Cracking writing from Kevin Maguire in the Daily Mirror:
David Cameron’s fundamental problem is the stench of a loser.
The Prime Minister stinks of defeat, a weak Conservative leader on skid row. The overpowering smell of failure, incompetence and chaos is suffocating. Cameron’s difficulties started when he failed to win outright three years ago in what were good times for the Tories. The U-turns and incompetence, compromises of ConDem coalition, have drained away his authority.
The Death of Baroness Thatcher
after Patricia McGuigan and Alexander Pope
Her hair was a headmistress dreaming
of again being allowed to use the cane.
Her ambition was a brass door knocker
on what was once a council house.
Her brain was a conversation about money
Sir Keith Joseph had with himself.
Her back passage was Basil Fawlty
complaining about car strikes to the Major.
The look in her eyes was a shoot to kill policy
in Northern Ireland.
Her sentimentality was a spinster’s thimble
in which you could fit what’s left of the Tory Party
in Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester,
Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle…
Her clenched fist was a skinhead
in nothing but Union Jack y-fronts.
She said the word ‘Europe’
like a woman coming down
from a severe overdose of Brussels Sprouts.
Her Christmases were dinner at Chequers
with a recently deceased sex offender.
Her ‘out’, ‘no’, ‘never’
were striking print workers
being given the cat of nine tails.
Her fingers and thumbs
were ten riot shields in a row.
Her final nightmare
was the silent, black eyed ghosts
of Joe Green and David Jones ,
who did nothing but each offer her
a hand.
NOTES
David Gareth Jones, from Wakefield, died amid violent scenes outside Ollerton colliery in Nottinghamshire on 15 March 1984. On 15 June Joe Green was crushed to death by a lorry while picketing in Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire.
One of the great Zionist lies is that Israel “made the desert bloom”. It didn’t. Palestine was doing just fine til Israel came along. But it isn’t now. Despite Ramallah getting more rainfall per year than London, water supplies are a real problem in occupied Palestine. Except for one group: the Israelis, and the illegal settlers. Israel steals vast quantities of water from Palestine, ensuring that the Palestinians are left with a pittance.
Not just that – Israel long ago made it illegal for Palestinians to sink wells, or to take water from Israeli wells. Palestinians are regularly shot, attacked and imprisoned simply for trying to get water.
The graphic below, from the excellent Visualising Palestine, describes the problem. Please feel free to share it – and next time a supporter of Israel tells you it’s a democratic, peaceful state, remind them: This is apartheid. Different roads for Jews. Military trials for Palestinians – in fact a completely different set of laws applied to Palestinians. Water denied to the Palestinians. “Skunk water” sprayed over Palestinian homes and farms. And, in Gaza, the deliberate total destruction of the sewer system, so the Gaza coastline stinks like a sewer and presents serious health risks to the population. This was carried out by Israel as a parting gift when it withdrew from Gaza and sealed its population in (along with massive destruction of Palestinian graves by IDF soldiers).
This is apartheid.
This article was originally published in January 2007. We repost it here as part of our Palestine Week posts, marking the 65th anniversary of the Nakba.
The March-April edition of the Israeli left magazine Challenge, included an interesting article about the documentary Asurot– which is an untranslatable word in Hebrew, referring to women both confined and forbidden. The full article is available here.
The story behind the documentary is that two film makers, Anat Even and Ada Ushpiz went to make a film about three Palestinian widows living in Hebron.
Hebron is a reasonably large Palestinian town, of around 200,000 inhabitants, but since 1996 the town centre has been designated as under Israeli control, as special area H-2, under the Oslo agreement. This Israeli enclave is home for some 300 religious extremists, mainly from America but some from France. These ultra-Zionists do not work, and live on hand outs from the Israeli state, and are guarded by an entire brigade of the Israeli Defense Force – some 4000 troops. (Here is a report of my own visit to Hebron last year)
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Who said protesting couldn’t be fun.Doing the Bhangra with @onkarsahota #SaveOurNHS Demo twitter.com/KamaljeetJandu…
— Kamaljeet Jandu (@KamaljeetJandu) May 18, 2013
The danger of the campaign for Scottish independence becoming associated with anti English racism is becoming increasingly apparent. On two separate occasions within a matter of months – involving first Iain Duncan Smith and most recently UKIP’s Nigel Farage – protesters and left wing supporters of Scottish independence have heckled both with chants of ‘Get back tae England!’ when they have appeared in Scotland.
Whether those involved have been motivated by anti English hostility or not – and in both instances the answer is clearly more likely not – perception is all in politics. And in this regard, with both events being covered widely by the media, any English person living in Scotland watching this developing trend will be justified in experiencing a growing sense of unease.
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Excellent graphic from Visualising Palestine showing how the Nakba wasn’t a single event, but is ongoing – Palestinian land is still being stolen by Israel. Palestinians are right now being forced into exile.
Visualising Palestine encourages people to share these graphics – please feel free to download it and share. Click the image for a full-size, high-quality version
Venezuela’s independent National Electoral Council (CNE) has concluded the first stage of the audit of the vote initiated following April’s Presidential election and has found “zero error”.
The audit came about after the losing right wing candidate, Henrique Capriles, refused to accept the result of April’s presidential election, that saw Nicolas Maduro elected, and instead claimed that fraud had been committed.
Venezuela has a fully electronic voting system. As well as voting electronically each voter gets a paper receipt corresponding to their electronic vote, which the voter can check, and which is then placed in a traditional ballot box. To ensure the accuracy of the electronic results, an audit of 54% of these paper ballots is automatically made on election night before the results are released and in front of witnesses from all political parties and members of the public. During this audit no discrepancies were reported by witnesses from the campaign team of Henrique Capriles. Venezuela’s fully automated electoral system underwent 18 audits before, during and after the vote. These were conducted in the presence of witnesses from all political parties who certified the system’s proper functioning and integrity. There was not one single instance of irregularity registered by these witnesses. On the contrary, all of the audits were signed off by all witnesses including those representing the losing parties. One further safeguard was the presence of over 150 electoral accompaniers from 22 countries who declared the elections free and fair.
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Great song about blacklisting – a real problem in the UK, and one affecting many readers of this site. Click below to listen to “There is a blacklist”
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian children it arrests amounts to torture. Child prisoners are arbitrarily detained and held for long periods, in a parallel military justice system that treats them far more harshly than Israeli child prisoners are treated. Once again, this is the hallmark of apartheid.
Tim Lezard of UnionNews reports from the FBU firefighters’ union national conference
Although delegates to the FBU’s annual conference did not vote to call a strike ballot immediately, they agreed to put a seven point plan to ministers and seek further talks. General secretary Matt Wrack said: “We still hope to avoid industrial action but we are determined to defend our pension rights. Genuine talks are still a real option and the ball is now firmly in government’s court to sort out the mess they have got themselves into.”
This is a guest post by Nadir Ahmed, in response to an article claiming that 80% of sexual exploitation offences are committed by Pakistani men. Nadir can be contacted on twitter.
It’s not often that I’m exercised enough about something that I feel compelled to write more than 140 characters on the subject. Yesterday morning I read a lengthy tract by Ajmal Masroor on the issue of sex, sexual exploitation and Pakistani men – it was probably in response to Tuesday’s news of the conviction of seven men in Oxford in the latest prosecution of sexual exploitation of young, vulnerable girls. The post was entitled ‘Sex grooming – whats (sic) gone wrong with Pakistani men?’ After a wave of criticism, the original post (the link is to a screenshot of the now-deleted post) was removed, edited, and reposted. But the gist of it remained the same – he simply added more brown people to have a go at.
No-one should question the severity of their crimes: abusing and exploiting some of the most vulnerable members of society. These men, and others like them, took advantage of young girls who had been otherwise abandoned and rejected by society.
Questions need to be, and are being, asked of the agencies with statutory responsibilities – local authority social services and police forces – and those people who failed these young girls also need to be held to account. No expense should be spare in providing the victims the support they need and measures need to be put in place to ensure other vulnerable young people never have to suffer as they did.
Back to Masroor’s post. He makes a number of assertions in his post that I profoundly disagree with.
First of all, Pakistani men are no more predisposed to sexually exploiting young girls than men of any other ethnic origin. The reason we’re hearing so much about these specific cases is because they fit with a particular narrative which needs to evoke images of dusky savages in order to be maintained. The Muslim community in the UK has been under unrelenting attack – in the political sphere and in the media – for a number of years now. This focus on the religion and ethnicity of the offenders is only a continuation of those attacks. It’s no coincidence that at a time when Muslims are under such sustained attack by the media and the state, so much more attention is paid to heinous crimes, whether that be terrorism or sexual abuse of children, when the perpetrators are brown and Muslim.
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This is a fantastic article from Adam Hanieh, analysing not just the failure of the Oslo process, but the effect it’s had on the economy of Palestine. It was published in Jacobin, a left-wing ‘magazine of culture and polemic’ in the US, and is published here with permission. Jacobin is a great example of solid but engaging left-wing writing – it’s well worth a read.
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli government. Officially known as the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, the Oslo Accords were firmly ensconced in the framework of the two-state solution, heralding “an end to decades of confrontation and conflict,” the recognition of “mutual legitimate and political rights,” and the aim of achieving “peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and … a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement.”
Its supporters claimed that under Oslo, Israel would gradually relinquish control over territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA) eventually forming an independent state there. The negotiations process, and subsequent agreements between the PLO and Israel, instead paved the way for the current situation in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority, which now rules over an estimated 2.6 million Palestinians in the West Bank, has become the key architect of Palestinian political strategy. Its institutions draw international legitimacy from Oslo, and its avowed goal of “building an independent Palestinian state” remains grounded in the same framework. The incessant calls for a return to negotiations — made by US and European leaders on an almost daily basis — harken back to the principles laid down in September 1993.
Two decades on, it is now common to hear Oslo described as a “failure” due to the ongoing reality of Israeli occupation. The problem with this assessment is that it confuses the stated goals of Oslo with its real aims. From the perspective of the Israeli government, the aim of Oslo was not to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or to address the substantive issues of Palestinian dispossession, but something much more functional. By creating the perception that negotiations would lead to some kind of “peace,” Israel was able to portray its intentions as those of a partner rather than an enemy of Palestinian sovereignty.
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Excellent evening last night, at Exeter City FC, for the SW TUC awards, where GMB activists involved in the dispute with Carillion at Swindon’s Great Western Hospital were winners in the Best Campaign and Organising category.
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This post was originally published in November 2006. We repost it here as part of our Palestine Week posts, marking the 65th anniversary of the Nakba.
The accusation that Israel is an apartheid state is not one of political rhetoric. It is an accurate use of the definition of apartheid, which is parallel social systems in the same land for different ethnic groups.
Let us look at roads in the occupied territories; here we see the construction of an entirely separate infrastructure of road building to connect the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank with Israel and the illegally annexed city of East Jerusalem.
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