Twit Archive 12-21 June 2011

Below the fold: tweets on Syria, Iran, Lybia, Afghanistan, Bahrain, and in the UK, Brian Haw and alternative medicine.

Also Danish silent comedians, Swedish cinema, and quite a bit of animation, including Otto Messmer, creator of Felix the Cat.

Above, Otto lends Felix a hand in Comicalamities, (1928) to the sound of The Real Tuesday Weld covering Abba’s The Day Before You Came.

Rubbernecking the WikiLeaks ethics pile-up

Two articles from yesterday on leaking police investigations into sexual assaults:

Harry’s Place on re-examining the Wikileaks release of unedited police files from the investigation that led to Belgian serial rapist Marc Dutroux being convicted in 2004. The files included “names, telephone numbers, addresses and bank details of witnesses and people involved in the investigations”.

According to Cedric Visart de Bocarme, prosecutor general of Liege, “there is some true, some false, some very disparate information here, involving some people who have done nothing wrong, who have simply been mentioned in an investigation and are thus exposed to public contempt [...] there is some wild stuff in these documents. Some witnesses are prejudiced and would say anything to try to blacken their neighbour, to make themselves seem white than white.”

Journalist Nick Davies of The Guardian responds to criticism of the newspaper’s reporting on leaked information from the Swedish police investigation into sexual assault allegations against Julian Assange.

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See also: Christopher R. Albon at The Atlantic On how WikiLeaks set back democracy in Zimbabwe, and from CNN, how the Cuban government is publishig cables from WikiLeaks that “detail meetings between independent Cuban bloggers with officials from the United States Interests Section, the U.S. diplomatic mission in Cuba”.

Earlier in The Guardian, “Assange defended one of WikiLeaks’ collaborators, Israel Shamir, following claims Shamir passed sensitive cables to Belarus’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko,” via HP, and more on Shamir’s exhortation to “kill a Jew” from Harry’s Place.

Previous posts here and here.

I blame Bonnie and Clyde

Another week of anti-establishment and anti-imperialist apologists for political repression, political violence, and alleged sexual violence, and whatever else it takes to stick it to the man . . .

On Friday The Guardian published sexual assault allegations against Julan Assange, central to which were assertions that he deliberately and repeatedly had unprotected sex with women contrary to their wishes. Bizarrely self-described feminist Naomi Wolf read this and saw only consent, as she says in this TV debate with Jaclyn Friedman. Wolf had earlier ridiculed the two women alleging assault.

Then there’s Michael Moore who described the allegations as “lie and smear” when interviewed by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown. And Mr Olbermann has turned out to be quite a spectacle himself, retweeting a link from Assange supporter Bianca Jagger to a piece written by Holocaust denier Israel Shamir naming both women in the case and alleging a link between one of the women and the CIA. Finding himself criticised as a result, Olbermann reacted in a rather extreme manner and has since kept on digging.

What else? Michael Moore found he didn’t like it much when his own name turned up in a WikiLeaked cable on Cuba, and protested that The Guardian had the story wrong. Terry Glavin tells just how wrong the story was, and putting it right gives no credit to Moore.

Oh, and conspiracy theorist Israel Shamir turned out to be not just an Assange supporter but WikiLeaks’ man in Russia. Bizarrely for a representative of an organisation supposedly devoted to fighting corrupt government, he popped up in Belarus making excuses for the regime’s brutal crackdown on opposition activists.

Modernityblog, a WikiLeaks supporter, finds himself stunned that somebody as internet savvy as Assange hadn’t thought to Google Mr Shamir before getting involved with him. Perhaps that’s because Assange has been too busy Googling himself.

Added: apologies, how could I have left out John Pilger?

Relativity

Oliver Kamm keeps himself occupied reading the papers, finding a familiar problem of relativity on the subject of Iraq, and morbid finality on an argument over Kosovo.

Mick Hartley goes to a gallery, MOMA in NY, and encounters a variation on the relativity problem at a retrospective of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Martin relaxes listening to music on the radio.

And Lars Vilks stays alive. Here is his blog. Here is Google’s (unreliable) translation.

The above image comes from a Ladybird book, The Story of Newspapers. Copyright © Ladybird Books Ltd. 1969.

Tall tales of the high seas

The opening verse of the sea shanty, Jack the Whaler, goes like this:

What’s more delight on a winter’s night

Than to sip a glass of grog,

And hear the old men spin their yarns

Before a burning log,

They tell their tales of monstrous whales

And of sights that they have seen,

It makes your hair stand end on end

and your stomach turn quite green.

And the folklore tradition described in this song is a living one, with new tales being spun out of the old, stories mysterious and creepy enough to send a shiver down the spine of the listener. Mysterious like the one about pirates raised from a watery grave by the all-powerful Mossad to plunder ships off the coast of Sweden. Creepy like the tale of The White Ship which steals children away when their parents aren’t looking, in order to cut out their kidneys, livers, and hearts.

Hopefully only a fool, Swedish or otherwise, would believe such stories, but still, for all the excitement of the new, I’ll stay with the tall tales of times safely past.

Be good now, children, or The White Ship will get you!

(Another kind of Swedish story from the history books here.)

Pages taken from Burl Ives’ Sea Songs of Sailing, Whaling and Fishing copyright © 1956 Burl Ives. Earlier samples here and here.

Today

Francis Sedgemore: Holocaust Memorial Day 2009

Norman Geras: Remembering Auschwitz and Forgetting the Holocaust, and earlier, Iniquity of the fathers?

Flesh is Grass: Remembering the Holocaust

Peter Ryley: Remembering 

(with a follow up from Bob: Remembering)

Noga: Holocaust Memorial Day

Sarah Franco: Aristides de Sousa Mendes: small tribute on Holocaust Memorial Day

Deborah Lipstadt: Holocaust Denier Bishop Williamson in his own Words

From the 25th, Richard Bartholomew: Some Thoughts of Bishop Richard Williamson

From the 26th, David T: Muslim Council of Britain Boycotts Holocaust Memorial Day Again

Martin: Remember

Update Jan 28th, David T: Holocaust Memorial Day on Al-Rahma TV