Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1207
June 17, 2017
Winners And Losers
Mick Hall,
writing @
Organized Rage,
advises:
Looking for winners and losers, look no further than YouGov and the mainstream media.
One Picture Worth Ten Thousand Words.
Ed Moloney the US based journalist, writer and blogger wrote this today and I endorse his sentiments totally:
If you're looking for winners and losers look no further than YouGov and the mainstream media. Over the course of this election almost all the MSM's dire predictions turned out to have been built on sand, and that includes a Tory landslide. They claimed Corbyn Labour was unelectable, it would not gain any seats in Scotland, and in England and Wales the Tories were going to win seats in traditionally Labour heartlands like Hartlepool and Wrexham. The New Statesman actually predicted 50 Labour MPs were at risk of losing their seats to the Tories and the Spectator went even further with 63.
Rather than holding their hands up in shame, they are now trying to claim Corbyn is a loser because he failed to win a majority.
The big winner is YouGov, whose poll for the Times got the result about right and their exit poll was also not far off the mark. Yet not one of the MSM cretins took either seriously as they are incapable of thinking outside of their narrow Westminster bubble.
As to the election night coverage it was awful, studio guests who had been wrong about almost everything during the campaign were dominant, Blairites like the odious Alastair Campbell studio hopped. While neoliberal former politicians like Ed Balls and George Osborne pontificated about Jeremy, despite having no inkling about what makes him tick. Hosting the shows were geriatric presenters well past their prime. The studios were full of middle class white people no sight of the energetic young people who all but destroyed May in June.
What has been so wonderful about Corbyn Labour's campaign is they bypassed these cretins by using social media, blogs, tens of thousands of activists on the streets in the constituencies, and Jeremy touring the nation on the stump, during which he met countless numbers of actual voters. Unlike May who was confined to carefully orchestrated spin-ins which the wretched MSM often reported in the most untruthful way.
The radical techies in places like Newspeak House in east London got to work creating apps and games which played a massive part in getting the young folk to vote. Apps which helped to sign up approx 100,000 students to the electoral roll and games like Corbyn Run were just two of many.
And my, my, my, how these young voters did themselves and the rest of us proud by turning out in great numbers to vote as John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn predicted they would.
Looking for winners and losers, look no further than YouGov and the mainstream media.
One Picture Worth Ten Thousand Words.Ed Moloney the US based journalist, writer and blogger wrote this today and I endorse his sentiments totally:
O joy! Oh bliss! It’s not just that Corbyn has shown how useless and out of touch are the bulk of the UK’s journalists – just like their American counterparts were last November – but in particular that the worst of the worst, exposed as frauds, are the bunch of Blairites masquerading as reporters in Britain’s allegedly most left-wing, intellectual journal, The Guardian.
Here is Marina Hyde, Queen of the Grauniad’s Blairites in her column yesterday, as people were still voting. The crime is, she’ll still be in a job tomorrow. How much do these people get paid? :
Whatever the result (and for what sub-minuscule amount it is worth, I suspect it’ll be an eye-wateringly big win for the Tories)………
This is not journalism. It is a wishful, anti-Corbyn neurosis pretending to be journalism. I’m over here in the U.S., 3,000 miles away, and even I could see she was going to be wrong!
If you're looking for winners and losers look no further than YouGov and the mainstream media. Over the course of this election almost all the MSM's dire predictions turned out to have been built on sand, and that includes a Tory landslide. They claimed Corbyn Labour was unelectable, it would not gain any seats in Scotland, and in England and Wales the Tories were going to win seats in traditionally Labour heartlands like Hartlepool and Wrexham. The New Statesman actually predicted 50 Labour MPs were at risk of losing their seats to the Tories and the Spectator went even further with 63.
Rather than holding their hands up in shame, they are now trying to claim Corbyn is a loser because he failed to win a majority.
The big winner is YouGov, whose poll for the Times got the result about right and their exit poll was also not far off the mark. Yet not one of the MSM cretins took either seriously as they are incapable of thinking outside of their narrow Westminster bubble.
As to the election night coverage it was awful, studio guests who had been wrong about almost everything during the campaign were dominant, Blairites like the odious Alastair Campbell studio hopped. While neoliberal former politicians like Ed Balls and George Osborne pontificated about Jeremy, despite having no inkling about what makes him tick. Hosting the shows were geriatric presenters well past their prime. The studios were full of middle class white people no sight of the energetic young people who all but destroyed May in June.
What has been so wonderful about Corbyn Labour's campaign is they bypassed these cretins by using social media, blogs, tens of thousands of activists on the streets in the constituencies, and Jeremy touring the nation on the stump, during which he met countless numbers of actual voters. Unlike May who was confined to carefully orchestrated spin-ins which the wretched MSM often reported in the most untruthful way.
The radical techies in places like Newspeak House in east London got to work creating apps and games which played a massive part in getting the young folk to vote. Apps which helped to sign up approx 100,000 students to the electoral roll and games like Corbyn Run were just two of many.
And my, my, my, how these young voters did themselves and the rest of us proud by turning out in great numbers to vote as John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn predicted they would.
Radio Free Eireann Broadcasting 17 June 2017
Martin Galvin
with details of today's broadcast from
Radio Free Eireann.
Belfast author, political analyst and former political prisoner Richard O'Rawe will discuss what British Prime Minister Theresa May's anticipated Westminster deal with the DUP as kingmakers will mean for nationalists and the Stormont Assembly as well as preview his upcoming biography of Guildford Four member Gerry Conlon.
Another former political prisoner, Paul McGlinchey will discuss his new book Truth Will Out, detailing the H-Block protest, and a legal battle over Britain's use of cancer causing substances on protesting Republican prisoners.
Go to Radio Free Eireann's web site RFE123.ORG for written transcripts of recent headline making interviews with Derry based journalist Eamon Sweeney on the Westminster Election, Bloody Sunday Campaigner Kate Nash's anger at British troopers being memorialized alongside their victims in the Free Derry Museum, and the latest program information.
John McDonagh and Martin Galvin co- host.
Radio Free Eireann is heard Saturdays at 12 Noon New York time on wbai 99.5 FM and wbai.org.
It can be heard at wbai.org in Ireland from 5pm to 6pm or anytime after the program concludes on wbai.org/archives.
Check our website rfe123.org.
Belfast author, political analyst and former political prisoner Richard O'Rawe will discuss what British Prime Minister Theresa May's anticipated Westminster deal with the DUP as kingmakers will mean for nationalists and the Stormont Assembly as well as preview his upcoming biography of Guildford Four member Gerry Conlon.
Another former political prisoner, Paul McGlinchey will discuss his new book Truth Will Out, detailing the H-Block protest, and a legal battle over Britain's use of cancer causing substances on protesting Republican prisoners.
Go to Radio Free Eireann's web site RFE123.ORG for written transcripts of recent headline making interviews with Derry based journalist Eamon Sweeney on the Westminster Election, Bloody Sunday Campaigner Kate Nash's anger at British troopers being memorialized alongside their victims in the Free Derry Museum, and the latest program information.
John McDonagh and Martin Galvin co- host.
Radio Free Eireann is heard Saturdays at 12 Noon New York time on wbai 99.5 FM and wbai.org.
It can be heard at wbai.org in Ireland from 5pm to 6pm or anytime after the program concludes on wbai.org/archives.
Check our website rfe123.org.
June 16, 2017
Peace Process At Risk From Whom?
Pete Trumbore
with his thoughts on the peace process being under threat ... again. Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @
Observations/Research/Diversions.
Actually, the Provos pretty much have gone away.Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams warned today that any coalition deal between Britain’s grievously wounded Conservative Party and the Democratic Unionist Party would put the Northern Ireland peace process at risk.
Given that the Provisional Irish Republican Army, which Adams denies ever being part of despite all evidence to the contrary, has been on ceasefire for more than 20 years, to call this a hollow threat seems generous at best.
Or, as Adams frequent critic, former Republican prisoner and blanket man Thomas ‘Dixie’ Elliot, put it on Twitter:
Certainly there was a time when the kind of warning Adams gave carried real menace. But that was before 2005, when the Provos stood the vast majority of their activists down and dismantled the bulk of the operational capabilities that allowed them to prosecute their war against Britain and the Northern Irish statelet.
While command, intelligence, and internal security structures were allowed to be remain mostly intact after 2005, as British security services were compelled to acknowledge in 2015, what armed capability the PIRA retained in the years since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has been largely used to cow – and occasionally quiet – opposition to the political direction taken by Adams and the leadership of Provisional Republican Movement.¹
None of this is to say that a deal between the Tories and the DUP is a good thing for Northern Ireland in general or for the stability of the Six Counties in particular. It’s just that the time is long past when Adams or any other leading figure in the Provisional Movement could credibly warn that peace there is threatened if they don’t get their way.
This is not to say that the peace that has held for two decades is assured. There are any number of armed Republican dissident groups (sometimes derisively referred to as “alphabet soup” IRAs) fully capable of causing some degree of mayhem even if not on the horrific scale of the Troubles.
And Loyalist paramilitaries like the Ulster Defense Association, while also on ceasefire, never went so far as the PIRA in dismantling their structures and remain active to this day, primarily menacing their own communities.
But it’s really hard to say what Adams is driving at in his warning. The Provisionals are not about go back to war, and Adams and his comrades neither speak for nor have influence over the armed groups that could.
So while Sinn Fein and its supporters have good reason to vigorously protest any arrangement that further empowers the DUP, they have little actual leverage to apply. Claims of a threatened peace process hardly qualify anymore.
¹I go into some detail on this in research I published last summer in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence.
Actually, the Provos pretty much have gone away.Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams warned today that any coalition deal between Britain’s grievously wounded Conservative Party and the Democratic Unionist Party would put the Northern Ireland peace process at risk.Given that the Provisional Irish Republican Army, which Adams denies ever being part of despite all evidence to the contrary, has been on ceasefire for more than 20 years, to call this a hollow threat seems generous at best.
Or, as Adams frequent critic, former Republican prisoner and blanket man Thomas ‘Dixie’ Elliot, put it on Twitter:
Certainly there was a time when the kind of warning Adams gave carried real menace. But that was before 2005, when the Provos stood the vast majority of their activists down and dismantled the bulk of the operational capabilities that allowed them to prosecute their war against Britain and the Northern Irish statelet.
While command, intelligence, and internal security structures were allowed to be remain mostly intact after 2005, as British security services were compelled to acknowledge in 2015, what armed capability the PIRA retained in the years since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has been largely used to cow – and occasionally quiet – opposition to the political direction taken by Adams and the leadership of Provisional Republican Movement.¹
None of this is to say that a deal between the Tories and the DUP is a good thing for Northern Ireland in general or for the stability of the Six Counties in particular. It’s just that the time is long past when Adams or any other leading figure in the Provisional Movement could credibly warn that peace there is threatened if they don’t get their way.
This is not to say that the peace that has held for two decades is assured. There are any number of armed Republican dissident groups (sometimes derisively referred to as “alphabet soup” IRAs) fully capable of causing some degree of mayhem even if not on the horrific scale of the Troubles.
And Loyalist paramilitaries like the Ulster Defense Association, while also on ceasefire, never went so far as the PIRA in dismantling their structures and remain active to this day, primarily menacing their own communities.
But it’s really hard to say what Adams is driving at in his warning. The Provisionals are not about go back to war, and Adams and his comrades neither speak for nor have influence over the armed groups that could.
So while Sinn Fein and its supporters have good reason to vigorously protest any arrangement that further empowers the DUP, they have little actual leverage to apply. Claims of a threatened peace process hardly qualify anymore.
¹I go into some detail on this in research I published last summer in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence.
Like Clouds Over Fields In May
The
Sean Mallory
take on the Faustian pact between the DUP and the Tories.
...Raglan Road, lyrics by the Dubliners
Unlike the poetic overtones of the song Raglan Road, the prosaic and soon to be cemented relationship between the DUP and May's Tories, all wrapped up in a Faustian pact, have led to the remnants of Victorian Bulwer-Lytton’s great unwashed, the English public, to squawk loudly as to just who this DUP malaise is.
The answers they discovered have caused them more anxiety than anticipated or pre-planned for.
Misogynist crackpots, Creationist cranks, homophobic Neanderthals, thieves, fraudsters and Unionist terrorists are just some of the less colourful depictions of the DUP.
Setting aside the more flowery descriptions of the DUP and their history, as expressed on the various social media platforms, aspects of this Faustian pact that should concern Irish Nationalists, is not the English reaction of abhorrence to the DUP being in government nor the DUP's vaunting of their dirty little pact with May and her brood of hard Brexiteers. No, Irish Nationalists have abhorred them for decades so that comes natural. An abhorrence that the English didn’t listen to and condescendingly dismissed away as an inter-communal fall-out. What Irish Nationalists need to be fully aware off is these few small aspects of the pact:
‣ The complete contempt that the British government has shown to an international agreement, The Good Friday Agreement – GFA, by flagrant abandonment of a gentleman's understanding to uphold their now exposed fraudulent former position of neutral broker. ‣ The complete contempt and disdain that the British government has shown to all participants of the GFA by secretly agreeing a pact with one of those participants several years before the recent British general election and before the fall of Stormont.
‣ In particular, the complete disdain that the British government has shown to the mandate of Irish Nationalists by agreeing a deal with Unionists while Nationalist MPs were present and sitting at Westminster.
‣ How the impartiality of the British government as an honest broker in the Good Friday Agreement has been publicly shot to pieces by the deceit and desperation of May and the Tories to cling to power. Responsibility for and inclusive of their old chums in Unionism, the DUP.
DUP connivance with the Tories began long before the fall of Stormont as they had already willingly agreed to step in to the breech. Thus privately undermining the principles of the GFA while publicly and deceitfully swearing fealty.
‣ That the restoration of the GFA, Stormont and the assembly is not only now completely defunct but absolutely pointless to pursue. ‣ The repugnant expectation that Irish Nationalists have to share power at Her Majesty's government’s insistence with a people who continually swear loyalty to an institution, Britain, that in turn, the same institution now finds it repulsive the prospect of this same people being in Downing Street. ‣ How this ‘new’ found pact has laid bare the extremely poor state of journalism in the North with particular reference to Northern journalism’s lack of focus on Unionist behaviour in general and their more deliberate focus on reporting the more tedious and nauseous ‘whataboutery’. A profession that now seems to lack in investigative journalistic pursuance but abounds with submissiveness to Unionist malpractice that borders at times on the defensive.
It looks like the boys and girls across the water have much more journalistic integrity than the bhoys and lassies in the North.
Aspects that should be to the fore of this Faustian pact but are lightly touched upon and deliberately held in the background by a compliant northern media.
But let us also reflect how inadvertently, the pact, demonstrates the powerlessness of representation of Irish Nationalism at Britain's Westminster.
How Tim Farron, having resigned as leader of the LibDems due to conflicts of party policy with his religious faith, May find succour in the Creationist DUP.....but at least he resigned!
And lastly, the DUP, like heavy rain clouds hanging over May and her Brexiteers, and a party whose nationality, and much to their own chagrin, has within a week moved from British to Northern Irish to Irish. Who says a week in politics isn’t a long time!
...Raglan Road, lyrics by the Dubliners
Unlike the poetic overtones of the song Raglan Road, the prosaic and soon to be cemented relationship between the DUP and May's Tories, all wrapped up in a Faustian pact, have led to the remnants of Victorian Bulwer-Lytton’s great unwashed, the English public, to squawk loudly as to just who this DUP malaise is.
The answers they discovered have caused them more anxiety than anticipated or pre-planned for.
Misogynist crackpots, Creationist cranks, homophobic Neanderthals, thieves, fraudsters and Unionist terrorists are just some of the less colourful depictions of the DUP.
Setting aside the more flowery descriptions of the DUP and their history, as expressed on the various social media platforms, aspects of this Faustian pact that should concern Irish Nationalists, is not the English reaction of abhorrence to the DUP being in government nor the DUP's vaunting of their dirty little pact with May and her brood of hard Brexiteers. No, Irish Nationalists have abhorred them for decades so that comes natural. An abhorrence that the English didn’t listen to and condescendingly dismissed away as an inter-communal fall-out. What Irish Nationalists need to be fully aware off is these few small aspects of the pact:
‣ The complete contempt that the British government has shown to an international agreement, The Good Friday Agreement – GFA, by flagrant abandonment of a gentleman's understanding to uphold their now exposed fraudulent former position of neutral broker. ‣ The complete contempt and disdain that the British government has shown to all participants of the GFA by secretly agreeing a pact with one of those participants several years before the recent British general election and before the fall of Stormont.
‣ In particular, the complete disdain that the British government has shown to the mandate of Irish Nationalists by agreeing a deal with Unionists while Nationalist MPs were present and sitting at Westminster.
‣ How the impartiality of the British government as an honest broker in the Good Friday Agreement has been publicly shot to pieces by the deceit and desperation of May and the Tories to cling to power. Responsibility for and inclusive of their old chums in Unionism, the DUP.
DUP connivance with the Tories began long before the fall of Stormont as they had already willingly agreed to step in to the breech. Thus privately undermining the principles of the GFA while publicly and deceitfully swearing fealty.
‣ That the restoration of the GFA, Stormont and the assembly is not only now completely defunct but absolutely pointless to pursue. ‣ The repugnant expectation that Irish Nationalists have to share power at Her Majesty's government’s insistence with a people who continually swear loyalty to an institution, Britain, that in turn, the same institution now finds it repulsive the prospect of this same people being in Downing Street. ‣ How this ‘new’ found pact has laid bare the extremely poor state of journalism in the North with particular reference to Northern journalism’s lack of focus on Unionist behaviour in general and their more deliberate focus on reporting the more tedious and nauseous ‘whataboutery’. A profession that now seems to lack in investigative journalistic pursuance but abounds with submissiveness to Unionist malpractice that borders at times on the defensive.
It looks like the boys and girls across the water have much more journalistic integrity than the bhoys and lassies in the North.
Aspects that should be to the fore of this Faustian pact but are lightly touched upon and deliberately held in the background by a compliant northern media.
But let us also reflect how inadvertently, the pact, demonstrates the powerlessness of representation of Irish Nationalism at Britain's Westminster.
How Tim Farron, having resigned as leader of the LibDems due to conflicts of party policy with his religious faith, May find succour in the Creationist DUP.....but at least he resigned!
And lastly, the DUP, like heavy rain clouds hanging over May and her Brexiteers, and a party whose nationality, and much to their own chagrin, has within a week moved from British to Northern Irish to Irish. Who says a week in politics isn’t a long time!
Museum Of Manipulation
From The Transcripts, John McDonagh explains a controversy over a piece of Brian Mór O’ Baoighill’s artwork that was donated to the Free Derry Museum.
Radio Free Éireann
WBAI 99.5FM Pacifica Radio
New York City
listen on the internet: wbai.org Saturdays Noon EST
(begins time stamp ~17:12)
John: The thing I wanted to bring up that – we had this problem when Brian Mór was alive. He designed a 1798 poster and when one of the Sinn Féin members became the Lord Mayor of Belfast he put it up on the wall there and we issued a statement on behalf of Bernie to say that he wanted that down – he didn’t want it to be up where British rule was being administered. And then – now all these years later Timmy Myles, AOH member from Nassau, had one of Bernie’s artwork from the Irish People newspaper of his drawing about Bloody Sunday in 1972.
And Timmy thought instead of keeping it in his house he would donate it to the Free Derry Museum. So when this happened Kate Nash said they got word that British soldiers were up on the same all walls as the people that were killed by the British soldiers and we knew that Brian Mór would not want to be a part of a museum that was honouring British soldiers and the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary).
The friends of Artist Brian Mor O'Baoighill know that he would demand that his artwork be removed from the Free Derry Museum until the names of the British soldiers and RUC men are removed from the exhibit, and are making that request on his behalf. Brian Mor O'Baoighill was deeply honored when his artwork was donated and displayed in The Museum of Free Derry. He would be horrified to learn that the Museum now includes a display honoring the RUC and British Soldiers who died...
So I got in contact with people from the National Irish Freedom Committee, Bernie’s partner, Joan, and I said: Listen, Bernie would not like this. So we issued a statement. It’s on Facebook – at Cabtivist on the Facebook and I’ll be reading that out when we get Kate Nash on the show.
But it’s just the high-jacking that Sinn Féin does – whether it’s the graveyard saying: If this guy was alive today he would support British rule in Ireland – but now it’s sort of the artwork saying: These artists support what’s going on now. And we wanted to put a stop to that.
And we were going to have Kate Nash hold the drawing until the names are taken down and then bring it back to the museum – which, when we talk to Kate Nash, there has been movement on that and we believe a lot of that has to do with her going to the museum with a letter from us in New York to take down the painting that’s up there.
Radio Free Éireann
WBAI 99.5FM Pacifica Radio
New York City
listen on the internet: wbai.org Saturdays Noon EST
(begins time stamp ~17:12)
John: The thing I wanted to bring up that – we had this problem when Brian Mór was alive. He designed a 1798 poster and when one of the Sinn Féin members became the Lord Mayor of Belfast he put it up on the wall there and we issued a statement on behalf of Bernie to say that he wanted that down – he didn’t want it to be up where British rule was being administered. And then – now all these years later Timmy Myles, AOH member from Nassau, had one of Bernie’s artwork from the Irish People newspaper of his drawing about Bloody Sunday in 1972.
And Timmy thought instead of keeping it in his house he would donate it to the Free Derry Museum. So when this happened Kate Nash said they got word that British soldiers were up on the same all walls as the people that were killed by the British soldiers and we knew that Brian Mór would not want to be a part of a museum that was honouring British soldiers and the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary).
The friends of Artist Brian Mor O'Baoighill know that he would demand that his artwork be removed from the Free Derry Museum until the names of the British soldiers and RUC men are removed from the exhibit, and are making that request on his behalf. Brian Mor O'Baoighill was deeply honored when his artwork was donated and displayed in The Museum of Free Derry. He would be horrified to learn that the Museum now includes a display honoring the RUC and British Soldiers who died...So I got in contact with people from the National Irish Freedom Committee, Bernie’s partner, Joan, and I said: Listen, Bernie would not like this. So we issued a statement. It’s on Facebook – at Cabtivist on the Facebook and I’ll be reading that out when we get Kate Nash on the show.
But it’s just the high-jacking that Sinn Féin does – whether it’s the graveyard saying: If this guy was alive today he would support British rule in Ireland – but now it’s sort of the artwork saying: These artists support what’s going on now. And we wanted to put a stop to that.
And we were going to have Kate Nash hold the drawing until the names are taken down and then bring it back to the museum – which, when we talk to Kate Nash, there has been movement on that and we believe a lot of that has to do with her going to the museum with a letter from us in New York to take down the painting that’s up there.
June 15, 2017
Why Islamic State Hasn’t Attacked Ireland. Yet.
Matt Treacy
writing @
Brocaire Books
explains why he thinks the theocratic fascists have not yet attacked Ireland. 
There was some consternation when it was revealed that one of the scum who was shot dead after the Jihadist attack in London had an Irish identity card.
“Oh, how did he come to have that,” people wondered. Pretty obvious really. And the reasons for the promiscuous tolerance of these people coming here and being allowed on the most absurd grounds to stay is one of the reasons why IS has not so far committed the sort of atrocities it has in most other western democracies.
Truth be told, Ireland is seen as the soft underbelly of western Europe. Not yet a target; more a place where almost anyone can come and go, claim asylum, acquire citizenship. And where Islamists have a safe home.
Ireland is the base for the Muslim Brotherhood who control the mosque in Clonskeagh. These people support jihadism, the eradication of Jews, the torture and murder of gay people and the sexual mutilation of infant girls. Among other things.
They were in the process of implementing all of this when they were overthrown by a combination of a popular uprising supported by the Egyptian left, and a military coup. Among those arrested was the Clonskeagh Imam’s son.
He is currently the focus of much angst on the Pollyanna left. The default whine seems to be “If his name was Murphy would the Irish government be silent?” Well firstly if his name was Murphy he would hardly be supporting an Islamist coup. Secondly, the Irish government has paid far too much attention to him. Thirdly, if he was a Kowalski from Warsaw who had gone home to support a fascist coup, he would hardly be leftie poster boy of the month.
Among other reasons the jihadists have thus far left us alone are the use of Irish banks for Islamic State funding. One of those arrested for that was a Moroccan national who was released without charge. At least one of those involved in the London atrocity was Moroccan, including the one holding the Irish identity card. One less, as they say.
In 2015 one of the main financial and logistics organisers for IS in Europe was allowed stay here when he contested a deportation order. His Care Bear defence team argued that it would be beastly to send him home as he might be tortured. Anyway, he won his appeal on the basis that one of his offspring had been born here before the 2004 Citizenship referendum.
So, we remain safe for the time being. Like the Hobbits, until we annoy the dark lords.
There was some consternation when it was revealed that one of the scum who was shot dead after the Jihadist attack in London had an Irish identity card.
“Oh, how did he come to have that,” people wondered. Pretty obvious really. And the reasons for the promiscuous tolerance of these people coming here and being allowed on the most absurd grounds to stay is one of the reasons why IS has not so far committed the sort of atrocities it has in most other western democracies.
Truth be told, Ireland is seen as the soft underbelly of western Europe. Not yet a target; more a place where almost anyone can come and go, claim asylum, acquire citizenship. And where Islamists have a safe home.
Ireland is the base for the Muslim Brotherhood who control the mosque in Clonskeagh. These people support jihadism, the eradication of Jews, the torture and murder of gay people and the sexual mutilation of infant girls. Among other things.
They were in the process of implementing all of this when they were overthrown by a combination of a popular uprising supported by the Egyptian left, and a military coup. Among those arrested was the Clonskeagh Imam’s son.
He is currently the focus of much angst on the Pollyanna left. The default whine seems to be “If his name was Murphy would the Irish government be silent?” Well firstly if his name was Murphy he would hardly be supporting an Islamist coup. Secondly, the Irish government has paid far too much attention to him. Thirdly, if he was a Kowalski from Warsaw who had gone home to support a fascist coup, he would hardly be leftie poster boy of the month.
Among other reasons the jihadists have thus far left us alone are the use of Irish banks for Islamic State funding. One of those arrested for that was a Moroccan national who was released without charge. At least one of those involved in the London atrocity was Moroccan, including the one holding the Irish identity card. One less, as they say.
In 2015 one of the main financial and logistics organisers for IS in Europe was allowed stay here when he contested a deportation order. His Care Bear defence team argued that it would be beastly to send him home as he might be tortured. Anyway, he won his appeal on the basis that one of his offspring had been born here before the 2004 Citizenship referendum.
So, we remain safe for the time being. Like the Hobbits, until we annoy the dark lords.
Greetings For Diana Buttu
The Uri Avnery Column discusses Diana Buttu's view that the Palestinian Authority should be disbanded as it is nothing more than a subcontractor for Israeli oppression. A Few days ago, a not so well-known Palestinian woman received an unusual honor. An article of hers was published on top of the first page of the most respected newspaper on earth: New York Times.
The editors defined the writer, Diana Buttu, as: "a lawyer and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization".
I knew Diana Buttu when she first appeared on the Palestinian scene, in 2000, at the beginning of the second intifada. She was born in Canada, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants who tried hard to assimilate in their new homeland, and received a good Canadian education.
When the struggle in the occupied territories intensified, she returned to her parents' homeland. The Palestinian participants of the negotiations with Israel, which started after the Oslo agreement, were impressed by the young lawyer who spoke excellent English - something rare - and asked her to join the national endeavor.
When the negotiations died clinically, Diana Buttu disappeared from my eyes. Until her dramatic reappearance last week.
The Location and the headline of the article demonstrate the importance which the American editors saw in her argument. The headline was "Do we need a Palestinian Authority?" and further on, in another headline, "Shutter the Palestinian Authority".
The argument of Diana Buttu seduces by its simplicity: the usefulness of the Palestinian Authority has passed. It should be liquidated. Now.
The Palestinian Authority, she says, was set up for a specific purpose: to negotiate with Israel for the end of the occupation and the creation of the hoped-for Palestinian state. By its very nature, that was a task limited in time.
According to the Oslo agreement, the negotiations for ending the occupation should have reached their goal in 1999. Since then, 18 years have passed without any movement towards a solution. The only thing that has moved was the settlement movement, which has reached by now monstrous dimensions.
In these circumstances, says Buttu, the Palestinian Authority has become a "subcontractor" of the occupation. The Authority helps Israel to oppress the Palestinians. True, it employs a large number of educational and medical personnel, but more than a third of its budget - some 4 billion dollars - go the "security". The Palestinian security forces maintain a close cooperation with their Israeli colleagues. Meaning, they cooperate in upholding the occupation.
Also, Buttu complains about the lack of democracy. For 12 years now, no elections have taken place. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu-Mazen) rules in contravention of the Palestinian Basic Law.
Her solution is simple: "it's time for the authority to go." To abolish the authority, to return the responsibility for the occupied Palestinian population to the Israeli occupier and adopt a "new Palestinian strategy".
What strategy, exactly?
Up to this point, Buttu's arguments were lucid an logical. But from here on they become unclear and nebulous.
Before Going on, I have to make some personal remarks.
I am an Israeli. I define myself as an Israeli patriot. As a son of the occupying nation I don't think that I have the right to give advice to the occupied nation.
True, I have devoted the last 79 years of my life to the achievement of peace between the two nations - a peace that, I believe, is an existential necessity for both. Since the end of the 1948 war I preach the establishment of an independent State of Palestinian side by side with the State of Israel. Some of my enemies in the extreme Israeli Right even accuse me of having invented the "Two-State Solution" (thus deserving the title of "traitor".)
In spite of all this, I have always abstained from giving the Palestinians advice. Even when Yasser Arafat declared several times publicly that I am his "friend", I did not see myself as an adviser. I have expressed my views and voiced them many times in the presence of Palestinians, but from that point to giving advice, the distance is great.
Now, too, I am not ready to give advice to the Palestinians in general, and to Diana Buttu in particular. But I take the liberty to to make some remarks about her revolutionary proposal.
Reading her article for the second and third time, I gain the impression that it contains a disproportion between the diagnosis and the medicine.
What Does she propose that the Palestinians do?
The first step is clear: break up the Palestinian Authority and return all the organs of Palestinian self-government to the Israeli military governor.
That is simple. But what next?
Diana Buttu voices several general proposals. "Non-violent mass protests", "boycott, divestment and sanctions", "addressing the rights of Palestinian refugees" (from the 1948 war) and the "Palestinian citizens of Israel". She mentions approvingly that already more than a third of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories support a single-state solution - meaning a bi-national state.
With due respect, will these remedies - all together and each one separately - liberate the Palestinian people?
There is no proof that it will.
Experience shows the it is easy for the occupation authorities to turn a "non-violent mass protest" into a very violent one. That happened in both intifadas, and especially in the second. It started with non-violent actions, and then the occupation authorities called in snipers. Within a few days the intifada became violent.
The use of boycotts? There is now in the world a large movement of BDS against Israel. The Israeli government is afraid of it and fights against it with all means, including ridiculous ones. But this fear does not spring from the economic damages this movement can cause, but from the damage it may cause to Israel's image. Such image may hurt, but it does not kill.
Like many others, Buttu uses here the example of South Africa. This is an imagined example. The world-wide boycott was indeed impressive, but it did not kill the apartheid regime. This is a western illusion, which reflects contempt for the "natives".
The racist regime in South Africa was not brought down by foreigner, nice as they were, but by those despised "natives". The blacks started campaigns of armed struggle (yes, the great Nelson Mandela was a "terrorist") and mass strikes, which brought down the economy. The international boycott played a welcome supporting role.
Buttu has high hopes for "Palestinian boycotts". Can they really hurt the Israeli economy? One can always bring in a million Chinese workers.
Buttu also mentions the international court in the Hague. The trouble is that Jewish psychology is hardened against "goyish justice". Aren't they all anti-Semites? Israel spits on them, as it spit on the UNO resolution at its time.
What Is left? There is only one alternative, the one Buttu wisely refrains from mentioning: terrorism.
Many peoples throughout history started wars of liberation, violent struggles against their oppressors. In Israeli jargon that is called "terror'.
Let's ignore for a moment the ideological aspect and concentrate on the practical aspect only: does one believe that a "terrorist" campaign by the occupied people against the occupying people can, under existing circumstances, succeed?
I doubt it. I doubt it very much. The Israeli security services have shown, until now, considerable ability in fighting against armed resistance.
If so, what remains for the Palestinians to do? In two words: Hold on.
And here there lies the special talent of Mahmous Abbas. He is a great one for holding on. For leading a people that is passing a terrible ordeal, an ordeal of suffering and humiliation, without giving in. Abbas does not give in. If someone will take his place, somewhere in the future, he will not give in either. Not Marwan Barghouti, for example.
As a young man I was a member of the Irgun, the underground military organization. During World War II, my company organized a "trial" for Marshal Phillip Petain, who became head the French government after the French collapse. This "government" was located in Vichy and took orders from the German occupation.
Much against my will, I was appointed counsel for the defense. I took the job seriously, and, to my surprise, discovered that Petain had logic on his side. He saved Paris from destruction and made it possible for most of the French people to survive the occupation. When the Nazi empire broke down, France, under Charles de Gaulle, joined the victors.
Of course, Diana Buttu does not refer to this emotion-laden historic example. But one should remember.
A Few days before the publication of Buttu's article, a leader of the Israeli fascist right, Betsalel Smotrich, a deputy chairman of the Knesset, published an ultimatum to the Palestinians.
Smotrich proposed to put the Palestinian before a choice between three possibilities: to leave the country, to live in the country without citizenship rights or to rise up in arms - and then the Israeli army "would know how to deal with them".
In simple words: the choice is between (a) the mass expulsion of seven million Palestinians from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Israel proper and the Gaza Strip, which would amount to Genocide, (b) life as a people of slaves under an Apartheid regime and (c) simple genocide.
The unclear proposal of Buttu constitutes, in practice, the second choice. She mentions that many Palestinians approve of the "one-state solution". She shies away from a clear-cut statement and hides behind a formula that is becoming fashionable these days: "two-states or one state". Rather like: "swimming or drowning".
This is suicide. Dramatic suicide. Glorious suicide. Suicide none the less.
Both Buttu and Smotrich lead to disaster.
After all these years, the only practical solution remains as it was at the beginning: two states for two peoples. Two states that will live side by side in peace, perhaps even in friendship.
There is no other solution.
British Values From Theresa May
Mick Hall @ Organized Rage questions the notion of superior British values.
We do not need lessons in British values from Mrs May: the truth is they're no superior to those of any other nation.
Tony Benn in Parliament warning MPs of the hundreds of innocent people that would be killed if they vote to bomb Iraq. Yet few of them learned a damn thing from Tony's wise words and we live with the dreadful consequences of that today. Gullible and heartless people have once again deceived themselves into believing that in death their god will award them a status they could never attain in life if they go out and kill and main totally innocent people who are going about their business.
For the prime minister to claim what has happened in recent weeks is nothing to do with British foreign policy beggars believe and goes against the advice she has had from the British security services.
As Myriam François wrote in a reason article:
When I listened to Theresa May's Speech on the morning after the atrocity in Borough market it took me back to the 1970s. She hinted at introducing internment, more rushed anti terror legislation, and as Myriam wrote; her government casting a wide net of suspicion over the entire Muslim population.
Such policies are a throwback to the 1970's, as too are soldiers on UK streets. It failed then and it will not only fail now but make a bad situation even worse. When internment was introduced in NI in August 1971, hundreds of people suspected by god knows who of being involved with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) were arrested and interned without trial. All those arrested were Catholics and Irish nationalists with a sizeable number of them having no connection whatsoever with the IRA.
This caused outrage within the nationalist community in the north of Ireland and amongst the Irish population in the rest of the UK. Their outrage was seen by the Tory government led by Edward Heath as a sign of disloyalty and thus they too came under suspicion. When you added in the rushed new anti terror legislation introduced by the then government, you had a recipe for a disastrous situation which saw the IRA grow from a small fringe organisation which was on its last legs, into one which due to the aforementioned quickly became embedded within the nationalist working classes communities across the north.
To paraphrase Myriam's words the Irish community in Britain experience a double penalty when bombing attacks occurred back then: the same trauma as all other citizens, plus the guilt cloud that hangs over it thereafter. That May if re-elected now intends to do the same to the Muslim population is infantile and plain wrong.
Myriam François concluded with this:
Indeed around the world Muslim's have been the main victims of ISIL yet we hear little about this fact.
Myriam continues:
We do not need lessons in British values from Mrs May: the truth is they're no superior to those of any other nation.
We do not need lessons in British values from Mrs May: the truth is they're no superior to those of any other nation.
Tony Benn in Parliament warning MPs of the hundreds of innocent people that would be killed if they vote to bomb Iraq. Yet few of them learned a damn thing from Tony's wise words and we live with the dreadful consequences of that today. Gullible and heartless people have once again deceived themselves into believing that in death their god will award them a status they could never attain in life if they go out and kill and main totally innocent people who are going about their business.
For the prime minister to claim what has happened in recent weeks is nothing to do with British foreign policy beggars believe and goes against the advice she has had from the British security services.
As Myriam François wrote in a reason article:
British foreign policy, whether you agree or disagree with its direction, is reverberating on British soil. And here it mixes with the underbelly that exists in all societies: the marginalised, the angry, the alienated; those looking for a higher cause to bring meaning to an often dead-end existence.
And as long as the UK is involved – rightly or wrongly – in military actions in the Middle East, there is likely to be violent blowback on home soil.
So the notion that the real problem is a set of ideas being pushed in the murky underground of the Muslim community is false. In fact, intelligence analysts are at pains to highlight that families – let alone the nebulous notion of “the community” – are often the last to know. And when they have had suspicions, recent cases have shown that families and mosques have approached the authorities. Communities work, and will continue to work, with the police to stop those who wish to harm us all.
But this relationship of trust and cooperation is made harder, not easier, when the government casts a wide net of suspicion over the entire Muslim community. To begin a conversation about counter-terrorism, as May did on Sunday, with the proposal that people (read Muslims) simply need to be better educated about “British values” is to cast terrorism as first and foremost a problem of social cohesion.
It suggests the entire Muslim community is a suspect group that needs to be inoculated, through the injection of a predetermined set of ethics – as imagined by the superior mind of May and her cohorts – to protect them from themselves. The days of empire may be long gone, but the notion that the barbarians at the gates need to be civilised is clearly alive and well.
The truth is that British values are no superior to those of any other nation. The very conversation is patronising to anyone of non-British origin. What’s the reasoning, exactly? If only these men had read a little more Jane Austen, they couldn’t possibly have considered the prospect of mass murder? Improving social cohesion is a laudable objective – but linking terrorism to integration produces a dangerous confusion over the roots of the problem, which ultimately stigmatises and alienates some of the poorest communities in this country.
When I listened to Theresa May's Speech on the morning after the atrocity in Borough market it took me back to the 1970s. She hinted at introducing internment, more rushed anti terror legislation, and as Myriam wrote; her government casting a wide net of suspicion over the entire Muslim population.
Such policies are a throwback to the 1970's, as too are soldiers on UK streets. It failed then and it will not only fail now but make a bad situation even worse. When internment was introduced in NI in August 1971, hundreds of people suspected by god knows who of being involved with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) were arrested and interned without trial. All those arrested were Catholics and Irish nationalists with a sizeable number of them having no connection whatsoever with the IRA.
This caused outrage within the nationalist community in the north of Ireland and amongst the Irish population in the rest of the UK. Their outrage was seen by the Tory government led by Edward Heath as a sign of disloyalty and thus they too came under suspicion. When you added in the rushed new anti terror legislation introduced by the then government, you had a recipe for a disastrous situation which saw the IRA grow from a small fringe organisation which was on its last legs, into one which due to the aforementioned quickly became embedded within the nationalist working classes communities across the north.
To paraphrase Myriam's words the Irish community in Britain experience a double penalty when bombing attacks occurred back then: the same trauma as all other citizens, plus the guilt cloud that hangs over it thereafter. That May if re-elected now intends to do the same to the Muslim population is infantile and plain wrong.
Myriam François concluded with this:
In her speech, May repeated the point that terrorist ideology is derived from a “perversion of Islam”. While this may be true, we’re in 2017, not 2001. Almost 16 years into this threat, it’s time to change the record. The statement that this has nothing to do with Islam, reiterated after each attack, seems not only trite but counterproductive. How many more times does this need to be stated: terrorists are not motivated by the faith of the 1.6 billion regular folk walking this planet; Muslims aren’t immune to bombs and bullets.
Indeed around the world Muslim's have been the main victims of ISIL yet we hear little about this fact.
Myriam continues:
How about not repeating this same toxic conversation after each attack? Because, frankly, there is a point at which it appears almost like the caveat after which the bashing can begin.
What the government could do however is be honest about the risks to domestic security of foreign military interventions – risks the public may or may not wish to accept. It can invest heavily in the security services working to keep the country safe. This means more resources, but it also means not creating a climate of suspicion around Muslims, who, like everyone else, are partners in the common goal of preserving life – incidentally, the highest of values in Islamic law. Creating dichotomies between British and Islamic values only feeds a toxic narrative.
The aftermath of the recent horrific events shows us that people from all faiths and none, drawing on their diverse value systems, can come together to emphasise love, solidarity and unity. We don’t need lessons in British values; but our politicians may need to learn a thing or two about not widening the very divisions they believe to be the problem.
We do not need lessons in British values from Mrs May: the truth is they're no superior to those of any other nation.
June 14, 2017
Religion Is Fundamentally Patriarchal And Anti-Woman
Maryam Namazie
writes:
Below is my monthly column for The Freethinker entitled: Religion is fundamentally patriarchal and anti-woman , 25 May 2016
As US suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton once said:
You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman.
In one Hadith, Mohammed, Islam’s prophet says: “I have left behind no fitnah more harmful to men, than women” (Al-Bukhari, Muslim). Hatred of women is a recurring theme in all major religions. There is a Jewish prayer recited by men that says: “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler the universe who has not created me a woman”.
In the Bible it says: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:11-14) This is also evident in Hinduism, Buddhism …
For those who only see the surface, there is an apparent contradiction that is often not understood. On the one hand, Islamic law and states are the beginning of the end of women’s rights. A pillar of Islamist rule is the attempt to erase women from the public space. On the other hand, women are everywhere – making sure they are seen and heard.
This female presence is palpable in all areas, including against the veil, gender segregation, opposition to Sharia … The extent of control of women and their bodies is a measure of the power and influence of the Islamists just as the extent of women’s autonomy is a measure of the resistance against Islamism but also Islam and religious “morality”.
Those only looking at the surface, see women’s active presence and resistance and wrongly credit Islam and Islamism. In Iran, for example, they credit the “reformist” faction of the Iranian regime. To me, it’s like crediting apartheid in South Africa for the black liberation movement or segregation in the US for the civil rights movement.
This absurdity is only possible today because of identity politics and cultural relativism, which no longer acknowledges citizens and human beings but homogenised religious identities that unsurprisingly coincide with the impositions of Islamists and the ruling class. This is why everything from gender segregation to the veil and Sharia are sanitised and legitimised at the expense of women’s rights. Only in a world where identity politics and cultural relativism reign supreme can the likes of Islamic feminism be given any credence.
But in my opinion Islam can never be feminist.
Religion can never emancipate women.
In fact any positive change in women’s condition, is not thanks to Islamic laws, states or Islam but despite it. It’s in fact thanks to women’s resistance against Islam and Islamism.
Of course that is not to say that believing women, Muslim women, cannot be feminists. Of course they can – just as men can be feminists and women misogynists – but one can only be feminist if women’s emancipation trumps religion. Whilst people – even believers – can be feminists, religion cannot. Religion is fundamentally patriarchal and anti-woman.
“Islamic feminists” like Shirin Ebadi will say that women have full rights under Islam and if they don’t it is “not Islam at fault but patriarchal culture that uses interpretation to justify whatever it wants”. Yet the Quran and Hadith are overflowing with anti-women rules and regulations. Stoning to death for adultery, for example, is in a Hadith, while wife beating is in the Quran. Islamic feminists will say the mistreatment of women is because of “bad” interpretations.
The problem with “good” versus “bad” interpretations is that yours is just one of many. Even if you have a “good” interpretation, it is the Islamists who decide; they run the state, they make the laws. But more importantly, are there “good” interpretations that are good enough for 21st century women? If you follow the “good” interpretations, you will soon realise the absurdity of this line of defence.
Take Sura al-Nisa (the women), [the fourth chapter] in the Quran 4:34, where it says: “As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly) …”
“Islamic feminists” will say that men have been made to wait, are not obliged to beat their wives, and when they do, they must not leave marks and beat their wives with thin sticks …
These are the justifications of those who are more concerned with defending Islam than defending women’s rights.
From a women’s rights perspective, no woman should be beaten – “disobedient” or not. Full stop. End of story.
If you want women’s liberation, you cannot leave women’s rights and lives at the mercy of religious rules and interpretations.
You have to choose – do you side with women’s rights or religion – you cannot defend both as they are antithetical to each other.
The fight for women’s liberation is a fight against Islam and Islamism. Also, it is a fight for secularism – the complete separation of religion from the state. Secularism is a precondition for women’s emancipation. Secularism is a women’s issue.
Rather than excuse and justify “good” religious interpretations and “moderate” or “reformist” Islamists, it would serve our societies better to defend citizenship rights irrespective of beliefs. It would serve our societies better to insist on secularism and women’s equality – not western, not eastern but universal.
• The above is a shortened version of Maryam Namazie’s speech at the Founding Congress of Enlightenment Feminism in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, where she spoke about Islam and Islamism as the greatest stumbling blocks for women’s emancipation and how Islamists target women and girls first – whether in Tehran, Peshawar or Manchester.
Below is my monthly column for The Freethinker entitled: Religion is fundamentally patriarchal and anti-woman , 25 May 2016
As US suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton once said:
You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman.
In one Hadith, Mohammed, Islam’s prophet says: “I have left behind no fitnah more harmful to men, than women” (Al-Bukhari, Muslim). Hatred of women is a recurring theme in all major religions. There is a Jewish prayer recited by men that says: “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler the universe who has not created me a woman”.
In the Bible it says: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:11-14) This is also evident in Hinduism, Buddhism …
For those who only see the surface, there is an apparent contradiction that is often not understood. On the one hand, Islamic law and states are the beginning of the end of women’s rights. A pillar of Islamist rule is the attempt to erase women from the public space. On the other hand, women are everywhere – making sure they are seen and heard.
This female presence is palpable in all areas, including against the veil, gender segregation, opposition to Sharia … The extent of control of women and their bodies is a measure of the power and influence of the Islamists just as the extent of women’s autonomy is a measure of the resistance against Islamism but also Islam and religious “morality”.
Those only looking at the surface, see women’s active presence and resistance and wrongly credit Islam and Islamism. In Iran, for example, they credit the “reformist” faction of the Iranian regime. To me, it’s like crediting apartheid in South Africa for the black liberation movement or segregation in the US for the civil rights movement.
This absurdity is only possible today because of identity politics and cultural relativism, which no longer acknowledges citizens and human beings but homogenised religious identities that unsurprisingly coincide with the impositions of Islamists and the ruling class. This is why everything from gender segregation to the veil and Sharia are sanitised and legitimised at the expense of women’s rights. Only in a world where identity politics and cultural relativism reign supreme can the likes of Islamic feminism be given any credence.
But in my opinion Islam can never be feminist.
Religion can never emancipate women.
In fact any positive change in women’s condition, is not thanks to Islamic laws, states or Islam but despite it. It’s in fact thanks to women’s resistance against Islam and Islamism.
Of course that is not to say that believing women, Muslim women, cannot be feminists. Of course they can – just as men can be feminists and women misogynists – but one can only be feminist if women’s emancipation trumps religion. Whilst people – even believers – can be feminists, religion cannot. Religion is fundamentally patriarchal and anti-woman.
“Islamic feminists” like Shirin Ebadi will say that women have full rights under Islam and if they don’t it is “not Islam at fault but patriarchal culture that uses interpretation to justify whatever it wants”. Yet the Quran and Hadith are overflowing with anti-women rules and regulations. Stoning to death for adultery, for example, is in a Hadith, while wife beating is in the Quran. Islamic feminists will say the mistreatment of women is because of “bad” interpretations.
The problem with “good” versus “bad” interpretations is that yours is just one of many. Even if you have a “good” interpretation, it is the Islamists who decide; they run the state, they make the laws. But more importantly, are there “good” interpretations that are good enough for 21st century women? If you follow the “good” interpretations, you will soon realise the absurdity of this line of defence.
Take Sura al-Nisa (the women), [the fourth chapter] in the Quran 4:34, where it says: “As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly) …”
“Islamic feminists” will say that men have been made to wait, are not obliged to beat their wives, and when they do, they must not leave marks and beat their wives with thin sticks …
These are the justifications of those who are more concerned with defending Islam than defending women’s rights.
From a women’s rights perspective, no woman should be beaten – “disobedient” or not. Full stop. End of story.
If you want women’s liberation, you cannot leave women’s rights and lives at the mercy of religious rules and interpretations.
You have to choose – do you side with women’s rights or religion – you cannot defend both as they are antithetical to each other.
The fight for women’s liberation is a fight against Islam and Islamism. Also, it is a fight for secularism – the complete separation of religion from the state. Secularism is a precondition for women’s emancipation. Secularism is a women’s issue.
Rather than excuse and justify “good” religious interpretations and “moderate” or “reformist” Islamists, it would serve our societies better to defend citizenship rights irrespective of beliefs. It would serve our societies better to insist on secularism and women’s equality – not western, not eastern but universal.
• The above is a shortened version of Maryam Namazie’s speech at the Founding Congress of Enlightenment Feminism in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, where she spoke about Islam and Islamism as the greatest stumbling blocks for women’s emancipation and how Islamists target women and girls first – whether in Tehran, Peshawar or Manchester.
More Than Just A Museum
Troubled Times at the Museum Of Free Derry, A piece from
Irish Dissent
by
Deaglán Ó Donghaile
, teases out the issues.
Free Derry was the part of Derry City, comprising the Bogside, Brandywell and Creggan districts, that had been liberated from police control following the decisive defeat of heavily-armed RUC, B-Special and Orange Order attackers by an unarmed popular insurgency, known as the Battle of the Bogside, that took place in August, 1969. Notwithstanding the efforts of Paddy Doherty to have barricades dismantled and the RUC redeployed in the Bogside, Free Derry persisted until the entire city was overrun by British troops during Operation Motorman in July, 1972. During this three-year period, Free Derry became recognized globally as a site of intense resistance to British political, military and police control.
Last week’s protest was called because the museum, which many people regard as a Sinn Féin-controlled front organization, has installed an exhibit recording the names of British troops and police killed in Derry. This has outraged a broad spectrum of people who have confronted the issue because they recognize it as contributing to the wider, decades-long policy of “normalization”: the policy whereby the aberration that is the British presence in Ireland is represented as normal, even natural. A fundamental policy of modern imperialism, normalization (also referred to during the 1970s and 1980s as “Ulsterization”) was also the key strategy behind the 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation, where it became known as “Iraqi-isation”. (1)
Power and Its Discourses: From Burke to Kitson
These ideas and policies can be traced back to Edmund Burke’s conservative political theories, as outlined in his 1790 book, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Here, Burke described the authority of kings as “the natural order of things”, and claimed that the subjugation of people by imperial and monarchical authority was an organic, and therefore just, phenomenon. (2) In his earlier work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Burke also argued that the natural human response to displays of power should be one of surrender because power and terror, the basic currencies of political authority, were inseparable from one another.
While these ideas have influenced British imperialism and guided its coercionist policies since the late eighteenth century, they were very significantly modernized by the British army brigadier, Frank Kitson. Having participated in and directed counter-insurgency efforts in Kenya, Malaya, Oman and Cyprus, Kitson updated the sublime object and function of imperial power by urging the state to facilitate its flow through every circuit of military, police and civilian organisation in a thoroughly integrated pattern of oppression and violence. The key to controlling entire populations, Kitson urged in his 1971 book, Low Intensity Operations, was to ensure that the interests served by state violence should become so normalized as to be obscure, untraceable, unidentifiable, even invisible.
In doing so, he brought Burke’s theory of the invisibility of power into the modern imperialist age: “To make anything very terrible,” Burke advised, “obscurity seems in general to be necessary”, (3) and state violence is no exception to this very basic rule. Whereas, for Burke, power was best administered from the Olympian position of the aristocracy, Kitson, by 1971, saw the need to co-opt local organizations directly into its grid and to create compliant front-groups (he called these “pseudo-groups”) that were loyal to the deep state. As we have seen since the ceasefire of 1994, these state-funded front organizations have spawned very rapidly, although study of their boards and memberships reveals very familiar patterns and networks of interest.
2017: A New Start for Counter-Insurgency
Kitson’s policy eventually succeeded with the total integration of Sinn Féin and its party militia into the British establishment, and this is most apparent (for those who look beyond the obscuring veil of Stormont power) in the fusion of their pro-British terror tactics with official policing. However, while this objective has been achieved, total control remains the final objective and, as every reader of Orwell knows, controlling the present depends very heavily on exercising dominion over the past: this is what every colonial power pursues through means of coercion, violence, manipulation and co-option. Through various fronts disguised as “community groups” controlled by Sinn Féin, which is itself controlled by MI5, this policy has been intensively pursued since the mid-1990s on political, economic and cultural fronts. Those who remember the various “peace groups” that emerged to serve British interests during the 1970s and 1980s, many of which were directed by the Officials and their political front, the Workers’ Party, will recognize an emerging pattern here.
The Crown Forces Museum of Unfree Derry is the latest addition to this long line of front organizations working in the service of British state power. Its inclusion of British military and police personnel in its exhibitions is a significant move towards normalizing the brutality and violence unleashed on the people of Derry from the late 1960s (and, indeed, since the inception of the state in 1922), and their present activity should be considered against this longer history of normalization.
Indeed, the museum’s spokesman, Robin Percival, has a long record of service to Sinn Féin front organizations since he first joined the party. Since then, he has been appointed to prominent roles within the Pat Finucane Centre, The Bogside Residents Group (from which he graduated onto the Parades Commission), the Bogside and Brandywell Health Forum, the Gasyard Centre, Cunamh and the Bloody Sunday Trust, as well as this museum. His close friend and colleague at the Pat Finucane Centre, Paul O’Connor, participates in Sinn Féin electoral videos, exposing that organization’s very close ties to the party. During last week’s protest, Percival took photographs of those who had come to voice their opposition to the memorial, and it can only be assumed that these images will be shared with his friends in Sinn Féin (these associations can be seen by checking the organizations’ boards and memberships on the Companies House website).
In a letter sent to The Pensive Quill website in 2014, Percival responded to criticism of the museum’s earlier but unsuccessful plan to build a garden that would commemorate crown forces personnel. He stated:
Percival publicly announced that he had “no plan to construct a memorial… to include British soldiers in the Bogside.” (4)
However, things can change very rapidly in the world of colonial doublethink, and now he is defending the projection of the names of British personnel on his museum’s walls.
The Long Line of Cooperators
Frank Kitson argued that co-option and cooperation are the basic requirements of colonial political control. Percival is among a long line of cooperators, ranging from Paddy Doherty and Brendan Duddy to the present class of professional, managerial “community representatives” and mysteriously-appointed “spokespeople”. While these figures have, largely, been involved in the political and economic management of the people of Derry on behalf of Sinn Féin, Stormont and the British establishment in London, what is novel about this museum it is dedicated to controlling the present through its representation of the past.
The normalization policy outlined by Kitson and the principles that he first proposed in 1971 are very relevant today. The museum operates entirely into line with British policy and represents a watermark of what he termed “civil-military relations” – the conscious fusion of military and civilian interests through long-term “popular projects” serving the occupier’s “single effective policy” : “the necessity for close co-ordination between the civil and the operational effort is apparent to everyone”, wrote Kitson in 1971. It remains so today because it is through this “unity of effect” that oppression becomes normalized and authority internalized by the target population, and how a people’s sense of their own selfhood is softened and eroded. It is the latest manifestation of psychological operations (still abbreviated by militaries, police forces and governments as “psy-ops”): the use of psychological means to distort and undermine a population’s sense of its own place in the world and in history, and to subvert its own understanding of itself. (5)
Identifying with the Oppressor
The museum has a single purpose: encouraging people to identify psychologically with the British army and police, and with the colonial violence that has repressed them for centuries. The British army’s infamous Bloody Sunday Massacre of January 1972 was key to the wider counter-insurgency policy that began in August, 1969, and its impact can still be felt in Derry, over four decades later. The Crown Forces Museum of Unfree Derry is dedicated to convincing the people that they should see something of themselves in the very murderers who shot down children, women and men during this period of particularly brutal state violence. It symbolizes a false and misleading ideology of reconciliation based on the assumption that we have much in common with these professional agents of colonial violence and the structures that they serve.
Last week’s demonstration registered popular refusal to conform to this ongoing process of normalization. The philosophy and practice of liberation that was practiced and displayed four decades ago by the people of Free Derry showed the world that refusal is a very powerful weapon. This protest articulated and renewed that refusal by addressing the still current problem of state violence and the ideological coercion that accompanies it, exposing its acceptance by organizations such as this museum, all of which, ultimately, act in the interests of the state.
The fundamental strategy of any empire is invasion, and this requires a considerable degree of integration on a number of levels, particularly within the cultural, political and psychological spheres. Imperialists occupy the physical territory of the countries that they invade with their military and police forces but they also work hard to colonize the minds of those whose lands they occupy with the relentless propaganda and distortions of the past that are circulated by their local agents. In Derry, however, this is being resisted because there are plenty of minds and imaginations that still remain free.
Sources:
1. See Paul Reynolds, “Rush to Iraqi-isation”, BBC News, 12th November, 2003 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3263545.stm), accessed 8/6/1017. See also “Letter (declassified): Rycroft to Baker”, 3rd June, 2003, The Iraq Inquiry (http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/212061/2004-06-03-letter-rycroft-to-baker-iraq-prime-ministers-meeting-3-june.pdf), accessed 8/6/2017.
2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, The Works of Edmund Burke, Vol. 3 (London, John C. Nimmo: 1887), p.296.
3. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ibid, Vol. 1, pp.131-2.
4. Robin Percival, “No Plan to Construct a Memorial Garden to Include British Soldiers in the Bogside,” The Pensive Quill, Friday, 8th August, 2014 (http://thepensivequill.am/2014/08/no-plan-to-construct-memorial-garden-to.html, accessed 31st May, 2017).
5. Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (London: Faber and Faber, 1971, reprinted 1991), pp.51-3, 71.
Free Derry was the part of Derry City, comprising the Bogside, Brandywell and Creggan districts, that had been liberated from police control following the decisive defeat of heavily-armed RUC, B-Special and Orange Order attackers by an unarmed popular insurgency, known as the Battle of the Bogside, that took place in August, 1969. Notwithstanding the efforts of Paddy Doherty to have barricades dismantled and the RUC redeployed in the Bogside, Free Derry persisted until the entire city was overrun by British troops during Operation Motorman in July, 1972. During this three-year period, Free Derry became recognized globally as a site of intense resistance to British political, military and police control.
Last week’s protest was called because the museum, which many people regard as a Sinn Féin-controlled front organization, has installed an exhibit recording the names of British troops and police killed in Derry. This has outraged a broad spectrum of people who have confronted the issue because they recognize it as contributing to the wider, decades-long policy of “normalization”: the policy whereby the aberration that is the British presence in Ireland is represented as normal, even natural. A fundamental policy of modern imperialism, normalization (also referred to during the 1970s and 1980s as “Ulsterization”) was also the key strategy behind the 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation, where it became known as “Iraqi-isation”. (1)
Power and Its Discourses: From Burke to Kitson
These ideas and policies can be traced back to Edmund Burke’s conservative political theories, as outlined in his 1790 book, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Here, Burke described the authority of kings as “the natural order of things”, and claimed that the subjugation of people by imperial and monarchical authority was an organic, and therefore just, phenomenon. (2) In his earlier work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Burke also argued that the natural human response to displays of power should be one of surrender because power and terror, the basic currencies of political authority, were inseparable from one another.
While these ideas have influenced British imperialism and guided its coercionist policies since the late eighteenth century, they were very significantly modernized by the British army brigadier, Frank Kitson. Having participated in and directed counter-insurgency efforts in Kenya, Malaya, Oman and Cyprus, Kitson updated the sublime object and function of imperial power by urging the state to facilitate its flow through every circuit of military, police and civilian organisation in a thoroughly integrated pattern of oppression and violence. The key to controlling entire populations, Kitson urged in his 1971 book, Low Intensity Operations, was to ensure that the interests served by state violence should become so normalized as to be obscure, untraceable, unidentifiable, even invisible.
In doing so, he brought Burke’s theory of the invisibility of power into the modern imperialist age: “To make anything very terrible,” Burke advised, “obscurity seems in general to be necessary”, (3) and state violence is no exception to this very basic rule. Whereas, for Burke, power was best administered from the Olympian position of the aristocracy, Kitson, by 1971, saw the need to co-opt local organizations directly into its grid and to create compliant front-groups (he called these “pseudo-groups”) that were loyal to the deep state. As we have seen since the ceasefire of 1994, these state-funded front organizations have spawned very rapidly, although study of their boards and memberships reveals very familiar patterns and networks of interest.
2017: A New Start for Counter-Insurgency
Kitson’s policy eventually succeeded with the total integration of Sinn Féin and its party militia into the British establishment, and this is most apparent (for those who look beyond the obscuring veil of Stormont power) in the fusion of their pro-British terror tactics with official policing. However, while this objective has been achieved, total control remains the final objective and, as every reader of Orwell knows, controlling the present depends very heavily on exercising dominion over the past: this is what every colonial power pursues through means of coercion, violence, manipulation and co-option. Through various fronts disguised as “community groups” controlled by Sinn Féin, which is itself controlled by MI5, this policy has been intensively pursued since the mid-1990s on political, economic and cultural fronts. Those who remember the various “peace groups” that emerged to serve British interests during the 1970s and 1980s, many of which were directed by the Officials and their political front, the Workers’ Party, will recognize an emerging pattern here.
The Crown Forces Museum of Unfree Derry is the latest addition to this long line of front organizations working in the service of British state power. Its inclusion of British military and police personnel in its exhibitions is a significant move towards normalizing the brutality and violence unleashed on the people of Derry from the late 1960s (and, indeed, since the inception of the state in 1922), and their present activity should be considered against this longer history of normalization.
Indeed, the museum’s spokesman, Robin Percival, has a long record of service to Sinn Féin front organizations since he first joined the party. Since then, he has been appointed to prominent roles within the Pat Finucane Centre, The Bogside Residents Group (from which he graduated onto the Parades Commission), the Bogside and Brandywell Health Forum, the Gasyard Centre, Cunamh and the Bloody Sunday Trust, as well as this museum. His close friend and colleague at the Pat Finucane Centre, Paul O’Connor, participates in Sinn Féin electoral videos, exposing that organization’s very close ties to the party. During last week’s protest, Percival took photographs of those who had come to voice their opposition to the memorial, and it can only be assumed that these images will be shared with his friends in Sinn Féin (these associations can be seen by checking the organizations’ boards and memberships on the Companies House website).
In a letter sent to The Pensive Quill website in 2014, Percival responded to criticism of the museum’s earlier but unsuccessful plan to build a garden that would commemorate crown forces personnel. He stated:
there never was a plan to construct a memorial garden to include British soldiers in the Bogside…. Nor are there any plans to construct a memorial to include British soldiers now or in the future. The focus of the Bloody Sunday Trust (which manages the museum) is about civilians killed by the state.
Percival publicly announced that he had “no plan to construct a memorial… to include British soldiers in the Bogside.” (4)
However, things can change very rapidly in the world of colonial doublethink, and now he is defending the projection of the names of British personnel on his museum’s walls.
The Long Line of Cooperators
Frank Kitson argued that co-option and cooperation are the basic requirements of colonial political control. Percival is among a long line of cooperators, ranging from Paddy Doherty and Brendan Duddy to the present class of professional, managerial “community representatives” and mysteriously-appointed “spokespeople”. While these figures have, largely, been involved in the political and economic management of the people of Derry on behalf of Sinn Féin, Stormont and the British establishment in London, what is novel about this museum it is dedicated to controlling the present through its representation of the past.
The normalization policy outlined by Kitson and the principles that he first proposed in 1971 are very relevant today. The museum operates entirely into line with British policy and represents a watermark of what he termed “civil-military relations” – the conscious fusion of military and civilian interests through long-term “popular projects” serving the occupier’s “single effective policy” : “the necessity for close co-ordination between the civil and the operational effort is apparent to everyone”, wrote Kitson in 1971. It remains so today because it is through this “unity of effect” that oppression becomes normalized and authority internalized by the target population, and how a people’s sense of their own selfhood is softened and eroded. It is the latest manifestation of psychological operations (still abbreviated by militaries, police forces and governments as “psy-ops”): the use of psychological means to distort and undermine a population’s sense of its own place in the world and in history, and to subvert its own understanding of itself. (5)
Identifying with the Oppressor
The museum has a single purpose: encouraging people to identify psychologically with the British army and police, and with the colonial violence that has repressed them for centuries. The British army’s infamous Bloody Sunday Massacre of January 1972 was key to the wider counter-insurgency policy that began in August, 1969, and its impact can still be felt in Derry, over four decades later. The Crown Forces Museum of Unfree Derry is dedicated to convincing the people that they should see something of themselves in the very murderers who shot down children, women and men during this period of particularly brutal state violence. It symbolizes a false and misleading ideology of reconciliation based on the assumption that we have much in common with these professional agents of colonial violence and the structures that they serve.
Last week’s demonstration registered popular refusal to conform to this ongoing process of normalization. The philosophy and practice of liberation that was practiced and displayed four decades ago by the people of Free Derry showed the world that refusal is a very powerful weapon. This protest articulated and renewed that refusal by addressing the still current problem of state violence and the ideological coercion that accompanies it, exposing its acceptance by organizations such as this museum, all of which, ultimately, act in the interests of the state.
The fundamental strategy of any empire is invasion, and this requires a considerable degree of integration on a number of levels, particularly within the cultural, political and psychological spheres. Imperialists occupy the physical territory of the countries that they invade with their military and police forces but they also work hard to colonize the minds of those whose lands they occupy with the relentless propaganda and distortions of the past that are circulated by their local agents. In Derry, however, this is being resisted because there are plenty of minds and imaginations that still remain free.
Sources:
1. See Paul Reynolds, “Rush to Iraqi-isation”, BBC News, 12th November, 2003 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3263545.stm), accessed 8/6/1017. See also “Letter (declassified): Rycroft to Baker”, 3rd June, 2003, The Iraq Inquiry (http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/212061/2004-06-03-letter-rycroft-to-baker-iraq-prime-ministers-meeting-3-june.pdf), accessed 8/6/2017.
2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, The Works of Edmund Burke, Vol. 3 (London, John C. Nimmo: 1887), p.296.
3. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ibid, Vol. 1, pp.131-2.
4. Robin Percival, “No Plan to Construct a Memorial Garden to Include British Soldiers in the Bogside,” The Pensive Quill, Friday, 8th August, 2014 (http://thepensivequill.am/2014/08/no-plan-to-construct-memorial-garden-to.html, accessed 31st May, 2017).
5. Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (London: Faber and Faber, 1971, reprinted 1991), pp.51-3, 71.
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