Child abuse report

Speechless and in tears - after watching this.

http://www.gavinsblog.com/2009/05/26/child-abuse-report/

More Double Standards?

Melanie Phillips draws our attention to the suffering of civilians under Sri Lankan bombardment. "Hospitals have been repeatedly shelled. Thousands of civilians have been trapped and unknown numbers have died. The BBC says more than 70,000 people have been killed in this conflict, while the United Nations says it thinks 265,000 people have been displaced."

"Sure, there are some protests. But where are the calls by academics or trade unions to boycott Sri Lanka? Where are the denunciations of Sri Lankan ‘atrocities’ by the bishops and archbishops of the Church of England? Where are the passionate and emotive TV documentaries about the plight of the Tamils, the one-sided grillings of the Sri Lankans on the Today programme, the front page splashes and multi-part newspaper features on the Sri Lankans’ supposed breaches of international law, the NGOs’ appeals for humanitarian aid for the besieged Tamils, the attempts by human rights lawyers to prosecute Sri Lanka’s military for ‘war crimes’? No, all these things are reserved instead for Israel, which has demonstrably gone out of its way to avoid civilian casualties as far as humanly possible and yet upon whose imagined crimes against humanity the western intelligentsia – which has barely bestirred itself over the Tamils -- obsessively dwells."

At Further Expense

The British people have been scapegoating Parliament because of members on the fiddle. Now MPs are piling all the blame on their Speaker.

As Oscar Wilde opined, 'Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.' We don't like MPs. We don't understand or appreciate what they do, or benefit from it ourselves in any immediate or obvious way.

We have a problem here but it's not about lying and cheating, because we all do that, especially when we can get away with it.

A letter in yesterday's Times proposed a moral audit of the whole nation. Must have been a Rabbi.

At Enormous Expense

I seem to be one of the few people who sees the current outcry against Members of Parliament as just another case of what Thomas Macauley termed the ridiculous sight of 'the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality'.

The proposition that these particular culprits are untypical of the rest of our society at work and play is the most nauseating nonsense. How many of us, for instance, would turn down an offer of workmanship done well, efficiently, cheaply, quickly, paid for cash-in-hand, no questions asked, at known expense to the public purse through non-declaration and thus non-payment of Income Tax and, probably, VAT? This is cheating - just as much as wrongly claiming state benefits. But I do not know anyone who hasn't done it and wouldn't do it - even my friend who happens to be a retired police officer.

Who wouldn't, in claiming expenses from an employer or estimating expenses to set against their earnings for tax purposes, give themselves the benefit of the doubt, generously if permitted?

Church spokesmen, unable to resist, have of course jumped on the bandwagon of moral condemnation. Like most others they have forgotten how easily and unhealthily we project our shortcomings onto others and make scapegoats of easily definable groups. Worst of all they have forgotten their own scriptures which warn against human greed, against casting stones at other sinners, against moral sadism in all its forms.

Let's hope that there are not individuals and groups with malicious intent waiting in the wings to exploit for their own nefarious ends our collective, sanctimonious indignation.

From Harry's Place

Surely the BNP hopes to gain votes from people who are very keen to “support our troops”.

Well, I support the troops. People like Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, for example.

Grenada-born L/Cpl Beharry was honoured in 2005 after twice saving lives under enemy fire. He became the Army’s most high-profile war hero when he received the VC for “repeated extreme gallantry and unquestioned valour” for the two rescues in May and June 2004 “despite a harrowing weight of incoming fire”.

He was at the head of a five-vehicle convoy when it came under attack in the town of al-Amarah on 1 May 2004. He guided the column through a mile of enemy ground to drop off wounded comrades at great risk to his own safety, his citation said.

Weeks later, his vehicle was hit by an rocket-propelled grenade round. Despite receiving horrific head injuries, he drove out of the ambush and again saved his crew.

The BNP is unimpressed.

The BNP, led by Nick Griffin, called Johnson Beharry “an immigrant” and claimed his heroics, which saved the lives of 30 fellow soldiers, were simply “routine”.

On its website the far-right political party states that Lance Corporal Beharry only received Britain’s top military honour because of “positive discrimination by the PC-mad government”.

It comes just days after the party held an Armed Forces Awareness Day to try to portray themselves as “the only party that supports our troops”.

Whatever their views on wars and politics, in March many people were horrified by the hateful Islamist protest against soldiers in Luton.

This racist belittling of bravery by BNP scum is no better than that.

Anyone who really does support British troops should never vote for the BNP.

Blog or Twitter?

Not sure which way to go.

Quite like short, not necessarily grammatical, notes with hyperlinks.

Went to a lecture Thursday night at Manchester Cathedral. Michael Schmidt, Professor of Poetry. Not the best lecture so far. I was left feeling not very clever, certainly not as clever as the speaker, and afterwards not much wiser. Especially horrified by the way he praised Rowan Williams' initiative on Sharia Law, one of the few things I think he has, as Abp of C, got catastrophically wrong.

Disturbing account in the Church Times of how serious religious violence in Nigeria is being ignored. Might cause the Abp to have second thoughts.

Carol Ann Duffy's appointment as Poet Laureate has been widely welcomed. In the past her lesbian stance might have prevented it, but, as she says, “I think we’ve all grown up a lot over the past ten years. Sexuality is now celebrated. It is a lovely, ordinary, normal thing.”

There's probably a philosophical label for this but I'm struck by how much trouble we make for ourselves by using nouns rather than verbs. Two have just occurred to me - depressive and failure. To be either a depressive or a failure is to be stuck in or with something, something you have to be cured of or delivered from. To be depressed sometimes, or to fail, is part of being human and of itself no big deal. I think, for example, the political left have wrongly judged that failing makes you a failure, and diminishes your worth as an individual, something you must be protected from, by state intervention if necessary. Is this the "all must have prizes" philosophy?

War by any other name

Joe Queenan lampoons some recent examples of newspeak.

The Obama administration has come under intense criticism for replacing the term "war on terror" with the emaciated euphemism "overseas contingency operations," and for referring to individual acts of terror as "man-caused disasters."

This semi-official attempt to disassociate the administration from the fierce rhetoric favored by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney has enraged Americans on both the right and left. Many feel that such vaporous bureaucratese is a self-emasculating action that plunges us into an Orwellian world where words have no emotional connection with the horrors they purport to describe.

Yet, if the intention of the Obama administration is to tone down the confrontational rhetoric being used by our enemies, the effort is already reaping results. This week, in a pronounced shift from its usual theatrical style, the Taliban announced that it will no longer refer to its favorite method of murder as "beheadings," but will henceforth employ the expression "cephalic attrition." "Flayings" -- a barbarously exotic style of execution that has been popular in this part of the world since before the time of Alexander -- will now be described as "unsolicited epidermal reconfigurations." In a similar vein, lopping off captives' arms will now be referred to as "appendage furloughing," while public floggings of teenaged girls will from here on out be spoken of as "metajudicial interfacing."

There's more.

On the Telly

I've just heard Ben Miller on ITV's Moving Wallpaper refer to someone as a 'misanthropic sociopath with entitlement issues'. Whatever this is, it isn't 'dumbing down'.

Not at peace

Sometimes I think I'm an introvert. But, if so, why are there so many people I want to shout at and shake at the same time?

Shoe thrower's sentence reduced

Gene brings news of justice tempered by mercy.

The journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush in Baghdad in the presence of Prime Minister al-Maliki last December has had his sentence cut from three years to one.

This is in contrast to what would have happened to him if he had thrown his shoes in the presence of Saddam Hussein while he was in power. In that case, the only things cut would have been his head and possibly other body parts.

I'm no expert on what is appropriate punishment but, as Gene says, it's a far more lenient sentence than he would have got in any other Arab country.

Solitude

“Solitude greeting solitude, that's what community is all about. Community is not the place where we are no longer alone but the place where we respect, protect, and reverently greet one another's aloneness. When we allow our aloneness to lead us into solitude, our solitude will enable us to rejoice in the solitude of others. Our solitude roots us in our own hearts. Instead of making us yearn for company that will offer us immediate satisfaction, solitude makes us claim our centre and empowers us to call others to claim theirs. Our various solitudes are like strong, straight pillars that hold up the roof of our communal house. Thus, solitude always strengthens community.”
Henri Nouwen

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman

timesonline reports from a region of Pakistan where the brutal Taleban have taken control:

In return for peace the Taleban can administer the region, run Sharia courts, ban women from marketplaces, outlaw music shops and stop girls older than 13 going to school.

Israel's crime

If you are beginning to feel "that Jews who are worried about anti-Jewish discrimination are really mendacious liars seeking to pull the wool over honest Gentile eyes" then please pay attention to this appeal by Eve Garrard.

Religion, theo-politics and race

Paul Sikander at Butterflies & Wheels has cautionary things to say about a phobia that is sweeping the world.

‘Islamophobia’ is a constructed model designed to protect Islam and Islamic politics from criticism. It has little or nothing to do with protecting individual Muslims from discrimination.

Until the late 1990’s, ethnic minorities in this country were conceived of as being susceptible to discrimination on the basis of immutable human factors. That you are black or Asian is a fact that cannot be altered, and you could face discrimination in British society because of it, prejudice sometimes subtle, sometimes violent and visceral. And so, civil and political society sought to counter this by privileging the dignity of the individual in the face of racism. If a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Sikh was to be called a ‘Paki’ it was not because of the religion they actively or nominally belonged to. If a West Indian was called a ‘nigger’ it was not because of any cultural or religious formulation or criticism they were facing. Anti-Semitism when it was expressed, the earlier racism of Europe, that had been present before the post war migration of black and Asian people to the UK, was simultaneously a similar and different mode of prejudice. But crucially, anti-Semitism when expressed and countered was not about defending the theology of Judaism.

The construction of the concept of ‘Islamophobia’ began in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair. The impetus for it was to stigmatise an entire range of individuals and opinions, from those who took issue with religious precepts of Islam, to those who questioned certain values of the religion, certain cultural practices recurrent inside the sub-culture of some British Muslim groups, all the way through to those who critically analysed Islamist politics.

For the first time, ‘racism’ was not considered to be the active discrimination against individuals because of their ethnic background. Now, ‘racism’ was asserted to be anything that remotely offended the sensibilities of religious Muslims, including those from within the Muslim community who dissented from a certain line on any range of issues.

What a victory. To weld together the protection of religion and theo-politics with the whole idea of racism. To no longer privilege the dignity of the individual against racial prejudice, but to privilege the ‘dignity’ of the religion of Islam, and the politics of Islamism, and providing them with an immunity — the righteous immunity of protection from ‘victimisation’.

Save the children from whom?

Norm sums up why people like me have stopped supporting what once were our favourite charities, and Comic Relief to boot.

Save the Children opposed the Iraq war, so doing what too many humanitarian NGOs have been doing lately, namely, adopting partisan positions on difficult and divisive political issues, thereby going beyond their stated and legitimate purposes, and turning away some of their longtime supporters. Save the Children favoured leaving the children of Iraq to the continued attentions of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The first and biggest lie

Brett at HP on a major casualty in the "war on terror".

According to a StWC press release: “Anti-war groups from across the world will meet to oppose any further expasion (sic) of NATO and demand an end to the occupation of Afghanistan.” Another rally will feature “leading speakers from the peace movement.”

That these are “anti-war” groups and that these speakers are from “the peace movement” is the first and biggest lie in what I know will be a flood of many more.

These are NOT “anti-war” campaigners. They are not pacifists. They are not conscientious objectors. They are certainly not against all wars. They are not against the use of armed force. And, perhaps most importantly, they are not even against all sides in current conflicts.

. . . the people invited to speak for the “Stop the War Coalition” are only against the use of military force if it is Western military force.

. . . this same sorry lot have no idea what do do about the theocratic fascists, the Taliban. As their malignant influence spreads into neighbouring Pakistan, as more women are forced into burkas, as more teachers are murdered and schools burned down because they educate girls, as the flirtatious are stoned to death and secularists murdered in their wake, what does the StWC recommend? Of course - western forces pull out of Afghanistan and leave them to it.

It is a position so ludicrous, so reckless and senseless, that the only way to make sense of it is to accept that it is in the interests of the enemies of democracy. Or peace.

There's no best species on earth award

That's what Pam Mason says in today's Guardian, and in so doing she grasps a beautiful truth:

Human achievements only matter to, and improve the lives of, other humans. There's no Best Species On Earth award which we win every year, like the US winning the World Series.

Who, apart from us, says we're so special? God? Darwin? A select committee of chimpanzees and dolphins? Yes, we have more abstract knowledge than we had 1000, 100, even five years ago, but it means absolutely nothing to anyone but us. Our achievements please us alone, and when we become extinct (most likely by our own hands) our vanishing will actually improve life for other species, provided we haven't wiped them out too.

Edward O Wilson was making a similar point:
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

It's a fabrication that Britain doesn't make things any more

The truth that dares not speak its name. From timesonline:

Manufacturing output accounts for a larger share of GDP in the UK (13 per cent) than it does in France (12 per cent) or the United States (12 per cent).

More equal than others

This, from Harry's Place, is more none-too-subtle evidence of a double standard.

. . . have a read of these extracts from a Socialist Worker article from 2005, and see if you can guess which stateless and oppressed nation it describes:

This is a country occupied by a murderous foreign power for decades. A country split apart by a 1,600 mile series of fortified walls backed by soldiers, heavy weaponry and millions of landmines.

A country with 160,000 people living in refugee camps and yearning to return to their homeland.

It is a country where young and old have declared an intifada against their rulers — and where hundreds of UN resolutions which call for justice have been contemptuously ignored.

Still not guessed yet? The language may be familiar but the target might surprise you.

Look here for the answer.

The conclusion: Jews behaving in a certain way, bad: Arabs doing the same, erm well, you don’t understand, you’ve got to see it in context…ah, can I phone a friend? etc etc

An ancient prejudice

An article by Howard Jacobson on anti-Semitism is always worth reading, especially when it includes lines like this:

A life spent singing anti-Zionist carols in the company of Ken Livingstone and George Galloway is its own punishment.