Sometimes my compatriots can be right tossers. Take a certain Richard Nichols for instance, who took it into his head to have a go at Nezua The Unapologetic Mexican.
He didn’t want to do that.
Then Jesus General noticed. Oh Richard, you big silly, you never should’ve started this…
Europol, the EU’s transnational police force, has released its first report tracking terrorism incidents and arrests within the EU and it makes very interesting reading (.pdf), especially when you compare the published figures against the perception of a Europe-wide Islamist terrorist conspiracy that’s projected by governmental spin and media presentation.
For instance, did you know that of 498 terrorist incidents reported by EU states in 2006, only 3 were Islamist-terrorism related?
Along with the failed terrorist attack that took place in Germany, Denmark and the UK each reported one attempted terrorist attack in 2006
The collected Europol data for October-December 2005 and for 2006 give a total of 549 attacks, 128 terrorist activities, 810 arrested suspects and 303 trials in the EU. From the executive summary of the report:
.In 2006, separatist terrorists carried out 424 attacks in the EU.
[…]
In 2006, left-wing and anarchist terrorists carried out 55 attacks in the EU.
[…]
Along with the failed terrorist attack that took place in Germany, Denmark and the UK each reported one attempted terrorist attack in 2006
[…]
A total of 706 individuals suspected of terrorism offences were arrested in 15 Member States in 2006. Investigations into Islamist terrorism are clearly a priority for Member States’ law enforcement as demonstrated by the number of arrested suspects reported by Member States. Half of all the terrorism arrests were related to Islamist terrorism.
Is it just me or is there an assymetry between the number of arrests and the actual incidence of Islamist terrorism? I could make any number of cheap political points about these figures but why bother, when several jump out right away by themselves, with very little coaxing?
But there are problems with the figures. This report, like any consensus report produced by the EU, is a creation of political manipulation and spin by member nations, despite the best attempts of the compilers. In the end the member countries validated their own data and picked and chose what they would release, despite having signed up to an agreed monitoring protocol.
For example, while all had lots to say on Islamist terrorism and an extensive reporting and monitoring process is in place, despite such terrorism’s admittedly low occurrence, right wing and neonazi activities are barely mentioned. That’s because some member states reported neonazi activity as terrorist and some didn’t:
Right-Wing Terrorism:
right-wing violence is mainly investigated as right-wing extremism and not as right-wing terrorism. Although violent acts perpetrated by right-wing extremists and terrorists may appear sporadic and situational, right-wing extremist activities are organised and transnational. For instance, details regarding possible targets are collected and disseminated on the Internet.
Exactly. People I know have been targeted in this way so I’m much less worried about some mythical threat from Al-Qaeda as embodied by some anonymous woman in a burqa than I am of home grown rightwing nutters in Lonsdale t-shirts and docs.
But neo-nazism and Islamism are political ideologies cut from the same authoritarian, repressive and separatist cloth, so why is the one reported and investigated but not the other? Why so many more arrests on suspicion of Moslems, and so little reporting on credible neonazi terrorist plots?
Might it have something to do with the number of quiet supporters, passive collaborationists and outright denialists – who’d rather see a threat from brown-skinned ‘others’ than from their compatriots – within the institutions of the member states and in the .eu-wide media?
So many in Europe, while condemning neo-nazism out of one side of their mouths, with the other will support the soft apologists and enablers of this kind of hatred, people like Geert Wilders or the late Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands or the right-wing theocrat Kuzcinski brothers in Poland.
Here’s one example of that passive collaborationism in the media, from Dutch writer Margriet De Moor:
Neo-Nazi movements to be taken seriously, like the ones in Germany, are practically non-existent in the Netherlands.
Non existent? No supporters? Oh, really?
Police raids led to arrest of neo-Nazis and arms finds
Serving soldiers amongst suspects
Geert Cool, LSP/MAS (CWI Belgium)Last Thursday, after a raid by the Belgian police, 17 activists from the Neo-Nazi movement, ‘Blood & Honour’, were arrested. Amongst those held were 10 Belgian army professional soldiers. The next day, two more neo-Nazis were arrested. The main suspects organised a fascist grouping inside the army, whose activities included weekend “terrorist” training camps and trading arms.
Those arrested are part of a section of Blood & Honour that go under the name, ‘Bloed Bodem Eer Trouw’ (BBET; Blood, Soil, Honour, Fidelity). There are two different groupings using the name Blood & Honour in Flanders, both linked to rival international groupings. The Blood & Honour group that was targeted by the police regularly use the name of its paper, ‘BBET’, as its public face.
Last Thursday, when police made the raids, they found over 100 high-tech weapons, including sophisticated weapons of war. On Friday, two more raids followed, in which another 100 pistols and machine guns were recovered. The police also discovered a large quantity of munitions, explosives and a sophisticated bomb. There was even a model letter claiming responsibility for terrorist attacks.
Although the Belgian police say the group did not have detailed plans to use the weaponry, one of those arrested declared publicly that the group did have the intention to strike against the state, migrants and radical left organisations. In an interview on television, this suspect said members of the security services, soldiers in the army and politicians would be involved in the planning and execution of these plans.
No right wing terrorism? Conspiracies like the above and the Lancashire right-wing bomb plot I referred to earlier are just the visble tip of potentially viciously violent and Europe-wide rightwing terrorist movement.
I’m certainly not suggesting there is no threat from Islamist terrorism in Europe; that would be patently absurd, given what happened in London and Madrid.
What I am saying is that, as so many times before, the facts are being fixed around the policy. While our leaders ramp up the paranoia and suspicion of the Moslems in our midst and present the available data to make it appear our biggest threat is from ‘outsiders’ (thus validating the ‘war on terror’ propaganda and rhetoric we’ve been subjected to since 2001) quietly the wannabe stormtroopers on the inside are regrouping.
Is from Mnemosyne at Pandagon, on the religiously and misogynistically motivated US Supreme Court decision to outlaw a method of late-term abortion used to save women’s lives when babies are irretrievably malformed or dead in the womb :
Mnemosyne
Apr 19th, 2007 at 2:04 amNot to mention … not a single “baby’s” life will be saved by this bill.
Not one.
The only reason women have this procedure done is because there is no way for the fetus to survive outside of the womb, assuming it’s not already dead, as Martha Mendoza’s son was.
The right-wing can scream and cry about saving “babies” all they want, but this decision did nothing but harm women whose planned and wanted pregnancies went horribly, horribly wrong and left those women’s doctors with fewer options to save their patients’ fertility if they want to try again.
So, trolls, go ahead and pat yourselves on the back: you just made life harder for thousands of women who’ve already gotten the worst news a pregnant woman can get — “Your baby will not survive to be born.” Yay, you! Time to par-TAY!
Exactly.
Do read that Martha Mendoza link and you’ll get some idea of the enormity of this attack by fundies on women’s right to decide about their own health and future.
It’s always been my view as a socialist that the reason why elites, ie white western men in this instance, want to deny women’s rights is to keep control over the means of production of new workers.
Heaven forbid that the silly fertile incubators should be in charge of their own bodies: the rich might run out of servants and cheap labour and that would never do. This decision, reached by religious absolutists appointed by Bush, reduces a woman’s status to that of a passive incubator with no say over whatsoever her own body. Which, the fundies consider, is as it should be – because God owns her body and God speaks to them so they get to say, not her.
And who will pay for the ageing white males’ pensions and make up for their declining fertility by providing them photogenic adoptive babies, if those uppity women get to decide not to have children?
Unthinkable. Better a few women should die from unsafe procedures. They’re not worth that much anyway, the dirty sluts, or they wouldn’t’ve had sex in the first place.
UPDATE: On rereading that I don’t feel I made my point sufficiently clear. This decision is about bodily autonomy: who owns women? The state or themselves?
The supreme court has decided that the state owns and controls women. Men, however, being superior, own themselves.
The US consitution, “Life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness” applies to you only if you’ve been born xy rather than xx.
I missed this on Sunday so thanks to No More Mr Nice Blog for pointing to this post by Phil Nugent which neatly puts the whole Imus kerfuffle, that on the face of it seems so insular and trivial (who listened anyway?), into the necessary historical context as an integral stage of the process of the absorption of barely-disguised racist right wing rhetoric into the common daily culture, a process that’s been aided and abetted by some of the most well-known names in US politics and media.
[…]
When someone shows himself to be a “real” racist, he’s stripped of his epaulets and driven from the fort. Unfortunately, in public life, you have to practically be filmed burning a cross in front of a black church and waving to the camera to be tagged as a “real” racist. If you protested the Vietnam War, you’re going to be explaining and even apologizing for it to your dying day, but there are plenty of people who voted against civil rights legislation in the 1960s–an act that you might think would pretty clearly and unambiguously stamp you as maybe not being, as Don Imus says, “a good person”– who have been allowed to go on to long, respectable political careers. People like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were held by the Beltway not to be racists because, well, because they just couldn’t be–they were duly elected politicians, so the thought was too morbid to be seriously considered. If necessary, apologies for anything they’d done that might give one pause would be fabricated on their behalf. After Trent Lott became Minority Leader last year, returning to prominence after the fall from grace that resulted from his kissing Strom Thurmond’s warty ass on the occasion of the old shitkicker’s unearned centennial, many in the media insisted that Lott had, of course, apologized for those remarks, though as far as I can determine, all he’d done was repeatedly say that he was sorry that so many mean people had misrepresented his sweet remarks to a nice old orange-haired man on his birthday. Lott, as his recent memoir demonstrates, is typical of the kind of Southerner who doesn’t think he’s a racist and would have apoplexy if anyone suggested that he is, but who still disapproves of the government’s role in implementing desegregation; if you ask him, in the right setting in front of the right tobacco-juice-stained crowd, he’ll be happy to explain that, while he’s happy as a clam that whites and blacks can share the same drinking fountain in Mississippi now, it was a dastardly act for the gummint to force all those good Mississippians to do what they’d never done before but would have been delighted to do, of their own free will, at some point. It’s just a shame that the mean ol’ gummint made them do it, thus muddying the issue. As a child in Mississippi in the 1970s, I grew up hearing this line of manure from the local grown-ups, who would apply it to everything from the minimum wage to the Clean Water Act to the attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. By forcing them to do the obvious right thing, gummint was leaning on the common people, and it wasn’t fair. Heck, the worst thing about it was the suggestion that they had to be forced, by law, to do the obvious decent thing. It was true they’d never done it before, but they had been planning to get around to it, and probably would have done it five minutes after the law had been passed, if gummint hadn’t gone and gotten its panties in a bunch. Now all they could do was bitch till the end of their days about the injustice of being forced to not lynch nigras when there was nothing good on TV and not pay their employees in shiny beads. Not that they’d have ever done those things anyway, but oh, the injustice of being told that they couldn’t do it!
It would be a very pleasant thing to be able to say that this line of self-pitying imbecility died out in the provinces and never spread to the shoe-wearing regions of the country, but Don Imus and his brothers in the talk radio stratosphere depend as much on it as the Trent Lotts of this world. The fact that he has so much in common with Trent Lott would probably sting Imus more than any realization of the no-brainer fact that he is not, in fact, “a good person,” a realization that would be quick to follow if he could ever get his rodent’s brain around the simple truth that you really have used a word even if you’ve used it in an “off-the-record conversation,” but there you are. The talk radio world, one that Imus worked hard to shape, is one where overpaid white guys who did well in the voting for the title of “Class Clown” at their respective high schools sneer at blacks, women, gays, what have you, in a dismayingly self-congratulatory tone. The self-congratulation comes not from the cleverness of their material–nobody could be that self-deluded–but from the fantasy that they’re speaking truth to power and taking on The Man by being, and here hold tight while we flash back to the thrilling days of 1993, “politically incorrect.” Their natural audience is people who hate their lives and, at least for a few minutes a day, like to imagine that they’re outlaws by listening to some peabrain on the radio make fun of, say, homeless people or the victims of the 2004 tsunami.
[…]
Like they say, read the whole thing.
Sadly, No has a post up re lawyer, blogger and online pundit Debbie Schlussel, and boy, I wish I’d never read it, or even seen or heard of her. Speaking as a former member of the legal profession (I was crap at it in practice, I freely admit) I’m under no illusions that lawyers are any more moral, clever or humane than other average mortals. Probably much less so if anything.
Nevertheless at times I’m just completely gobsmacked at the sheer ineptititude, spite and moral stupidity that comes out of US law schools. Ann Althouse, for example, and Ann Coulter and the Powerline trio – all those petty-minded little people with their petty little hatreds, who’ve been given a public bully pulpit to spout off from, just because they were able to pass a bunch of multiple choice exams and can spell ‘libertarianism’. (At least all my finals questions required actual essays, even if I did throw up in Trusts and Equity from sheer exam nerves, and had to resit it in the autumn.). Detroit lawyer Schlussel can spell libertarian too, but only in ALLCAPS.
The ability to memorise a pile of case cites and headnotes does not automatically confer the ability to reason – if only – and so it proves yet again. This US law school product turned, airbrushed-blonde-wingnut-pundit, seems to think an obsession with the race and/or immigration status of the mass-murderer of 33 people is somehow relevant to the crime, and also that the insult ‘Paki’ is a perfectly acceptable epithet for someone from Pakistan.
That’s bad enough, but Schlussel takes her lack of rational thought further into batshit insane wingnut territory as she reasons that because some students are Asians and some Asians are Pakistani and some Pakistanis are Moslem and some Moslems are terrorists – why, then it must’ve been a terrorist…
Who is the “Asian” Mass Murderer at Virginia Tech? UPDATE: Shooter is Chinese National w/Student Visa
[…]
Here’s what we know about the murderer of at least 32 students and maimer of at least 28 more at Virginia Tech, today:
* The murderer has been identified by law enforcement and media reports as “a young Asian male.”
* The Virginia Tech campus has a very large Muslim community, many of which are from Pakistan (per terrorism investigator Bill Warner).
* Pakis are considered “Asian.”
Now I’m no Majikthise, but that reasoning strikes me as just ever-so-slightly disingenuous. And “Pakis”? How very ignorant. Yet a simple google would have produced this as the top result:
Web definitions for Paki
AVOID. An offensive term referring to Pakistanis. Sometimes used in Britain as an epithet against all South Asians
If she didn’t find out whether it was insulting she’s ignorant and racist: and if she knew and just didn’t care she’s maliciously racist. Either way it’s racist. I somehow doubt Ms Schlussel will be guest of honour at the Bradford mela this year, though she might get a pash note from our very own fellow lawyer and racist Nick Griffin.
Seeing this a number of commenters kindly pointed out her error, to be met with this polite response:
MY NAME IS DEBBIE SCHLUSSEL, NOT DON IMUS. IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO FALL ALL OVER THEMSELVES IN SHAME AND GROVELLING FOR YOUR FORGIVENESS FOR SAYING SOMETHING YOU FIND OFFENSIVE, GO TO THE IMUS HOME. ALSO, THIS IS NOT MSNBC OR CBS RADIO. IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO CAVE INTO YOUR THOUGHT-POLICE ORTHODOXY LIKE A WET NOODLE, THE OWNER AND OPERATOR OF THIS SITE–ALSO ME–IS NOT WHAT YOU ARE SEEKING.
DEBBIE SCHLUSSEL
Well, there’s a measured and well-thought-out reply. How does a noodle cave, exactly?
Counselor Schluessel has the online manners of a rampaging hippo on angel dust and the literary skills of our 3-legged cat Hector. No wonder she chose punditry over litigation if that’s her courtroom persona. Schlussel, from my admittedly brief perusal of her works, doesn’t strike me as the unambitious type; but if she really wants to reach the giddy heights of Instahackdom (and don’t they all?) it’d help if she had a handle on the correct euphemisms to use when making brioad, sweeping, racist generalisations.
So here, courtesy of Loren Javier is a handy aide-memoire for Schlussel when those racist ants in her undoubtedly pristine pants start to get a little itchy:
Asian
A term either describe somebody of Asian descent or something that comes from Asia. When speaking of Asians who are American citizens, however, use Asian American, Asian Pacific American (APA), Asian Pacific Islander (API) or Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI).Asian AmericanThis phrase was first used in the 1980 Census to describe American citizens from all Asian ethnic backgrounds. It is a commonly used term and is preferred by those of Asian descent who were born and raised in the United States.
Asian Pacific American
This is a relatively new term that is inclusive of both Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. It is abbreviated as APA. Some other acceptable terms are Asian Pacific Islander (API) and Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI)Cantonese
Chinese dialect spoken in the environs of Canton, now known as Guangzhou, near the South China Sea. The dialect of many of the early Chinese immigrants to the United States in the 1840s to 1870s. Also the principal dialect of Hong Kong. Still widely spoken in U.S. Chinatowns.China Doll
AVOID. A figurine, usually porcelain, but when used metaphorically or as a comparison the implied image of female submission demeans women of Chinese heritage.[…].
Desi This is a colloquial name for people of South Asian descent, particularly those of Indian and Pakistani descent, to self describe each other or their community. The term is derogatory outside of the South Asian community.
Dragon Lady
A cartoon character from the popular 1930s comic strip, “Terry and the Pirates.” Variations of the Dragon Lady were later popularized in many Hollywood adventure movies of the 1940s and later. She was portrayed as sexy and evil in Chinese silk gowns with long sleeves, cigarette holder between two fingersGook
AVOID. This is an offensive term that American soldiers coined to describe Koreans during the Korean War. “Gook” is actually Korean for “country.” “Han Gook” describes a person from the People’s Republic of Korea while “Mee Gook” describes a person from the United States. The irony is that American soldiers believed Koreans were describing themselves as gooks when, in reality, they were describing Americans. The term eventually was used during the Vietnam war and became widely used as a derogatory term for all Asian Americans.Gosei (GO-say)
Fifth-generation Japanese Americans, generally born in the new millennium. Term is mainly of historical interest only.[…]
Paki
AVOID. An offensive term referring to Pakistanis. Sometimes used in Britain as an epithet against all South Asians.Pinoy/Pinay (pee-NOY/pee-NAHY)
This term describes a Filipino American man (Pinoy) or woman (Pinay). While it is widely used within Filipino American communities, some consider it derogatory. It is advised that media use “Filipino American” unless quoting someone who self-identifies that way.Potato Queen
This is a slang term used to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Asian Pacific Americans, particularly men, who only date Caucasian people. While it is used tongue-in-cheek, it is considered derogatory by some people and, therefore, advised that media avoid it, unless quoting someone who self-identifies that way or is used by an Asian Pacific American in a more opinion or editorial tone.
You’d think a lawyer’d have the necessary research skills to have found that out herself, wouldn’t you? Unless of course that lawyer were determined to give full rein to her basest lizard-brain feelings in the hope of making herself an online career. Otherwise, she’d probably be sitting in some law mill with a thousand other associates churning out boilerplate real-estate contracts. If not for blogging and an unfortunate turn for hateful bile, most of these wingnut lawyer/blogger/pundits’d be doing the same. Aren’t the interwebs wonderful?
[*Note to male progressive bloggers, re Michelle Malkin and oingoing references to pingpong/patpong: much as we loathe her, this post applies to you too. But feel free to use ‘potato queen’ though. It seems rather apt in light of Jesse Malkin’s undoubted caucasianity.]