Harry's Place

This is a guest post by Harvela

Looks like intrepid reporter and Palestine activist Harry Fear did not fare too well at the Islamic University of Gaza recently. It’s no wonder as (at 2.12 in) Fear makes the bizarre assertion that the female students, because they were wearing the Hijab, probably did not support the concept of Freedom of Speech. Not the way to win an audience over Harry, especially in Gaza.

Scroll to 24 mins as the students prepare to protest. It appears that the Palestinians are sick of ‘internationalists ’setting the agenda and narrative of the Palestinians’ rather than merely providing an echo chamber for the resistance . Mariam Barghouti has more to say on the subject here. Click on the link ‘original location of blog’ for the BTL comments. Here is one comment emphasising the point about ‘Right On’ Palestinian solidarity activists such as Harry Fear .

Layla on April 19, 2013 at 12:12 am

Thank you so much for this absolutely essential article. It is so timely it is uncanny as amongst several pro-Palestinian activists we were discussing some of the issues that you raised based on the recent emergence of a certain Harry Fear, as well as other self-indulgent and narcissistic characters. He is violating every single one of the principles you have outlined with a view to arising to quick fame, and, disgracefully suggesting he can give a voice to the people of the OPTs. I am in the process of trying to see if someone can present him your article, and only hope that he reads it and is humbled. Yet again, I am truly grateful for this succinct and deeply honest useful article.

Asa Winstanley expresses his concerns about Harry Fear here.

So there we have it. Internationalists as self indulgent narcissistic characters. As if we needed a Gaza university protest to tell us that.

Finally, here is Electronic Intifada

“Are you enjoying filming our misery? Film: it’s fine, you are like the others. You show up in the camp, film, leave, and we are still here.”

This is a cross-post by Marc Goldberg

The West did a really good job of watching the Spanish Civil War from the sidelines while making absolutely sure that those fighting for freedom couldn’t get their hands on any weapons. In Hungary in 1956 the people rose up and threw off the shackles of communist dictatorial rule and embraced freedom and from their border the Americans watched and made nice noises right up until the point that a Soviet army rode into Hungary at which point they stopped making nice noises and said absolutely nothing at all.

On the other hand the USA did a bang up job of invading Iraq twice for oil and invading Afghanistan to kill Osama Bin Laden only to get him 10 years later in a different country. A country which by some monumentally stupid policy the USA supplies with the most advanced weapons known to man while standing back and allowing them to imprison the man that enabled them to kill the greatest enemy they have ever known. Not to mention watching them fund and train the same people who are killing their warriors just over the border.

US Marines were blown up en masse in Beirut, the USA did a bang up job of running away and doing absolutely nothing in response to their deaths. Well not nothing they did fire the lone CIA agent they sent to Beirut to investigate the bombing for the unforgivable crime of finding out who did it.

Growing up, it always seemed to me that the United States was the place, perhaps the only place in the whole world, that stood up for freedom. It seemed to me that the Americans were the guys who were going to stand up for those who didn’t have a voice, for those who couldn’t speak for themselves. I was wrong. The United States talks about exporting freedom but instead exports computers, cars and movies. When it comes to propping up a South American or Arab dictator the USA does a bang up job but when it comes to helping out people who are fighting for the very values enshrined by the US constitution and taken for granted by the citizens of that great country the Americans are nowhere to be found.

Such as in Syria.

Now I know that it’s not going to be easy to bring democracy to Syria, I really do but I don’t care. This is supposed to be what the USA is all about, this is supposed to be the one issue above all others that motivates the USA to intervene in a foreign war, this is supposed to be the single most important human endeavor, the most important human right that anyone in the entire world can fight for. So why is it that the bastion of freedom in the world, which is by no coincidence at all the single most powerful country in the world, feels the need to sit back and watch those who are fighting for their freedom die in abject failure while the forces of darkness take over the country that could be the single most important place in the world.

The stakes in Syria are huge; were Syria to become a secular democratic country the Middle East would change entirely. The land bridge between Hezbollah and Iran would disappear, the millions of refugees who have fled to neighboring Lebanon and Jordan would be able to return without fear rather than remaining where they are and destabilizing them by their mere presence, by being mouths to feed and people to take care of.
It’s too damn easy for the great democracies to stand by and utter nice sounding words while throwing meaningless gifts to a rebellion that they should be both influencing, backing and training, hell they should be screaming from the rooftops that freedom shall reign in Syria when this civil war that has killed 80,000 people and counting is done!

Instead the United States is watching Qatar and Saudi Arabia send millions of dollars and lethal weapons to people who make Al Qaeda look like a friendly bunch of guys to hang out with. The US contents itself with providing a bunch of Special Forces folks to train the occasional Free Syrian Army ‘soldier’ in Jordan and lets not forget the non-lethal equipment they’re sending, which at the same time as being a very nice gesture it’s also completely f*cking useless if you want to kill soldiers from the regime that has been murdering and torturing your family and friends for as long as you’ve been alive.

It’s no wonder that the Russians have sent a flotilla of warships into the Mediterranean and S-300 anti aircraft missiles into Syria, they certainly have nothing to fear from the only country in the world that could stop them. Just out of interest am I the only one who noticed that both a fleet of warships and advanced anti-aircraft missiles are absolutely useless to Assad and his forces in their fight against an insurrection that possesses neither an Air Force nor a Navy. That those anti aircraft missiles pose a threat only to an Air Force that might attempt to violate Syrian airspace and the warships might well send a message to a country nearby that is considering military action.

Cheers America, your inaction has brought Russia right into Israel’s face.

Perhaps it’s time that the USA got involved in a conflict not because there was economic gain, nor because America herself had been attacked, but because to get involved in this conflict is the right thing to do.

America are you listening?

I’ve just read about what seems to be a very worthwhile initiative, The Apostasy Project. Alom Shaha has set this up to support apostates from all faiths.  A while back I posted about some of the responses to his Young Atheist’s Handbook. Ex-Muslim Shaha reported that, happily, he had had no negative responses to his book from Muslims but is well aware of the huge problems faced by many atheists from a Muslim background.  He touches on the issue here, and there’s some excellent coverage on the Council of ex-Muslims’ Forum. But Shaha’s project is designed to help all apostates, not just Muslims, and on this video atheists from a range of different background discuss the problems – and pleasures – of apostasy.

Today people around the world have been marking (or trying to mark) IDAHO, the international day against homophobia.   An LGBT march in Kenya, where homosexuality is a criminal offence, was stopped from going ahead. LGBT protestors in Tbilisi, Georgia, were threatened by Orthodox priests:

Father David, a priest who was one of the organizers of Friday’s anti-gay rally, said the parade “insults people’s traditions and national sentiments.”

Here are some supportive photos from Tehran – although it is too dangerous for these Iranians to reveal their names or faces. Only 12% of Russians support the justification or display of homosexual relationships, and demonstrators were attacked in St Petersburg, and their protest closed down by police. Here young Israelis share their hopes for a more equal society.

Finally – it’s good to note plenty of support for IDAHO in the UK – from, for example, the police, hospitals, local councils, museums and MPs.

Have you ever wondered about the correlation between men’s upper-body strength and their attitudes toward economic redistribution?

So have I. Fortunately a study published in the journal Psychological Science provides some interesting answers.

The study found that among rich men, those with the most upper-body strength had the most negative attitudes toward redistribution. Somewhat more surprising (at least to me):

In men of lower socioeconomic status, the correlation was reversed: stronger men were more in favor of redistribution, while men with smaller muscles were less likely to support it.

These associations remained significant even once the researchers controlled for political party. No relationship between strength and ideology, however, was seen in women.

The authors of the study suggest the differences are a product of evolution:

[I]t is a fitness error for weaker contestants to attempt to seize resources when they cannot prevail and for stronger ones to cede what they can cost-effectively defend.

In a recent post, Tony Greenstein explained that his mission has now essentially come to an end because Gilad Atzmon who had formerly been ‘running wild over the solidarity movement’ had now been reined in, ‘except at the fringes’.  Greenstein also asserts that

In 2012, a holocaust denier Frances Clarke-Lowes [sic] was expelled from PSC to the fury of the Zionists and Harry’s Place.

This seems a curious characterisation of the HP coverage of this event.  Here’s my own post for example. A bit grudging maybe, but hardly furious. If Atzmon’s influence has indeed been kept in check by the PSC, then that is also something to be welcomed – even though a quick search of this site reveals there is still plenty to object to in the movement.

However Atzmon is still finding people to promote, not just his music, but his ideas.  Tonight, for example, he will perform at a concert hosted by Roseanne Barr, and we learn from this site that:

Roseanne first met Gilad at the Levantine Cultural Center on Leap Year, 2012, but the two have shared progressive world views for years via the Net. (Atzmon’s US tour is being prominently puffed over on Counterpunch as well.)

Several people have tried to persuade Roseanne that Atzmon is bad news – without success. She has over 200,000 followers on Twitter, all being told that opponents of Atzmon – a group which includes people with dramatically different views on Israel of course – are liars (and perhaps victims of that ‘Jewish mind control’ problem she was fretting about last year.)  I pointed her in the direction of the Electronic Intifada’s denunciation of Atzmon signed by several Palestinian activists – and I note that Atzmon is too much even for Joseph Massad – and received a sharp response which has since been deleted.

Update: This is is how the Levantine Center, the venue for the concert, responded to criticism

https://twitter.com/LevantineCenter/status/335593446339383298

This is a guest post by Paul M

It’s not controversial to say that ideas, like other living things, are subject to the law of natural selection. Ideas are thrown out into the world in competition with other ideas. The ones that seem most persuasive live on, the others are discarded and either forgotten altogether or dragged out from time to time for a laugh: Look at what people used to believe, back in the old days.

I have been coming to the conclusion lately that natural selection works on ideas in a different way as well, a way I haven’t considered before. I think that bad ideas ultimately select against the people that believe them.

You may choose to believe that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle, or that it is flat, or at the dead centre of an infinite series of spheres holding the other planets, the sun and stars. These ideas are all quaint antiques, but they’re more than that. Societies that hold beliefs like these can’t send men to the moon or put telecom satellites into orbit. They fall behind the ones that see more clearly.

You may believe that a supreme being created the universe entire & stocked Earth with life forms of his own design and manufacture 6017 years ago. Most contemporary people will think you’re odd, but far more importantly you’ll have a hard time developing a functional understanding of medicine, genetics, microbiology, embryology or pretty much any of the other life sciences. Crucial parts of the world will be a closed book to you.

So far, so obvious, but it’s not the hard sciences that have been on my mind. Aside from a few mopping-up operations, those battles have largely been fought & won and science rules in its domain. The soft science of Middle East studies is where the action is nowadays, and it is the recent piece by Joseph Massad that made me sit down and put pen to paper (or whatever it is we do these days).

I’m not going to spend time rebutting Massad’s arguments. Their sheer lunacy and malice relieves me of the need to: If you don’t immediately see it for yourself, nothing I say will open your eyes & I can save myself the trouble. But what do we make of Massad? There are only two options. It’s certainly possible he doesn’t believe a word of the rubbish he puts out, and its a straightforward case of lying to serve his cause. The other case is that he does believe. He is, after all, like any academic, paid to think outside the box and as Orwell famously pointed out, no-one beats an intellectual for gullibility. Massad’s essay reads like a classic of the self-delusion genre and it’s of a piece with his previous work. I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt: I think he actually believes it. Furthermore I’m sure there’s a ready audience out there, in the Middle East but also in parts of the West, who will believe it too.

Jews, Israel & Zionism, however, don’t exist in isolation. You can no more turn their history and meaning upside-down without seriously distorting your understanding of the world, than you could put your fingers through the holes in a fishing net and twist them 180 degrees without tangling and deforming the rest of the net. The consequence for Massad is that, if he really believes that Zionism is antisemitism is Nazism, he’s trying to navigate his world from a false map. Not only his understanding of Zionists and Israel, but also of the wider Middle East and the West in its relationship to it, will be wrong—and all this is the subject of his professional life. Much of his output, in other words, rests on imaginary foundations and when current political fashions are corrected by history, as they sooner or later will be, it will be largely discarded. If it contributes at all to future scholarship, it’s likely to be as a cautionary example.

What’s true for the individual is also true at larger scales. A Middle East Studies department that provides a congenial environment for a Massad is not likely to contribute to a usable understanding of the region; a university that can’t maintain the intellectual standards of its departments, or even express its displeasure at their decline, is itself en route to losing its prestige to those that can.

Transferring the focus back to the Middle East, there are whole societies there—essentially all of them—the majority of whose people seem ready to believe what Massad believes, and more. What effect will natural selection have on political cultures built around the notion that evil Jews control their world, and that nothing is more important than expelling the Jews from their sliver of land by any expedient means?

It’s a pity that men’s issues are often taken up by those who don’t do their cause very good service – people who seem more concerned with knocking women than helping men.  However this piece by Glen Poole seemed a reasonable one to me.  He anticipates with interest a speech by Diane Abbott in which she will touch on what Poole calls ‘Britain’s crisis of masculinity’.

Abbott in particular will place a specific focus on the importance of Labour feminists developing a male-friendly narrative, a nuance that points to the real issue here – how do feminists deal with men’s issues?

Poor educational attainment, homelessness and suicide are some of the issues Poole identifies as problems which disproportionately affect men.  This all seems fair enough, although I wished Poole had not treated feminists as a monolithic group, as I’m sure many do not want to trivialise sexual abuse against men.

In fact, even some of the most pro-feminist men’s groups will tell you privately that feminist thinking can often be a barrier to helping men and boys. A prime example is the field of sexual abuse, where these groups claim that the women’s sector has persuaded the government to exclude charities that specialise in helping male victims from its rape support fund.

He seems to think that gender equality is – or will be perceived as – a zero sum game by feminists, but in fact breaking down stereotypes (whether your immediate focus is women or men) should benefit both sexes.  He claims that Labour will need to ‘face up to the crisis that tackling men’s issues creates for feminism’.  But, going by the comments under his piece, I think he may be overstating the amount of resistance to projects which help men.

Update: I thought Laurie Penny’s short article on this topic was reasonably sensible and sympathetic, in line with other statements she has made about the problems faced by men and boys.  It’s a great pity it attracted so many hostile comments.

The dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, in Berlin, tells of her visits to the Jewish Museum and the Stasi Museum.

Of the latter she writes:

I enter their cells, the interrogation rooms. I come from the perspective of a Cuban who was detained in the same place, where a window looking outward becomes an unattainable dream. One cell was lined with rubber, the scratch marks of the prisoners can still be seen on its walls. But more sinister seeming to me are the offices where they ripped — or fabricated — a confession from the detainees. I know them, I’ve seen them. They are a copy of their counterpart in Cuba, copied to a T by the diligent students from the Island’s Ministry of the Interior who were taught by GDR State Security. Impersonal, with a chair the prisoner can’t move because it is anchored to the floor and some supposed curtain behind which the microphone or video camera are hidden. And the constant metallic noises from the rattling of the locks and bars, to remind the prisoners where they are, how much they are at the mercy of their jailer.

After this I again need air, to get out from within those walls. I turn away from that place with the conviction that what, for them, is a museum of the past, is what we are still living in the present. A “now” that we cannot allow to prolong itself into tomorrow.

And speaking of Socialist Unity…

This is a guest post by E

George Orwell defined Doublethink as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.”

Glancing over the pages of Socialist Unity today, I couldn’t help but think of this very definition.

Yesterday, May 14, was the anniversary of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, in 1948. If you are Israeli, it is a day of jubilation (although it is celebrated according to the Jewish calendar, which varies from the Gregorian calendar). If you are Palestinian, it is your day of Nakba (“disaster”). And apparently if you are a socialist, it is the day in which began All That is Wrong in the World.

This is how the front page of Socialist Unity looks today:

You will notice that the red title bar has been changed to green, a caption in Arabic has been added reading “Solidarity with Palestinians for peace and justice”, and a Palestinian flag with the caption “Remembering al-Nakba” has been placed on the site’s right-side. And on the front page there are currently four posts from the past several days dealing with Israel/Palestine.

What struck me wasn’t the fact that Socialist Unity chose to commemorate the Nakba. There’s no denying that Israel’s creating has been catastrophic for the Palestinian national movement, and from their perspective they rightly view Israel’s creation and the results of the 1948 war as a disaster. SU and far-leftists in general are well known for their support for the Palestinians, so it only makes sense for them to hold the same view, and they are certainly within their right to express it.

So that’s not what bothers me. Even taking into consideration the one-sidedness of their position and their complete ignorance of any pro-Israeli argument or suffering throughout this conflict, it isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. What does strike me, however, is how selective Socialist Unity is in selecting the causes it champions, and the blatant hypocrisy in which this support manifests itself.

For example, Socialist Unity, or any other far-left site for that matter, has never commemorated in such a manner the Armenian Genocide, the genocide in Rwanda, or the killing fields in Cambodia; it has never put up a Kurdish flag to commemorate the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds by Turkey during WWI or their gassing by Sadam Hussein in 1990; nor has it ever altered the blog’s title bar to read “solidarity with Darfur for peace and justice” to protest the atrocities there. With the Armenians, Rwandans, Cambodians, Kurds and Darfuris – all of whom have suffered several times in magnitude than the Nakba – there is no unity. For them there is no solidarity.

But really, why travel decades back or halfway around the world? All ones needs do is compare SU’s treatment of the Palestinian issue with something happening these very days in a land not-so-far-away: Syria.

Recent reports put the death toll of the Syrian conflict at 80,000, the majority of which are civilian, with some estimates going up even to 120,000. Nearly 1.5 million Syrians have become refugees, and similar numbers are displaced internally in Syria. Alawite pro-government militias are carrying out acts of ethnic cleansing to create an all-Alawaite zone in western Syria, and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah is deepening its involvement in the conflict. More people have been killed and displaced in Syria in two years than during the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And yet, when it comes to Syria, socialists in general and Socialist Unity in particular seem to have their head in the sand (not to speak of other places…). Posts on the subjects are few and far between, and usually range from a mild condemnation of both sides and a call for an end to hostilities (while keeping Assad in power, of course), to outright support for the Assad regime.

John Wight, a well-known anti-Israel campaigner and one of SU’s main editors has publicly declared his support for Assad:

Who’s neutral? I’m with Assad and the Syrian people against a Saudi and Qatari armed insurgency, supported by the West, comprising religious zealots and obscurantists engaged in barbarism.

Wight is also a leading activist in the Scottish Palestinian Solidary Campaign, one of the most extremist and vehemently anti-Israeli outfits in the UK today, which frequently fails to distinguish between being anti-Israeli and being anti-Jewish. Aside from his support for Assad, Wight has written several pieces on SU decrying “outside intervention” in Syria. Naturally this opposition is only limited to Western intervention. Oddly enough, when it comes to Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah involvement, Wight has nothing to say on the matter.

Moreover, when it comes to Syria and Assad, even “solidarity with the Palestinians for peace and justice” takes a back seat. In late 2012, Syrian army forces shelled the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp on several occasions, killing scores. One would expect that an organization named the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (or its Scottish counterpart) would scream at the top of its lungs against such an atrocity. And yet, there was barely a protest, let alone condemnation of Assad or his Iranian masters. The same goes for Socialist Unity, which was utterly silent. It seems that when it comes to certain matters, even solidarity with the Palestinians goes only so far.

I’m sure that some of the editors and readers of Socialist Unity will go to bed tonight confident in the virtuousness and self-righteousness of their “solidarity” and arm-chair “resistance”. They should realize, however, that such displays of one-sided nationalism – while completely ignoring the other side, forgetting about every other conflict in the world, and even forgetting about their own namesake when it suits them – don’t make them right or righteous.

It just makes them hypocrites.