I learn the interesting news that David Aaronovitch tweeted to Joan Smith and Jenny Jones that I am:
“an angry and dangerous man who could as easily be on the far right as the far left”.
I had no idea I was on the far left, though I suppose it is a matter of perspective, and from where Mr Aaronovitch stands I, and a great many others, look awfully far away to the left. I don’t believe you should bomb people for their own good, I don’t believe the people of Palestine should be crushed, I don’t believe the profit motive should dominate the NHS, I think utilities and railways were better in public ownership, I think education should be free. I guess that makes me Joseph Stalin.
But actually I am very flattered. Apparently I am not just angry – since the invasion of Iraq and the banker bailouts everybody should be angry – but “dangerous”. If I can be a danger to the interests represented by a Rupert Murdoch employee like Aaronovitch, I must have done something right in my life. I fear he sadly overrates me; but it does make me feel a little bit warmer, and hold my head that little bit higher.
who are pathologically obsessed with it to the extent that they think everything that happens in the world revolves around it in a kind of arachnoid fashion
Do you believe it does not?
It is sort of an “obsessive” disorder with the rest of the world, whom think otherwise.
What a load of tosh? Have you checked out the US elections lately? Ever noticed the ziofuckwit land flag next to The US flag?
The unholy combination of the US imperial muscle and supremacist zeal of the ziofukcwits turning the twenty first century into the year zero of the Muslim cull of the planet that so far has effectively spread war from Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Libya, to Syria, and beyond does not exist, millions of dead Muslims, displaced Muslims, maimed Muslims do not exist (we don’t do body count) and anyone whom thinks otherwise they are antisemtic conspiracy theorist!
“….@Mary
I agree there Harriet. I have no time for Greenstein but was merely using that article of his to illustrate Aaronovitch’s views.
Steve Cook. It is not ‘anti Semitic’ to criticize a cruel Occupier. The very strong Israel lobby in this country and in the US have been clever in getting that label across….”
Mary
I fully agree with your views vis a vis the concerted action of Israel and the USA.
however, i have seen over thle last week a pattern of propoganda and misinformation. It has more or less taken the form of:
“Assange is a rapist”
“Anyone who would efend Assange is a rape apologist”
“Assange is an oddball/paranoid/egotistical/(insert your character assassination of choice here)”
“Defenders of assange are conspiracy theorists and so are also, odballs”
“Defenders of assange are obsessed with Israel and so are anti semitic”.
Have you noticed something Mary?
Nowhere is there any mention of American atrocities as outlined in cablegate.
Whenever I have tried to bring up those issues on any of the Guardian comnetns ections, they have been deleted.
However, any number of both reasonable and raving comments on any of the above issues I have listed are being allowed through.
Nootice a pattern Mary?
Thanks for that document Mark G. and that great poem Nexus. Mary’s points about SO10 are duly noticed, I did expect to find our ramblings over his possible escape here, from his solitary embassy confinement, on their briefing papers, what else have they to go by as a basis for their increasingly mad agenda.
To tie Iran into the Assange affair, the work of many zio fascists appearing like flies on shit, is just the latest hysteric twist in this ping pong match. Surprising that they can’t establish a direct link to the devil, cause they would if they could.
The FourCorners doumentary has been pulled from anywhere on the interent.
Surprise, surprise.
Scratch that.
It’s still to be found on the four corners site
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/07/19/3549280.htm
I’m going to scrape it off their site in case it gets pulled completely
“Nowhere is there any mention of American atrocities as outlined in cablegate.
“Whenever I have tried to bring up those issues on any of the Guardian comnetns ections, they have been deleted.”
Same here. My comment on the DailyMail site — regarding the smothering of the topic of US war crimes, with all this “He’s a rapist!” “No, he’s not!” — was not allowed through.
That piece by Philip Sherwell in the Telegraph! Keeping to the doctrine that ‘Israel’s problem with Iran is the world’s problem’ has long been UK policy, and now they are pinning Ecuador on to this. Had someone else granted Julian Assange asylum, they would have pinned them on instead.
Iran is no threat whatsoever to the US and the UK – any more than Afghanistan or Iraq were. We are getting a long-term build-up to another war, once again using utterly fake reasons. This is not a side issue to the persecution of Julian Assange. Nor of course are Afghanistan and Iraq, but unfortunately the Wikileaks effort hasn’t had much success so far.
Meanwhile UK politicians and journalists keep ever so quiet about the size of the Israeli nuclear arsenal – not to mention the fact that Israeli security companies ‘protect’ nuclear installations in the US, both civil (power stations) and military (nuclear weapons). If that’s not scary, what is?
PS Josh Treviño has taken his position on the ‘faster, please!’ wing, à la Michael Ledeen.
OT. But just what the doctor ordered:
.
Clap! Attilla the Stockbroker reveals Prince Harry’s Knob. Should go viral. Not of course in any clinical sense, you understand http://bit.ly/PkIAqK
@Jonangus Mackay – Was Prince Harry circumcised by a rabbi, like his father Prince Charles was?
Re. Arthur’s post, at 3:13pm. See what I mean? This is exactly the sort of thing to which I was referring. It doesn’t even have anything to do with Palestine/Israel, let alone Wikileaks/Assange/Manning/US wars, etc.
Quite agree. And with Steve Cook’s remarks on same.
Steve Cook, I wouldn’t worry about the ABC pulling the Assange piece. Every episode is archived and available for viewing since 2008.
.
If people think the ABC piece was good, they should really check out: sbs.com.au/dateline/
It makes the ABC look like Fox news 😉
WE would do well to remember too that Bradley Manning is a UK Citizen:
http://blog.ukfriendsofbradleymanning.org/
CheebaCow, thanks so much – that is a superb channel. Check out Wikileaks’s Syria Files – go to 05:00 mins into the recording, as before that, it’s mike testing, etc.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1666258/WikiLeaks-publishes-2m-emails-from-Syrian-official
http://wikileaks.org/syria-files/
And as Wikileaks in releasing The Syria Files as we speak, here’s a view on the Syrian situation, by John Ward, of ‘The Slog’ website (which describes itself as, ‘Enhanced Bollocks Deconstruction’):
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/syria-a-brief-heads-up-on-whos-massacring-who/
Suhayl, yeah SBS in general, but Dateline in particular is pretty much the best news source on TV from anywhere I have seen. They constantly show reports about important issues I have never heard of, and always from the perspective of the local people. Little weight is given to government lines.
More torture revelations, an Iranian diplomat in Iraq kidnapped from 2007 till 2009, along with 4 others was tortured by the Americans, endured amongst other terrors -holes bored through his feet and shins with an electric drill.
And remember folks, they’re the good guys in this the new century of American fascism
“The Iranian diplomatic mission that the US stormed was in Arbil (Hewler), the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and had been representing Tehran’s interests in Iraqi Kurdistan since 1992. US forces arrested and detain five Iranian diplomats without charges and ransacked the Iranian mission taking all the Iranian diplomatic files they could get their hands on, including the office computers. Aside from the Iranians, KRG officials have also acknowledged that US forces stole the mission’s files. The US government claimed it was acting on behalf of Iraq, but both the Iraqi federal government and KRG rejected this outright.”
http://williambowles.info/2012/08/25/the-british-siege-of-the-ecuadorian-embassy-dj-vu-anglo-american-disregard-for-international-law-by-mahdi-darius-nazemroaya/
The U.S. and its ruling corporations are like some sort of mortally wounded vulture, sucking on a putrid bone, shreiking at those desiring nothing more than to put it out of its misery.
Rant and wail as we will, our only recourse is to prevent in this country such governments who support this sort of thing from forming ever again;
That means no more party politics, instead independent candidates and high turnover of MPs – no incumbent member can stand repeatedly for a constituency. A ‘new’ parliament should be just that, there should not be any remnant of the old. Then no such thing as a ‘safe seat’ for any party to dole out to their fellow ideologically crippled monomaniacal cronies. Combinations of political representatives directed and coerced to act in concert – political parties – are by their nature a conspiracy. Fifty or so should be the miniumum age for entering parliament. The professional politician is a laughable concept, for what is essentially unskilled work, time to put the puppets back in their boxes and nail them down.
The present unending wars can only be justified if one is to accept the racist garbage that some group or another, Arabs, Persians, Chinese or Russians are somehow lesser beings, sub-human, inferior. What is needed from the U.S. is for them just to fuck right off and think long and hard – for at least a century – about what they have become, till then the rest of the world would hesitate to piss on their farce of ‘democracy’ if it were on fire.
Sometimes, in the midst of this political rough-and-tumble, it behooves us to pause, raise our heads and glance upwards at the sky, even if only to ask, why do we do this, why do we do anything, why do we care?
‘Nevertheless, it is one of the few events of the 20th century that stands any chance of being widely remembered in the 30th. Despite its origins in Cold War paranoia and nationalist rivalry, Mike Collins recalls in interviews a brief moment of global unity: “People, instead of saying ‘you Americans did it’, they said ‘we—people—did it’. I thought that was a wonderful thing. Ephemeral, but wonderful.” ‘
The above is from The Economist’s Obituary of Neil Armstrong.
Now, go to the NASA site, below, read it and then scroll down to the very bottom of the page, watch the one minute video there.
A chalk universe swirling on the blackboard and, in the manner of Oscar Wilde, bright eyes gazing through large telescopes up at the stars. The schoolkids of the 1960s and 1970s, we were indeed the Children of Neil and Yuri!! It’s difficult now to convey to people who weren’t there, the general sense of optimism of those days.
Some in those times used to criticise the space programmes, saying there were so many problems on earth and so on. Yes, but the solutions to those problems do not need to be mutually exclusive. In my view, it is one of the things on which money should be spent, in a peaceful manner, rather than spending it on yet more weapons.
My father sat up till 4am, recording the TV programme – in those days, TV programming normally ended at midnight – on a silent, reel-to-reel, 8mm movie projector. Black-and-white TV, but the recording is suffused with blue moonlight. We still have that tape.
I wish space exploration funding had not been cut and diverted towards weapons systems (by Reagan and his successors). I support the space exploration that continues to occur – eg. the ‘Curiosity’ Mars-lander. Think of the two ‘Voyagers’, one now is leaving the Solar System. That is with 1970s technology, for goodness sake! Think of it. We all thought we’d be moving to Mars by 2001, we really, seriously did. It was a time of great optimism for humankind.
Instead – and this is ironic, given that we are talking on a blog – we became introverted, navel-gazing, no longer heroic in our dreams. Some of the people who worked at NASA – and their Soviet counterparts – were like magicians, alchemists – they were always bigger than their particular flags, they represent(ed) the best of human endeavour. It is not nostalgic hindsight. It is transcendence.
Farewell, Moon Man. One more step now, into infinity…
I wish money spent on space exploration would be spent on sorting out this global mess, Suhayl, on people, rather than looking for a way out and start wars somewhere else.
Moon man took nearly half of Newsnights time last night, he was still warm and already assigned as a space filler, unintended pun, sadly.
may he rest in peace like everyone else, nobody will forget the massive expenditure he benefited from, it is hewn in stone and minted in molten metal, maybe some of the millions who are homeless, without medical insurance or food in the US will realise that these missions are undertaken to gain advantage over others, nothing more would ever come of it.
Excellent stuff Suhayl and this really merits a discussion on its ownI think the stranglehold neo cons have over the media and education systems has a lot to do with it.Opposition such as it is seems to come from either Russia or modern day variants of the John Birch society.
Rupert Murdoch tweets – “Needed to demonstrate no such thing as free press in UK.” And this from the biggest press mogul in the world.
Well, at least he is being honest!! Isn’t it time the other papers were honest too and admitted as much??
@Cryptonym – Interesting info about the US storming the Iranian consulate in Iraq. That brings to 3 the number of attacks by a state on another country’s diplomatic premises that I know about: Nicaraguan ambassador’s residence in Panama 1989, Chinese embassy in Belgrade 1999, Iranian consulate in Erbil, Iraq 2007. All were attacked not by the receiving country, but by the military forces of a third country, the US. In the first two cases they pleaded ignorance and apologised.
Thanks, Lucy.
Pepe Escobar on Sibel Edmonds’ blog:
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2012/03/26/podcast-show-81-real-reportage-on-syria-iran/
“People, instead of saying ‘you Americans did it’, they said ‘we—people—did it’. I thought that was a wonderful thing. Ephemeral, but wonderful.” ‘
Not as ephemeral as all that, and still quite wonderful. Thanks, Suhayl.
Very amusing.
Next thing you’ll be branded a terrorist. Sooner or later that happens when anyone uses a brain and questions something. I don’t think you are the Stalinist here….
I mean, the above could apply to the negative as well as the positive.
@RR
‘Rupert Murdoch tweets – “Needed to demonstrate no such thing as free press in UK.” And this from the biggest press mogul in the world.
Well, at least he is being honest!! Isn’t it time the other papers were honest too and admitted as much??’
Unfortunately, Murdoch is a large part of the reason we don’t have a free press.