Harry's Place

Here’s something nice to help see out the old year and see in the new. It’s performed by our blogging colleague David Adler of Lerterland.

Happy New Year to Harry’s Place readers and here’s hoping for a more peaceful and just world in 2010.

It’s been a difficult half-year or so for the rulers of Iran and (fortunately) 2010 promises even more problems for them.
It’s times like this when the leaders of a murderous and repressive theocracy, clinging to power through sheer brutality, find out who their true friends are. Did they ever doubt it for a moment?

Venezuelan [...]

This is a cross post by Edmund Standing
For much of 2009, we have been honoured to have regular contributions in the Harry’s Place comments section from BNP Legal Director comedian Lee John Barnes. So, for all his numerous fans, I bring you the best of Lee Barnes, 2009:
January:
LJB brings us his first poetic masterpiece of [...]

A few days ago I wondered when we might hear from the the pro-Galloway Socialist Unity blog on the latest uprisings in Iran.
For the record, they are finally heard from. It looks to me like a desperate effort to shift the focus to “Western interference” and to muddle what to any clear-eyed and genuine leftist [...]

From the Socialist Unity comments box:
Isn’t it about time for a new international of progressive parties and organisations led by countries such as Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and with supporters e.g. from this blog, Die Linke, the Parti de Gauche, the Workers Party (Ireland), Respect, the CPB, etc.?
We could all achieve so much more [...]

This is a cross-post by Edmund Standing
The Czech Republic is fast becoming a hot bed of neo-Nazism and racist sentiment. The Times reported in November on the terrible treatment being received by Roma families:
The squalid hostels embody the institutionalised racism against the Roma and their powerlessness. The 200,000 to 300,000 Roma in the Czech Republic [...]

Longtime readers may remember sundry Harry’s Place comments box dwellers explaining away very real acts of Islamist terrorism in the years after 9/11 as either ‘inside jobs’ or mere figments of overactive and easily-scared imaginations.
Typical comments often included the words and phrases: ‘Bush’, ‘Reichstag fire’, ‘no real evidence’ and the dead giveaway ’scary Muslims’. Such people [...]

Pearls Before Swine:

But in real life wouldn’t the cows want the duck dead, rather than the goat?

George Galloway has issued a typically snide denial that he has any connection to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the airliner bomber.

Advisory from George Galloway MP
Re: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
I have had several calls from the media about a meeting at which I am alleged to have spoken, organised by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab,apparently a former president of the [...]

The Times reports that anti-terrorist authorities are investigating whether the underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was ‘groomed’ by Al-Qaeda while he was President of the Islamic Society at University College London.
More disturbingly:
He is the fourth president of a London student Islamic society to face terrorist charges in three years. One is facing a retrial on [...]