Stonewall Jackson

Here’s a taste of a rather incredible exchange between Stewart Jackson, Conservative MP, and Jonathan Portes, Director, National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

It began with a claim by Stewart Jackson that 37% of EU migrants to the UK have never worked, which Jonathan Portes quickly showed to be wrong. This was followed by some bluster and stonewalling from Jackson, which I’ve omitted for length, until the next morning he changed his claim to saying 37% of EU migrant job seekers, a number only a fraction of his original claim.

Not that he admitted to any error in this. Rather he made a further hash of it, conflating people looking for work with people claiming benefit.

Stewart Jackson MP is a member of the Public Accounts Committee.

British public opinion on Syria

For many of us who support military intervention in Syria primarily on humanitarian, internationalist, and moral grounds, the arguments in opposition to strikes can be frustrating and even baffling, particularly those made on the Left.

No war? But there is a war already, and will continue to be one even without UK action. And as the war continues, it’s not the embassies of those fully committed to the war, Syria or their Russian allies, that Stop The War campaigners target, but that of the US, a country which has not yet dropped a single bomb in Syria.

Yet though Stop The War and their fellow marchers may be the loudest on the anti-intervention side, and though they may be the most obnoxious to left-of-centre interventionists in their claim to being of the Left, they don’t represent the majority view of those British people opposed to military action by the UK. Focusing on the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of Leftist anti-war activists probably misses the main  causes of British antipathy to intervention.

Norman Geras pointed to an interesting analysis by Peter Kellner in the Sunday Times of a YouGov poll conducted between Friday noon and Saturday morning:

It finds that by more than four to one (68% against 16%) we think parliament took the right decision - an even wider margin than the two to one opposition to military action recorded before Thursday’s debate.

The BBC and ICM Research conducted a similar poll showing 71% in favour of the MP’s vote and 20% against. But as Peter Kellner points out, it seems most of those against UK action in Syria are not against the US doing the job. From the Sunday Times poll:

We asked people whether Britain should help America if President Barack Obama ordered an attack and requested our help. By huge majorities we want Britain to share intelligence information about Syria (by 70% to 15%) and to support America at the United Nations (by 64% to 16%).

By a smaller but still clear margin (48% to 31%), we would be happy to give access to Britain’s military base in Cyprus to US forces attacking Syria.

It’s not just the British that think like this. Support for intervention just so long as someone else does it is also the dominant view in Germany. An old story no doubt.

The parties that took the firmest stand against UK intervention were small parties such as the Green Party, UKIP, the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, some Northern Irish parties, and the far right BNP. These mostly represent varieties of nationalists, with the exception of the Greens. With that in mind it’s interesting to compare the polls of opinion on Syria with polling of British public opinion on immigration.

Recent polling commissioned by Lord Ashcroft of the Conservatives shows responses hostile to immigration ranging from 60% to 81% depending on the particular question. See the complete survey or reports in the Sunday Times and Independent. If we overlay this survey and the YouGov survey on intervention in Syria, the minimum overlap between those opposed to UK action and those with a negative view of immigration ranges between 28% and 49% depending on which immigration question is asked. This means that the majority of those opposed to UK strikes against Assad also hold some negative views on immigration, and by implication quite likely hold some negative views of foreigners.

Without more detailed polling it’s impossible to be conclusive on a link between a degree of xenophobia amongst the British public and their aversion to expending British resources and endangering British lives for the sake of Syrians. But the correlation such as it appears suggests that arguments based on mercy or justice for Syrians may not be the most effective way to shift public opinion.

As unpleasant as it may seem to anyone who’s moved primarily by reports of hundreds of Syrian children gassed in their beds, or by the thousands of children slaughtered by other means, British opinion is more likely to be responsive to any perceived danger to British people in Britain. So talk about how Assad’s war breeds extremists and how his broken borders won’t hold them, talk about millions of Syrians now on the move and maybe coming this way, talk about how effective sarin gas is in a modern subway system, but don’t waste too much time talking about Syrian victims.

Americans opposed 2 intervention in #Syria need 2 understand: what happens in Syria won't stay there, spillovers won't be limited 2 region

— Ammar Abdulhamid (@Tharwacolamus) September 4, 2013

Kissinger Obama, Nixon Obama, Pax Obama.

In the Ottowa Citizen, under the title Shrugging at Syria and its refugees, Terry Glavin writes:

When the United States and Britain turned away 70,000 starving Jewish refugees from the fascist Romanian regime of Ion Antonescu in February, 1943, it fell to U.S. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to explain why. There are reasons, Welles said. It’s a trick of some kind. Taking those Jews would just play into the Nazi propaganda machine. There are reasons.

Thirty years later, in 1973, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir came to Washington to plead on behalf of the Soviet Union’s persecuted Jews. In a secretly recorded conversation released only in 2010, President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger are heard to congratulate one another after having just shown Meir the door. They had their reasons.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger is heard to mumble, “and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Nixon responds: “I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

Push the clock ahead 40 years to last month, when events in Syria were unfolding in such a way as to call President Barack Obama’s bluff about the “red lines” he’d blustered about having drawn around Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad’s use of poison gas. To extricate Obama from his predicament, an anonymous White House official is summoned to perform a pitch-perfect ventriloquism of Kissinger’s casual aside to Nixon. “If he (Assad) drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”

Read the rest here.  He has a related post on his blog, Syria: Paint it Black.

Terry Glavin is not alone in his analysis. From Der Spiegel, Gregor Peter Schmitz writes on an Unlikely Heir: Obama Returns to Kissinger's Realpolitik.

An early version of the Obama-as-Nixon theme came from Nick Cohen in the Observer back in 2010, Obama is the most reactionary president since Nixon.

Others are making the Obama-Nixon comparison not on foreign policy but on press freedom. In the opinion pages of the New York Times, James C Goodale writes that Only Nixon Harmed a Free Press More. I confess that’s a story I haven’t been following closely, but John Cassidy of The New Yorker provides a catch-up post with links, The Leaks Scandals: Questions for Obama.

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Turning back to Syria, Jeff Weintraub has this month blogged a lot on the war, linking to writers he’s found informative. Here is a list of his posts:

• Escalating atrocities and counter-atrocities in an increasingly ugly Syrian civil war
• From the Spanish civil war in the 1930s to Syria's civil war today – Michael Petrou explains the fallacies of “non-intervention”
• Military stalemate and social meltdown in Syria
• Henri Barkey suggests that, on Syria, Turkey should put its money where its mouth is

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Finally, Norman Geras has a good post up today which touches on how a war can be worth fighting even when it means allying with undemocratic states, even when one’s own side commits war crimes, and even when the end results are far from perfect, if the alternative to fighting is allowing a dreadful reign of barbarity to prevail. He’s not writing about Syria, but about the Second World War: Just a second more on that second war.

Refugee drawings by Ronald Searle

These drawings are from a series made in European refugee camps. They were published as a 17 page feature in Punch in 1959, and then as a book by Penguin, titled Refugees 1960: A Report in Words and Drawings by Kaye Webb and Ronald Searle.

See selections from the book at Graphic Witness, and more from both the book and the Punch article at Perpetua, a Ronald Searle tribute blog, part one here and part two here.

The above image, a pencil drawing of Isrecko Dimitriyevich, San Antonio Camp, Salerno, dated 16 Nov 1959, comes from the Chris Beetles Gallery site. The Punch page below is from Matt Jones’s Perpetua blog.

Matt Jones has gathered together links to some of today’s obituaries for Ronald Searle. See also Charley Parker’s Lines and Colors blog.

Added: more on Searle and Kaye Webb - the Gentle Author on Ronald Searle in Spitalfields. Stephen Kroninger shares some Ronald Searle book jackets from his shelves, and Brad Holland on why Searle was an inspiration:

“It wasn’t his style that I wanted. I got over that quickly. It was the witness he bore to the times we lived in.”

Swallows for spring

Digital proof of cyan, magenta, and yellow separations, from three drawings in pen and black ink.

Fleeing by land and by sea

Fleeing Guilin by the North Station, print by Cai Dizhi, 1945.

From the book art blog, A Journey Round My Skull.

Navio de emigrantes (Ship of Emigrants), painting by Lasar Segall, 1939.

From the art blog Weimar.

La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars), a film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1982.

We watched this film last night, and the mirroring of what’s happening now in Libya was almost too painful to bear.

The dictator’s loss of power is now a certainty, so every killing by his forces in these days is a murder to no end, but still it goes on.

Make note of who still supports him, and by this know them well.

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PRI’s The World produced a series of reports on migration last year centering on the story of one Somalian man fleeing war. Read and listen here, and learn how Gaddafi's thugs went about preventing migrants from reaching the EU.

Animals without borders

Following on from the previous post, more Erich Kästner, with a book I haven’t read and a film I haven’t seen. The book is Die Konferenz der Tiere from 1949, beautifully illustrated by Walter Trier. I have a lovely hardback edition, but I can’t read more than a handful of words in German, so I’ll have to wait ’til I find a copy of the English translation, The Animals’ Conference, out of print since the mid ’fifties I think.

Some friends of ours were unfortunate enough to stray into a cinema during the holidays, and suffered through Animals United, a grotesque-looking film based on Kästner’s book. Having seen the trailer, I have no desire to repeat their error. It’s not the first animated adaptation, as discussed last year at Cartoon Brew.

Below a page from the story, with animals agitating for no borders.

Sequence 69, Exterior: Somewhere in Flanders

CLIVE: Murdoch! do you know what this means?

MURDOCH: I do, sir. Peace. We can go home. Everybody can go home!

CLIVE: For me, Murdoch, it means more than that. It means that Right is Might after all. The Germans have shelled hospitals, bombed open towns, sunk neutral ships, used poison-gas - and we won! Clean fighting, honest soldiering have won! God bless you, Murdoch!

From the 1942 script for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. More on this troublesome and complex film here, and more on the Colonel here. Did I mention troublesome?

Below is a fragment from Kevin Macdonald’s book, Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, on the consequences of the war’s end for Imre Pressburger in his home town of Temesvar (Timişoara) in the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Someone somewhere had decreed that he was to be Romanian or Serbian and he would have to accept it passively. For almost two years Temesvar was occupied by the Serbs, but ultimately, along with the rest of Transylvania, it was assigned to Romania at the infamous Trianon Treaty of 1920, when the allies, led by Britain, distributed about two-thirds of Hungary’s land mass and half its population to clamouring neighbours. It is said that Hungary’s Deputy Foreign Minister fainted when he saw the recoloured map.

Imre was now a Romanian - a foreigner in his own country. The pattern of his life as an eternal alien had begun. Without having to budge an inch from home, he had set out on the circuitous journey that would eventually lead him to England.

Finally a relevant Blimp clip via Bob.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp script copyright © The Estates of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1994.

Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of a Screenwriter copyright © Kevin Macdonald 1994.

Added: George Szirtes on changing maps and remembrance.

The Radio Bug

Sadly, the Speechification blog, main source for the last two radio posts, has gone off the air. You may still get some joy by searching Google’s cache of the site, at least for a limited time.

On the plus side though, BBC radio seems to be keeping ever more programmes available online for longer, for example The Age of the Genome, a four part Radio 4 series presented by Richard Dawkins from June is still available. Some Radio 4 programmes which are no longer available for streaming after a week, then turn up on the BBC World Service available indefinitely.

From across the Atlantic, here are three programmes looking back on the last seven years of war in Iraq, in order of my preference.

First, from This American Life on WBEZ, Iraq After Us, an outstanding hour of radio built primarily on interviews with Iraqis recorded in Iraq.

Second, on PRI’s The World, Reflections on Serving in Iraq, Former U.S. Army Captain Blake Hall interviewed by Jeb Sharp of How We Got Here.

Third, on WHYY’s Fresh Air, A Foreign Correspondent Reflects On Iraq War, Anthony Shadid of the New York Times interviewed by Terry Gross. The interview focuses on this story about the trials of a family trying to locate the body of a family member kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and dumped.

I had minor reservations on that last interview, to do with distracting comments by the interviewer, but I still recommend it.

Related, Roland Dodds writes, State Building in Iraq has Just Begun.

From those same three sources, let’s have some other topics.

Here’s a This American Life broadcast from 22nd of May 2009, Turncoat, on red-baiting amongst America’s Vietnamese population, on Brandon Darby’s trip from anti-cop anarchist activist to FBI informer, by way of encounters with one of FARC’s pals in Venezuela and a pro-Hamas bombing conspiracy in the US, and ending with reading a short story from Israel by Etgar Keret.

And another from PRI’s The World, Revisiting the Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, lawyer Judith Armatta talks about her experience of monitoring the trial, and of her book Twilight of Impunity. Interviewer Jeb Sharp includes a report from the trial she recorded in 2003.

Three related blog recommendations: Café Turco, Greater Surbiton, and Americans for Bosnia.

One more from The World, in the science archive, Seeking the Roots of Kindness: The Life and Work of George Price, in which Oren Harman talks about his book, The Price of Altruism.

And a blog post related to that, at Stumbling and Mumbling, Gamu Nhengu and the context of justice, on altruism, asylum, and familiarity.

A bunch from WHYY’s Fresh Air: Mark Feldstein talks about Jack Anderson and Richard Nixon, ruthless journalist vs ruthless politician, David Bianculli talks about The Smothers Brothers (see earlier post), Eric Foner on the evolution of Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery, and Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration (see earlier).

Finally, not really radio, from Wolfgang’s Vault, a 1978 interview with David Bowie. You’ll need to register for this, but it’s free, it just means being put on their mailing list. More Bowie at Bob’s.

PICTURE CREDIT! The comic strip is The Radio Bug in ‘If 8:15 isn’t a good hour, what is?’ by Walt McDougall, reprinted in Jerry Robinson’s The Comics, an Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, soon to be reissues in a new edition. Copyright © Walt McDougall.

Radio in a bottle

I only recently came across the Speechification radio blog, via a post by illustrator Stephen Kroninger on the case of The Gorbals Vampire, a story of children, comics, and censorship, that began in a Glasgow graveyard in 1954, and led to the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955, a law that is still in force. A BBC Radio 4 documentary on these bizarre events is preserved at Speechification.

UPDATE 19th October: Speechification has gone off the air, along with its archive. I’m leaving the dead links in place in case of some future change of heart. You might also find cached copies of the blog via Google useful.

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Debunking the Islamisation Myth is a substantial attempt by Edmund Standing to distinguish between rational concern about radical Islamist movements, and irrational fears of Britain or other European countries being somehow conquered by political Islam, either via immigration or via conversion. Edmund Standing’s writings are mainly about the extremists of Britain’s racist far right, but he has also written on the extremism of political Islamism, and the interactions between political Islamism and the kitsch element on the left.

In the past I’ve disagreed with Standing’s views on immigration. I don’t know if his thoughts on that have now changed, but this current effort is a good attempt to tackle the problem of the racist right using concern over the extremist Islamist right to gain support for their divisive politics. Some reactions to it here.

Edmund Standing is a frequent contributor to Harry’s Place, a blog which has itself often been criticised for failing to adequately distance itself from racism and religious bigotry in its ongoing effort to cover extremist Islamism in the UK, this criticism being mainly in relation to the commenters it attracts. More on that topic by Flesh is Grass, Marko Attila Hoare, and Poumista.

Speechification has two BBC documentaries that complement the above particularly well: from Archive on 4, Hate against Hope, on the struggle against racist extremists in London’s East End in the 1970s and ’80s, and Turkey in Europe, on migration and Islam in Austria and in the Balkans.

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After that, a break for some music. Speechification is not just talk, here’s a Radio 3 documentary on outsider composer Moondog. There’s hours more Moondog radio with Irwin Chusid on WFMU here and here, and Mr Chusid blogs Moondog here.

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More recently on the WFMU blog, The Comedy Writer That Helped Elect Richard M Nixon, on the superficially counter-culture TV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, its head writer Paul Keyes, and the media team of TV and ad men he worked with on Nixon’s campaign. (Spotted by Paul.)

The post details a substantial bit of American political and media history, and reading it is not easy in the WFMU blog format of white text on black. I printed the whole thing out, and it was worth the effort.

The post also goes into the Nixon White House campaign against another TV comedy show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. If, like me, you were unfamiliar with them, may I recommend the following clips in order of ascending madness: Boil That Cabbage Down, a folk song from Israel, and My Old Man.

And to wash that down, one last item from Speechification, The Life and Crimes of Lenny Bruce, a BBC Radio 3 documentary from 1996.

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The illustration for this post is a detail from my cover art for The Chesterfield Arrangements, music by Raymond Scott performed by The Metropole Orchestra with The Beau Hunks.

“The half ain’t been told.”

From a slide show at The New Yorker, Jack Delano’s 1942 photo of a Chicago Defender newsboy.

The images accompany an article from last week’s issue by Jill Lepore, reviewing oral histories of the Great Migration, the 20th Century journey of six million African-Americans from the South to the northern cities of the US, and in particular a recent book by Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns.

Long live NATO’s anti-imperialism

There has been a lot to blog about on Afghanistan in recent weeks, but I haven’t had the strength, though I’ve read a lot elsewhere and commented occasionally.

Comment trail: on anti-imperialism at Contested Terrain, and on non-Western imperialism in Afghanistan at Terry Glavin’s joint. My argument in short: as the only powers capable of sustaining imperialist policies in Afghanistan are its neighbors, none of whom are reliable allies of NATO, by necessity NATO’s policy in Afghanistan is on the whole anti-imperialist.

Intersectionality

Comment trail: on feminism and war at Pickled Politics.

There, blogger Earwicga seems of a view similar to that heard from Judith Butler & Co. earlier, that feminism is only valid if it’s also anti-war, and anti-Western anti-imperialist. This seems to mean that making too much noise about Islamist theocratic misogyny is bad as that could be seen as pro-war and Islamophobic. In support of this, Earwigca introduces the word ‘intersectionality’.

Now it seems to me that intersectionality can usefully be used to illustrate precisely the failure in contemporary anti-imperialism. Earwigca gives two references to explain her use of the word: Wikipedia and a PDF from the African American Policy Forum, A Primer on Intersectionality. Here intersectionality is used to describe the problem of individuals or groups focusing on one particular form of discrimination, for example sexism, being unable to fully recognise and understand another form of discrimination, for example racism, causing a blind spot when they are faced with a victim of multiple overlapping forms of discrimination.

Where the focus is on just one form of discrimination, these more complex cases can be obscured as the wrong kind of victim, or the wrong kind of discrimination.

Misapplying intersectionality

The AAPF document takes the argument further and talks of the danger that treating different forms of discrimination separately may lead to different groups of victims seeing themselves as being in competition with each other, and not being aware of the vulnerabilities of their fellows who fall into the overlap between groups. Thus there's a danger that those arguing against one form of discrimination may fall into another. A small example of this I once heard in polite conversation: “The French are very racist,” i.e. xenophobic bigotry in the name of anti-racism.

This argument about one group of victims being set against another forms the centre of Judith Butler’s arguments against mainstream German gay rights campaigners (see her mis-definition of double jeopardy for example) and criticisms of Peter Tatchell by some anti-imperialists (see here and here).

So what happens when this argument is misapplied? The sweeping statement “group X discriminate against group Y” is likely to be discriminatory against group X, but what about an analysis along the lines of “some members of group X discriminate against some members of group Y, or against members in the overlap between X and Y”? If this kind of analysis of discriminatory action by a subset of X is made properly, with examples given and mechanisms demonstrated, it should not be dismissed in the same terms as the earlier sweeping statement about X being bad to Y.

If it becomes impossible to look at individuals and subsets within X discriminating against Y or discriminating against the common membership of X and Y, then another kind of blind spot results, not of the wrong kind of victim, nor the wrong kind of discrimination, but of the wrong kind of perpetrator of discrimination.

Thus Islamist misogynists become the wrong kind of misogynists because they are a subset of Muslims who as a group are the target of religious discrimination, and individual immigrants who are homophobic are the wrong kind of homophobes because they belong to a group that is the target of xenophobia and racism. The consequence is that Muslim victims of misogyny and immigrant victims of homophobia fall under the blind spot of those arguing too narrowly against religious discrimination, or too narrowly against xenophobia and racism: precisely the result that ‘intersectionality’ attempts to avoid.

An example of ‘right and wrong kind of perpetrator’ thinking can be found in Judith Butler’s comments at Bully Bloggers, where she expresses her preference for looking at perpetrators on the German right or in the Catholic Church, rather than in migrant communities. If she argued ‘as well as’ that would be fine, but ‘instead of’ is not good.

An intersectionality of blind spots

Now to return to feminism, war, and anti-imperialism. Back to Earwicga’s post where she raises ‘intersectionality’. Here she labels Gita Sahgal’s criticisms of Amnesty International as Islamophobic, and described the recent Time cover photograph of Aisha, a mutilated young Afghan woman, as “yet another manipulation of feminism supported by feminists ignorant of other power structures”.

Earwigca’s problem here is the same as Judith Butler’s. Islamists are the wrong kind of misogynists because they are a subset of Muslims who are a target of religious discrimination. It doesn’t matter that the victims of Islamist mysogyny are also members of that same group of victims of religious discrimination; they fall into the ‘wrong perpetrator’ blind spot.

Looking at it further, there is an intersectionality of ‘wrong perpetrator’ blind spots at work here. Not only are the Taliban the wrong kind of misogynists, but as Muslims discriminating against Christians, Buddhists, and versions of Islam other than their own, they are the wrong kind of religious bigots. As agents of Pakistani and Iranian imperialism fighting against a popular Afghan government allied with Western powers, they are the wrong kind of imperialists.

For those viewing the world with these intersecting blind spots, the only way the abuse of women like Aisha becomes visible is if the cause is traced through a game of degrees of separation to Western policies in Afghanistan decades ago, though not back as far as the Soviet invasion, as that would lead to another blind spot. Having found the only acceptable cause of the abuse, the remedy offered is of course the withdrawal of exactly those Western forces standing in the way of a return to power by the actual, immediate perpetrators of the abuse.

How do anti-imperialists maintain this degree of blindness without poking their own eyes out?

Gaza on the back of an envelope

Caution be damned, here we go:

The argument for the blockade of Gaza is that if it is lifted, Hamas will be free to re-arm, and Iran will increase its influence in the area.

The arguments against the blockade are that it causes hardship to the population, prevents development of the legitimate economy, encourages the illegitimate smuggler economy, and fails to prevent Hamas re-arming.

I’d make one more argument against the blockade: it reinforces the primacy of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the lives of Gaza residents. This might seem a bit too obvious, but I read little or no comment on the possibility of changing Gaza’s relationship with the world to something broader than the dysfunctional Israel-Palestine binary relationship.

I think long term peace depends not just on improving the binary relationship, but on diminishing its importance relative to other relationships between Gaza residents and the wider world.

My back of an envelope solution is to put Gaza’s port under the control of a UN Port Authority mandated by the UN Security Council, with control over customs, security and economic development in the port area.

I fully trust this is a solution that will please no-one. The history of UN Oil For Food in Iraq comes to mind, as does UN failure in the Bosnian war. A UN regime at the port would no doubt be unable to stop smuggling and corruption, and would probably offer new possibilities in this area. It would be unable to stop Hamas re-arming. But these downsides are likely in any case.

Here are a couple more things a UN Port Authority would not do. It would not exert any control over Palestinian politics in Gaza outside of the port area. It would not prevent Israel or Hamas from waging war. Again, no change there.

So what could change? A UN Port Authority should have as part of its mandate the greatest possible development of economic and cultural connectivity between Gaza and the wider world. It should be an active investor in developing the port as an international shipping centre, not just a deposit point for aid. It should allow and encourage a legitimate economy to develop. It should facilitate the free flow of information between Gaza and the wider world. It should facilitate the free passage of people from and to Gaza.

A UN Port Authority could open the door for Gaza to step outside of the Israel-Palestine binary relationship.

Purple fingers 2: on Iran

The above painting is by the Iranian artist and animator Ali Akbar Sadeghi. See his 1975 short Malek Khorshid on UBUWEB.

Image © copyright Ali Akbar Sadeghi.

Below is a partial follow up to this post on international struggles for democracy.

On Iran

Johann Hari in The Independent last week, writing on Islamists, their victims, and hypocrisy. An excerpt:

Kiana Firouz is a 27-year-old woman who grew up in revolutionary Iran, and slowly realised that if she ever acted on her natural impulses – to kiss and hold and love another woman – she would be subjected to a hundred lashes. If she did it again, she would be hanged, in a public square, before a jeering mob. But Kiana believed the freedom to fall in love was more important than her own safety. She stood up in Tehran and made a film showing that there are gay people there just as there are gay people everywhere, and they deserve to live and love freely. The police began following and threatening her. She knew what had happened to other gay Iranians – a bullet, a ditch, a lynch mob – so she came to a country she associated with freedom for gay people, Britain, and appealed to us to save her life.

We refused. The Home Office told her to go back to Iran and be “discreet” about her sexuality. But the law in Iran doesn't say discreet lesbians get out of jail free. They are tortured and killed just the same.

Martin Fletcher in The Times on the same day, under the headline Iranian actress Kiana Firouz fears film of her life ends in death, writes:

A young Iranian actress named Kiana Firouz will attend the London premiere tonight of a film in which she plays a lesbian seeking asylum in Britain because the Iranian authorities are pursuing her. The Home Office rejects her application and sends her back to the Islamic republic, where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death.

Unfortunately for Kiana Firouz the film is not make-believe. It is based on her life. The Home Office has denied her asylum and she now faces the prospect of deportation to Iran followed by flogging, execution or both.

Der Spiegel on Iran’s homeless dissidents: Asylum Requests Still Pending a Year after the Green Revolution.

Reuters: French court frees man who killed ex-Iranian PM. Shapour Bakhtiar, best known as the last Iranian prime minister under the Shah, was also a veteran of both the International Brigade in Spain and the French Resistance. The French government denies a link between the release of his killer Ali Vakili Rad, and the release by the Iranian government of a French teaching assistant accused of spying. Clotilde Reiss had been sentenced to ten years, but this was commuted to a fine of $285,000.

Francis Sedgemore: Who’s forgetting Iran?

Potkin Azarmehr writes that Jafar Panahi’s release shows international pressure works. Earlier, Pedestrian on Pahani’s hunger strike.

Neo-Resistance on The Hanging Baluchs and on Hijab Power-Play.

At Tehran Bureau, Hardliners Close in on Mousavi.

Posted all over the place, Unemployed workers chant at Ahmadinejad speech.

In The New York Times, Roger Cohen argues that the US administration is moving the goalposts in its response to the Brazil-Turkey-Iran nuclear fuel swap proposal. But over at Arms Control Wonk a lot of well informed people seem to see it the other way around: Zombie Fuel Swap, Back from Dead, Again, with more here, and here, and here. Though they do have a friend who’s not quite as pessimistic.

In that NYT column, Roger Cohen cites John Limbert, once one of the Embassy hostages in Tehran, now dealing with Iranian affairs at the US State Department. I’ve heard the talk that Mr Cohen is quoting, and enjoyed it. You can watch a version delivered just over a year ago at the Rumi Forum here, or listen to an MP3 of a version from last November at the Middle East Institute.

Finally, Variety on an Iranian animated science fiction feature being directed by Bahram Azimi: Tehran 2121, via TPMB. Judging by the artist’s website, he has a taste for the colour green, and compared with Ayatollah Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi’s dreadful fantasy about Iran’s future, Mr Azimi’s vision looks quite benign.

Earlier: Purple fingers the first.

This is to certify that the bearer is a member of the human race

Orson Welles crosses the border.

More in the series here.

Via Oscar.

What Shuggy said

Here:

Honestly - you can’t say anything about bigots these days. It’s political correctness gone mad, I tell you...

The rest.

In fear of the people - 6

An illustration in the New York Times earlier this week. On his Drawger blog, artist Edel Rodriguez shows some of the work process behind the image.

Art copyright © Edel Rodriguez 2009.

Today’s updates from The New York Times, The Guardian, Raye Man Kojast, and Andrew Sullivan, and a press roundup from the SWJ.

Also recently updated: ModernityBlog, Azarmehr, Jeff Weintraub, Michael Totten.

UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband yesterday: “A proud people wants to decide its own future. We should defend that.”

Background:

Via Global Dashboard, the BBC documentary Iran and the West.

Episode 1, The Man Who Changed the World,

clips one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Episode 2, The Pariah State, 

clips one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Episode 3, Nuclear Confrontation,

clips one, two, three, four, five, and six. 

_

As the regime threatens a more extreme crackdown, Harry’s Place reports on the UK government’s forced deportation to Iran of a convert. This concerns an Iranian accused of apostasy, a ‘crime’ punishable by death in Iran. The UK Government had first attempted to deport him on a commercial flight to Tehran on June 9th, but the pilot refused to take him.

Here is Melvyn Kohn’s account of how he sought help from Brian Iddon, Labour Member of Parliament for Bolton South East:

So he will not be emailing MP Brian Iddon anymore with his desperate pleas. What we thought would be a good move turned out to be a waste of time. Iddon, in emails sent to a colleague, rather than getting the young man released, spent his time speculating on his motives - and went so far as to reply to one reader of this site that the young man was not doing much to help himself. I had to go over the case point by point to undo the damage. Let me reply to Iddon’s nonsense here as well: the man was a genuine Christian and had entered the country legally. Iddon, you had a duty to help him, not ask inane questions. Precious time was wasted. Why were you so unhelpful? You eventually put a caseworker on to it, who did call Harmondsworth, but why stop there? The buck stops way above Harmondsworth. There was no mention of any attempt to contact Phil Woolas - a step other MPs are on record as having taken (John McDonnell for instance, in regards the case posted to this site on 6 June). Your caseworker was asked this quesion earlier this afternoon in an email.

It may well be a rhetorical question. The young man is gone. You are still here. And I hope that soon you too are gone. Thanks for nothing.

Here’s more on Brian Iddon MP and friends.

Humans vs. Robots

At Harry’s Place, the story of BMI flight BD 931 from Heathrow to Tehran, of a young Iranian Christian under threat of deportation into the hands of a regime which accuses him of apostasy, a ‘crime’ punishable by death in Iran. Read if you will about the several Labour politicians and their staff intent on evading responsibility, and about the pilot who did take responsibility, refusing to do the dirty work of the UK government.

Exactly wrong

The xenophobes and protectionists who argue that immigrants cost jobs have it exactly wrong. Newcomers create jobs and they always have. A report by the Center for an Urban Future recently described immigrants as “entrepreneurial sparkplugs,” and the reason is obvious. If they weren't risk-takers, they wouldn't be here.

Steven V Roberts writing in The Washington Post, via TPM Barnett’s blog. However the main subject of the piece is not economic migrants but refugees, as he’s reviewing Outcasts United by Warren St John, a book about a soccer team in Clarkston, Georgia, made up of refugees from a dozen different countries.

Beatrice Ziaty and her children (three sons played for the Fugees) fled out the back door of their house in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, as her husband was being killed in the front room. Most immigrants to America come eagerly, after years of saving and scheming; they stay in touch with kinfolk back home via cell phones and e-mail and retain a sense of connection and community. The refugees of Clarkston were uprooted against their will. “There's no point in thinking about where to go back to,” said Paula Balegamire, whose husband languished in a Congolese prison, “because there's nowhere to go back to.”

Back in the UK: related from Mick Hartley. Reminds me of . . .

Woody’s focus is firmly on kinetic operations. Such tactics sometimes have a place, but only as part of a more comprehensive strategy. Here’s an extract from Principles of Modern American Counterinsurgency: Evolution and Debate, a paper by Janine Davidson at The Brookings Institution. It seems an earlier draft of this may have played a role in the evolution of the successful candidate last year.

First principle of a successful COIN campaign:

(I) A long-term political strategy focused on creating a viable, sustainable stability – through building or enhancing local government effectiveness and legitimacy – while marginalizing insurgents and winning over their sympathizers. Building the political legitimacy and effectiveness of the government, in the eyes of its people and the international community, is fundamental. Political reform and development represent the hard core of any counterinsurgency strategy, and provides a framework for programs and initiatives. In parallel, the political strategy is designed to undermine support for insurgents, win over their sympathizers to the government side, and co-opt local community leaders to ally themselves with the government.

This seems highly relevant to current challenges in the UK.

Update: Kilcullen on tackling extremism in Europe. He’s talking about one flavour, but surely the principles are the same for dealing with more familiar forms of fascism. Also, Your Friend in the North on how not to do it.

Beyond wooly thinking

This post on immigration is the strangest thing I’ve seen on Harry’s Place; beyond wooly thinking, beyond mushy logic, it’s complete toxic sludge.

The fanaticism feared by the voices in the post and its comments thread, this fanaticism that they seek to counter by restricting immigration, it is a fanaticism that opposes openness, that opposes the modern globalising world, that wishes to restrict populations behind barriers.

It will not be defeated by raising more barriers, it will be defeated by the spread of enlightened principles of science, critical thought, democratically accountable rule of law, universal human rights.

Migration, along with communications technology and global trade, drives the expansion of these ideas. Global migration is a far greater threat to the dead-end ideological fanatics than it is to open societies.