These people are genuinely paranoically delusional. Fucking chill out!
(and yes, linking to the last post is slightly unfair: the guy’s an autistic, paranoid, war-supporting BNP member who believes Melanie Phillips’ writings on MMR, so taking the piss out of him is rather like machine-gunning a barrel of pickled herrings).
“Only the Americans are allowed to do terror and politics at the same time. If you’re not the imperial power, you’ve got to choose. And we might still kill you anyway.”
Let’s start with an uncontroversial statement: there are a whole load of crazy Muslim-hating bigots in the US. More specifically, various US politicians are trying to block Dubai Ports World’s takeover of P&O, on the grounds that filthy Ay-rabs would end up operating facilities at various American ports.
The deal poses no security issues, in the UK, the US or elsewhere: for a start, port security is overseen by governments rather than facility operators – and Dubai Ports World is run by civilian commercial management. DPW could be owned by Osama Bin Laden himself, and the threat posed to international security would still be zero. But that’s not even the point: Dubai is a civilised and stable country with no involvement whatsoever in terrorism (well, one of the 9/11 hijackers was born in the UAE. And Tim McVeigh was born in the US). Its troops fight alongside the US Army. Opposing the deal – hell, even questioning the deal any more than you’d question a takeover by a Canadian or Australian company – makes you a crazy racist fuckwit, or at best an ignorant fuckwit.
Scarily, the opposition isn’t a left/right issue: liberal bloggers like Kos and AMERICAblog are jumping on the “we can’t trust these filthy Ay-rabs” bandwagon (although obviously the criticism from the right is more toxic). George Bush, to his great credit (and that isn’t something I say often), has stood up to this criticism. Hopefully, he’ll continue to do so.
The Moderate Voice has a roundup of comment on this issue. TMV’s article is reasonably sane and balanced; the mouth-breathing bigots it links to are generally not.
Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, being a right-wing tract that doesn’t actually care about free speech, reneged on its original offer to print the Holocaust cartoons published in Iran’s Hamshari newspaper. Pigdogfucker has no such qualms.
About half of the Iranian cartoons are Holocaust-denialist, and about half are saner works about Israel’s status as racist oppressor and occupier. They are all offensive, to differing degrees, and they are all rubbish. They’re arranged roughly in descending order of sanity over the fold.
More impressive and far funnier than the Iranian competition, though, is Boomka.org‘s take on the whole affair. It’s run by a pair of Jewish cartoonists who feel that Jews ought to be far better than these Gentile upstarts at antisemitic cartoonery. If you’re Jewish and fancy a bit of antisemitic scribbling, you’ve got until March 5 to enter. I especially like this one.
So, what about those rubbish Iranian cartoons, then? – Continue reading
On Radio 4 this morning, Jonathan Lewis of the United Kingdom Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists said:
“Germany is the most democratic country in the world in that they have an office for the protection of their constitution which ruthlessly suppresses right-wing and Nazi speech”
Yes, it’s important to ruthlessly suppress right-wing speech in order to have a democracy. Twat.
The BBC suggests that David Irving “might appeal“. I can’t imagine David Irving appealing to anyone… But in some ways, Mr Irving’s lack of positive qualities is unfortunate. It’s harder to stand up for free speech when the person being oppressed is some dickhead for whom you have no personal sympathy – whether they’re an ignorant Danish bigot or a Nazi-sympathising pseudo-historian.
Even though Mr Irving is awful, jailing someone for lying about historical facts is not a sane way to proceed – and rather than breaking with German-speaking Europe’s historical tendency towards authoritarianism, Holocaust denial laws strengthen and emphasise it. The right way to deal with harmless loonies like David Irving is to mock them and to expose their lies for the nonsense that they are – and this has already happened. In the UK, people like Nick Griffin and Abu Hamza who try and raise mob riots are justly punished; people who merely say wrong and stupid things are not.
One thing I can’t work out, though, is why Holocaust denial is treated so differently from other stupid and wrong takes on history. If Irving had been right, would that justify antisemitic attacks today? Of course not. Does the fact that the Holocaust did happen justify Israel’s behaviour in Palestine? Of course not. Would the President of Iran’s views on Israel be changed in the slightest if he believed in the Holocaust? Of course not.
Denying the Holocaust is like saying “the US Civil War didn’t happen! Union troops never burned the South!” It’s a nonsense claim, but not one that makes a blind bit of difference to anything (well, OK, you could reasonably expect a kicking in Mississippi/Tel Aviv, but that’s about it).
Tampon Teabag has a nice bit of Guantanamo satire. This extract makes no sense out of context, but I like it anyway:
“Your son, today he come to my shop and he try buy alcohol and porny-magazine. I tell him no, and he start shouting. He break things in my shop. I tell him stop, stop, please stop. But he not stop. He say his father police chief and he can do what he want. He break window. I call police, they tell me call you. What you do about it?”
Semi-relatedly, anyone found using the term “moral equivalence” non-parodically ought to be shot seven times in the head. It inevitably means “I agree with everything the US and Israeli governments do, everything they do is glorious and wonderful, and therefore anyone who suggests their actions are similar to those taken by famous bad people and dictators is a scumbag. Even if their actions do appear similar to those taken by famous bad people and dictators. Oh, and I’m also a pretentious cunt”.
Some Aussies have been convicted of heroin trafficking in Indonesia. Unsurprisingly, Indonesia being a barbaric third-world hellhole, the footsoldiers have been sentenced to life imprisonment and the ringleaders have been sentenced to death.
Obviously executing people for supplying substances is about as sensible and proportionate as crucifying people for jaywalking, but barbaric third-world hellholes are entitled to make their own rules. Australia, however, is not a barbaric third-world hellhole. It has decided that imposing the death penalty for supplying substances, or indeed for anything else, is a scummy act which serves only to trivialise and cheapen human life. Good for it.
It’s a bit of a shame, then, that when the Aussies found out about the operation, they decided to kill these poor buggers. The government passed the gang’s details onto Indonesian coppers, rather than arresting them on arrival into Australia and trying them in a justice system that broadly understands the meaning of the word…
On January 29 this year, the Sunday Times reported that a well-connected gang were due in court this month over attempts to bug phonecalls and hack computers. The article named one of the defendants as Matthew Mellon, gazillionaire, shoe tycoon, and ex-husband of Jimmy Choo creator Tamara Mellon. The UK IT press followed up the Sunday Times’s scoop, with organs such as The Register and ZDNet naming Mr Mellon as one of the defendants in court.
ZDNet may regret this decision: the company has issued an apology to Mr Mellon and has agreed to pay him substantial damages. According to ZDNet’s apology, “we accept that our report was entirely untrue and defamatory and that Matthew Mellon has not been arrested or charged in relation to such offences at all“.
This sort of thing occasionally happens, of course: an embarassing mix-up with names, a leak from a dodgy informant, and an innocent man – say, a wealthy shoemaker – has his name dragged through the mud. But it’s all a bit weirder than that: the Register article and the Times article are still live, and neither has issued an apology. If Matthew Mellon “has not been arrested or charged in relation to such offences at all”, surely these organs would have faced the same wrath as ZDNet? The Sunday Times has a rather wider readership, after all.
So, has Mr Mellon been charged? If so, what the hell are his lawyers and ZDNet playing at? If not, what the hell are the Sunday Times playing at? Answers in the usual space…
Is Nosemonkey satirising the loonier end of the “media complicit in treachery for reporting bad things about the war” spectrum, or has he joined it?
The News of the World was and is fully aware of the potential for a violent response in publishing [the 'British troops batter the shit out of innocent Iraqis' story]. Yet they went ahead and ran it anyway, putting British troops in further danger, isolating them further from the average Iraqi. In a regular wartime situation, that could be considered tantamount to treason.
Hmm. In other news, William Peers was fully aware of the potential for a violent response in publishing his report into Mai Lai. Yet he went ahead and published it anyway, putting US troops in further danger, isolating them further from the average Vietnamese. In a regular wartime situation, that could be considered tantamount to treason.