“an unbearable sorrow that no parent should have to endure”
— Gordon Brown.
Gaza
If the shoe fits…
Throw it at the apologist for Israeli state terrorism:
During a talk at the Apollo Hotel in Amsterdam on Sunday, Israeli speaker Ron Edelheit was pelted with shoes thrown by members of the audience. Mr Edelheit was a spokesman for the Israeli army during its recent offensive in the Gaza Strip. Police arrested two men and one woman, all in their early twenties. Outside the hotel, around fifty others protested against Mr Edelheit’s visit, in what police said was a peaceful manner.
According to the Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel, the location for the event was changed at the last moment, after the College Hotel received threats.
BTW, that innocous sounding Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel is the main zionist propaganda arm in the Netherlands, so everything they say about anti-semitism or “threats” should be taken with a boulder of salt. They were last seen spewing the exact same lies about Israel’s war on Gaza as you could read on every zionist blog.
Apathic students are good for business
Hicham Yezza looks at the student protests against the Israeli re-invasion of Gaza and what this meant for the political awareness of students:
For anyone interested in the health of our political system, these events are highly instructive. For a start, they would have been unthinkable a decade ago: everyone remembers the quasi-proverbial, and not wholly undeserved, reputation students have cultivated over the years for extreme political apathy. Indeed, the extent of the indifference to the political process among the youth was a source of national despair, wistfully and routinely bemoaned by politicians across the spectrum.
More importantly, these protests have also been very indicative of some larger truths: not only have they highlighted a rise in political awareness among a new generation raised in the shadow of the Iraq war debate, they have also exposed what has for long been a suspected but unspoken reality: rather than being the centres of learning, debate and intellectual engagement of yore, British universities are now little more than businesses purveying a product, employable students. The message is unambiguous: political engagement might be good for the mind but it is very, very bad for business.
Of course I doubt these “centres of learning, debate and intellectual engagement of yore” ever really existed apart from in golden Baby Boomer memories of ’68… Universities have always been as much if not more guardians of the existing order as incubators of radicalism and any room for political engagement has to be created by the students themselves. What has happened in the last few decades is that this room, hard won during the sixties, seventies and eighties, has disappeared as universities “went commercial” while succesive governements made it more difficult for students to do anything but study. If you have to depend on a student loan of several (tens of thousands) of pounds to be able to study, you’ll be less likely to waste your time with political activity, especially if, as in the Netherlands, your loan or grant is made dependent on your study results. It’s perhaps no coincidence that there was little if any student protest over here against the invasion of Gaza, certainly not on the scale of the UK protests.
If the name of Hicham Yezza sounds familiar, it’s because he was the student arrested for supposedly downloading an Al Queda terrorism manual, which turned out to be made available at the U.S. Department of Justice website and who, once he wasn’t charged under the anti-terrorism law, was re-arrested for unspecified offences against the Immigration Act — wouldn’t want to waste an investigation after all. Here’s what you can do to help him.
Waltz with Bashir: Israeli propaganda
Gideon Levy demolishes the supposedly humanitarian message of Waltz with Bashir:
Hollywood will be enraptured, Europe will cheer and the Israeli Foreign Ministry will send the movie and its makers around the world to show off the country’s good side. But the truth is that it is propaganda. Stylish, sophisticated, gifted and tasteful – but propaganda. A new ambassador of culture will now join Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, and he too will be considered fabulously enlightened – so different from the bloodthirsty soldiers at the checkpoints, the pilots who bomb residential neighborhoods, the artillerymen who shell women and children, and the combat engineers who rip up streets. Here, instead, is the opposite picture. Animated, too. Of enlightened, beautiful Israel, anguished and self-righteous, dancing a waltz, with and without Bashir. Why do we need propagandists, officers, commentators and spokespersons who will convey “information”? We have this waltz.
The waltz rests on two ideological foundations. One is the “we shot and we cried” syndrome: Oh, how we wept, yet our hands did not spill this blood. Add to this a pinch of Holocaust memories, without which there is no proper Israeli self-preoccupation. And a dash of victimization – another absolutely essential ingredient in public discourse here – and voila! You have the deceptive portrait of Israel 2008, in words and pictures.
This is not an uniquely Israeli disease of course. Just look at the endless stream of “sensitive”Vietnam movies that came out of Hollywood from the eighties onwards, which exclusively focused on American pain, with only lip service paid to what America did to Vietnam. Here in the Netherlands, we can’t shut up about what happened to us in World War II, but the independence struggle of Indonesia is only remembered in the context of Dutch suffering during the Japanese occupation.
Spirit of ’68 ’09
Students turn out not to be apathetic proto-consumers shock!
Beginning with a 24-hour occupation at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) on 13 January, the sit-ins spread across the country. Now occupations have been held at the LSE, Essex, King’s College London, Birmingham, Sussex, Warwick, Manchester Metropolitan, Oxford, Leeds, Cambridge, Sheffield Hallam, Bradford, Nottingham, Queen Mary, Manchester, Strathclyde, Newcastle, Kingston, Goldsmiths and Glasgow.
Among the demands of students are disinvestment in the arms trade; the promise to provide scholarships for Palestinian students; a pledge to send books and unused computers to Palestine; and to condemn Israeli attacks on Gaza.
Technology has set these actions apart from those of previous generations, allowing a national momentum to grow with incredible speed. Through the linking up of internet blogs, news of successes spread quickly and protests grew nationwide.
Just three weeks after the first sit-in at SOAS, students gathered yesterday at Birkbeck College to draw up a national strategy. The meeting featured speeches from leaders in the Stop the War movement, such as Tony Benn, George Galloway MP and Jeremy Corbyn MP. There has also been an Early Day Motion tabled in Parliament in support of campus activism.
At the end of the month students from across the country will gather for a national demonstration calling for the abolition of tuition fees, an event that organisers say has rocketed in size following the success of the occupations over Gaza.
Vice chancellors and principals have been brought to the negotiating table and – in the majority of universities – bowed to at least one of the demands. The students’ success means that now there is a new round of protests. On Wednesday two new occupations began at Strathclyde and Manchester universities, and on Friday night students at the University of Glasgow also launched a sit-in.
I predict we’ll be seeing a further radicalisation of students in the coming few years. The people now in uni or starting uni have largely grown up under New Labour, have constantly been disappointed by New Labour, not in the least by the way it pulled up the ladder behind them (grants turned into loans, top-up fees etc). You’d think this would mean students would be more focused on getting a degree than on getting involved in politics, especially now the economy has collapsed, but this generation of students doesn’t toe the line easily.
Their most enduring political memory has to be the build-up to the War on Iraq in which they had been actively involved as well. When the war finally broke out you’ll remember it was the students that went out on strike, including primary and secondary school kids. The greatest political event of their lives was a war that millions of people protested against using all legal options available to them and that ended up happening despite a majority of the country being opposed to it.
The cynical way with which the antiwar protests were disregarded by a political establishment desparate to crawl into George Bush’s arse (or suffering from a messianic complex) has shown this generation that just going on marches is not enough. We’ve seen the results during Israel’s assault on Gaza. By putting pressure on their universities to divest themselves from Israel students took a radical and practical approach to the issue, a way to directly help the Palestinians. It’s a very good sign for the future.