Tag: Israel

Abusive verbal attack on Green canvassers

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This is quite a disturbing post, put up by a guy who is evidently proud of it. It records a 2 minute discussion in the street during the local elections between three Green Party canvassers and an irate local resident; which starts off with him being quite calm and reasonable but ends up with him shouting abuse at them. They remain calm and polite throughout. He was filming the encounter from the start – presumably with a view to putting it about on social media afterwards, as he did.

His tone first starts to rise when he starts to argue that the motion put to the Green Party conference in March that Zionism is racism indicated “you don’t like Jews actually” because “95% …98%” of the Jewish community identify with Zionism. This is wrong on two counts.

1 Those figures are inaccurate. According to this article from the Jewish Chronicle from February 2024, in UK 63% identify as Zionist. And in the US thats 58%. And support for Israel is declining among Jewish people, just as it is more widely; because of what Israel is doing. That 63% in the UK is down from 72% in 2010. This is particularly the case among younger people. 8% in the UK considered themselves to be “anti Zionist” and 15% “non Zionist”. This active opposition is divided between religious currents that see a return to Israel before the coming of the Messiah as heresy, and internationalist Jews who see the adoption of communalist nationalism as a betrayal of the best humanist Jewish traditions. We should note that this survey was carried out by JPR, as the Chronicle puts it “before the current Hamas war,” and “found that support for the ideology of Zionism is slipping in UK Jewry as a whole” even then. So, what we have is not a community united around the Zionist project, but one that is deeply and traumatically fractured by its consequences. Some of that trauma is expressed by the increased vehemence of its supporters as more and more people are shocked by what they see.

2 The core of the argument is, however, whether Zionism can be described in any other way than racist. Liberal Zionists like Jonathan Freedland are without doubt appalled by the behaviour of people like Ben Gvir, partly because its bad PR, but also because it cuts against what they genuinely think Israel can represent. In his arguments around the IHRA definition, Freedland put the point that it is not antisemitic to criticise the state of Israel, but it would be to criticise a state of Israel. The distinction being that to criticise what a state does is legitimate, but not what it is. His problem is that it is impossible to envisage any state of Israel based on the core Zionist principle that the state is, and has to be, fundamentally a Jewish state, that did not treat the Palestinian population that also lives there as a threat; even if just demographically, and did not discriminate against them as second class citizens at best, subject, occupy, ethnically cleanse and expel and, in extremis, bomb them at worst. Its a bit like arguing that you can criticise Apartheid South Africa as it was, but not the principle of Apartheid South Africa. The problem for people like Freedland is that were Israel to treat the Palestinian population that lives under its rule with equality, it would cease to be Israel as a Zionist project and to maintain Israel as it is requires increasing levels of repression. Faced with challenges, “facts on the ground” have to be stamped down harder and harder. And as the power of the United States wanes, the viability of survival as a pro US military frontier state declines with it. The demonstrative violence in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon prioritise tactical victories over strategic viability and are a demonstration of weakness because they have to do this and keep playing double or quits until they can’t do it anymore. Rowing back from that course before that point is reached would be preferable for all concerned.

The final part of this film is quite surreal. Three very polite, slightly hurt and unhappy looking Green canvassers walking politely away from a man who is yelling at them to “F*** off!” and calling them “Nazis” in full confidence that they are nothing of the sort. Actual Nazis would have attacked him brutally and, I have no doubt, the Green Party people would have defended him from them. Embrace communalist nationalism and alliances get turned on their heads. The paradox of this is expressed by two young Jewish guys I was sitting beside on the tube when J and I were on our way to the Nakba demonstration last weekend. They were quiet outer suburban professionals, having a conversation about how people here had “had enough” and were looking to buy houses in Israel and how prices were now low (which indicates that more people want to sell/leave than move in; because Tel Aviv is actually a lot less safe than London and always will be). As we went along they were sharing info from their mobiles from family who were on the Tommy Robinson march, which they were joining themselves. And that’s where you end up. Finding common cause with people who want to “Unite the Kingdom” by deporting our neighbours.

On the Nakba Day demonstration, there were, among others, powerful and passionate Jewish speakers – you could have heard a pin drop for Stephen Kapos – and all the speakers called for unity against all forms of racism, stressing that “antisemitism has no place in our movement”. On the, much smaller, “Robinson” march Islamaphobia was common ground, with a big Christian Nationalist contingent who want to ban all other religions. When they come for the Mosques in the morning…People like our irate resident and the two young guys on the tube should think that through.

What a “hate march” looks like

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

For anyone with any difficulty identifying a “hate march”, it looks like this report of this year’s Jerusalem Day demonstration from Deutche Welle.

A crowd chanting “Death to Arabs”, “may your villages burn”, “Gaza is a graveyard”, forcing the Palestinian population to board up their shops and stay inside for fear of the attacks they make on targets who cross their path. It happens every year on May 15th – an Israeli national holiday to mark the conquest of East Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six Day war in 1967.

This march is a naked celebration of racial supremacy; a model for what a fascist march through a diverse community might look like if it had overt state backing; and it punctuates and celebrates the ethnic cleansing which is displacing the Palestinian population in Jerusalem as well as the West Bank.

There’s a really strange dissonance from a young woman interviewed in the middle of the clip who says “Jerusalem is the heart of Israel. Its the place where you can recognise notes of peace and harmony and basically all the goodness and moral compass that Judaism is trying to show the whole world”. She really seems to believe that. Its hard to think that she’s looking at the same event that the rest of us can see with our own eyes; or what she has to ignore to interpret it like that.

An increasing number of Jewish people across the world are rejecting this kind of disavowell. Many, in the UK, will be on the Nakba Day march today to oppose this “racist system of oppression … ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide” and “against the far right in Britain who glorify Israel’s racism and brutality.” A support that will be in evidence today on the second “Unite the Kingdom” march called by Tommy Robinson, deliberately timed to clash, for those “who have had enough of migration and mass immigration”.

That, I fear, will be what a hate march looks like.

But, as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign puts it “Our unity and solidarity is stronger than their hatred and division.”

“Terrorists” don’t litter pick

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

I have spent too long in the last two years feeling inhibited about wearing a keffiyeh; because it felt disrespectful to people who have been so relentlessly bombed and starved. To identify with them without undergoing what they are going through seemed somehow trivialising. Not worthy. This was, of course, absurd self indulgence. The point of wearing it is to show solidarity. Now that we are over two months into a “ceasefire” during which the IDF have carryied on relentlessly, remorselessly firing and killing people every single day, it feels disrespectful not to put it on.

On my way to the Palestine soldarity demonstration last Saturday, I was walking down an extremely steep hill that should probably have bannisters, when a woman coming out of her house spots my keffiyah and asks if I’m going to the football, before correcting herself, because its obviously not a team scarf. “No, the Palestine demonstration” I say cheerfully, smiling at her, because its something that should not be seen as an“out there” activity – the way the government and press presents it – only carried out by people you can put in a pigeon hole marked “dangerous” – when anyone can go, and a vast range of people who have basic human empathy do. As a result, its also a lot safer and more peaceful than a lot of football matches too of course; and a lot more good natured.

In something of the same spirit, as I’m leaving the flat with the keffiyeh on, and come across a pile of potato peelings, old spuds and eggshells that someone has considerately left splattered across the pavement, I go home, get my spade and food waste caddy and shovel it in; because “terrorists” don’t litter pick. And I am extra polite and considerate all day for the same reason. If you are wearing something that identifies you with people who are being attacked, and the commanding heights of government and media are portraying those people and anyone expressing solidarity with them as some sort of threat, opening the door for people, or gesturing for someone to get on the bus first with a smile, undercuts their smears about who we are. Speak softly and carry a strong message.

The opposite of the approach recomended by the pharmacist in my local chemists, with whom I often banter. “How you doing?” “OK, pootling along. One day at a time”. “Good idea. Keep your head down”.”Nah. Won’t be doing that!” At times like this, we need to keep our heads, and elbows, UP.

Walking on further, it occurs to me that during that whole hyped up broo ha ha about the ban on Tel Aviv Maccabees fans travelling to that game at Aston Villa, and subsequent witch hunting of the West Midlands chief constable out of his job – as if these fans didn’t have a reputation inside Israel for racist thuggery, and as if the Amsterdam riots hadn’t happened in the way we saw them do – put emotively as “Jews are being banned from watching football” (as if all Jewish people are complicit in their behaviour, as antisemitic an identification as any you could wish for) no one mentioned the fact that football teams, or players, from Gaza were routinely not allowed out of the strip in the “normal” conditions before Oct 7th nor that, as of August last year, the IDF has killed over 672 Palestinian athletes since, including over 240 footballers; so perhaps some sense or proportion might be in order.

A sartorial paradox is that I’m also wearing my Dad’s old raincoat, bought from Israel supporting Marks and Spencers. A strict interpretation of BDS would consign this garment to the bin, but in some ways wearing it could be seen as a sartorial expression either of a two state solution and/or a one state solution – an Israeli mac and a Palestinian keffiyeh coexisting alongside each other, or, indeed, together in one ensemble.

On my way past the last contingents streaming into Whitehall from the Strand two hours after it started, with a spirited version of Bella Ciao belting out from a mass drum band powering the sort of resistance dancing that uncowed people do, an old friend tells me to “watch out for the far right in Trafalgar Square”. The last bitter fragment of UKIP, people for whom Nigel Farage is too much of a softy sell out, a sliver of ice in the heart of the body politic, “the cold cursing the warmth for which it hungers” as Tolkein put it, had planned a march on Tower Hamlet that afternoon. Anything Oswald Mosley could try. Perhaps for their own protection, the police had banned them from doing so and given them a route provocatively close to the Palestine demo, perhaps hoping for incidents that could then be played up to ban future marches. Checking out their route before coming in to Central London so I wouldn’t walk into the middle of them unawares, I’d noticed that they had been given an embarassingly tiny, tiny patch of Marble Arch to assemble in; with strict instructions to stay on it or face arrest. Walking up alongside the Square, where they were supposed to be rallying, there was no sign of them until a small knot of people, that could at first glance be mistaken for a tourist walking party, could be glimpsed gathered in a desultory huddle outside the National Gallery. One or two Union Jacks, a couple of wooden crosses of the Christian nationalist persuasion and, at the back, a small phalanx of Iranian monarchist flags mark them out as the weird bloc they are. I head into St Martins crypt for a coffee and to meet a man about the climate crisis.

Trying to kill the Truth.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This brilliant graph by Nicki Draper shows what the killing rate for journalists in Gaza actually is. The initial graph is bad enough, but adjusted for time it shows that this is not an average loss of life in a risky job. Does anyone really think that this can be anything other than a deliberate policy, to kill the eyes and ears, stifle the witnesses, carry on the genocide in silence and darkness?

The scale of the killing of journalists by Israeli forces in Gaza has been so great that their colleagues in Western media can’t avert their eyes anymore.

Though the framing is still often grotesque. Jonathan Crook’s question How is it possible for a BBC reporter to have made the following obscene observation in his segment on Israel’s murder at the weekend of Al-Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif: “There’s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?” goes to the heart of the racist double standards applied by the Western media to their own colleagues in Gaza. How much collateral damage is OK?

As Cook points out, if studio with Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet, Yollande Knell, Lucy Williamson and Jon Donnison was been hit by an Israeli strike, and all five killed: would any BBC reporter ask “There’s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?”

The reporter’s question is also absurd. The IDF does not target individual journalists. It targets journalists. No one from outside is allowed in. Anyone on the inside has a target on them.

They do not want the facts getting out. They would prefer it if everyone went about their lives in an innocent bubble, untroubled by disturbing images and news.

But we see them. We know. The bloody tooth paste is out of the tube and you will never get it back in. We will tell others. We will mobilise. This will end.

Armageddon in Gaza

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“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” W B Yeats

The decision by the Israeli war cabinet to try to fully occupy Gaza to “eliminate Hamas” will kill many, many more people, with intensified military action adding even more to the steadily mounting total of people being starved to death; and, as a side effect that Netanyahu is well aware of, ensure the deaths of all the remaining hostages. As the Duke of Warwick says in Shaw’s St Joan; “It was nothing personal. Your death was a political necessity”.

The reported stand up row with IDF commanders, and the letters from thousands of reservists and nearly 600 retired Israeli security officials and former intelligence agency heads who see no achievable military objective, also reflects the strain that the war so far has placed on the IDF itself and Israeli society more broadly.

Their casualties are tiny by comparison with those suffered by the Palestinians in Gaza of course. The 60,199 fatalities for which the Gaza Health Ministry has records are generally accepted to be a serious underestimate.

There is no doubt that, unless a change of course is forced, there will be many more dying very soon. 12,000 children under five alone are reported as suffering from acute malnutrition in July; and this number is growing as the trickle of food aid forced in by international pressure and condemnation is spread thinner and thinner as time drags on.

Nevertheless, the impact of the war on the IDF is far from negligable, and this will accelerate once they move into the quagmire of Gaza City.

So far, they have lost 454 fatalities and 2,870 injured in the 22 months since October 7th.

To think of that in UK terms, with a population almost ten times bigger – that would be 4,358 dead and 27,552 injured.

To put that into perspective, 179 UK soldiers were killed in Iraq, and 457 in Afghanistan (the latter over nearly 20 years); roughly a tenth as much at a much slower rate. It led to quite a strong sentiment against overseas interventions, even with a proffessional armed forces, that is still a factor to be taken into account.

In US terms, with a population 48 times bigger, that would be 21,798 soldiers killed and 136,320 injured. To put that in perspective, that would be at a rate almost twice as fast as the 58, 281 soldiers the US lost in their nine year invasion of Vietnam.

The Vietnam comparison is instructive, because the US and its allies killed over a million Vietnamese. And they were still defeated, partly because the scale of their murderousness became globally apparent, its inability to stop the Vietnamese became apparent with it, the morale of their conscripted soldiers was crumbling, and draft resistance fuelled a counter culture that was letting all sorts of dangerous ideas loose; so they had to cut their losses and bide their time.

What we are seeing in Gaza is a level of barbarism even more concentrated than when B52s were carpet bombing Vietnamese cities and dropping Agent Orange all over the countryside. The Gaza City invasion will make this much worse.

However, Israel is more capable of sustaining this than the US, even with conscripts, because the war is right in their faces, not in “a land far away”, a high proportion of their population are settlers on a mission to drive Palestinians out, and most see the conflict as zero sum communalism, “us or them”; which has a genocidal dynamic.

Nevertheless, the strains are real. Up to the end of 2024, 672,000 people, mostly young and educated, had left the country. Thats almost 10% of the population. This is paralelled by a 10% hit on its economy, which any Gaza City invasion will compound.

The question now is how bad things have to get before Netanyahu runs out of road, or their society cracks, or the US makes the calculation that the damage to its own global standing from underwriting all this is worse than the salutory effect of the apocalyptic warning it gives to the whole global South of what could happen to you if you step out of line, and pulls the plug. Which it could have done at any point since this began, It hasn’t.

When Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian has (almost) given up on apologetics and even Tim Stanley can write in the Daily Telegraph that “its now impossible to ignore the nevidence of human suffering (try as you have, Tim) or the sham of the official Israeli narrative that says no one is starving or, if they are, its because Hamas stole all the food“; the tectonic plates have already shifted and Netanyahu is standing on thinner and thinner ice, and every bomb he drops cracks it more.

In the period ahead, we will have to mobilise more and more against this, and break the complicity of our government in it.

Gaza – the Holocaust and the Bengal famine.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“Dead or dying children in a Calcutta Street. Photograph published by the Statesman, Calcutta, on August 22nd, 1943.”, Public Domain

Even right wing newspapers now have front pages showing Palestinian children who look just like these with headlines like “For Pity’s sake stop this” (Daily Express 23/7/25) without saying how. The limitations of the Excpress approach are well explored here.

The latest UN Report states

  • Gaza’s one million children continue to bear the brunt of continued bombardment, deprivation of access to life’s essentials, including food, water and adequate health care, and exposure to traumatic events. In a briefing to the UN Security Council on 16 July, Catherine Russell, Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), stated that more than 17,000 children have reportedly been killed and 33,000 injured in Gaza over 21 months, which is the equivalent of a classroom of 28 children killed in Gaza on average each day. (My emphasis)

Starvation is already the common lived experience of everyone in Gaza.

Genocide by industrialised intent.

In the 1940s, the Nazi’s industrialised the mass extermination of people, mostly Jews, that they considered “untermensch”, lesser humans. Around 6 million were killed, initially by being shot by Einsatzgruppen, marching them out into the woods (see Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning) then by mass gassing, starvation and being worked to death in the extermination camps. No one kept exact records, but the scale and horror of it is in no doubt.

Genocide by neglect.

In the same decade, around 3 million colonial subjects of the British Raj in Bengal starved to death in the Bengal famine. Again, no one kept exact records, and estimates vary from just under a million to just under 4 million, but the scale and horror of it is in no doubt.

It is, however, much less well known. They died “from starvation, malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions, poor British wartime policies and lack of health care.” What Wikipedia describes as “poor British wartime policies” covers limiting food aid overall, on the argument that this was needed for the war effort, and manipulation of what food aid there was to communities that were considered politically loyal. This was a material factor in exacerbating communal tensions that were later to explode at partition.

This was not an aberation in British India. It took independence to end famines. See Mike Davies, Late Victorian holocausts.

Genocide by deliberate deprivation.

Without food, people can survive for just over two months before they starve to death. In 1981, the longest lasting IRA Hunger Striker, Kieren Doherty, survived for 73 days, the shortest, Martin Hurson, died after just 46. Most died after 60, 61 or 62 days. Two months. And these were fit young men who were able to drink clean water.

Without food, the entire population of Gaza is a risk of starving to death by the end of the summer. 43 have died in the last three days, and this is accelerating.

The deliberate, calculated, performative cruelty of the GHF “aid” operation will slow the pace of this a little, spin out the suffering, but also aims to destroy community. As Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation puts it, “You can’t approach starvation as a biological phenomenon experienced by individuals, but it is also a collective social experience. Very often that societal element – the trauma, the shame, the loss of dignity, the violation of taboos, the breaking of social bonds – is more significant in the memory of survivors than the individual biological experience. All these traumas are why the Irish took almost 150 years before they could memorialise what they experienced in the 1840s. Those who inflict starvation are aware of this.”

So are we. This cannot be allowed. Demonstrate on Friday. Let’s break our government’s complicity in it. The six demands of the Bogota Declaration are a good basis for getting beyond David Lammy’s stance of wringing his hands while passing the ammunition.

Local actions so far

Thursday, 24 July

Hastings: Murial Matters House, TN34 3UY, 6pm

Friday, 25 July

Abergavenny: St. John’s Square, 6pm

Birmingham: Barclays Bank, 79-84 High Street, B4 7TE, 5pm

Cambridge: Addenbrooke’s Roundabout, 6pm

Cardiff: UK Government Building, Central Square, CF10 1EP, 6pm

Coventry: Foleshill Road/Ring Road roundabout (near Eden School), CV1 4FS, 4.30pm

Exeter: Bedford Square, High Street, 6pm

Leeds: City Square, LS1 2ES, 6pm

Liverpool: Lime Street Station, 5.30pm

London – Hackney: Hackney Town Hall, 6pm

London – Ilford: Wes Streeting’s office, 12a High View Parade, Woodford Ave., IG4 5EP, 6pm

London – Newham: Stratford Station, 6pm

Milton Keynes: Milton Keynes Central Station, 302 Eldergate, MK9 1LA, 6pm

Newport: Jessica Morden’s office, Clarence House, NP19 7AA, 6.30pm

Oxford: Carfax Tower, Queen Street, OX1 1ET, 6pm

Portsmouth: Constituency Office, 72 Albert Road, Southsea, PO5 2SL, 6pm

Reading: Central Railway Station, RG1 1LZ, 6pm

Sheffield: Sheffield Train Station, Sheaf St., 5pm

Slough: Aldi, Farnham Road, SL1 4BX, 6pm

Worcester: Cathedral Square, WR1 2QE, 6pm

Saturday, 26 July

Brighton: Churchill Square, 12pm

Carlisle: Barclays, 33 English St, CA3 8JX, 1pm

Slough: Meet outside Empire Cinema, SL1 1DD, 11.30am; 12noon departure for march

The Words of the Prophets…

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

…are written on the subways walls, and tenement halls” or, very often, the walls of pub toilets. In the toilet at the Chandos pub, wedged between St Martin in the Fields and the Colosseum, and reached up a narrow twisting staircase lined with black and white photos of opera singers, you’d expect something classy.

Above a startlingly black and white diamond floor, someone has written gnomic messages in the tiny capitalised writing of the obsessive along the grout between the wall tiles. “The World is flat”. “The World is grey”. “Trump is a bump in the road” The last of which can’t help but make you wonder “Where to?” Rather than clean up these rather faint assertions, the pub management has drawn over them in coloured marker; which paradoxically draws attention to them and makes decoding what you can and can’t see underneath a bit of a mission.

Behind the cistern, someone has written, bolder, larger, in green, red and black, “Free, Free Palestine!” then poignantly added “please!” drawing an angry retort in scrawled biro, most of which has been equally angrily scribbled over so only the sentiment “Let us finish the job” can be read. A third person, presumably the one who scribbled it out, has drawn an arrow to the sentiment and added “You did that in 1948”. So, at the pub toilet in the Chandos, as in the Oxford Union, its evident that Israel’s exercise of its “right to defend itself” has blown away any pretence it had at moral standing with every bomb it has dropped, every tactical success lays the ground for strategic failure; and the writing is now on the wall.

Graffiti in pub toilets varies with the clientelle. Back in the seventies in York, when I was more inclined to be a regular than the very occasional visitor I am now, the Spread Eagle in Walmgate seemed to specialise in satire at the expence of John Smiths brewery. Just above the urinal, someone had written, “You don’t buy the beer here, you rent it”. Somone else had added “Don’t take the piss out of John Smiths bitter – you might remove its entire liquid content”. In the more sophisticated refuge of the York Arms, a cosy mostly gay pub tucked snugly in behind Bootham Bar, there was a line in arch and witty comments about anything and everything. Most were a fleeting laugh, but, for a reason that is mysterious to me, this one has stuck. “To be is to do” Rousseau. “To do is to be” Sartre. “Oo be do be do” Sinatra.

A similar mixture of the cod profound and the down to earth was written on the whiteboard on the concourse of Piccadilly Circus tube station that was crowded with people rushing hither and thither in an even busier than usual pre Xmas crush, giving a Hallmark sentiment a practical punch line. “Life is about the journey, not the station – SO KEEP MOVING”.

A sticker in the tube car read “My girlfriend said it was her or Reading – I still miss her sometimes”. My initial thought was that Reading is a nice place, definitely deserves to be a city, but not so nice as to break up over living there, and that this was a strange way to promote its charms; until I tumbled that it was about the football club. The same thought applied though…

Another tube advert illustrated the limitations of synthetic phonics as a method of teaching reading. It read “Whne yuo cna’t dceipher thier priicng bnudles”. I expect that most people reading this will have had no trouble working out what that said, because you’d have been using your sense of meaning and syntax to work with your knowledge of possible letter/sound correspondences (which can vary in English, vowels being especially slippery, as in “I like reading in Reading” or “Gove loves to move”). If the sentence had had a jumbled word order as well as a jumbled letter order, it would have been much harder to work out.

The problem with an over dogmatic phonic approach to reading is the insistence that meaning follows decoding, when it is necessarily very often the other way round. Even when learning the phonemes themselves, its a lot more effective to do so from a word that has meaning for the learner (like their name, or words like “Mum”) than a random list.

The brain works like a very sophisticated version of the spellcheck/predictive text systems that are now on phones. As you type, the system will give you possible options for words that might make sense if they come next. As you type more letters, the words change as the possibilities narrow.

This perception is important from the off, as without making sense being built into the process, there is a danger of what used to be called “barking at print”, where a child might learn to decode the sounds and pronounce the words, but be reading them as a random list. This might get good marks in the phonic screening children in Year 1 have to do, which is set up exactly as a random list, many of them as “non words” to eliminate any input from meaning contaminating the purity of the letter,sound correspondences; but it doesn’t allow lift off into self sustaining reading for pleasure or information – because the activity is abstracted from all that.

More creative mishears. In a discussion on the antecedents of the HTS in the Al Nousra Front and Jolani’s split from ISIS, I misheard the name of the ISIS caliph Abu Bakr Al Bagdhadi as Big Daddy, which conjured a different image altogether.

The Unbearable Racist Chutzpah of the Observer: Two Letters arising from today’s edition

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The Massacre of Children in Gaza is not a Libel

Howard Jacobson’s article (Tales of infanticide have stoked hatred of Jews for centuries. They still echo today Observer 6/10/24) is evidence of an inability to reconcile support for Israel with a belief in himself as a moral person who would “never dream” of doing what the IDF is actually doing.

The deaths of children in Gaza is not a malevolent racist fiction, like the blood libel he refers to, but a horrific reality that is going on and on and on. When the names of all the people killed in Gaza that it has been possible to identify were published, the first fourteen pages were children under one year old. He knows this. Which is why it is so unbearable to see it night after night on the news; as he says “what you cannot bear to see done”.

But, lets be clear, “Jews” are not committing the genocide in Gaza. The Israeli state is. A growing number of Jewish people around the world oppose it, organise against it march against it. Howard Jacobson does not, chooses to identify himself with the state that is doing it, and that sets up the psychic stress between what that state is doing and how he sees himself. If Howard cannot bear to see this, he should oppose it.

Editorial

A year ago, in response to your first editorial about October 7th, I wrote you the following letter.

Since the turn of the century the casualty rate from the conflict in Israel Palestine has been twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Given that the suffering on the Palestinian side is so much higher, why does your editorial find calls for violent vengeance from Israel “understandable”, but consider that violent actions from Palestinians “defy comprehension”? 

Perhaps you should write another editorial explaining the asymmetry of your empathy.

Your editorial this year, describing the “unfathomable hatred” of Palestinians, and the questions that Israelis ask “reasonably enough”, begs the same question.

Starmer through the looking glass

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The hypocrisies and biases of a political stance are often revealed starkly by keeping the grammar of a statement intact but reversing its terms. The result puts whats being said, and, crucially, what isn’t, into a sharp relief.

This is very clear in Keir Starmer’s statement on the Iranian retaliation for succesive Israeli assassinations and terror attacks and their latest assault on Lebanon.

For ease of understanding I have kept in the original word in brackets.

“I utterly condemn this attempt by the Israeli (Iranian) regime to harm innocent Palestinians (Israelis), to escalate this incredibly dangerous situation, and push the region ever closer to the brink”

“It cannot be tolerated. We stand with Lebanon (Israel), and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression. Israel (Iran) must stop these attacks”.

Israel (Iran) “has menaced the Middle East for far too long, chaos and destruction brought not just to Palestine (Israel), but to the people they live amongst in Lebanon and beyond.”

“We stand with the people of Palestine (Israel) and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression,” adding that Britain supports “the Palestinian People’s (Israel’s) reasonable demand for the security of its people.”

Idiocies of the Week

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Its Conservative Party Conference week, so we are spoiled for choice.

Liz Truss announced that she wasn’t going to back any of the 4 candidates for Party leader. The sighs of relief from the candidates could be heard from coast to coast.

Kemi Badenoch – and has no one noticed that her name is an anagram of Bad Enoch (its even in the right order) – said that she was shocked that so many recent immigrants to this country “hate Israel”. Given that Israel has spent the last year killing over 41,000 people and bombing Gaza to rubble, accelerated the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, been indicted for genocide at the International Criminal Court and, to return its 60,000 internal refugees to their northern border, has just killed another 1,000 people in Lebanon invaded the country and displaced a million people there, what’s not to love?

Her team in the leadership campaign released an odd pamphlet arguing that 21st century politics is different from 20th century politics because – although everything can best be understood in the form of a triangle – in the old days the triangle was divided horizontally and the bottom of society supported the Left while the Right defended the top, today the triangle is divided vertically; to indicate that both Left and Right have support from top to bottom, but without any acknowledgement that the right still defends the interests of the people at the top, while it is the role of the Left to fight for the bottom.

Confused? You will be. Just to make things even clearer, in their diagram the Left is on the Right and the Right is on the Left. This might indicate that the Tory Right approach the world in an inverted way, but it also might simply be a Freudian slip, implying that somewhere deep in their heart of hearts they know that the Left is, ultimately, right.

Another way of looking at it is that they don’t know which way is up. Bottoms up chaps!

Another gem from Badenoch is that her way of dealing with the problem that highly educated people tend to lean Left is to have fewer highly educated people. All those “pointless university degrees” that make people think have got to go.

Meanwhile, Miriam Cates, speaking on Politics Live, unravelled the full insanity of the Right’s line on immigration. On the one hand the country can’t afford to have all these people coming in, but at the same time it needs people coming in to fill job vacancies because, in Cates’ view “we’re not having enough babies”. So, the country isn’t full up after all. Breed damn you! Breed!

Jo Coburn, the anchor of Politics Live, noted that the Tories were obsessively discussing immigration while most of the electorate are concerned about energy bills and the cost of living, the NHS and the state of public services; without reflecting that Politics Live itself obsessively discusses the issue “we can’t talk about” almost every time it comes on. Anyone would think there was an agenda somewhere to push this under everyone’s noses at every opportunity, carpet bombing us with BS.

Robert Jenrick – a small, cheap embodiment of petty minded mean spiritedness, best known for his order as immigration minister to paint over a mural in a child refugee centre to make it less welcoming – dropped an honest bollock when he said that the problem with the European Court of Human Rights is that it meant that UK Special Services were having to shoot terrorists rather than arrest them because the EHRC would order them released. While this is an absurd claim in itself, its notable that none of the people who criticised Jenrick for this statement denied that UK Special Forces do indeed breach the Geneva Convention in this way. There are a number of cases from Afghanistan that the SAS kept locked away for years to maintain the fiction that they didn’t happen. But its now well known that they did. But to everyone from his rivals for the Tory leadership to “a Labour source”, its just terribly bad taste, and awfully insulting to our brave boys to say that they have done what they have done.

Jenrick also criticised the police for dealing with peaceful demonstrators calling for an end to genocide and a ceasefire in Gaza more gently than rioters who were trying to burn refugees alive in hostels, threw bricks at the police, attacked people in the streets and trashed their neighbour’s houses. Quite inexplicable.

And two from last week.

A delegate at the Reform Conference, interviewed on Politics Joe, opined that the rivers are polluted, not because of the water companies failing to invest – “I think they are being scapegoated” – or too much toxic runoff from farmers overfertilising their fields – its because all those immigrants are coming over here and overwhelming our overloaded sewage system with all their poos. Talk about S*$t.

And David Lammy at the UN last week saying “I know Imperialism when I see it”. A question for David. When you go to work as the British Foreign Secretary at the Foreign Office, and you walk past that statue of Robert Clive, and stride along corridors resplendently decorated with paintings of Britannia and all the rest of it (which you can see here), perhaps through the “Durbar Court”, and you look at all that, what exactly do you see?