I am becoming quite fond of my little corner of Schiphol airport. I have put up my Christmas cards and a few bits of tinsel. I now have a boarding card for the 0800 to Manchester. This is the sixth boarding card I have had. It is very hard to understand why, time after time, they don’t know a flight is cancelled until some time after it was due to leave and all the passengers have queued at the gate for hours.
Of course, Manchester is a lot further from Ramsgate than Schiphol is, so even if the flight atually goes, this represents rather dubious progress.
Happy New Year everybody.
Remarkably, KLM delivered my lost luggage, including my laptop, at 9.30 pm on New Year’s Eve. At that time a pretty lively party was already in full swing,much improved by the presence of a great many beautiful young women, mostly from Latvia. I am not sure why; my life as ever consists of a bewildering succession of chance encounters with really nice people. I am in the fortunate position of being able to say that Nadira was the most lovely of all, without indulging in dutiful hyperbole.
It was an extremely happy Christmas. Having my mum, both my brothers and all my three chidren together was as great as it was rare.
We have been through the laptop in lost luggage discussion before. The problem is that my shoulders dislocate at the drop of a hat, and I travel without hand luggage to avoid an accident.
2011 is going to be a very important year for me. particularly the first quarter. A number of crucial events are going either to set me up financially for the rest of my life, or result in real distress and failure. At present I have reason to be very optimistic. I am also very absorbed in my life of Alexander Burnes, which I hope will help establish a serious academic reputation.
The Portuguese edition of Murder in Samarkand has sold unexpectedly well in Brazil. The translation of the Turkish edition has just been finished.
I hope to do a Wikileaks retrospective in the next couple of days. Just a quick thought on the case of the poor young gardener in Bristol. Of the Jill Dando case, long before Barry Bulsara’s succesful appeal I blogged that this appeared to be a miscarriage of justice in which the police had fitted up the local weirdo.
Despite not being enamoured of landlords in general, I fear the same dynamic is at work in Bristol, albeit Chris Jefferies is much more intellectually capable than Bulsara. My instinct is that the police have picked up on Jefferies for being camper than a boy scout jamboree and archer than Trajan.
Jefferies’ release on bail has me worried that there was nothing against him other than the “He’s a weird one, guv” instinct of some not very bright cop. The case needs to be closely watched as history shows that the powers of the police to make the evidence fit the suspect are considerable.
Suhayl, I broadly agree; but I think there has always been a problem with the teaching system: from David Copperfield to the Rainbow, the potential for brutality and exploitation both ways has always existed. I think because it’s been set up to reflect our military industrial complex (and because old people, who design these systems, have forgotten what it’s like to be young). In the 70’s teachers like John Holt & thinkers like Illich were arguing, from very different perspectives, that school should never be compulsory. Intellectually and emotionally I agree with them; practically I can see problems for children with hideous home lives who are only saved by ‘having’ to go to school.
Accepting the inevitability of school (children are now going be banged up for 18 years, I see, a fact which has received remarkably little attention), the question remains whether teaching is allowed to be an *enjoyable* experience for all concerned – and the answer, because of the artificially imposed constraints, pressures, and targets, is generally, no. No wonder the children are rebelling; there’s no sense or reason in it. But I feel for those terrified teachers: traumatised by having to be, as you say, the blunt and instruments of power.
Oh come on! Iraq, regardless of which heinous regime was in power, had an excellent record on female education in any case. Afghanistan was wrecked over several decades by the USSR and the Coalition of USA-Saudi Arabia-and-Pakistan. Now you go in and say, “we did this and we did that”. You created the blooming problem in the first place! You murder thousands of women and children in the creation of the problems then you murder thousands more in the ‘solution’ of that problem. Then you say, “Look what we did! We imperialists with our White Man’s Burden, freeing Brown Women all over the world from Nasty Brown men!”. It’s a very old song. It that the best you can do?
Here is a message from the real women of Afghanistan. Read it well:
http://www.rawa.org/index.php
!
Oh we have a silly pretend feminist here.
First off your statistics are bollocks.
Women were being educated under the taliban. There were Women’s schools. The white racist press just lied.
So take your 0%, and your 73% and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.
You % doesn’t help all the women who have been killed by the invasion.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan.
White men have always used the excuse of making brown peoples lives better as an excuse to invade, murder and turture brown people.
So pretend feminist, Do you think those helpless brown women need you to come murder their husbands, sons and brothers because they are to helpless and too brown to be able to educate themselves without such an intervention?
Do they need your white armies to gand rape them and strip search them, lock them in your prisons and torture chambers away from their husbands to teach them about western feminism and the women’s rights of white nations?
Take your womens rights with you to hell, and we will keep our own rights the Allah has given us in the Quran.
What silly white feminists don’t understand is women in Muslim Iraq and Afghanistan want food for their children, they dont want their husbands murdered, tortured or disapeared by the Americans.
They could not give a shit about what western feminists think they should want.
Dear All
It maybe a new year but the nutters are out in force early to ‘grab a bargain’.
“Craig Murray is a sex fascist”.
Can I see the tape or evidence instead of a cyber rant?
“He objectivises the Eastern European women in this posting. He does not mention any attribute except physical appearance. His notion of beauty is an oppressive stereotype”.
Maybe it was just a throw away comment which depicts and convenes the feeling and mood of a party.
“Craig Murray is pro-rape as shown by his defence of Julian Assange”.
Isn’t Assenge innocent until proven guilty? Pro rape charge rejected.
“Added to this he makes homphobic jokes about Chris Jefferies. He shows no interest in the actual victim – because she is a woman”.
Who shows no interest?
“This website is fascist and should be closed down”.
Craig Murray from my reading of his posts over a considerable period of time doesn’t fit the bill of a fascist.
Craig, you have upset people, keep going there is a good lad!
Yours sincerely
George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University
Aha, @”justice for women”, I spy an agenda! It is good to be honest about these things up front, I find, otherwise one can look like one is concocting astroturf opposition in order to advance other interests.
But do tell us about your womens’ rights group, and add a link to your website: you’ll find a lot of solidarity here with genuine feminists, though many here are of the anti-imperialist kind also.
@Arsalan – not all white feminists are silly. That would either be a racist, or sexist, statement, depending on your motivation. Naomi Klein for example is a white socialist, feminist and a lot of other things besides, but she’s also a smart cookie, and not at all silly.
Happy new year, everyone! And thank goodness we’ve got a new thread. The last one was getting out of hand.
New year, new thread, and how about we strive for a new attitude of peace and comradeship? I’m sure we can manage it.
Thanks to Arsalan and Suhayl for showing that is was the women of RAWA that made sure that shools existed before and during the Talibans reign, although somewhat clandestine.
To the issue of Isrels new found wealth and the rights over the seabed in the mediterranian, please find Adel’s paper, the only relevant paper I could trail up.
On page 67 you can clearly see that the map that was printed in the Independent, showing the border between Lebanon and Israel almost surrounding the gasfield, does not concure with the borderline drawn in the relevant paper.
http://www.un.org/Depts/los/nippon/unnff_programme_home/fellows_pages/fellows_papers/alsied_0506_libya.pdf
If parts of the field lies within Cyprus territorial waters, or that of Turkey, we can expect trouble from the word go.
and under communism in Kabul, women were doctors, teachers, engineers – just as they were far more free under Saddam’s reign in Iraq. By attacking both the West has increased the discrimination and violence it claims to hate. But everyone knows that, just as they all know the West funded the original Taliban extremists, in the guise of Hesb i Islami, instead of the moderate mujahedeen. I suppose, if you are encouraging people to kill each other in the name of a cause or ideology, what happens to them and who you leave in power afterwards are the least of your concerns.
“Silly pretend feminist”: obviously.
The only group calling “justice for women” i can find from googling is a UK based one which seems to do good work campaigning for the release of women who have e.g killed violent partners in self-defence.
There’s nothing about Craig or Julian Assange on their website though and i doubt the poster here has anything to do with them – likely one of the usual suspects playing the usual childish games.
oops last comment was me – forgot to put in name etc
@ Craig,
HAPPY NEW YEAR CRAIG AND ALL THE BEST TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY.
I am really concerned for you because I see that you are under serious attack:-
“Craig Murray is a sex fascist.
He objectivises the Eastern European women in this posting. He does not mention any attribute except physical appearance. His notion of beauty is an oppressive stereotype.
Craig Murray is pro-rape as shown by his defence of Julian Assange.
Added to this he makes homphobic jokes about Chris Jefferies. He shows no interest in the actual victim – because she is a woman.
This website is fascist and should be closed down.”
I am willing to provide free legal representation, not least because I don’t want anyone shutting down your allegedly fascist blog ?” being myself one of the regular contributors.
Now let’s see what kind of defence we can craft:-
Charge number 1: “He objectivises the Eastern European women in this posting. He does not mention any attribute except physical appearance. His notion of beauty is an oppressive stereotype.”
Advice: Please when you next post anything about Eastern European women, remove from your mind any physical image of them. This should help in not running the risk of writing as if the woman had a physical being and presence. If you do have an image of the subject in mind do not sustain one that is an oppressive stereotype.
Defence: “The defendant denies that he intentionally objectified the Eastern European women and shall state at trial why mentally he had to have an image of a woman in mind to bring forward the non-oppressive thoughts that he truly held when he expressed himself”
Charge number 2: “Craig Murray is pro-rape as shown by his defence of Julian Assange.”
Advice: Distinguish the actual charge against Assange from the charge that has been preferred.
Defence: ” The defendant states that the charge as framed is misconceived and shall rely on the following points at trial:-
i) The Swedish charge is: “He who lays hands on or by means of shooting from a firearm, throwing of stones, noise or in any other way harasses another person will be sentenced for harassment to fines or imprisonment for up to one year.”
ii) The option did exist for the authorities to advance a charge of rape as initially contemplated , but the factual circumstances did not sensibly so permit.
iii) Clearly, there is a distinction to be drawn between consensual sex and the actual act of forcefully and without consent penetrating an unwilling female.
Defence: ” The defendant states that the charge as advanced does not comport with the allegation leveled.”
Charge number 3: “Added to this he makes homphobic jokes about Chris Jefferies. He shows no interest in the actual victim – because she is a woman.”
Advice: This is a two pronged allegation. First the homophobic charge, then the want of compassion for a victim.
Defence: ” The defendant states that a joke involving a homosexual does not imply nor support the allegation that the individual making the joke is himself homophobic. As regards the want of an interest in the victim, the defendant repeats the defence as pleaded in reply to the second charge and states further that Ardin and her friend were not victims in circumstances as follows:-
i) The case made by Ardin suggests that the mind in operation making the charge is as disturbed as is it mischievous;
ii) It was Ardin who invited Assange to Sweden;
iii) Assange did not call the woman the next day after he had consensual sex with her;
iv) Assange’s condom may have broken or he had consensual unprotected sex with her ?” which are matters of fact to be detrmined by a tribunal of fact ?” and in either situation a charge of rape cannot be sustained;
v) A harassment charge is not a direct unequivocal charge of rape;
vi) Ardin appears not to be sure whether she was raped or not;
vii) In all the circumstanes of Ardin’s allegations it was four days later when the second lover calls the first that Ardin alledged that she was raped;
thus Murray asserts that in actuality on the facts so far known, it was Julian Assange who has been vilified and victimised and not his two accusers.
Charge number 4: “This website is fascist and should be closed down.”
Advice: Deny the charge.
Defence: ” The defendant avers that having regard for the forceful yet wholly unsubstantiated allegation of support of fascism, the only evidence of such posting to be found on the blog is by a femi-Nazi who has raised allegations that does not comport with any evidence to be found in the blog, save and except the femi-Nazi posting.”
You will note that I ignored the “sex fascist” reference, since it should easily be dismissed as frivolous and vexatious. Clearly, we who blog here regularly are convinced that you like sex, but have yet to be convinced that you are anything other than a “sex liberal”.
For democratic reasons is understood why non “sex liberals” are allowed to blog on this site, hence the true “sex fascist” sneaked in.
I believe that you have a sound defence Murray ?” and keep blogging all throughout 2011.
I so advise.
Courtenay Barnett ?” Barrister.
Re: Bristol gardener
She seems to have left the flat with the pizza, but without her coat, so that does indicate that she went to another flat in the same building, or maybe next door.
However, I agree that the landlord should not be treated like this.
@”justice for women”,
If I win Murray’s case, in any other matters that you may have, I can be retained – having myself argued many human rights cases. I remain willing to defend any genuine cause for any truly oppressed or needy litigant. Should you fit this category, I am willing to provide you with the address of my Chambers.
In future be cautious about making defamatory and/or unfounded allegations.
Courtenay: it’s interesting to respond, but – as with so many threats here – too early to prepare the legal papers 😉
Still, good response. Not sure about the femi-nazi stuff though: more likely he/she is just misguided, and perhaps hasn’t thought through the (feminist) consequences of supporting imperial power.
Mr. Barnett:
How silly it is for you to attempt to graft common law legal concepts onto the Swedish legal system.
Happy New Year, Larry. Was wondering where you’d got to – had been missing your considered and thoughtful input!
Happy New Year Craig – love to Nadira, Cameron, Emily and Jamie.
So Jon – when you take over this website, will it finally be a 911 truth site like infowars.com?
suhayle
O.K. I’ll come clean on this one Juniper is my creation.
He’s NOT W.Indian he is pure Zora Hurston you berk! Hurston was from the all black town of Eatonville in Fla. Her most famous work is Their Eyes Were Watching God but as a cultural anthropologist specializing in folklore she also wrote academic papers for one,Franz Boas.
Boas was the leading (Jewish) advocate of cultural pluralism in the US academia at that time. In other words Zora’s anti-racist credentials are impeccable.
Her essays bristle with comic irony and sensitivity re-the black condition in her time. Read How It Feels To Be Coloured Me or My People Oh My People or The Characteristics of Negro Expression or Zora’s magical autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road and I guarantee you’ll be awestruck by the quality of the writing. Like Morrison’s it just simmers with black cadence and rhythms.
Excuse me getting all “essentialist” but as both writers would tell you describing racial experience in the way they do would only be hampered by allegiance to post-structural sensibilities of little relevance to the study of black art forms.
If you weren’t so up your own backside re-your own literary merits you would know that my MA research paper was on Toni Morrison who is regarded by many as the greatest black writer of the current age. She won the Nobel Prize in 1993.
Like Hurston she is in a black tradition of artists and writers for whom the prime vocation is to be able to speak and write on behalf of their people.
Morrison has been quite explicit re-her black cultural advocacy agenda.
Hurston was necessarily-writing as she was in the 1930s when her people were still excluded from full citizenship rights-more oblique re-this cultural project but there is little doubt that she was she was making a timely cultural intervention on behalf of her people.
Hurston sought to convince Americans that African-Americans were playing key roles in the nation’s history though they were simultaneously being denied full citizenship. She wanted to demonstrate that her people were only too aware of the discrepancy between their contributions and their rewards, that they knew the significance of the sweeping events in which they were participating like WW1 and the great migrations.
Circumstances may have dictated that Hurston needed to don her comic mask in order to make these things clear to her fellow citizens but she did this with a will. Real interpretive effort to read her double-voiced stories is richly rewarding especially if one seeks to understand Morrison’s serio-comic art.
Like Hurston who was accused in her time of portraying her characters as “minstrels” Morrison has been accused by some critics as depicting hers as “freaks”.
These are gross misrepresentations based on lack of understanding re-the black aesthetic and in particular the preference for grotesque forms of characterisation and the use of humour to make powerful political points.
I had hoped I could use “Juniper” in the same way as Hurston used characters like Janie Crawford in Their Eyes but it appears to have been quite lost on you. Perhaps you’re right-I am a frustrated writer and if Juniper is anything to go by I must be a poor misunderstood one too-BOO, HOO!
This is from Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine(1934) where she famously compares Booker T Washington’s form of race leadership with that of W.E.B.DuBois. Here a bitter chorus of anonymous folk voices accords priority to Washington’s achievement:
Ain’t never been two sho’nuff smart mens in dese United States-Teddy Roosevelt and Booger T Washington. Nigger so smart he et at the White House. Built uh great big ole school with uh thousand dollars, maybe mo’.Teddy wuz allus sendin’ fuh ‘im tuh he’p ‘im run de Guv’ment. Yeah man, dat’s de way it ’tis-niggers think up eve’thing good and de white folks steal it from us. Dass right.
As for the racism charge well that’s typically quite wide of the mark. I discovered Toni Morrison’s books when I was working in Kenya. I have also worked in Egypt.
I have nothing but profound respect for the achievements of black Americans. Travel in Africa and literature like the above taught me that respect.
Isn’t about time you grew up?
My view is 9/11 comment is welcome on the site, both for the official story and for the various alternative theories. Generally people should go to the 9/11 thread if they want to start a discussion, but of course if it comes up naturally then I think it’s okay – but even then excessive discussion perhaps could be continued to the other thread.
Will this site become a “truth” site? Well, self-evidently not: Craig is supportive of the official story, as you know, and he is well within his rights to do so. I see no evidence that he intends to change his mind.
Incidentally I don’t intend to ‘take over’ anything – but I have suggested some anti-spam mechanisms and some gentle moderation. I don’t advocate censoring your views on 9/11, if that’s what you’re worried about.
with all that ‘black cultural sensibility’ it must have been tough when the great leader was feted by the Ku Klux Klan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04QolIvfQEw
Memories, memories. And memories of the fact that on July 6th, this poster was declared unwelcome here for ‘persistent anti-semitism and holocaust denial’. Not a good basis for ‘comic portrayals’ of other races, though it must be tempting to try and fool some of the people, some of the time.
@Steelback – I had hoped my intervention above could act as an entente cordiale between you and other posters: FWIW, I think it still can. Suhayl is open and honest with people here, but you’re admitting to sock-puppetry as well as carrying on an abusive tirade.
Your evident powers of logic and learning are fully wasted on any forum such as this, since you usually hide them under a barrage of adversarial nonsense. But you could change tack: why not tell us where you’re from, where you’re based now, and then offer something on topic? (I’m afraid your Juniper creation just came across as a mockery of a black slave – too subtle, perhaps?)
If you like, why not try AB’s questions? He is supportive of your criticism of the ‘Frankfurt School agenda’, and there are some difficult issues to answer in there. I’ve had a go, and am still hoping AB will continue the conversation.
Go on, Jon, you have a go. Suhayl, Richard Robinson, Angrysoba, dreoilin: they’ve all manned the defences. If you have moderation on your side, cool.
By the way, I notice in an earlier post that you said ‘if a woman’s place is in the home…’. Sure you didn’t mean to imply that a gender has a place, or that anyone else should decide what it is?
If you’re someone who thinks that an “official story” exists, then you probably lean towards trutherism.
Yards and yards in the press and hours and hours on the news channels about Joanna Yeates but pretty well nil on these Palestinians whose deaths took place on the first two days of the New Year.
The IOF thugs are doing well. One Palestinian death per day is their aim. They felt ‘threatened’ by a bottle and note how the Zionists at the BBC are implying that Jawaher had a pre-exisiting condition. She was asking for it by being around when tear gas was beind used in other words. The ZBC reporting is outrageous. Instead of ‘Israelis say, we have ‘doctors say’ this time. Perhaps the ‘doctors’ are Israeli.
2 January 2011 Last updated at 11:38
Palestinian shot by Israelis at West Bank checkpoint.
A Palestinian man has been shot dead after trying to attack Israeli troops at a checkpoint near the West Bank city of Nablus, the Israeli army and Palestinian officials say.
The man, in his 20s, tried to attack troops with a bottle when he was refused permission to pass through the checkpoint, they said.
The incident happened early on Sunday.
On Friday, a Palestinian woman died after inhaling gas fired by Israeli troops at a protest in Bilin.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said the contents of the glass bottle were not known.
“The soldiers apparently felt threatened,” she added.
‘Cover-up’
The lawyer of the woman who died on Friday has accused the military of a cover-up.
“Once again the army is covering up the actions of its men, instead of apologising and conducting a serious inquiry,” Michael Sfard told Israel’s army radio after the military announced an investigation into the death of Jawaher Abu Rahmeh.
It is not clear how Ms Abu Rahmeh died as tear gas is not meant to be lethal.
Doctors say the gas can kill on rare occasions if a victim has a pre-existing condition.
Although some reports said Ms Abu Rahmeh had suffered from asthma since childhood, her parents are reported to have said she was healthy and did not have the respiratory condition.
Rateb Abu Rahmeh, a doctor and a spokesman for the Bilin protesters, said she had a “weak immune system”, the Associated Press news agency reports.
Dr Mohammed Eideh, who treated Ms Abu Rahmeh in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, said she died of “respiratory failure and then cardiac arrest” caused by tear gas inhalation. He said he did not know if she had a pre-existing condition.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12104336}
No, just recognising the power dynamic behind one particular version. Anyway, I am not going to get drawn into a conversation on the topic – will you wish everyone here a happy new year instead?
Night all.
Justice for Women….what a joke. Fuck off whoever you are
Craig Murray is spot on about the police predilection for easy investigations which end with the “fitting up” of people like Barry George.
This type of police investigation came after a long period where hitherto we had got used to the idea of long expensive investigations which finally uncovered a serial killer who had been highly mobile rather than coming from the same community as the victims.
Around the time of the advent of Blair we started to see police investigations that found and convicted “killers” like Roy Whiting, Sian Jenkins, Barrie George and Ian Huntley rather quickly.
The trouble was that these easy-to-find murderers often turned out not to be the killers at all. Police went out of their way to link these people with the place where the victim’s body was found by planting evidence.
The Huntley case seems to glare out at anyone who doesn’t trust BBC reporting and carries out the slightest research of their own as another in a series of horrible miscarriages of justice.
This was the case that the Blair government used to justify introducing the expensive CRB check system.
The first link:
http://www.justjustice.org/index.html
presents evidence that suggests the girls’ bodies were actually found off the A142 at a place called Warren Hill between Soham and Newmarket. Also that the girls were abducted from the War Memorial on the outskirts of Soham and had been seen by witnesses prior to this in Soham High Street some time after they are supposed to have been murdered in Huntley’s house.
A taxi driver reported seeing a car on the A142 driving extremely erratically with the driver attempting to snatch a mobile phone from one of two children in the rear seats.
Needless to say none of these witnesses were called at the Old Bailey trial.
Those of us who remember the case know that Huntley, the evidently perfectly sane young man who told TV reporters and police that he may have been the last person to speak to the girls when they were alive was held in Rampton for two months prior to the trial and that reporters were forbidden from reporting on his obviously drugged state when he finally appeared in court.
The second link is to the late Joe Vialls who surmised that the Lakenheath site for the girls’ bodies suggested it was highly likely the murderer/s came from inside the US airbase. He argues that Blair’s involvement in an unpopular war on US coat-tails necessitated the fitting-up of Huntley.
http://codshit.blogspot.com/2003/12/soham-murder-trial-update.html
Hurry a lot of the Vialls stuff is disappearing fast since his demise.