Harry's Place

Speaking of Cranbrook, the exclusive prep school that Mitt Romney attended, I was reminded of my favorite scene from the movie 8 Mile, set in Detroit, in which Eminem plays a white working-class rapper who is harassed by a rival rapper, a privileged black guy posing as a lower-class thug.

In the final rap battle between the two, the Eminem character discloses, among other things, that his rival attended Cranbrook, and proclaims his pride in being “white trash”– to the delight of the mostly-black crowd.

Warning: Lots of f-words

Class triumphs over race. Good stuff.

Update: This is not a post about Obama. Or Romney.

Last week a Washington Post article about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s years as a student at the exclusive Cranbrook prep school near Detroit in the 1960s drew a lot of attention– particularly to some reported incidents of bullying and cruel behavior in which Romney was involved.

In one incident, Romney is alleged by former classmates to have joined in a posse of students that attacked, held down and cut the hair of a non-conformist student with long, bleached-blond hair.

The victim later came out as gay, although Romney now says he had no idea of his sexual orientation.

Another time, a then-closeted gay student said, Romney shouted “Atta girl!” at him in class.

In another “prank,” former classmates say that Romney held open a door for an English teacher with diminished eyesight, but then allowed him to walk into a closed door and “giggled hysterically.”

After The Post article appeared, Romney apologized, after a fashion.

“Back in high school, I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that,” Romney said in a live radio interview with Fox News Channel personality Brian Kilmeade. Romney added: “I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far, and for that I apologize.”

OK, in one sense, fair enough. Who among us can look back at our teenage years without cringing at some of the cruel and nasty things we said and did? The best we can do is feel sorry about it and, if possible, apologize to the victims– although I’d like to think that even back then I would have regarded what Romney did as going too far.

But it seems Romney has carried his love of pranks and practical jokes into adulthood. In an effort to counter his “stiff” image, Romney’s wife Ann said:

“I still look at him as the boy that I met in high school when he was playing all the jokes and really just being crazy, pretty crazy,” she said. “There’s a wild and crazy man inside of there.”

In an interview on Saturday, Romney described a prank he pulled on a state trooper who had short-sheeted the then-Massachusetts governor’s hotel room bed.

“And the next morning when I came down to breakfast, he of course had a big smile, because he was going to see how I reacted,” Romney said. “I pretended not to notice.”

The candidate describes having a letter typed on hotel stationery, “saying we are so sorry that your bed was improperly made, Mr. Romney, and we have fired the maid who did it.”

A staffer showed the letter to the trooper, Romney said, whose boss insisted the trooper call the hotel to explain the maid’s innocence.

“He got on the phone all red-faced, and then finally, of course when the manager had no idea what he was talking about, he realized the joke was on him,” Romney recounted. “So, we play tricks even with the people I work with.”

Har har. Or rather, not. I mean, it’s nice that the state trooper felt comfortable enough with Romney to short-sheet his bed. But allowing the trooper to believe– even for a short time– that he was responsible for the maid losing her job doesn’t strike me as funny at all. In fact it’s about as humorous as the story of the band in Michigan playing “On Wisconsin.”

Couldn’t Romney have pulled the ol’ bucket of water on the head prank instead?

Now that’s funny.

You didn’t think the Obama campaign was going to let this drop, did you?

From the Monongahela valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story’s always the same
Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name

–Bruce Springsteen, “Youngstown“

The Law Society let its rooms to a conference opposing marriage equality for gays. Then, it cancelled it:

Sir Paul Coleridge, the Family Division judge who recently launched a new charity to combat marital break-up, had been lined up as the main speaker at the annual event at the Law Society’s London headquarters later this month.

But organisers were forced to cancel it at short notice after the Law Society ruled that the programme reflected “an ethos which is opposed to same sex marriage”.

They accused the Society, which represents solicitors in England and Wales, of an “extraordinary” attempt to stifle debate on current affairs and warned that the cancellation itself could be against equality laws.

…

Organisers said the conference had been booked for up to six months and a deposit of around £4,700 has already been paid.

But in an email on Thursday, Adam Tallis, general manager of Amper&and, the company which organises hospitality at The Law Society, informed them that the booking was being cancelled and the deposit refunded.

“We regret the need to take this step,” he wrote.

“I can assure you that it is not something we do lightly.

“However, where an event does not fit within this company’s diversity policy, it is a step we must take.

“The nature of your event has recently been drawn to our attention, and it is contrary to our diversity policy, espousing as it does an ethos which is opposed to same sex marriage.”

By contrast, this is how The Law Society behaved when questions were raised about the hosting of the so-called Russell Tribunal of Palestine: which featured a collection of racists, supporters of terrorism and conspiracy freaks, determined to bring Israel to an end.

The Law Society insisted that it was not “hosting” the Russell Tribunal, was merely letting its rooms to it in a “normal market transaction“, and saw the event as unproblematic. On the day of the conference, amie – who had raised concerns about the propriety of the event – was barred by the organisers from attending on completely spurious grounds.

Now, it appears, they can cancel the events they “host” after all.  Just so long as they have a problem with its “ethos”.

UPDATE: Blackwell has now cancelled this event

Leila Khaled was a plane hijacker working with the PFLP.

Blackwell’s Manchester proudly announces:

On May 24, we will launch a biography of Leila Khaled, the young woman who hijacked a passenger jet in 1969.

Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation bySarah Irving is a compelling account of Khaled’s turbulent life. At the book launch, Sarah will explore Leila Khaled’s involvement with a radical element of the PLO, the rise of Hamas, the role of women in a largely male movement and Khaled’s activism today.

On the event advert, Blackwell’s offers a handy ideological graphic for those who might be a bit queasy about hijacking and blowing up civilian airliners in order to liberate one’s fellow terrorists:

The book is written by Guardian writer and ISM activist Sarah Irving. The event is hosted by Manchester PSC activist Linda Clair.

Meanwhile, the Marxism Festival 2012 – hosted largely in Friends House – reveals:

It is an old adage that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. And Marxism 2012 is very proud to play host to some incredible freedom fighters.

Leila Khaled is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and has dedicated her life to Palestinian freedom. Most famously she hijacked two planes in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Banned from the UK, Leila joins us via Skype Sun, 3.45pm.

This is the event which will be hosted at UCL in its Cruciform Lecture Theatre:

Intifada! The struggle for Palestinian freedom Leila Khaled, Sarah Irving & Peyman Jafari #resistance #imperialism #palestine

Sounds like a perfectly peace-loving, liberal girl from whom the Left and pacifists can enjoy and learn.

This is a guest post by Abu Faris

Chatham House are often esteemed as an international affairs think-tank of global repute. Every year, Chatham House awards the Chatham House Prize to “the statesperson who is deemed by Chatham House members to have made the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year.”

Previous recipients have included such luminaries as Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy campaigner and long-time political prisoner of the disgusting Burmese military junta, who won last year. On the other hand, Chatham House have “balanced” such worthy awards by, for example, awarding the Hamas-friendly, Islamist President of Turkey, Abdullah Gül, the prize back in 2010 – despite the howls of disapproval from secularists, liberals and minorities in Turkey herself.

This year, nominations have just closed for the Chatham House Prize. Two nominees, one a Christian cleric from South Sudan, the other an Islamist cleric from Tunisia, stand out as further examples of Chatham House’s persistent addiction to dubious Third World leaders and to stretching the meaning of the expression “improvement of international relations” to breaking point.

The first of these nominees for this year’s prize is the Anglican/Episcopalian Primate of Sudan, Archbishop Deng. Chatham House puff the Archbishop for his “invaluable contribution to South Sudan’s peaceful transition to independence in 2011.” In particular, we learn that the Primate of Sudan was personally responsible for brokering “a ceasefire agreement between the army and militia loyal to General George Athor, enabling the South to go to the polls united.”

Let’s examine these claims. Firstly, the Anglican/Episcopalian Church in South Sudan played no greater or lesser role in the independence struggle than any other church organised in that place. Secondly, the chairmanship of the group tasked with stopping the inter-tribal feuding in South Sudan hardly makes the brokering by that group of partial accords (largely and almost immediately broken by the Dinka hegemony in the new state, as it happens) the personal victory of Archbishop Deng as Chatham House seem to think. In fact, it grossly insults the role of others in brokering that deal – men and women who have spent a lifetime on the ground in struggle and not sequestered in the Episcopal Palace in Juba – or, in Deng’s case, mostly jetting around the world on jollies paid for by missionary groups from outside of Sudan.

In considering Deng for their prize, Chatham House might do well to dwell on the fact that Deng oversees approvingly a Church in South Sudan that is at the forefront of a growing campaign of rampant homophobia – a campaign that has gained the backing of the President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir. Recently, one of Deng’s senior clergymen, Reverend Faustino Wel, fulminated:

Let us always bear in mind that the world and all its materials are not eternal. We came from the Lord without our knowledge and will return to Him with our knowledge. And creation is for a purpose, which must be fulfilled. Our failure to fulfill the mission of creation means that destruction awaits us in the end. The South Sudan cannot afford to be part of the societies and people who wish to earn the anger of the Creator and his lethal punishment.

Our culture in diversity opens the doors for all and sundry, but gays and lesbians and others whose actions, thoughts and conscience are by it not progressive and are opposed to the Divine Will cannot be entertained.

Chatham House might also want to consider the case of the Bishop of Khartoum, over whom Archbishop Deng has direct control. Bishop Kondo of Khartoum has been repeatedly – and with considerable evidence – been accused, along with his own clergy, of (amongst other things) a series of diverting Church funds into their own pockets, using the funds of Church-owned educational institutions for their own benefit, defrauding overseas charities and Church missions… all of this is known to Archbishop Deng. He has done not a thing – even refusing to respond to letters, emails and direct contacts about these matters.

There are a lot of questions to be asked of Archbishop Deng and the Episcopalian Church in Sudan. His winning a prize dedicated to the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year would be entirely unacceptable and a travesty.

If consideration of an often absentee Archbishop with oversight of an allegedly deeply-corrupt and definitely homophobic African church is bad enough, Chatham House have another killer nomination up their collective sleeve. Another contender for the 2012 Chatham House Prize is none other than the Muslim Brotherhood’s very own man in Tunisia, Rachid Ghannouchi.

Clearly wedded to the delusion that there are “good, moderate” Islamists that we should be encouraging, Chatham House spurt dizzily about Ghannouchi. The Islamist thug, well known for his anti-Semitic comments and support for violent jihad has been jointly nominated with the human-rights activist, one-time political prisoner and exile and now President of Tunisia, Moncef Marzouki.

Marzouki has proved rather too keen to opportunistically acquiesce in the creeping Islamisation of Tunisia’s traditionally very secular and liberal (by MENA standards) society, joining the Islamist led coalition soon after his election – despite having made noises that he would do quite the opposite in the run-up to his accession to the presidency.  In March this year, Marzouki dismayed many of his remaining liberal and secular supporters by explicitly supporting the conviction of two men for “insulting the Prophet”. One wonders if that is what Chatham House had in mind when they described these individuals as “two sides of the same coin.” Whatever the case, one wonders if a president’s self-serving and repeated collapses in the face of local Islamist clerical fascist pressure is really what should be considered high statesmanship.

Chatham House ooze over Ghannouchi:

Sheikh Ghannouchi has been widely praised for preparing the Ennahda movement – of which he is the spiritual leader – for Tunisia’s democratic Constituent Assembly elections in October 2011.

What? “Widely praised” for organising a clerical fascist Islamist party, wedded to the ideas of the forcible introduction of Shari’a, with extensive links to other organisations of similar ideological perspective across the globe? By who has Ghannouchi been praised – save the usual bien pensant chattering hordes in the West and the global Muslim Brotherhood?

Chatham House cannot contain their adulation for Ghannouchi. The spin increases to a velocity of epic proportions:

Without seeking political office himself, he oversaw the transformation of the Islamist Ennahda movement from an illegal opposition at the beginning of 2011 into a well-organized and successful political party. After winning the election, Ennahda was open to working with secular political formations in Tunisia, including in the coalition government established after cross-party negotiations in November 2011.

Unfortunately for Chatham House, their pet Shaykh is also known for other interesting propensities and alliegances.

In 1994, scholar Martin Kramer reported on Mr. Ghannouchi’s his extremist background:

Assuming a valid distinction can be made between Islamists who are “extremist” and “reformist,” Ghannouchi clearly belongs to the first category. Since his last visit to the United States, he has openly threatened U.S. interests, supported Iraq against the United States and campaigned against the Arab-Israeli peace process. Indeed, Ghannouchi in exile has personified the rejection of U.S. policies, even as he dispatches missives to the State Department.

Kramer also notes that Ghannouchi has alleged that Jews are behind a “worldwide campaign against Islam”:

The Jews everywhere are behind a worldwide campaign against Islam. Islam and the West could reach an accommodation, he says, were it not for the worldwide machinations of the Jews, who fan the fires of mistrust. Beware the Jews, he admonishes the West: “We Islamists hope that the West is not carried away by the Jewish strategy of linking the future of its relationship with the Islamic world with a war against Islam.

In another article posted that same year (1994) on an Islamic website, Mr. Ghannouchi wrote:

“Zionism can be seen as hostile to every element rooted in ethical and religious principles (excepting those remnants, which can be exploited as slogans and national myths). It both represents and serves the new existential ethos which transforms the human race into ‘marketing’ and ‘geopolitical’ units which can be deployed, rewarded or punished by the powers that be, who are accountable to no-one save themselves. Zionism, then, nurtured by and in turn nurturing this global pseudo-civilization, represents a secular onslaught on the heart of our Islamic nation. The Islamic project, by contrast, is its polar opposite, representing the hope that human civilization can be rescued from this new worship of the golden calf. To speak of saving Palestine from the Zionists is to speak simultaneously of one’s hope for a global liberation. The ‘Palestinian cause’ does not signify the simple reconquest of a patch of territory occupied by aggressors. It is not even about peace and war; Its implications go much further. For to strike at Zionism in Palestine is to strike at the enemy in its new citadel, which it has constructed at the centre of the world, in the very heart of our Muslim nation, in a land which has always been of unlimited strategic and spiritual fecundity. The West, as a civilization, seems set to extend its influence to the heartland of the Old World, the better to destroy the surviving traces of spiritual resistance which have remained intact there, and finally to obliterate mans remaining hopes for the rebirth of a civilization which is qualitative and humane, rather than quantitative and secular.”

According to one Muslim Brotherhood watch-site, as recently as 2002, Mr. Ghannouchi co-signed a statement that said “The bodies of the men and women of Palestine are shields against the Zionist agenda, which its greater target is to destroy the entire Islamic Ummah.” The statement was also signed by:

• Mustafa Mashhour, the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood
• Esam Al Atar, leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood
• Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General for Hezbollah
• Ahmed Yassin, the late former spiritual leader of Hamas

In March 2010, Mr. Ghannouchi said that the Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip, “is compatible with Israel’s aggressive nature”. In a May 2011 interview, Ghannouchi called for and predicted the end of Israel.

A homophobic archbishop, a weak principled President and a leader of a clerical fascist Islamist party that supports international terrorism – these are amongst three of the nominees for the Chatham House Prize this year.

I am speechless.

Earlier this week, the Guardian ran a friendly piece on Viva Palestina’s difficulties, which arise from Galloway’s decision to work with the murderous Syrian regime in bringing the convoy through Syria. Following a certain amount of outrage in the comments section, the editor of the Guardian’s The Northerner blog, Martin Wainwright, intervened to say:

Appreciating how strongly people feel, may I just appeal for as much recognition of opponents’ bona fides as possible and for the calm style which actually is much more persuasive to the uncertain than entrenched positions. Sorry if I sound a bit schoolmasterly, but reader involvement is the glory of modern journalism and we are particularly aware of that, and proud of it, on the N.

Among those who have, erm, reservations about Viva Palestina are the Hamas supporters of the Jordanian Lifeline Committee Chairman, who have organised their own Ansar II convoy leaving from Jordan to Gaza on the 18th May. Over to its spokesman, Wael As-Sakka:

Yes Viva Palestina did approach us but only last week asking if they could join the Ansar convoy. As we explained to Mr Kevin Ovenden we have already arranged the logistics of our convoy which included sending detailed information to the Jordanian and Egyptian authorities so this unfortunately will not be possible.

…

In addition, events in Syria is a very important matter on the public agenda in Jordan and the convoy travelling through Syria would be regarded by the majority of the Jordanian population as cooperation with the Syrian regime, legitimising crimes committed against its people.

This situation would complicate cooperation with any convoy that might be regarded as helping or being close to the Syrian regime. This is particularly important for the Jordanian Lifeline Committee that aims to break the siege on Gaza and support the resistance of the Palestinian people and so do not wish to be involved in any political conflicts in the region in any form.

I’m assuming that the money on offer from the Assad family is just too good to turn down.

Still, we should all recognise Galloway’s “bona fides”, right?

I support gay marriage.  However my first instinct is to think Cranmer (not a favourite blog, particularly BTL) has a point in feeling aggrieved at being pressured to respond to complaints (from the ASA) about the fact that he carried an advert on his blog on behalf of the Coalition for Marriage. The ad’s assertion that 70% of people in the UK are opposed to gay marriage seems backed up by at least one poll, so it is not making false claims.  Although I don’t like the message of the advertisement, I don’t like the idea of it being censored either.

However, although I think it’s important to monitor and discuss issues relating to freedom of speech in the UK, it’s vital not to lose sight of the far more chilling restrictions elsewhere.  In Russia another activist has now fallen foul of new laws against the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality:

Nikolay Alexeyev was fined 5,000 roubles (£105) for spreading ‘homosexual propaganda’ among children, after he went to St Petersburg city hall with a placard reading “Homosexuality is not perverted”.

He plans to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

After a campaign of “venom” on social media, the Irish band Dervish has cancelled a planned tour of Israel.

This does nothing to vitiate the notion that Ireland is the most anti-Israel nation in Europe. I expect that for some of the Israel haters there, it’s a reputation to be proud of.

Or has he?