How ‘anti-Islamisation’ is uniting the European far-right
post by BenSix of Back Towards the Locus
Here’s an interesting picture. On the right is Markus Beisicht of the Pro Köln movement, in the centre is Petra Edelmannova of the Czech Národní Strana and on the left is Fillip Dewinter of Belgian’s Vlaams Belang party. They’re at the Anti-Islamisation Congress, demonstrating unity against the fearsome Mosque-constructing hordes…
The Národní Strana (or, National Party) have been in the news recently, issuing a promotional ad that’s luridly blunt in its bigotry…
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Geert Wilders’ great plan to save the west
I recently wrote about the Dutch MP Geert Wilders being slammed by the right-wing lobby group Anti-Defamation League, but forgot to put his comments in context. The Dutch MP made an acceptance speech for the Freedom Award he was given by the Florida Security Council in Miami.
And Geert Wilders certainly believes in ‘freedom’, because he advocates a ten point plan to Save Western Civilisation:
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Smearing British Muslims through opinion polls
Last year I wrote about what I called the “disgusting misrepresentation of British Muslims,” the publication of heavily biased opinion polls by lobby groups that were quickly picked up and promoted by elements of the right-wing press.
This week, I’m pleased to say that a group of British Born Muslims who saw that coverage and my article, got in touch to let me know that they’ve been going out and collecting evidence to help fight for the reputation of their community. Those who saw my first piece for Liberal Conspiracy know that I’m here to advocate science-based policy, so this week I want to explore the science of opinion polls, and look at how the evidence has been abused by a network of right-wing journalists and lobbying interests.
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The Soho Bombings: 10 years on
On April 30, 1999 the Admiral Duncan pub was targeted by a fascist psychopath.
On two consecutive Saturdays ten years ago London was the theatre of unexplained explosions. The first injured fifty people on the corner of Electric Avenue in Brixton, while the second hit Brick Lane, a busy and picturesque district with a large Bangladeshi population.
Barely were Londoners beginning to make sense of those incidents that, in the evening of Friday, April 30, the crowded Admiral Duncan pub – at the heart of London’s gay village- was blown up.
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Torture: does it actually work?
In the current debate over the Bush administration’s use of torture, most of the discussion has been around the moral and ethical dilemmas involved, with the strongest argument in favour being the infamous ‘ticking bomb’ scenario.
But in fact these arguments and make-believe situations are irrelevent if torture doesn’t work in the first place. On my own blog I argue for evidence-based policy, and in my first piece for Liberal Conspiracy I want to explore the evidence for torture, because if those who advocate it can’t prove that it works, then they have already lost the debate.
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Whatever happened to the terrorist plot?
A guest post by Pagar
There has been little on the blogosphere regarding the proposed deportation of the North West “terror suspects” and, in passing, it would be interesting to hear views on why this is. So what occurred?
There are two possibilities.
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Police, Camera, Action
David at Minority Report offers some words of warning, regarding the slow trickle of citizen generated footage of alleged brutality at the G20 protests earlier this month:
Reconstructing events by using any number of restricted viewpoints is no replacement for vital missing facts. If I present you with a black box that contains a photo I made of a scene, I’ll happily let you make as many pin holes as you like – you will still struggle to make out whats going on. Especially if I choose the image.
Different circumstances, but I felt this way after Saddam Hussein was executed. There is a real danger in allowing snippets of grainy amateur footage to act as the definitive account of an event. The result in this case has been yet another trial by media, only this time the police seem to be on the receiving end. In reality, we have no way of knowing precisely what killed Ian Tomlinson, and the account of the Nicky Fisher assault makes me uneasy (although admittedly this feeling is entirely based on her sightly spaced-out media interviews). continue reading… »
Hidden tiger – the Tamil protests in London
A few thoughts on the ongoing Tamil protest in London that the mainstream media has largely ignored. Here’s a report written over the last week:
Tuesday 14 April, 6pm:
Down at parliament square, a small marquee has been pitched – probably less than 300m from the place where our mighty prime minister and his various hangers-on bitch about the consequences of hiring Derek Draper and other vital matters of state, etc.
A young man called Prarameswaran Subramaniyam sits at the back of the marquee, wrapped in a pile of blankets. Subramaniyam is 28 and a Tamil. He’s in the eighth day of a hunger strike that he hopes will draw world attention to the plight of Tamil civilians being slaughtered by the Sri Lankan government in northern Sri Lanka – the latest awful chapter in the famously horrific 60-year-old conflict between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority.
Anyway – the publicity returns of Subramaniyam’s hunger strike remained disappointing at the time of writing. The protestors have yet to be offered a substantive UK government statement on the conflict, and – apart from a handful of reports last week when Tamil protestors occupied Westminster bridge at rush hour and started chucking themselves into the Thames – mainstream journalism has managed to ignore the fact of this loud eight-day-old protest almost entirely. Alas for UK Tamils, journalism has been at full stretch on important topics such as measuring the gap between Susan Boyle’s looks and talent, and probing Dolly and Damian McBride.
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Readers’ editor smacks down Nick Cohen
The Observer’s readers’ editor Stephen Pritchard steps into the recent row between Nick Cohen and Sunder Katwala:
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as just so much scrapping by a small clique, but let’s look a little closer at the detail. Shiraz Maher, Cohen’s “Muslim liberal”, is a former Islamist activist who associated with Glasgow bomber Bilal Abdulla, recently jailed for at least 32 years. Readers should have been told that.
Maher wrote in the Mail on Sunday last month about government ministers being unwilling to promote the idea of Britishness, yet the concept of what it is to be British is central to Gordon Brown’s government and has been a major Fabian theme. If Maher really is this out of touch with democratic public debate, it calls into question his credibility on the subject of think-tanks.
Katwala told me that Maher had never had any contact with the Fabians or the IPPR, but “his co-authored paper is quite good; it contains nothing we could not have published”, so it would appear that Maher and Cohen’s accusation of censorship is without foundation in this case.
No doubt Nick Cohen will see this as example of the ‘vast leftwing conspiracy’ in action. Nevertheless, it is a shame Nick cannot engage in a proper debate other than accuse the left of being blind just because “noted lefties” such as the Queen apparently appease Islamists, and then saying everyone is trying to censor him.
Exclusive: Policy Exchange forced to apologise; takes report off website
The right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange has been forced into a humiliating climbdown over its report, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, for making allegations in the report that it now admits were unsubstantiated.
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Counter-terrorism, an improved stance
Whenever the government hypes something up, you can almost guarantee that the end result will be less than the sum of its parts. So it is with the latest attempt by the Home Office to get to grips with something approaching an anti-terrorism strategy.
While in the past such doom-mongering was regular, both from politicians and police, this latest document mainly eschews scaremongering, as have the politicians promoting it. With the exception of the potentially worse than useless training of up to 60,000 people in how to act should they suddenly find themselves in the middle of a terrorist attack, which in reality amounts to an around 3 hour seminar session for business people, and the emphasis that has been put on the threat of some variety of “dirty” attack being launched increasing, it mostly keeps things in something approaching perspective.
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Propaganda and the media: Counter-Jihad and the ‘Decent’ Left
Over at the Yorkshire Ranter, Alex Harrowell comments on the ongoing story of Glen Jenvey, who featured as an anti-terrorist ‘expert’ in a Sun story about threats, which it now appears he posted himself, against public figures on a Muslim web forum.
It’s a very good question just how many terrorism stories (especially ones that have the “Internet” flag set – it means “stuff I don’t understand” to a lot of editors) are the work of these people, whether the upscale, Decent version or Jenvey’s Comedy Gladio.
There are indeed some interesting connections between the kind of right-wing “CounterJihad” networks represented by Jenvey and the so-called “decent left“.
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Met’s propaganda poster lies about terrorism and CCTV
The contract of advertising agency Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy with the Metropolitan Police Service expires at the end of March. They are being replaced by Gordon Brown’s favourite ad agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, who gave him “Design services” during his Labour party leadership non-election “coronation” campaign.
ABV BBDO have also been awarded the lucrative Home Office ID Cards propaganda account. Presumably Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy are at least partly to blame for the current Metropolitan Police Service anti-terrorism advertising campaign launched this week.
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What planet is Nick Cohen on?
Sunder Katawala has written a reply to Nick Cohen’s article in The Observer this weekend. In fact, a reply is not really a satisfactory word. Sunder tears apart Nick Cohen’s poorly written article with great force. He completely eviscerates it. If this was Menace 2 Society, which I watched yesterday, Sunder would have taken out an Uzi 9mm and destroyed the whole joint. You get my point.
This has become Nick Cohen’s latest game: to attack the liberal-left by using ‘liberal Muslims’ as his proxy. It would be funny if this wasn’t a national newspaper column expressly aimed at influencing the govenment’s Preventing Violent Extremism strategy. So, let’s play that game.
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Gun control and school shootings
While I tend to be for the most part as socially libertarian as you can get, one of the things I tend to disagree with the actual libertarians on is gun control. One of the undoubted major reasons why gun crime in this country is for the most part incredibly rare, especially when compared to other countries is thanks to the draconian nature of our laws; you could argue that we’ve never been major gun lovers over the last century in any case, and that we’ve never had the sort of constitutional protection like in the United States which has encouraged mass gun ownership.
But it’s almost certainly a factor as to why we thankfully haven’t experienced the school shooting massacres that the US has become notorious for and which Germany experienced its second of earlier this week.
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In defence of the Luton Islamist demo
Al Muhajiroun’s Luton demonstration and the Real IRA/Continuity IRA killings of the last week – although vastly differentiated in terms of degree -are based on broadly similar tactical considerations.
It is a law of politics that actions such as these are designed to provoke equal and opposite reactions.
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How do we explain the populist case against civil liberties?
At the Convention last week, the magnificent array of speakers did their job of giving us some strong and pithy arguments against the encroachments on our shared civil liberties.
Memorable rhetoric is important, because the shifting of public opinion is not shifted by one speech by Philip Pullman, (however lyrical) but by a hundred thousand discussions in homes and offices, and more than a few more opinion columns and TV shows in the coming years.
But we did not hear how to address the possibility that specific crimes may be committed when some of the state’s major incursions into our liberty are rolled back. It is crucial that those of us who push for a tempering of databases and surveillance own these possibilities and embrace them.
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Which Taliban was responsible?
Once we’ve set aside the horror and revulsion one inevitably feels in the wake of these latest attacks in Pakistan, I’m more inclined than ever to think there’s some truth to the Terrorists-Are-Dumb theory of international politics. I mean, if your idea of jihad is striking a possibly fatal blow to your country’s favourite sport, I think it’s safe to say that you’re going to suffer a major recruitment problem.
Beyond that, I think it’s important to avoid either jumping to rash conclusions, or merging Pakistan’s many militant factions into one slimy gloop called ‘Taliban’, as a guest contributor to Harry’s Place seems to do here. Shiraz Maher links the tragedy in Lahore with the recently-brokered ceasefire between the national government and the thugs who control the North-Western Province (or Swat Valley).
I think this is a mistake.
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Guantánamo: definitive prisoner list published
Andy Worthington, London-based journalist and author of “The Guantánamo Files” (Pluto Press), today releases the first definitive list of the 779 prisoners held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
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Alan Sugar to sue The Sun
The Media Guardian reports today that Alan Sugar is suing The Sun newspaper for its recent front-page story that Muslims had issued a ‘Jewish hit-list’ targeting him among others. The story was, of course, pure rubbish. He
…yesterday issued a writ at the high court in London against the Sun’s publisher and News International subsidiary, News Group Newspapers, and its editor, Rebekah Wade. The businessman and TV star is understood to have been angry at the story, which he felt risked his personal security.
Woohoo! There are two issues here.
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» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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