This brilliant graph by Nicki Drapershows 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.
“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.
“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.
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
…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.
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.
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.”
Travelling on the bus up Golders Green Road, the hoardings just opposite Grodzinski’s bakery (now modernised but smaller than it was) are covered with A3 posters of the Israeli hostages. 97 of them are still alive. If you were to stick pictures like this of them up alongside the road in a single line they would stretch for approximately 100 metres. About the length of three semi detached houses side by side.
As of April this year, Israel was holding 3,660 Palestinian prisoners in adminstrative detention, that’s to say without trial. Hostages by any other name. Rarely mentioned on the news. No imperative to release them. Effectively invisible. No pictures of them up on hoardings anywhere. But if you were to stick them up in a single line of A3 posters, it would stretch for about 1,220 metres. On a street of semis that would not stop at number 6, as it would with the Israelis, but at number 73.
If you were to stick up posters of the Israeli victims of the Oct 7th attack on the same street it would not get so far. About 400 metres, just to number 24. You could walk it in a couple of minutes. Doing the same for the 41,534 Palestinians killed so far in Gaza since, and you’d need a road more than ten kilometres long. Walking at an average 3mph it would take you more than two hours to get to the end.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,”President Biden. May 8th
On the face of it, this is a very strange statement. Israeli troops had already entered Rafah two days before Biden said they hadn’t done it yet. But, although this statement was already out of date at the point that Biden made it, on the other hand, it is “clear”, or seems to be from this statement, that “if they go into Rafah” – no caveats about that – the US would cut off “supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, with the cities…”
What happened since is that the Israelis have continued sending troops into and occupying Rafah, while shelling and bombing the parts of it that they do not occupy.
The UN puts the impact of that like this.
Ground incursions and heavy fighting also continue to be reported, particularly in Rafah. Intensified hostilities following the issuance of evacuation orders and the Israeli military operation in Rafah have so far forced the displacement of about one million people, amid a decline in the entry of humanitarian aid. Between the afternoons of 29 and 31 May, according to MoH in Gaza, 113 Palestinians were killed and 637 were injured, including 60 killed and 280 injured in the past 24 hours.
In Rafah, only three field hospitals are still operating, one of them partially. The World Food Programme (WFP) calls for the immediate opening of all access points, emphasizing that its ability to support people in need is deteriorating. Health and environmental risks are on the rise due to fuel shortages, limited access to clean water, sewage overflow, accumulation of solid waste, and infrastructural damage, UNRWA and partners warn.
The US, in response, made a tokenistic gesture of blocking one weapons shipment. This had the same performative media feed quality as their aid air drops and the pier they built to deliver aid that has now began to sink.
The International Court of Justice ruled on May 24th that Israel “must halt” its military offensive “immediately”. That was a week ago. The Israelis have ignored the ruling. They are in breach of international law and therefore, as the saying goes, “the rules based international order”.
The film below of National Security Council spokesman and former Rear Admiral John Kirby, a man who definitely has “something of the night about him”, slipping and sliding under pressure from reporters on this question is a study in squirming self righteous evasiveness that becomes embarassingly revealing.
His line can be summarised as …“the Israelis say that they didn’t do the bombing, it “might have been” a Hamas ammo dump spontanously combusting, and anyway they used their smallest bombs, a teeny, tiny bomb, and if they did it was somewhere else, and an accident, and they are investigating it; so I really can’t comment until their investigation is complete. And of course we will not rush to judgement until they have had time to judge their own actions, and there will be nothing self serving about this because they are a “democracy”. We haven’t been able to verify any of the evidence we have seen. We will ask the Israelis about this and accept what they say. Any critical view about this is conjecture that does not fit the facts, even though I’ve just said that we won’t know what the facts are until the Israelis decide what they are. As far as red lines are concerned, there is no mathematical formula, so, trust me, trying to pin me down on this will be like trying to nail blamange to the wall. A great deal of aid has gone into Gaza but I am not going to specify how much because I know damn well how far short it falls. We have a red line against a major incursion, but no matter how major the incursions have been so far, they won’t be major enough for us to actually do anything; and we are in constant talks with the Israelis so we are on the same page on whatever this is going to be. Trust me. Anyway, all this could be avoided if Hamas came out of their tunnels and lined up with big targets on their heads so the IDF could shoot them without having to, sadly, drop 2,000 lb bombs on thousands of people trying to shelter in tents; because its very worrying that the Israelis are having to send troops back into areas that they had already flattened and thought they had “cleared”; so there needs to be a plan for the day after, though for goodness sake don’t ask me what that might be.”
Watch it for yourself. Its an education.
“You cannot make judgements in the midst of a conflict”John Kirby. Exept that the US judgement to cut funding from UNWRA after Israeli accused 7 UNWRA personel of taking part in Oct 7th was immediate, and in the midst of the conflict, even though the Israelis presented no evidence at the time; and the funding remains suspended even though the Israelis have presented no evidence since. This is complicity in using famine as a weapon.
I can think of many words to describe what the IDF is doing in Gaza. “Moral” would not be one of them.
Perhaps Michael Gove looks at things differently; rather like Frederick Lindeman, Churchill’s right hand man and an advocate of mass area bombing in World War 2, who, when asked for a definition of morality replied: “I define a moral action action as one that brings advantage my friends”.
Only such a skewed perspective could allow him to see systematic algorithms that target air strikes and shelling using a 50:1 ratio of collateral damage (making it ok to kill 50 civilians if a strike manages to kill one fighter), smashed hospitals, schools and water treatment plants, the destruction or damage of over 250,000 homes, the displacement of nearly 2 million people, and the use of famine as a weapon as evidence of a superior morality on the part of the Israeli government.
Perhaps he hasn’t seen the people with white flags being shot in the street, didn’t listen to 6 year old Hind Rajab’s pleading phone call from a car trapped by the IDF, nor hear the IDF bullets that killed her family, nor note the way that the IDF waited for paramedics to get to her before they killed both her and them.
Perhaps he hasn’t seen any of the gloating videos made by IDF soldiers, and some civilians, or the Israeli civilians trying to blockade aid trucks.
Or perhaps he thinks all of this is ok; as his presumption of moral superiority for the IDF is not based on objective criteria, but because they are allied with the UK in the US centred Global North Bloc and therefore “the good guys”; on the side of “democracy” and “human rights” no matter what they actually do.
In a way this is almost Nietzchian. The ubermensch of US allies by definition “beyond good and evil”; and certainly not subject to the International Criminal Court.
Gove’s indignation at the ICC prosector arguing for arrest warrants for Israeli PM Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant as well as 3 Hamas leaders, echoes that of Netanhayu himself, who has spluttered his “disgust” that “democratic Israel” (i.e. him) has been put in the dock with what he described as “mass murderers” and threats from the United States to impose sanctions on the ICC.
In the interests of objectivity, it makes sense to look at who has been carrying out murder en masse; and how Hamas matches up to Israel in that respect.
This graph compares the numbers of people killed in Israel on Oct 7th with those killed in Gaza by the IDF since.
If Hamas are mass murderers, what does that make the IDF?
If Hamas leaders are culpable for deaths at their hands, how much more culpable is Netanyahu for the deaths at his?
Nearly 30 times… so far.
This is even higher than the ratio of 20 Palestinians for every Israeli killed in the period from 2000 up to Oct 7th 2023, which, once you’re aware of it, goes some way to explaining why it happened.
In quantitative terms, there is indeed, no equivalence. What the IDF have done since Oct 7th, and what they did before Oct 7th, is far, far worse.
And they are doing it in a now futile attempt to reassert by terror and massacre the status quo for a state that occupies and represses another people; against whom it commits continuous and casual violence, systematically discriminates, and has been inexorably dispossessing since 1948.
Its hard to listen to the slippery emollience of Michael Gove without Lewis Carroll coming to mind. Twas Brilig, and the slithely Gove did gyre and gimble in the wabe (Jabberwocky, slightly tweaked).
What follows is a number of points that Angela Rayner could have used to attack Michael Gove’s sinister redefinition of “extremism”, had she not followed the strategy of the current Labour front bench in deciding to attack it from slightly to its right.
Its hard to work out sometimes if the low calibre of the current government is because they are just second rate in themselves – Grant Schapp’s recent speech arguing for preparation for World War 3, for instance, came across, despite the gravity of its subject matter and perhaps because whatever AI algorithm wrote the speech for him had selected phrases designed to sound Churchillian, as the Gettysburg Address revoiced by a used car salesman – or because the diminished weight and power of the British state renders its representatives smaller, somehow hollow and sotto voce. In the case of Gove’s “Extremism” redefinition, perhaps the two go together with the the fact that his argument is taking place within the bubble of a mutually agreed false narrative; which can’t help but make them feel unreal and fake; however serious the consequences will be.
This reflects a ruling class out of its depth, with the challenges they face beyond their personal capacity; because time honoured systems of control are breaking down. The old songs don’t have quite the same potency. A poll of those willing to fight for their country at the time of Shapp’s speech showed just 27% willing to do so in the UK (and most of those were in age groups too elderly to actually be called upon to do so). The old knee jerk reactions once so easy to tap don’t spasm with the old reliability. CND marchers in the 1980s sang “We won’t die for Thatcher”. Very few people, it seems, are now happy to die for Rishi Sunak, or, indeed, Keir Starmer, bedeck themsleves with Union Jacks as much as they like.
In this context, the new working definition of “extremism”, unveiled with much fanfare by Michael Gove this week, is both tighter and more vague than the version that sucked Fundamental British Values out of the air ten years ago. Those were an anodyne and easily forgettable list of “democracy”, “respect”, “tolerance” (for those for whom respect is a bit too much to ask) “liberty” and “rule of law” – none of which were actually fundamental to the foundation of the British state in 1707 – quite the reverse for most of them – most of which had to be fought for against bitter resistance from the Tory Party, and few of which were applied with any consistency since; especially not in the Empire.
The impetus for this redefinition is the panic in Downing Street at the mass mobilisations against Israel’s brutal and illegal assault on Gaza, and its expression in the result of the Rochdale by election. Democracy must be at risk, because people voted the wrong way. And they keep marching in huge numbers. And Lobbying MPs. And not being brushed off with bromides because they can see a massacre taking place before their eyes. And have done for 140 days. Day, after day, after day. So, opinion is turning against a key UK and US ally and sympathy being expressed for people being occupied and oppressed by it. And that will never do.
Whatever the formalities of the definition, the framing of this movement as “hateful extremism”, or “extremism motivated by hate” is now such a trope that, with a nod and a wink, everyone knows what they mean. Are we thinking what they are thinking? Most of us aren’t, but it won’t stop them trying it on.
So, we now have “Extremism” defined as “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to: 1 negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; or 2 undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or 3 intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve the results in (1) or (2)”.
This is very odd. Because dividing and ruling by use of hatred and intolerance, restricting the freedoms and fundamental rights of minorities and the working class majority, including such choice devices as restricting the franchise, has been a very succesful modus operandi for the Conservative Party since its foundation in 1688; and they are still doing it right now. Just in this Parliament. Windrush. Scapegoating refugees. Photo ID for elections to restrict voting rights. Wars on “woke”. Restrictions on the rights of juries. The Minimum Service Levels and strike vote thresholds and protest restriction laws. Need I go on?
In fact, this definition is another attempt to do just that, because of who it is aimed at (and who it isn’t). Just a day or so before announcing this definition, the same Mr Gove commented on the direct incitement for Diane Abbott to be shot, made by Tory donor and beneficiary of government contracts Frank Hester – which undeniably expressed a lot of hatred, intolerance and violence – saying that he should be entitled to “Christian forgiveness.“
Diane, of course, was not recognised to speak about this at PMQs even though she stood up during the debate forty six times, by a Speaker who claimed to be so concerned about the safety of members that he bent procedure during the Gaza ceasefire debate two weeks ago. Not so concerned in this case it seems. So, all of this is relative. If the target of hatred, intolerance and violence is a Left wing Black woman, nothing to see here, lets move on; especially if the intolerant, violent hater has given fifteen million quid to the Conservative Party.
The Speaker’s concern during that debate was part of the softening up process for this defintion. Presenting the 5,000 or so people lobbying their MPs on that day calling for a ceasefire as though they were a threat to their life and limb. On Radio 4 this was expressed as MPs having “the right to vote with their conscience” without being “put under pressure”. Another way to put this is MPs having the right to vote against a ceasefire – for the continuation of a massacre – without having their equanimity about it disturbed by constituents arguing with them about why they shouldn’t. Some of these MPs, mostly but not solely Conservative, voted with their bottoms on this, being seen from the Public Gallery to be recieving slips informing them of constituents in the lobby wanting to see them, folding them up, putting them in their pockets, and staying put.
Gove says that this is aimed at “extreme rightwing and Islamist extremists who are seeking to separate Muslims from the rest of society and create division within Muslim communities”. This is an oddly contradictory sentence with a strange focus; because the division they claim to be concerned about is within the whole of society, not just “Muslim communities”.
More to the point, the “extreme right wing” is trying to demonise such communities, without much subtelty about it. But that is also true of the right wing of the Conservative Party and its Frankenstein child the Reform Party.
It caps consistent attempts by the government to pose this mass expression of a majority humanitarian concern as an expression of communalist hate. The comments Suella Braverman got sacked for – and which helped generate the biggest of the marches so far as people came out in outrage at her mischaracterisation, is now expressed in policy.
This is because it is instrumentally useful for them to do so. Not because it is true.
As if the demonstrations were not diverse, representative of all ages and communities, with large vibrant Jewish contingents, with whole families of all age groups, peacefully bearing witness to and protest against one of the great crimes of our time and an expression of majority opinion in the countryand theworld. The most recent poll shows that two thirds of the public think there should be a ceasefire. The votes in the UN have been overwhelmingly in favour of a ceasefire. So, the marchers, organised by PSC, Stop the War, CND, Muslim Association of Britain and Friends of Al Aqsa represent the majority opinion in the country and the world. It is the government that is out of step. It is the government that is being divisive. Could this be because – when it comes to the crunch – they defend the “violence, hatred and intolerance” currently being dealt out to the Palestinians by the IDF and illegal West Bank settlers? With their votes at the UN, their overt supply of military assiatnce and covert supply of intelligence, they are certainly providing a “permissive environment” for it.
It is in the nature of a wedge to start with a thin end. And this is it. Rumours that climate organisations like Just Stop Oil would be included have not come to fruition, yet. But setting up and open ended Counter-Extremism Centre of Excellence to investigate (produce) organsiations that can be targetted in this way shows the direction of travel. “Centre of exellence” is an odd label. House Un-British Activities Committee might be a more appropriate title. There will now be a body whose job is to find organisations which can be defined as “extremist”.
A foreshadowing of this is the review of Prevent designed to play down referrals for far right sympathies because, as Suella Braverman put it, these are “mainstream Conservative Values” – and play up the focus on Muslims (even as ISIS was crushed and its appeal was long gone) and slipping in “ideologies” such as “socialism” and “anti-fascism” as potential indicators of “radicalisation” that could lead to “terrorism”. There has been no far left terrorism in the UK since the Angry Brigade planted 25 bombs betteen 1970 and 1972, injuring one person, so you’d have to be over 50 to have experienced it. Not exactly a clear and present danger. And “anti- fascism”? Fascism isn’t exactly a movement you can be a bit “meh” about. Its not something you can “disagree agreeably” about, as Obama put it. The only people who are not anti fascists, are fascists. This is such a wide sweep, and so transparently from a nakedly factional basis, that no one subject to the “Prevent Duty” in public service would refer people on these bases unless they are dyed in the wool right wing zealots.
And this is more fundamentally what is driving this. “We”, as a nation, are divided. Most of us have no “common interest” with a ruling class pushing austerity, towards war, and failing to deal with the climate crisis until it is too catastrophic to ignore.
Given the scale of the crises we already face, with the climate breaking down at an ever faster pace, and Gaza showing the level of military barbarism in rehearsal in the wars for the New American Century, there is no doubt that in a future in which American policy takes a turn towards far right mania with Donald Trump back in the White House, the Conservatives in opposition taking their lead from him, and Labour in government trying to appease him, they will find no shortage of targets.
Urban ramblings 