- The Westminster child abuse ‘coverup’: how much did MPs know? | Politics | The Guardian – Another day, another set of shocking headlines about allegations of historical child abuse and high-level coverups, this time a dossier being handed over by the Metropolitan police themselves to the Independent Police Complaints Commission to examine 14 allegations of Scotland Yard’s own complicity in the alleged coverup of a high-level paedophile ring.
- On the “dispute” between radical feminism and trans people – In a world where left-wing politics has often derided LGBT identities as “bourgeois” and then accused us of splitting the movement, it infuriates me that I’ve had to take a break from writing a piece on the Tories’ “liberation” of the NHS to write 8,500 words to debunk a sexological concept that was shown to be untenable before the start of the First World War.
- Featured news – Skeletons uncovered at Ipplepen reveals major Roman cemetery – University of Exeter – The significance of the discovery took on further importance when one of the skeletons was found to date from around 250 to 350 years after the Roman period, an era often referred to as the ‘dark ages’. These discoveries are of both national and regional value in providing a glimpse into Romano-British life and how the settlement continued into post-Roman times.
- Minister-President over discriminatie: oplossing ligt bij slachtoffers – "Eén van de dingen die ik [van leerlingen] leer, is hoe ingrijpend discriminatie is. Dat het in Nederland nog veel voorkomt en het echt uitmaakt of je Mohammed of Jan heet als je solliciteert. Ik heb daar over nagedacht en ben tot de conclusie gekomen dat ik dit niet kan oplossen. De paradox is dat de oplossing bij Mohammed ligt. Ik kan tegen Nederland zeggen: ‘discrimineer aub niet, beoordeel iemand op karakter en kennis.’ Maar als het wel gebeurt, heeft Mohammed de keus: afhaken wegens belediging of doorgaan. Nieuwkomers hebben zich altijd moeten aanpassen, en altijd te maken gehad met vooroordelen en discriminatie. Je moet je invechten."
- Who wants to be a millionaire? Peter Oborne on Tony Blair – But Tony Blair has made a fortune. A J P Taylor, in his masterpiece English History 1914-45, noted that Lloyd George was the first prime minister since Walpole to leave office considerably richer than when he entered it. Blair falls into the tradition of Walpole and Lloyd George (though his exploitation of the office of prime minister came after he left Downing Street).
- Malaysian SFF writers and projects: a directory | Zen Cho – I’ve been conscious for a while that I’m no longer able to keep up the list of Malaysian SFF writers in English that I put up awhile ago — because I’m busy, but also because there are more of us than ever! I think it is helpful to have a directory for interested readers and people who want to connect with other local writers, but it needs to be updated regularly if it’s to be of use.
- Google Bullies, Censors MintPress & AntiWar.com Over Abu Ghraib Photos – On March 12 Google AdSense contacted MintPress News threatening to disable our Google Ads if we did not remove gruesome and now infamous photos of American soldiers torturing Iraqis in the Abu Ghraib prison.
- Miwa Hirono: my Home Office hell | Opinion | Times Higher Education – Because of this policy, I am now forced to quit my permanent position at the University of Nottingham after six and a half years of dedication and contribution to the university and to the wider policy and scholarly communities. My family and I will be removed from this country as of next Sunday.
- Student political protest is under threat, not free speech | Comment is free | The Guardian – We are deeply concerned about the letter “We cannot allow individuals to be censored and silenced” on 15 February, which contained serious inaccuracies. For example, neither Kate Smurthwaite nor Germaine Greer were no-platformed; poor ticket sales were a factor in the cancellation of Smurthwaite’s show and Greer’s talk went ahead.
- We cannot allow censorship and silencing of individuals | letters | World news | The Observer –
- What is Twine? (For Developers) | Liz England –
Articles with the Tag Tony Blair
Your Happening World (June 22nd through June 24th)
Blog fodder for June 22nd through June 24th:
- The War Nerd: Like it or not, what’s happening in Iraq right now is part of a rational process | PandoDaily – I just wish Americans would stop assuming every place is like us. Let me tell you, for a Sunni Kurd to say, “I have Shia friends, I have Christian friends” is about as brave and radical as it gets, short of suicide, in the Middle East. I never heard any of my Saudi students say anything remotely like it. Well, how could they? By law, Shi’ism and Christianity are banned in the Kingdom. So they didn’t have the opportunity, even if they’d had the mindset (which they didn’t).
- Genre needs a lot more cruel and nasty reviews | Damien G. Walter – We need writers and reviewers like Priest who have the expertise and willingness to reflect back the problems in modern genre fiction. Because the problems are very real. Violence of the flattened, meaningless kind Priest pinpoints in Barricade is endemic in the genre.
- Editor’s blog: I am sexist • Eurogamer.net – This is a realisation that has slowly dawned on me over the last few years. Without really meaning to do so, I have been going around saying and doing things that demean women and casually downplay the importance of issues of gender discrimination all my life. It's a horrible thing to recognise about yourself, gradually or not. I try to be a generous and caring person and I am pretty sensitive, so the idea that I have been ignorantly treating half of the people I know and love in this way makes me feel awful.
- Tony Blair, dread creature of the forbidden swamp | Idiot Joy Showland – Tony Blair rises every couple of months, like a bubble of swamp gas. First there’s an uneasy buried rumbling, then small tremors shake the surface, and then suddenly he bursts through, a gassy eruption stinking of farts and sulphur. It doesn’t matter how many rounds you fire into his shambling frame; he just won’t die. Whenever something unpleasant happens in the Middle East, whenever some huge corporation is discovered to be starving people to death or poisoning them through calculated negligence, whenever the chaos of the international order reaches a starts to wobble into another death-spiral, a damp wind blows through a graveyard somewhere in England and Tony Blair emerges from his tomb.
- WW2 Drawings –
What Twitter was made for
Epic is not the word for it, Chris Brooke’s Tour de Force retweeting of Tony Blair’s autobiography. Thanks to his sacrifice there’s no need to read it yourself anymore — you can get the gist of it from the quotes:
42. Blair, p. 65: “On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength.” Wed Sep 1 12:03:56 2010 via web
[…]
163.Blair doesn’t say that something is funny, he says (p. 290) that there had been “a proper quotient of amusement”. Wed Sep 1 19:15:17 2010 via web
[…]
215.Blair broods, p.373, every day, on the victims of his wars, & “uses that reflection to recommit to a sense of purpose in the bigger affair.” Thu Sep 2 09:27:54 2010 via web
216.Blair, p. 373, “can only hope to redeem something from the tragedy of death, in the actions of a life, my life, that continues still.” (Wow) Thu Sep 2 09:28:56 2010 via web
[..]
426.Blair, p. 509: “The British people, whom I genuinely adored… like a love affair, had ceased loving and were not going to start again.” Thu Sep 2 20:15:41 2010 via web
[…]
529.Blair, p.567: the killing of JC de Menezes was a “terrible error”, but he also feels sorry for the officers, “who were acting in good faith” about 21 hours ago via web
[…]
554.Blair, p. 578: the heart of New Labour was its “championing of aspiration”. “Equity cd not & shd never be at the expense of excellence.” about 21 hours ago via web
[…]
771.Blair, p. 670: “Keynes was a great man”, but “I bet he would be surprised at how his theory is being applied today.” about 14 hours ago via web
The only thing Blair deserves costs about thirty cents
But since this is a fundamentally unjust world, he’ll get one million dollars for his
“global leadership”:
Tony Blair has won a prestigious million-dollar (£697,000) prize for his leadership on the world stage, it was announced today.
The former prime minister, now a Middle East peace envoy, will receive the Dan David prize for “his exceptional leadership and steadfast determination in helping to engineer agreements and forge lasting solutions to areas in conflict”.
The award is presented by the Dan David Foundation, based at Tel Aviv University, and a spokesman for Blair said the money would be donated to the former Labour leader’s charity for religious understanding, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.
It sounds absurd to give Blair this prize — and you’ll notice the word “Iraq” doesn’t occur in the announcement — until you realise who‘s giving this award. Dan David is an avowed zionist and his foundation is located at Tel Aviv University; zionist usually have little problems with mountains of corpses, if they’re Arab corpses. Furthermore, Blair was very helpful to Israel not just with Iraq, but also with the War on Lebanon, helping delay the ceasefire to give the IDF more time to kill civilians.
It would of course be impolite to mention Blair gets this money for helping get rid of an enemy of Israel or perpetuating mass murder, hence the blather about “asking the important questions” and “morally courageous leadership”. Note that the Israelis aren’t the only ones to thank Blair for delivered services; he’s made a very nice living hovering up nice cushy jobs after he left office. That’s why he went along with Bush all these years. Never mind whether or not he genuinely believed in the War on Terror in the end he did it all for the old do-re-mi, his staunch Christianity no barrier for starting an immoral war that killed some million Iraqis now.
He’s not the only Christian crusader. Our own prime minister, the great moral scold and Harry Potter (grown up to be an accountant) lookalike Jan Peter Balkenende, fought tooth and nail to keep an inquiry into the War on Iraq from happening. Yet he would call himself a moral man, an examplar to the nation, always happy to disapprove of binge drinking teenagers or something, but who so far has not shown any recognition of the sheer monstrosity of what happened, what is still happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of the great and the good have, whether they were pro or anti-war back in 2003. It was just another policy choice for them, not a moral question and it could’ve gone either way if the incentives were right.
Israeli war aims: ethnical cleansing Gaza?
Israel always had a bit of a problem with Gaza ever since it conquered the territory in 1967. It’s one of the most densely populated places in the world, it houses a lot of people driven out of their homes in 1948, doesn’t really have that much going for it and is therefore less of a prize than the West Bank is. As Christopher Hitchens (!) recounts in his foreword to Edward Said’s Peace and its discontents, Gaza has always been seen by the Israelis as a trap to spring on the Palestinians; as Moshe Dayn allegedly put it, “a bridge to doublecross”. The Israeli withdrawal from it in 2005 was therefore a bit of p.r. stunt; Israel could do with Gaza much more easily than it can do without its control of the West Bank. And because they kept control of the borders, airspace and the sea, the Israelis thought they had created more or less the largest open air prison in the world, a ghetto even, which if the inhabitants got too uppity could always be choked off. As Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert put it in 2006 “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. Olmert himself talked of “not allowing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza” but having no intention of “making their lives easier”. Such nice, humanitarian gestures are of course much more easy to pull off if there aren’t settlers stuck in the middle of Gaza of course.
But as we’ve seen again and again in the years since the Israeli withdrawal, the Gazans have not let themselves be cowed, voting in a Hamas government despite Israeli, European and American warnings about what would happen if they did, the rockets have continued to be launched against Sderot (founded in 1951, but once the site of a Palestinian village called Najd), so talk has been turning in Israel to more extreme measures…
Back in March of 2008, Lenny reported about a plan for a possible ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, (or as the Israelis might call it, the establishment of a security zone), based on a report by an Israeli television channel. More rumours of such a plan have been floating around ever since and ever since the war began I’ve been thinking this was going to be the IDF’s ultimate war aim. When the ground invasion began this seemed to be further confirmed and now we learn that the Israeli defence minister has been asking legal approval to “evacuate” thousands of residents of Gaza City. It may not be necessary, as already some fifteen thousands people have
fled towns in northern Gaza, after being threatened by Israeli pamphlets and radio announcements…
But, as the inhabitants of southern Lebanon found out back when Israel targeted their country in 2006, fleeing does not make you safe. Even United Nations schools, known to the Israelis to be UN schools, with the UN having provided the IDF with the full details and GPS coordinates of all their buildings in the Gaza Strip, are not safe: thirty dead when an Israeli tank shelled it. As per usual the IDF blames their enemy for making them shoot the school, as the troops in question were supposedly fired upon. Of course, everytime something likes this happens, the IDF trots out the same old story and every time it turns out to be a lie.
So don’t put too much faith in all the “diplomatic efforts” being undertaken by the various bigwigs to end this conflict, especially when Tony Blair, with his usual brilliant prioritising thought the most important question was to stop Hamas getting weapons. This conflict will end when Israel wants it to end, or is forced to do so. If we don’t ratch up the pressure on Israel quickly, this will end with ethnic cleansing. When you have people like Avedon Carol talking about getting ‘a chill up my spine when I heard they were talking about a “permanent solution” to the Palestinian issue’, you know this is going to get much worse before it gets better, if it ever will. But it only will if we make the Israelis stop.