The Guardian has released yet another vicious man-hater on the world to pontificate on the DSK case. This one is called Zoe Williams.
Ms Williams actually thinks that it is a bad thing that:
“when a charge of sexual assault is made, everything the accuser says is picked over for inconsistency and improbability”
You do seriously have to question whether Ms Williams world view is not lacking in sane objectivity, if she can write that without self-reflection. No, of course Ms Williams, we should just immediately put the accused in a hell-hole for seven years without questioning the evidence of the accuser. Who could possibly have the temerity to examine the evidence?
Ms Williams brings in another red herring – the accuser’s immigration status. She quotes a Ms Dustin as saying “rape victims can have insecure immigration status … and they can still be raped”.
Of course that is true. It is also irrelevant. It is not Ms Diallo’s immigration status which is relevant. It is the fact that she admits that she lied on her application – and lied about being raped. Of course that calls her credibility into question. It damn well should.
Listen, Ms Williams. I expect I have done a great deal more, in the real world, to help asylum seekers than you have. I have given evidence for asylum seekers in dozens of cases. I have appeared at their tribunals. I am working on three cases right now. I have never lost a case at appeal. I have organised campaigns which have prevented two last minute deportations – one stopped literally on the way to the airport.
If there is one thing hated by those of us who genuinely have put in the hard graft to help real asylum seekers, it is false, lying asylum applicants who poison the minds of the public and administrators of the system against those in real need. Butt out, Williams. You have no idea what you are talking about.
There are other lies. Ms Diallo lied about her number of children to claim social security benefit, lied about her income to get state housing, lied about very large sums paid into her bank accounts. The same applies – defending welfare provision is not helped by benefit cheats. Yet we should not question her credibility?
There is other nonsense in Williams’ article. She claims that the discrepancy in Diallo’s account is only about whether she went to the next room to collect her things, but actually it is about a full missing hour in which she lied about where she was – lied repeatedly and for no obvious reason, not just in the immediate aftermath when, had she been attacked, she would have been in shock.
I could go on, but I won’t. The final thing worth noting is the quite amazing claim that:
Diallo’s credibility – which is undermined here by hints about her trustworthiness in a range of situations rather than any evidence about her sexual behaviour – comes under so much more scrutiny than Strauss-Kahn’s.
What absolute nonsense! We have been treated to mound upon mound of stuff about DSK’s past sexual encounters, his sexual harassment of women who have worked for him (of which I strongly disapprove), a previous allegation of assault, his use of prostitutes. Not least by the Guardian. To pretend that Diallo has had her past unpicked more than Strauss Kahn is another example of the distorted world view of those who see women as nothing but victims.
The Sheridan case, the DSK case and the Assange case have all brought to the fore the true ugliness of sex negative feminism and man hatred, and the extent to which they made inroads into our culture and society just as insidious as the right wing propaganda of the Murdochs. They have also shown how those right wing forces can so easily hijack stupid blinkered man haters to the right wing agenda.
Eddie Truman,
Explain where the misogyny lies.
I guess we have to face up to the fact that Eddie Truman is a gender feminist proxy.
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Meanwhile Andrew McKillop at Market Oracle has written a Keiser-esque piece, The End of the False Flag Wars.
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http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article29544.html
After a bit of googling, I see we have to face up to the fact that the right-on Zoe Williams is an untalented wealthy lefty-because-it’s-fashionable who went to expensive private school then Oxford and who uses private medicine http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/2009/03/zoe-williams-goes-private.html
and who spends her time polishing her own wikipedia entry
http://www.septicisle.info/2007/03/zoe-williams-watch-those-wikipedia.html
Madam Miaow
On the precise translation of the conversation with her boyfriend in jail, i really don’t know. But I am confused by the description of fulani as an obscure language – it isn’t at all.
Thank you, Craig – that septicisle link had me in stitches.
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Busy little beaver, indeed 😉
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P.S. If you care about privacy, instead of google try:
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http://s1-eu.startingpage.com
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It doesn’t record your ip and you have the option of viewing sites via a proxy.
“I honestly can’t think of any real reason why Fulanis would need political asylum from Conakry at all.”
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Perhaps because she (Nafissatou Diallo) suffered FGM and wanted to save her daughter from it. Perhaps because her husband was dead and she was not in control of her own fate as a widow with a young daughter. Do you know that she didn’t need political asylum? Or are you just guessing?
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“But I am confused by the description of fulani as an obscure language – it isn’t at all.”
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But you’re not suggesting that New York is littered with fulani translators, presumably.
This is a very unpleasant thread. I’m not surprised that Technicolour left.
“The Murdoch press could even whip them up against the most liberal Justice Secretary since Roy Jenkins, Kenneth Clarke – who is a very decent man indeed.”
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Except in this case it was the Murdoch New York Post that accused this woman of being a prostitute. Which is the reason she is suing them and the reason she has waived anonymity and is giving interviews now. Oddly enough, Craig already suggested she was a prostitute when he said some time back (in response to someone asking “why would she agree to have have sex with DSK?”) and he replied “$300” or “$300 is my guess”.
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“The fact that the establishment can use sexual allegations against any man they find dangerous”
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Sounds like you have already made up your mind about who’s guilty in this case. And it’s not DSK.
Me, I’m waiting to see if there’s a trial.
It’s regrettable that Zoe Williams made ill-considered comments in her article that have infuriated Craig – to make some ill-considered comments. It doesn’t matter what the alleged victim may or may not have done, if she has been harmed then the fact that the assailant is a member of the elite is also beside the point – in theory. In reality, there is one law for them and another one for us. Just look at the expenses scandal. Ordinary people, confused by the complexities of the benefits system, could receive money that they are not entitled to. Once caught, try saying that it was an unfortunate error and just pay the money back. Even in the unlikely event that they were able to scrape the refund together, the likelihood is that they would still be prosecuted.
Very little effort was made to find enough evidence of wrong doing to prosecute many MPs. In fact, for the previous Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, to claim that her main home was her sister’s spare bedroom is laughable.
There may be conspiracies involved in DSK’s or Assange’s cases and the fact that once accused it’s hard to recover one’s reputation if the charge is false and malicious is unjust. If the DSK case has been brought to discredit him, and he is exonerated, then the accuser will deserve to be prosecuted for her false accusation. However, it is a high profile case and it does seem that the legal process is being undermined by the media.
As for misandry and other reverse bigotry towards men by women, in a democracy where 50% of the electorate are male it does seem unfair that there is a disproportionate number of men in high office or in top jobs. I think the world would be a better place if more women were in these positions.
Jon wrote: “I agree it is galling to see people laughing about a serious assault, and there is definitely a double-standard at play. But to her credit, one lady at the end says that no-one would be laughing if the man cut off his wife’s breast.”
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Actually, she ‘questions’ the morality; failing to see the obvious, her feeble challenge is unanimously rejected with further derisive laughter, of which she follows suit. So no credit there.
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Jon wrote: “There is a casual misandry at play here, and it is probably a reflection of the media-lite version of women’s rights, and perhaps also a silly part of a backlash against the persistence of male dominance.”
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That’s like saying: The Zionists demonstrate a ‘silly backlash’ to the persistent memory of the holocaust to their forefathers, with casual ethnic cleansing. Either they are right, or they are wrong. And your downplaying of the revelation of misandry, is either equivocation, or moral cowardice.
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Jon wrote: “That all said, I wouldn’t take this clip too seriously. I mean, it has bloody Sharon Osborne on it – who is previously on record as crapping in a box and sending it to someone she didn’t like. Why on earth do they invite her to anything these days?”
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Why on earth? Because she is a deranged feminist, and that’s popular with women infected with Marxist-Feminism. If it weren’t, she wouldn’t be invited, as she has no other ‘virtues’.
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Jon wrote: “So, it’s not exactly a serious treatment of the topic. In any case, we’ve all laughed at things that are horrific, and that doesn’t make us bad people. We sometimes laugh at things that are so distant that they don’t matter to us, even though to the people concerned they’re horrific.”
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Remind me what happened to the careers of Richard Keys and Andy Gray? Did you hear about Jethro coming home from the pub along the railway line? He found a woman tied to the rails; took her home, and made passionate love to her all night long. When asked by the incredulous barman the following night, whether he got a blow-job; Jethro replied: “No… I couldn’t find her head!”
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Jon wrote: “I know for damn sure that if I sustained such an injury, none of the women I know would have a laugh about it. I should think that would go for most women, in fact – which means that the video doesn’t at all set out what the original poster presumably wanted to prove, which was that all women are cruel and misandrist.”
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You should get out more often from your mother’s boudoir. Do you think CBS advertise to their respective audiences: “Only fucked up misandric cunts need apply, normal women stay away please.”?
Damn you, Craig Murray, for making me agree with dreoilin.
Is there a Mr Zoe Williams?
‘And to smear the word ‘feminist’ with this kind of language is wrong on another level’
No it isn’t Technicolour.It is quite clear from the links Craig gives that expensively educated Zoe Williams isn’t brain-dead. However the article extruded by Williams onto the pages of the Grauniad (and which prompted our host to blow a gasket) is sloppy, ill-informed and reeking of malice. What therefore possessed Ms Williams to produce such guff ? Her self declared feminism by any chance ?
Dreoilin,
But we know a bit about what she said on her asylum application and there is no evidence at all that it related to FGM. FGM is much more common in East Africa, and North Africa, than in West Africa. Fulani is spoken right across the savannah belt of sub-Sahelian Africa, by many millions of people – it is a huge language group. There are, indeed, plenty of perfectly adequate Fulani translators in the United States.
The Fulani are not a persecuted group in Guinea Conakry – if anything the reverse. But as someone who has lived and worked much of his life in Africa, I was objecting to the trite description of it as a hell-hole. That is not applicable to Guinea-Conakry at all.
I asked if she has a partner because her Wikipedia entry says …’where she wrote columns on a variety of subjects, and a diary about being a single woman in London’ yet in 2009 she writes that she is pregnant again and ‘went home and said to C, “Do you think I’ve put on weight?” He eyed me suspiciously. It is unlike me to ask him a question so direct, but it is not unusual for me to ask a question to which there is no correct answer, and then get incredibly angry. (Last time I was pregnant, I said: “Do you think men find obese women unattractive as a biological prophylactic against the time-waste of shagging someone who’s already pregnant?”)’
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/13/anti-natal-zoe-williams
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If she is such a master at editing Wikipedia, you would think she would update the entry which is skimpy anyway.
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Incidentally I don’t think her writing which is mostly opinion adds much to the fount of knowledge.
We can do without the crude jokes from Jimmy Giro.
The link to Liberal England, highlighting Ms William’s decision to go private when she was up the duff, is interesting.
Her wikipedia entry says she lives in ‘Camberwell, South London’. This means that, had she used NHS ante natal care then, she would have entered an environment where both the midwives and the mums to be would have been, overwhelmingly, black.
Is Ms Williams’ incoherent defence of Ms Diallo her way of repressing her unacknowledged racism ?
I think we should be told.
“We can do without the crude jokes from Jimmy Giro.”
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Nope… couldn’t find her funny bone.
Pingback: Craig Murray » Blog Archive » Thoughts on Feminism
Have read Zoe article, she is not my favourite Grauniad journalist, I have come away with the thought ‘sour puss’ in my mind, but I would not call it ugly souled feminismn, there are some far more testi harpie’s about who even turn woman off with some of the bile they write.
Although I have not had Craigs experience of being hounded by the media with sexual connotatiopns of a personal nature, bliss, I still find this post distatefull and arbitrary, because its a moving case still going on. If I was french, this man would not get my cross, regardless of how many Rothchilds he knows or schoozes with. And if one was a high powered, apparently lechering man in his position and standing, I would not make out with Ms. Diallo, however desperate i felt. If there is anything behind his behaviour, the rumours of other woman, too late but still valid imho, and if he regards chamber maids as ‘vogelfrwei’, as long as one leave a few hundred dollars, then I hope he gets hammered for it.
I love woman for all their differences and as they come, for all their attributes, good or bad, I would not want to be without them, but I do not regard myself as a feminst, we are different and thats fine with moire. Inequalities still exist and it is picked up by those who can afford to pick at it, who are not dependent on their jobs for a living, don’t have to stoop to please the boss, the Zoe Williams of this world.
I think this is the most unfortunate piece you wrote Craig, It is not the issue of overbearing feminsismn but the choice of words you use to express some of their tedious bandwaggoning, that has turned me off.
leaves one point to make. What will you write, after this premature ejacu-provocative post, if DSK is found guilty to a certain degree, if a french challenge and court case shatters his obscure pseudo presidential purity, and when feminsit turn on you in droves?
So if you go to a minor public school and Oxford and use private medicine this damns you and your argument but if you go to grammar school and Durham this simply reinforces your right to slur feminists and feminism? Where was Strauss-Kahn educated? Do you think he uses private medicine? Do I hear the sound of a barrel being scraped?
One can try and qualify this attack on feminism as much as one likes but ‘sex negative feminism’ is not feminism, it is misandry. A perfectly good word and far less clumsy, so why use the word ‘feminism’ at all?
Jimmy:
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You’re harping on about Nazism again, which is not in the same league at all, and demeans your position. I think I can invoke Godwin’s law and claim my five pounds from you!
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Like your New Labour examples, you choose a woman you don’t like, call her a feminist, and use this ‘evidence’ to demonstrate how odious all feminists are. It’s an incredibly flimsy approach partly because you choose women who aren’t feminists, and you then go on to assume that all feminists are the same! Sharon Osbourne is not a feminist in the sense that Naomi Klein is, or Germaine Greer, or the examples that Suhayl gave. Osbourne is loud and shouty, but her traits are overwhelmingly masculine – and I should be most surprised if she has a history of fighting for women’s rights, or a demonstrable history of feminist political thought.
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I am guessing: I think she is invited onto talk shows because she is loud and shouty. She also has an interesting and colourful rock’n’roll history, and so is presumably has plenty of good material for a empty-headed sleb-obsessed audience. Feminist indeed…
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> Remind me what happened to the careers of Richard Keys and Andy Gray?
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Glad you raised it. I forget which one is which, but one of them made some sexist remarks that were caught on a non-live camera – “did you smash it” in reference to a girl they were discussing. In normal circumstances he would probably have received a written warning from his employer, but there were other factors at play. Partly they are in the public eye, and so the broadcaster wants to be seen to be “doing the right thing”, even if it is an over-reaction. But also, I believe one of them was suing News International for (allegedly) hacking his phone, so it is possible he was pushed out of spite.
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Anyway, not sure what you wanted to prove out of that saga. I don’t think there is much mileage in claiming it is a Marxist-Feminist plot to rid the world of football commentators! Equally I am not sure how your necrophilia joke is relevant, but whatever. Mildly amusing, but don’t give up the day-job.
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> You should get out more often from your mother’s boudoir.
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I wonder whether you are sometimes offensive to people in order to push people away from the discussion and win by default (as I sometimes suspect with one other commentator here). But since I think you’re a bit obsessed, I find it hard to take offence at this at all. As has been mentioned by other folks here, your attitude to people who want to engage with your ideas is sneering and condescending, and doesn’t do your views any credit whatsoever.
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Do I think CBS specifically want misandrist women on their talk-shows? No, I don’t. As I say, I think the clip is illustrative of a media-lite version of women’s rights, which mocks men as evidence of female power, when of course the path of true political and professional equality has a seriously long way to go. I think there is a great deal more hate in evidence in the scroll-text before and after the clip, which appears to have been added onto the video by someone who hates women a great deal.
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Anyway, I don’t think you answered my last part well at all. Put another way, if you sustained a serious physical injury at the hands of a woman, do you think that all the women you know would sit around laughing about it? I am pretty certain this is unlikely!
Jon wrote: “if you sustained a serious physical injury at the hands of a woman, do you think that all the women you know would sit around laughing about it? I am pretty certain this is unlikely!”
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No I don’t. Because ‘all the women you know’ are voting selfishly, with familiarity, to ingratiate themselves with you; whereas all the women infected with Marxist-Feminism, ‘that you know’, vote for policy that is misandric to all men.
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Think how Ozzy Osbourne feels when seeing his wife deliver such misandry? No wonder he permanently bombed; probably on the advice of his divorce lawyer.
This is, perhaps, the downside to an adversarial justice system ? The two teams cherrypick their favourite facts, and it becomes hard to see that we have any choice except to line up behind one story or the other depending on which of our buttons they push.
I agree that the misandry on the clip would make any of the women’s husbands feel like an outsider. I’d certainly offer a piece of my mind, though I don’t think the attitudes you’ve witnessed are grounds for divorce.
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But your main response leaves me baffled, I’m afraid, though I would like to understand what you mean. I don’t understand the purpose of the quotes around ‘all the women you know’ either. In what way are the women I know, or the women you know, voting selfishly? Do you think that 99% of women would not be horrified if they heard that a man they knew personally sustained a serious injury at the hands of a woman?
I should be interested in a response to the Keys/Gray issue as well, Jimmy. I suspect you didn’t know about the hacking angle – that one is courtesy of Private Eye. It’s fine if you hadn’t heard about it, but you may wish to rethink that particular part of your argument, given the new facts to hand (as I hope I’d do, if you were to supply pertinent new facts).
Just thought, Craig Murray, but can you ever debate the issue of feminism without referring to personalised and awful language like “ugly-souled feminists”?
When it comes to rape allegation it’s not about getting to the truth or looking at the evidence it’s about rendering the woman powerless and destroying her credibility.
And thats what you fail to understand as you’re clouded by your own chauvinism and misogyny to think clearly about this without throwing personalised and apolitical insults at women who dare question the way rape victims are treated and when the accused happens to be someone who is worshipped as some great progressive dude. And these progressives can do no wrong, can they?!
HarpyMarx,
Yes I can, if I want to, but I find the occasional bit of meaningless abuse hurled at your target helps to grab their attention. With the serenely self-righteous you have to shock them into listening.
But sometimes it is getting to the truth which does damage the woman’s crdibility – that is the problem with the Diallo case.
Jon wrote: “Glad you raised it. I forget which one is which, but one of them made some sexist remarks that were caught on a non-live camera – “did you smash it” in reference to a girl they were discussing. In normal circumstances he would probably have received a written warning from his employer, but there were other factors at play. Partly they are in the public eye, and so the broadcaster wants to be seen to be “doing the right thing”, even if it is an over-reaction. But also, I believe one of them was suing News International for (allegedly) hacking his phone, so it is possible he was pushed out of spite.”
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I didn’t know that, but then many of the M-Fs baying for their heads wouldn’t have known, or cared, about that detail either.
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The point of the comparison should be obvious, their faux pas was deemed excessive, with demands of their sacking; whereas Sharon Osbourne’s ghoulish display, along with all the other ‘women’ on the show panel and audience, warranted not a fillip.
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In Nazi Germany, they made the Jews non-citizens, before they persecuted them.
Well, I’ve acknowledged there is a double standard, but I don’t think that particular case is as important as you want it to be. Would still like to hear a straight answer to my much more important question.
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Still unimpressed with the Nazi comparisons, which are just silly. If I got my fiver for each time, I could make a fortune out of you!
Jon wrote: “Do you think that 99% of women would not be horrified if they heard that a man they knew personally sustained a serious injury at the hands of a woman?”
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Clearly the CBS clip showed exactly that, a straight consensus of glee at the thought of male mutilation.
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You do not want to recognise this fact, and the women in your life are quite happy to ingratiate themselves to you by indulging you with your delusion that they are made of sugar and spice and all things not misandric. It is this quality of pretending to be humane for the sake of placating the men in their lives, which makes Marxist-Feminism an act of betrayal of all the good things we used to regard as womanly; indeed it is the betrayal of heterosexual love itself.