As readers know, in general I am opposed to the lazy characterisation of Ukrainian nationalists as Nazis, fascists or racists, because in general it is untrue. But some of them are, and one who undoubtedly fits the bill is the anti-Semite Andriy Paribiy, founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine.
Paribiy will be speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall on this Friday, 23 October, at 11am. The meeting is described as open to all. I do hope people will be able to express their opinion of him freely.
This is the party symbol of Paribiy’s Social National Party, in case anybody doubts me. It is perfectly clear what Mr Paribiy stands for. That the Royal United Services Institute invites him to spread his views in the heart of Whitehall, says a great deal about the position of the right wing British establishment. Today, the British government proposes new legislation to close down mosques and bookshops deemed extreme, even if they advocate against violence and do not break the law. These are dangerous times – and the danger is from the right.
“Al-Khwarizmi’s Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wal-muqabala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing) was a pioneering piece of work – offering practical answers for land distribution, rules on inheritance and distributing salaries.”
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Diophantus was born roughly seven centuries before Al-Khwarizmi.
Diophantus of Alexandria is considered the Father of Algebra.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diophantus
The ‘Left’? Where can they be found? Bernie Sanders? Heh. Larry David nailed it on SNL. There’s your ‘Left’.
We need to define our terms when talking about who or what is Left. Shades of grey Progressive Left dominate the dilution of political identity.
Larry David on Bernie @ 2:10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfmwGAd1L-o
Giyanne: ” A Muslim cannot lie, fornicate or steal. Same as Christians, Buddhists or Jews.”
You’re saying there’s no such thing as a Muslim, Jew, Christian or Buddhist, then?
Ref my comment earlier on the Ellwood Q&A on Israel and Palestine, here is the link to Hansard. No 7 half way down the page followed by No 8 Libya, then Syria, refugees, Second Gulf War, etc etc
One question stood out for its directness. It received an anodyne answer.
Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab):
Are not the deaths of an Eritrean immigrant who was just murdered in Beersheba by Israeli thugs, the deaths of seven Israelis and the deaths of 40 Palestinians the direct consequence of Netanyahu’s refusal to grant freedom to Palestine, the illegal wall, the illegal settlements, the 500 check points and the persistent desecration of the al-Aqsa mosque by Israeli settlers? Will the Government take action to get Netanyahu to the conference table?
Mr Ellwood:
We recognise that there are frustrations due to the lack of progress towards peace, and we share those frustrations. The peace process was launched more than two decades ago, yet we still have not achieved the two-state solution that was envisaged, but there is absolutely no justification for the sorts of attacks we have seen.
No mention of the death of Jacky Sutton even from Hammond. He was well informed on the state of the Foreign Office cleaners though.
http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/hansard/commons/todays-commons-debates/read/unknown/7/
RoS: “Diophantus of Alexandria is considered the Father of Algebra.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diophantus”
I wonder how often people actually bother reading their own references. This one, for instance, included the following:
Fedup, ha! Good one! Poor old Alfred, should’ve stuck to stamens. But then, there are all those hot Venusian fly-trap hybrids with mouth-watering, luscious lips, wandering around Toronto, swinging their deliciously wide hips. I blame Gregor Mendel and his pornographic monkery!
Glenn, thanks, good man.
Al-Khwarizmi is also to thank for “Arabic” numerals and Algorithms – although I admit we still owe thr Roamns the aqueduct
“Al-Khwarizmi is also to thank for “Arabic” numerals and Algorithms – although I admit we still owe thr Roamns the aqueduct”
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Of course Eculid of Alexandria had calculated an algorithm 900 years before Al-Khwarizimi.
Elucid’s Algorithm was designed to compute the greatest common divisor.
“Elucid’s Algorithm”, eh? If you’re interested in Euclid (note spelling – you gave it a couple of stabs, neither of which were particularly close for someone well versed in his works), you might be interested in the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach
I have been meaning to give this book back to a German friend for quite a few years now.
Well, the pursuit of knowledge is a human endeavour and through time has been driven from many points.
Surely the key point here – and one of purposes of the allusions in my original post – is that certain key everyday words in the English language are Arabic. And the need to state this arises from the fact that (in common with the entire population) in spite of having studied algebra, I was never, ever taught this fact at school. In fact, Muslims, Arabs, etc were almost never mentioned unless in some negative, colonial light. And later – even today – when I pick up popular or ‘arty’ books on science, while European scientists are named and we discover their favourite vintages and so on, Arab ones are almost never mentioned by name, just as a brief reference, thus: ‘The Arabs’. Yes, just like the Israelis so casually refer to, ‘The Arabs’.
This all makes it that much easier to go and bomb them into dirt.
And so, in my opinion, the teaching of, say, algebra in the popular imagination OUGHT to be subversive in the cultivated historical imagination, but sadly, it is not.
Oh, and of course, of one wants a phallic contest worthy of the Ancients, the Indians, Egyptians and Babylonian mathematicians all pre-dated the Greeks by vast swathes of time. But you see, these arguments are just a little absurd, aren’t they, and they miss the point, don’t they?
Suhayl, I was trying to come up with some sort of counter, along the lines that we were taught at school how these were Arabic numerals, that the concept of zero was invented by the Arabs, and how superior this system was compared with that of the Romans, Greeks and ancient Celtic ways.
The most negative attitudes were directed far more at “the blacks”, a seething mass apparently from “sub-continents”. I took from my basic education that Arabs were a cunning, extremely cultured lot with the deepest history. Perhaps it was just down our way that anything Arabic was taken to mean mysterious, rather sophisticated and elegant, and the individuals exceedingly knowledgeable.
We were told about Cleopatra, 1001 Nights, magic carpets, the pyramids, the origin of many religions, and of course stories from the Christian Bible. None of these seemed anything but respectful towards Arabs. It gave me a childhood impression of wonder, enchantment, and the feeling that the mysteries of the world could be somehow answered there.
On the other hand, we heard of Newton (of course), Copernicus, Leonardo, etc. but nearly all of these were white European males, preferably British. Very few people of colour, even more rarely by name and personal habits.
However, there was never the sort of demonisation necessary that you seem to suggest, so that people are inclined to think it OK to bomb amorphous “Arabs”. That’s probably why most people didn’t agree with way we were being led into the New Dark Age, back in 2001-2003. We have been pushed to do so, but British culture seems admirably resistant to this relentless propaganda.
To your final point – yes, the arguments are absurd, and I think (in this example, on this thread) are more about petty point-scoring against fellow posters than any point of actual substance.
All this, while I sit back dismissing genuine prejudice, because as a white, able-bodied male of serviceable age, I’m doubtless rather oblivious to most kinds of negative discrimination. Very sorry if this comes across as being so obviously from someone that ignorant.
No need to reinvent the wheel.
It’s all here:
http://www.odsg.org/Said_Edward%281977%29_Orientalism.pdf
Very powerful, for a while.
We are witnessing the inch by inch, checkpoint by checkpoint genocide inflicted upon the poor Palestinians by satanyahu with the aid of immigrant south african jews well versed in the evil art of state apartheid. Very soon the devils will have enough checkpoints on the West Bank to force every Palestinian to pass one before even going to the loo !
As the citizens who voted in this complicit government we ALL have the karma chameleon on our backs too, not only the freedlands and melanie phillips’ that are insidiously ruling us and winding up Islamophobia to deflect from this huge evil that is being perpetrated in our name too.
Mehmet the kebabists only power in our country is limited to starving us on Saturday nights if he decides to close shop early, its really the bercows who decide a rifkind will kick of the al-Ghouts false flag debate in the commons. The extent to which the synagogue of satan has taken over the land can be very easily seen. A crypto as AoC baying for the blood of two algerian patsies over the charlie hebdo false flag, yet completely silent over Gaza,current ongoing murder of Palestinians, Christian Syrian refugees, etc.
@Glenn, sorry but such ahistorical comments need responding to;
Cleopatra was Greek not Arab; a descendent of one of Alexander the Great’s Generals, not only the last Pharaoh of Egypt, and the only Greek Ruler that bothered to learn Egyptian.
There is no competitive disconnect between Arab Science & the Ancient World. The flourishing of the Islamic Golden Age occurred during the Middle Ages, at a time when ancient knowledge had been lost to the West, but in the Arab World many classic works of antiquity were translated into Arabic and Persian, and so preserved & eventually transmitted much later to the West.
BTW Do you recall how dismissively wrong you were about the fuss & value of the Hilary Clinton emails ? Turns out they provide a Smoking Gun of Bliar’s duplicity in the run-up to Iraq.
The 1943 massacres in what was then eastern Poland have left a lot of skeletons in the cupboard for those Ukrainian nationalists who blindly continue to venerate the memory of people like Bandera and Shukhevych. 200 000 isn’t quite on the scale of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, but genocide it most certainly was. In German-occupied Poland Ukrainian forces carried out a mass slaughter of Polish villagers who posed no military threat and whose only crime was that they were not ethnic Ukrainians.
The slaughter was as horrifying as it was methodical. No one was spared. Ukrainian men with Polish wives were ordered to kill them or face execution themselves. Worse still, many of the Polish villagers were brutally tortured and mutilated before they died. When the killing was over, it was time for the wives and children of the killers to come and help with the looting.
Men, women, children, old people and babies all shared the same fate. Pregnant women’s babies were often ripped out of their bodies before they themselves were finished off. Any Ukrainians who dared to defend their Polish neighbours — and there were not a few of them — were also killed as traitors to the Ukrainian nationalist cause.
There’s only too much evidence in the archives, including photographs of young children’s bodies strung up together on village fences as some sort of macabre trophy. The massacres were so appalling that even some members of the German army were moved to secretly provide Poles with arms so that they could defend themselves!
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this genocide was the fact that it was condoned by many members of the Uniate or “Greek Catholic” clergy, who actually held services to bless the perpetrators and their weapons before they set out to do their deeds. Perhaps that explains why this church is still in denial about Bandera, who later in his life never expressed any sorrow for what he and his comrades-in-arms did.
By clumsily attempting to doctor the historical truth, Ukrainian “historians” and journalists are doing a great disservice to the Ukrainian nation. How are Ukrainian teenagers going to feel when they eventually learn what their so-called national heroes really did? Fortunately at least one impartial Ukrainian historian — Viktor Polishchuk / Poliszczuk — has steadfastly refused to fall in line with the Ukrainian Canadian UPA propaganda machine and has left them an account of what really happened.
Glorifying Bandera is a road to nowhere. It’s time to ditch “heroes” like Khmelnytsky and Bandera, who were stupid enough to sell Ukrainians into slavery and ignominy.
The sad truth is that between the two world wars some Ukrainian nationalists (and no, I have nothing against nationalism!) succumbed to the temptation to side with Germany in return for German support. That explains why they assassinated any Pole or Ukrainian who actively worked for Polish-Ukrainian understanding.
When Poland was divided up between Germany and Russia they continued to play the German card. And play the German card they did! Many Ukrainian nationalists became guards at Nazi death camps, going down in history as unparalleled sadists, while others took part in massacres of Poles and Jews, whose presence spoilt their dream of an ethnically pure Ukraine.
Reply to Suhayl Saadi @6:52 pm.
Well worth a look;
https://theburningbloggerofbedlam.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/the-killing-of-serena-shim-the-suicide-of-former-bbc-journalist-jackie-sutton/
Macky: Good reminders there, thanks for keeping us straight. Also a very good point about how ancient knowledge was kept alive during our dark ages.
Thanks, Miss Csatello, very relevant – interesting site too.
“There is no competitive disconnect between Arab Science & the Ancient World. The flourishing of the Islamic Golden Age occurred during the Middle Ages, at a time when ancient knowledge had been lost to the West, but in the Arab World many classic works of antiquity were translated into Arabic and Persian, and so preserved & eventually transmitted much later to the West.” Macky.
Absolutely. And the contribution of Arabs and Persians to the body of knowledge during that period was significant, so it wasn’t simply a case of transmitting it to (Christian) Europe. It was one of the major factors in the provenance of the Renaissance.
I’m really pleased my little humorous comment about algebra being a subbversive word induced such a fruitful discussion. Thanks, all.
I think, though, Miss castello that you may havemenat to post the link on the ‘Jackie Sutton’ thread?
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Now, if one gazes up at the night sky, one will be able to identify the large number of stars with (in ‘Western’ astronomy) Arabic names.
“This is a list of traditional Arabic names for stars. In Western astronomy, most of the accepted star names are Arabic, a few are Greek and some are of unknown origin.” [from link below]
I never learned this at school, either, and I was in the Astronomy Club! I do not recall – I might be wrong – Patrick Moore or Carl Sagan mentioninhg it either.
My own name, ‘Suhayl’ is the Arabic name for Canopus, the second-brightest star in the sky. Just call me a ‘Star’! 🙂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arabic_star_names
Suhayl Saadi; 11:25pm- One of my links gone astray!?
Suhayl Saadi’s comments on the Arab world raise some interesting questions because it was not just in science and mathematics that their “golden age” led the rest of the world but also in commerce, and trade and in the standard of living of its peoples. Just two examples: At its height the Arab world controlled the Indian Ocean, fostering peaceful trade, while also giving the people of Spain tolerant governments and a living standard that they would not again achieve for many years.
But to me the interesting question is this: what were the forces that made the Arab civilization so dynamic from the late 8th century to the late 15th and (2) what are the forces that have made it so inert for the last few centuries?
I hope to get to the Whitehall demo in the morning, but I have another demo outside the RCJ before it.
Parubiy is also speaking at the Ukraine Cultural Centre 154 Holland Park Avenue W11 4UH Friday 22/10/’15 at 18:30
200 yds. Holland Park Underground (Central Line)
There will be a demo there too.
Just to say that, aside from speaking at RUSI, Parubiy also visited Westminster (details from his facebook page, along with a photo of him with Lord Robertson). His account of the meetings on Wednesday states:
“I met with Lord Robertson, former NATO Secretary General (pictured), an old and sincere friend of Ukraine. Other meetings – leader of the opposition in Parliament Chris Bryant, cross-party group secretary for relations with Ukraine, Labour Stephen Pound and the representative of the Scottish National Party, a young deputy Stephen Gethins. All assured support for the continuation of sanctions against Putin”.
A statement on UKRINFORM says that
“in London Parubiy will meet Minister for Europe David Lidington; Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport John Wittingdale; an inter-party group on relations with Ukraine in the British Parliament chaired by Sir Gerald Howarth.”
Seems he is here to talk to all political parties.
For a second I thought I was looking at the same logo shown in Craig’s article when I looked at https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligue_de_d%25C3%25A9fense_juive&prev=search.
The same colours.
http://www.liguedefensejuive.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ldj10.jpg
The LDJ have just attacked the Paris office where a journalist David Perrotin works as they do not like what he writes for Agence France Presse.
BuzzFeed journalist attacked by far-right Jewish extremists in Paris
“A leading French journalist working for BuzzFeed was attacked by far-right Jewish extremists as a mob tried to storm the offices of the country’s national news agency in Paris on Thursday.
David Perrotin was protected by police after being surrounded by a dozen masked men brandishing batons.
The Ligue de Défense Juive was protesting against Agence France Presse’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Trouble broke out soon after 8pm when about 100 people brandishing flags and letting off flares tried to storm AFP’s offices.”
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/23/buzzfeed-journalist-attacked-paris-david-perrotin-ldj-afp
Nice people.
@ Mary: No word about any arrests! Now if it was a Muslim mob….
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