Yesterday's Independent front page headlined with:
Robin Cook, who died on Saturday, was one of the most principled and eloquent politicians of our time. Here, in a column he wrote for 'The Independent' in March last year, he holds the Government to account for its war on Saddam. His strikingly prescient words are more relevant than ever
Today's Independent front page headlined with:
Terror fears push oil prices to 22-year high
Meanwhile Tony Blair is busy playing the Islamist's game with his own little political martyrdom operation against Al Muhajiroun and Hizb'ut Tahir.
A point which is gratifying not lost on David T over at Harry's Place.
This is perhaps slightly surprising given the generally hysterical tone of the hardheads in Harry's New Moral Army, though to be fair Mr T has for a while being showing promising signs of not believing that all the world's problems can be sorted out using an extremely well-equipped American van and as many Sam Peckinpah clones as Donald Rumsfeld can lay his hands on - preferably led by a token, but nonetheless impressive, black man.
David has posted 'a lot' on this and there is much good stuff united by the common sense recognition that this is about politics, not clashes of civilization or 'Threats to Our Way of Life' [copyright Georg W Bush, Texas USA - under UK license to Mr T. Blair, Downing Street, London].
In his post 'A Fable' - see August 2005 David makes an interesting allusion around cocaine which I'm sure his ex-colleague at Harry's the dissident Johann Hari would agree with - see Drugs Legalisation
However the Ban 'will not deter extremists' argue some of our less 'radical' self-appointed islamic spokesmen who Like Mr T are not wholly convinced by the Blair vows hard line on fanatics rhetoric and less still by the 'radical' shift in policy this represents.
Tony had better watch himself in this respect (sic) since Monday's Metro was eagerly telling us that 'Radicals May Face Treason Charges as its front page lead, while today we hear Judge-only terror courts considered
...but lets leave the latest authoritarian lurch by Tony's increasingly nervy government aside, particularly as Lord Falconer Tony's old legal beagle says Treason proposal a 'non-runner' ...what I'm concerned about is the latest set of yankee-style language abuse we seem to have started - an abuse which once again tries to limit the breadth of the area in which it is acceptable to think and to narrow the political options of civil society - Lets take another look at that headline:
Radicals eh? those scum who fought for the middle class to have the vote in the nineteenth century maybe? or maybe they mean the Free Radicals or perhaps the Jesus Radicals - or just any old radicals - in fact anyone who isn't toeing a safe middle(way) line? So this is what the Third Way was about eh Tony - neither Moscow nor Mecca but international capital (or something like that?) But heck maybe we shouldn't worry, after all its only directed against those scary religious nutters with their Terrorist Response to our western democracy...
OK there are some scary people out there with some nutty views but if you want to stop them persuading kids to come to London and pave our streets with blood then banning them isn't going to help.
As David infers, at worst it adds glamour, at best it makes little difference. And what certainly helps even less is lumping the terrorists together with people who aren't - thus talking about Islam and what the laughable concept of 'the muslim community' needs to do about 'islamist' terrorists only places the terrorist within a spectrum which is 99.9% non-terrorist - how helpful is that for the non-terrorists tarred, one might say,by the association? And how very very helpful for the terrorist now defined as the 'radical' fringe of the community with all the jazz and best tunes that implies? And all those potential recruits whose chairs you just pushed up against his...
Well thank goodness we have a liberal party in the UK (no I haven't been voting for it or anything, calm down...) otherwise we'd probably be seeing headlines such as 'Liberals May Face Treason Charges' or some such Ann Coulter-isms: Liberals, Treason & True Americans
Meanwhile on the streets local dreads will no doubt be relieved not to be a the prime threat to society any more - see for example Force braced for Yardie threat - now exactly how many yardies were there in Cleveland again?
However one thing is for certain they aren't wearing those Muhammed Ali Nation of Islam T-Shirts too much these days... what was that about 'radicals' again. Oh I forgot - don't mention the war right - wellnot THAT war anyway...
By way of not wholly unrelated diversion boxing fans may want to check out some Ali stuff at the intriguing Edge of Sports: at http://www.edgeofsports.com/2004-01-15-37/
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
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6 comments:
We have a liberal party? Surely, you're not talking about wee Charles Kennedy, whose oppositionist and opportunist 'liberal' politics seem more informed by meteorological factors - slight breeze to the left/right - than anything else.
Interesting piece of Ali though and how he has since been rebranded with the deep impact he had on politics and sport in the sixties airbrushed away in favour and adopted as a "harmless icon".
The rebranding culturally minorities is all the rage of course with the Home Office Minister Hazel Blears keen to "rebrand" ethnic minorities in the UK in a bid to inspire greater patriotism.
She wants to see Asians in Britain become Asian-British, Pakistani-British or Indian-British, rather than simply as "Asians".
Saying of course will make all the difference.
Well-linked G! That was in my mind too.
The asians asked by the Indy pretty much sum up my reactions - see 'Ethnic groups shun minister's 'rebranding' plan' at: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article304647.ece
It such a crassly insenstivie and frankly crazy thing to start talking about at present it almost beggar belief.
Nitan Sawhney sums up one aspect of it saying, "I have a massive problem with people focusing on nationality. In the present climate where people's civil liberties are being undermined and people are being specifically targeted for their ethnicity and skin colour and religious beliefs, it's dangerous to be bringing these things into their profile. It breeds insecurity and paranoia. If you are going to focus on nationality then you should refer to everyone as British if that person is born here."
This is exactly the same rubbish I was talking about with the appeals to the muslim community.
I really do think the government is panicked by where it feels it has got us - in fact its possible to argue that in private they appear to be making even stronger links between terrorism and their own foreign and domestic policies than some of their opponents are trying to do in public.
While most people are concentrating on building a real unity of community and purpose around peace and rejection of terrorism and hate, our government is busy shoving the chairs of hundreds of thousands of integrated and productive members our society across to the jihadis side of the dancefloor where Sympathy for the Devil is playing quietly on a continuous loop with Osama behind the decks of the portable disco King Fahd of Saudi Arabia hired for him. You couldn't make it up.
The government needs to take a tip from the scousers and 'aclm down, calm down'.
As Charlie K said that you shouldn't legislate on notions of public mood. In reality the situation is worse than that.
Government leads public mood and with asylum seeker now officially an insult thanks to 8 years of labour government featuring home office portfolios in the hands of abrasive northeners with constituencies which are models of failed policy on race and ethnicity, never mind citizenship and urbanisation, one might have thought this government of tough-talking cowards sheltering behind the myth of public opinion might have noticed that by now!
'Calm down, calm down' I mean of course - frequently transliterated as 'Cam down, Cam down' (with a bit of jiggling).
Frankly though if the government thinks a responsible approach to leadership is to push away a large proportion of our population and say 'it your problem, nothing to do with us' - "just hand 'em over and we'll bang 'em up and throw away the key (well unless you can persuade them to 'go home' of course" [to where exactly Leeds, or Aylesbury maybe?] then they, or at any rate their high-pitched and fly-blown leader, really have reached redundancy.
Talking abouit the recently redundant (then not so), this help they can certainly do without:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4128994.stm
These faces (and their 'ethnicity' or whatever) should be reflected upon> Are some of them now 'Asian-victims'?:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/london_blasts/victims/default.stm
I really do think the government is panicked by where it feels it has got us - in fact its possible to argue that in private they appear to be making even stronger links between terrorism and their own foreign and domestic policies than some of their opponents are trying to do in public.
Than some of their opponents? Parts of the media, the Guardian and Independent and others repeat the words Iraq/terror/link doesn't mean it is fact or true.
And they do try hard pushing it hard the Independent will run any poll or piece of research on its frontpage ceaseless trying to link the Iraq with the war on Terror. Like the report it recently splashed on from Tory former Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd: "You cannot divorce Iraq from the terror equation. We created in Iraq a new base for terrorism, and the world including Britain is less safe because of that."
Again what has that got to do with any of the bombs and killings the Islamofascists have perpetrated before Iraq? Bali, 9/11, World Trade Centre 98 et cetera.
This idea that Britain is suddenly less safe is ridiculous. If we had never invaded Iraq they would still be bombing issuing videos of their favourite former fascist theocratic state – Afghanistan. But why is liberating Afghanistan never cited by these same pushers of Iraq/terror/link line? Because even for people and media like that it would be too much of a hard sell to their readers as everyone was long familiar with the evils committed by the Taliban who still fight along with the remnants of Al-Qaeda.
You can beat your life that had we never attacked Iraq the same /terror/linkers would be substituting Afghanistan for Iraq.
Missed point I feel slightly. I Agree with you on why the Afghan sell never gets a big push, though in reality-check land one has to look in general at a f**ked up region where everyone is to blame - us, us in capital letters, us with a capital u, a capital s,another s and an r, them (you know the lot that live there), history (the process) and probably god if s/he exists...
The key point however about Iraq is that it was mooted as a beach-head of stability and progress whereas at present its a beach-head of chaos that strengthens the ideological hand of extremists across the region and beyond while also simultaneously threatening the security of the kurds (though paradoxically in the short-term keeping them distracted from things on the Turkish side of the border which they think shouldn't exist...) - another major achievement of the Iraq invasion has been a shift back toward a more extreme theocratic government in Iran - but I guess thats OK as they'll soon have a similar neighbour in Iraq by the looks of it, with only the Kurds holding out for Peace Democracy and Socialism (natch).
Invading Iraq was quite simply a mistake. Overthrowing Saddam was desirable but invading then occupying for ages with too few troops while you try a pantheon of inadequate puppets with no local support then find armed militias, some representing overseas interests, filling the power vaccuum - that was both stupid and undesirable.
Now we have to find a way of getting out and giving them the ten to twenty years minimum its going to take to build a truly viable state which won't seem scary at the even the most basic level of perusal.
At that point the Kurds look to Turkey again (remember Europe has a border with Iraq by this time if Tony has his way)...
If we stick around too long and/or the constitution isn't federal enough expect Kurdistan to declare itself independent and then some hard negotiating in parallel to Turkey joining the EU. Hey be happy you might even get a third of Iraq in the EU by say 2030...
That said I'm not sure its what the people voted for, any people, except, just perhaps, the kurds.
On the bit you quoted I'm serious I think the government internally now kind of believes at the level of political allegory something which isn't really true but kind of feels like it has the right echoes in the focus groups - talk about being hoist upon ones own petard, or other poll-type thing...
Invading Iraq was quite simply a mistake.
Q - It seems that the left had less difficulty accepting the war in Afghanistan as they did the war in Iraq.
[Christopher Hitchens ] But lets look at the case of Iraq and the left. If you asked someone who has the principles of a 1968 leftist the following question: what is your attitude to a regime that has committed genocide, invaded its neighbors, militarized its society into a police state, that has privatized its economy so it is owned by one family, that has defied the non proliferation treaty in many ways, that sought weapons to commit genocide again and cheated on inspections, that has abolished the existence of a neighboring arab muslim state? What is your view of this as anyone who is a 1968 leftist? For me, I would be appalled if anyone knew me even slightly would not guess my attitude. Iraq should have been taken care of a long time ago. Instead, when I made my view public, I was berated by the left and my view was seen as an insane eccentricity.
http://www.washingtonprism.org/eng/showarticle.cfm?id=1
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