people to take over the United States of America would be the Chinese or the Russians. However, he changed his mind. The purported “invasion” comes from those who are from Central America. They are the source of God’s punishment. Wiles stated:
About Atheist Republic
Follow Atheist Republic on Twitter @AtheistRepublic
Photo Credits: TruNewsAccording to Dead State, there was a bizarre claim by Rick Wiles about a “brown invasion” as a punishment from God for abortions in America.
Rick Wiles, a well-known fundamentalist conservative Christian radio host and conspiracy theorist, took on a stance associated in the report with Christian-styled anti-abortion/pro-life position tied to white nationalism.
Wiles runs the show called TruNews, where he holds forth on his fundamentalist and conspiracy theorist ideas. In one short reported-on segment, he spoke on what he characterized as a “brown invasion” from Latin America.
This, he surmised, was a punishment of white people for the sin of abortion. He stated that this was a soil soaked in babies’ blood and so the soil is making a cry for some form of justice.
Wiles opined:
Four thousand babies killed every day, their guts, their intestines, their brains, their blood flushed down the toilet in the baby butcher shops … [it] goes into the sewer system, carried in the sewer pipes under the city streets, into the sewage system. Our country is soaked in blood and the soil is crying out for justice.
He argued that there needs to be repentance based on these assertions. Otherwise, another people, presumably not white people, will take the land. He is known as an End Times conspiracy theorist who is pro-Trumpism.
He originally considered the people to take over the United States of America would be the Chinese or the Russians. However, he changed his mind. The purported “invasion” comes from those who are from Central America. They are the source of God’s punishment. Wiles stated:
It just hit me in the past week … We’ve already been invaded. We’re already being pushed off the land. It’s already happened … The judgment has been underway for years and we didn’t see it. God is bringing another people in to America and pushing the white Europeans off the land … We have a brown invasion that has come in … This is the land vomiting the people out.
About Atheist RepublicFollow Atheist Republic on Twitter @AtheistRepublic
July 14, 2018
Sling Your Hook England
Anthony McIntyre waxes dismissive of claims that anti-English bigotry is behind the sound of one hand clapping for the relative success of the England national team in the 2018 World Cup finals.
England are out of the World Cup, as anticipated by anyone with a modicum of common sense. A mundane team that only played two quality sides during the tournament and lost to both. Out of seven matches played, three ended in defeat. Sort of tells you something.
Yet there are those “who lazily conflate truth with negativity or some claim of anti-English sentiment.” We aficionados of the sport who appreciate good soccer but rarely find it in the English national side are nevertheless accused of being narrow minded bigots, mocking English efforts for any reason other than the obvious of England being "the most overblown football nation there is." And the illusionists who rage when the rest of us are not taken in by apparitions, manage to reach their state of disconnect without the aid of mind altering substances. At least I have to get drunk before attaining that accomplishment.
I don’t hate the English. Theirs is a country where I have visited more than any other - getting tanked up in many of its cities - on occasion to indulge my passion for soccer. I have stood in mournful silence at the Anfield shrine, and sport a tattoo in memory of the English Liverpool fans who died in the unlawful killings at Hillsborough stadium 29 years ago. When Jordan Henderson stepped forward to take his spot kick during the last 16 shootout with Colombia, I held my breath in a Catalonian bar in the hope that he of all players, the Liverpool captain, would not miss. He did but it had no bearing on the outcome. I also like to see minnows do well when they don't have grossly inflated expectations of themselves. You can put your donkey in the Aintree Grand National if you choose but don't demand that the rest of us back it against the tried and tested steeple chasers.
What was never in doubt for soccer realists was that England would go home as they have consistently in the post-1966 era, empty handed. In terms of international football, England is a trophy free zone. This was a second tier team. The second youngest squad in the competition, it was much improved on the hopeless shower that went out in humiliating style at the Euros two years ago. It could hardly have been worse. It might yet put in a decent performance in the Euros in 2020.
The weakness of the current squad was exposed again this afternoon against a much classier Belgium in the non-event that is played out for third place. A loser’s final, eminently suitable for England, with the real McCoy due tomorrow afternoon being fought out by two worthy squads. Semi-finalists for sure but there is simply no way that England are among the top four teams in the world. They managed to get the easier route through. Even this has to be tempered by:
On the matter of anti-English sentiment, not related to soccer per se, somewhere in the midst of the derangement lurks English nationalism, a spectre that haunted the world leaving so much misery in its trail. There is much feeling around in opposition to that but it exists in abundance in England as well. So it is hardly anti-English to resile from English nationalism. Where English nationalism asserts itself, there is always a response to it from those who have been burned in the empire where the sun never sets. Much as I recoil from Brexit when I see those who are its most vociferous champions, I do likewise from the little Englander delusional nationalism that seeks to become a global power, this time on the soccer field.
I don’t care who supports England. Just don’t expect, out of some sense of chauvinistic entitlement, that I too should cheer them on. The superiority complex that distorts mediocrity into magnificent, that has perennially underwhelmed and underachieved should be mocked, much as the supernatural claims of religion. So when we are told to doff the cap, tip the forelock, fall behind the butcher’s apron and chant in unison with the dullards, Come On England, don’t be surprised if we respond with a curt dismissive Sling Your Hook England.
It's coming home alright, the team not the cup.
Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.
Follow Anthony McIntyre on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre
England are out of the World Cup, as anticipated by anyone with a modicum of common sense. A mundane team that only played two quality sides during the tournament and lost to both. Out of seven matches played, three ended in defeat. Sort of tells you something.
Yet there are those “who lazily conflate truth with negativity or some claim of anti-English sentiment.” We aficionados of the sport who appreciate good soccer but rarely find it in the English national side are nevertheless accused of being narrow minded bigots, mocking English efforts for any reason other than the obvious of England being "the most overblown football nation there is." And the illusionists who rage when the rest of us are not taken in by apparitions, manage to reach their state of disconnect without the aid of mind altering substances. At least I have to get drunk before attaining that accomplishment.
I don’t hate the English. Theirs is a country where I have visited more than any other - getting tanked up in many of its cities - on occasion to indulge my passion for soccer. I have stood in mournful silence at the Anfield shrine, and sport a tattoo in memory of the English Liverpool fans who died in the unlawful killings at Hillsborough stadium 29 years ago. When Jordan Henderson stepped forward to take his spot kick during the last 16 shootout with Colombia, I held my breath in a Catalonian bar in the hope that he of all players, the Liverpool captain, would not miss. He did but it had no bearing on the outcome. I also like to see minnows do well when they don't have grossly inflated expectations of themselves. You can put your donkey in the Aintree Grand National if you choose but don't demand that the rest of us back it against the tried and tested steeple chasers.
What was never in doubt for soccer realists was that England would go home as they have consistently in the post-1966 era, empty handed. In terms of international football, England is a trophy free zone. This was a second tier team. The second youngest squad in the competition, it was much improved on the hopeless shower that went out in humiliating style at the Euros two years ago. It could hardly have been worse. It might yet put in a decent performance in the Euros in 2020.
The weakness of the current squad was exposed again this afternoon against a much classier Belgium in the non-event that is played out for third place. A loser’s final, eminently suitable for England, with the real McCoy due tomorrow afternoon being fought out by two worthy squads. Semi-finalists for sure but there is simply no way that England are among the top four teams in the world. They managed to get the easier route through. Even this has to be tempered by:
Italy and the Netherlands failed to qualify, before Germany shocked the world by crashing out at the group stage, and Spain, Argentina and Portugal bowed out in the last 16. That's the last four World Cup finalists, and the last four European Championship finalists, out before the tournament kicked into second gear.
On the matter of anti-English sentiment, not related to soccer per se, somewhere in the midst of the derangement lurks English nationalism, a spectre that haunted the world leaving so much misery in its trail. There is much feeling around in opposition to that but it exists in abundance in England as well. So it is hardly anti-English to resile from English nationalism. Where English nationalism asserts itself, there is always a response to it from those who have been burned in the empire where the sun never sets. Much as I recoil from Brexit when I see those who are its most vociferous champions, I do likewise from the little Englander delusional nationalism that seeks to become a global power, this time on the soccer field.
I don’t care who supports England. Just don’t expect, out of some sense of chauvinistic entitlement, that I too should cheer them on. The superiority complex that distorts mediocrity into magnificent, that has perennially underwhelmed and underachieved should be mocked, much as the supernatural claims of religion. So when we are told to doff the cap, tip the forelock, fall behind the butcher’s apron and chant in unison with the dullards, Come On England, don’t be surprised if we respond with a curt dismissive Sling Your Hook England.
It's coming home alright, the team not the cup.
Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.Follow Anthony McIntyre on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre
The Central Park Five
Christopher Owens reviews a 2012 book about a US miscarriage of justice.
Miscarriages of justice don't shock us anymore, but what does shock us is the machinations that take place to ensure that such things occur.
We know the obvious cases (Birmingham Six, Tottenham Three, Stefan Kiszko), but what about the smaller stories like Chris Jeffries? The media openly condemning him as guilty without a trial. And all because he seemed "a bit weird."
Very dangerous, and genuinely scary.
It's a simple formula: take a police force under severe pressure to solve a case, a media where more and more journalists struggle with the concept of "contempt of court" and an apathetic public.
And it was this combination that led to The Central Park Five being jailed for the brutal attack and rape of Trisha Meili, a young investment banker.
It is these sections where the book excels, depicting New York City as a decaying metropolis by the end of the 80's where crimes against blacks and Latinos were commonplace, but given nowhere near the consideration as the rape of the white lady. With the cases of Tawana Brawley, Michael Griffith and the Subway Vigilante in the background, the city had an unpleasant recent history with racial violence and this case was one in a depressingly long list. Throw in a city on the verge of collapse due to racial tensions, crime and unemployment and you've got a tinderbox, ready to go at any second.
Although Burns does a good job of presenting the story in a linear fashion, keeping the prose dry enough for it to be read as a legal thriller while allowing moments of outrage to permeate the paragraph, the end result is something of a dry read. It has neither the righteous indignation of David Rose's A Climate of Fear, nor the bare minimalism of David James Smith's The Sleep of Reason.
Interestingly, she pays little attention to the advert taken out by business tycoon (now El Presidente) Donald Trump at the height of the search for the culprit. Lawyers for the five have made the claim that Trump's advert, combined with a heated interview where he said "...maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done", fanned the flames of public opinion against the accused.
To be fair to Burns, the book was published in 2012, so it probably seemed more of an oddity from that period as opposed to a starting point for the sort of rhetoric we now see coming from Trump's Twitter account. Even then, the idea that one of New York's "elite" producing such an advert with such conservative rhetoric deserves closer attention.
As well as this, Burns indulges in a little disingenuity.
It's widely acknowledged that the accused were in Central Park causing mayhem, around the same time as the rape of Meili. Such mayhem consisted of attacking homeless people and badly beating a cyclist. Although Burns does discuss these incidents, the narrative around them is inconclusive, almost as if she didn't want to focus on them too much in case the reader loses sympathy.
Maybe this is down to a lack of confidence on the part of the writer, but including these as part of the overall narrative would have shown the complexity of the case and, inadvertently, criticised the police for focusing on one specific crime instead of several.
While such tricks would normally lead me to be suspicious of the author, and what else they may have glossed over, the end tale is potent enough that the reader allows the author such transgressions.
Overall, a decent enough read. But don't expect to be fired up with righteous fury.
Sarah Burns, The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City's Most Infamous Crimes 2012 Anchor Books ISBN-13: 978-0307387981
➽ Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212
Miscarriages of justice don't shock us anymore, but what does shock us is the machinations that take place to ensure that such things occur.
We know the obvious cases (Birmingham Six, Tottenham Three, Stefan Kiszko), but what about the smaller stories like Chris Jeffries? The media openly condemning him as guilty without a trial. And all because he seemed "a bit weird."
Very dangerous, and genuinely scary.
It's a simple formula: take a police force under severe pressure to solve a case, a media where more and more journalists struggle with the concept of "contempt of court" and an apathetic public.
And it was this combination that led to The Central Park Five being jailed for the brutal attack and rape of Trisha Meili, a young investment banker.
It is these sections where the book excels, depicting New York City as a decaying metropolis by the end of the 80's where crimes against blacks and Latinos were commonplace, but given nowhere near the consideration as the rape of the white lady. With the cases of Tawana Brawley, Michael Griffith and the Subway Vigilante in the background, the city had an unpleasant recent history with racial violence and this case was one in a depressingly long list. Throw in a city on the verge of collapse due to racial tensions, crime and unemployment and you've got a tinderbox, ready to go at any second.
Although Burns does a good job of presenting the story in a linear fashion, keeping the prose dry enough for it to be read as a legal thriller while allowing moments of outrage to permeate the paragraph, the end result is something of a dry read. It has neither the righteous indignation of David Rose's A Climate of Fear, nor the bare minimalism of David James Smith's The Sleep of Reason.
Interestingly, she pays little attention to the advert taken out by business tycoon (now El Presidente) Donald Trump at the height of the search for the culprit. Lawyers for the five have made the claim that Trump's advert, combined with a heated interview where he said "...maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done", fanned the flames of public opinion against the accused.
To be fair to Burns, the book was published in 2012, so it probably seemed more of an oddity from that period as opposed to a starting point for the sort of rhetoric we now see coming from Trump's Twitter account. Even then, the idea that one of New York's "elite" producing such an advert with such conservative rhetoric deserves closer attention.
As well as this, Burns indulges in a little disingenuity.
It's widely acknowledged that the accused were in Central Park causing mayhem, around the same time as the rape of Meili. Such mayhem consisted of attacking homeless people and badly beating a cyclist. Although Burns does discuss these incidents, the narrative around them is inconclusive, almost as if she didn't want to focus on them too much in case the reader loses sympathy.
Maybe this is down to a lack of confidence on the part of the writer, but including these as part of the overall narrative would have shown the complexity of the case and, inadvertently, criticised the police for focusing on one specific crime instead of several.
While such tricks would normally lead me to be suspicious of the author, and what else they may have glossed over, the end tale is potent enough that the reader allows the author such transgressions.
Overall, a decent enough read. But don't expect to be fired up with righteous fury.
Sarah Burns, The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City's Most Infamous Crimes 2012 Anchor Books ISBN-13: 978-0307387981
➽ Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212
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