UCU Passes Palestine Motions
May 29, 2008
The UCU has passed its 3 motions in favour of solidarity with Palestine (that also question links with Israeli academic institutions) by an overwhelming majority [I hear it was 250 to 30 but I've yet to have this confirmed]. To read the motions in full see Lenin’s Tomb, for one of the better articles on the topic look to the Guardian and if you want to laugh (or cry depending) try reading the rantings of that well known loon Melanie Philips (whose article is titled ‘The Universities Witch-hunt Against The Jews’). Below is the UCU Press release.
On a rather different note its interesting how groups like Stop the Boycott, the Israeli media etc are only interested in academic freedom in defence of the state of Israel and not when that state is silencing critics such as Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein was recently arrested by the Israeli authorities when trying to visit the occupied Palestinian Territories (not Israel) and was deported back to the US without any outcry. This is an example of how Palestinian academic life is interfered with: as visitors to their Universities can be refused, travel of Palestinian academics abroad can be denied and travel internally is often blocked by checkpoints. Finkelstein’s case is just another example of how academic freedom is only important when it serves Israel not Palestine.
Delegates at the University and College Union (UCU) congress this afternoon (Wednesday) reaffirmed their commitment to helping international colleagues denied the freedoms they enjoy. A series of motions called for greater links and solidarity with trade unionists from Darfur, Zimbabwe, Palestine and Burma. Delegates debated the Palestinian motion at length and passed one which supported solidarity with Palestinian academics and did not call for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
Commenting on the motions passed this afternoon, Sally Hunt said: “Delegates in Manchester for UCU congress this week have the freedom to debate a whole host of issues. They can do this without worrying about being arrested, beaten and even killed. There are trade unionists around the world that are not so fortunate and we must never take our freedom to debate, whatever the issue, for granted.
McClellan whacks Bush, White House
May 29, 2008
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan flays the Bush administration in his new book, Mike Allen reports.
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.
Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):
• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.
• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.
• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”
• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.
• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
The Road Well Travelled
May 29, 2008
Last night I finished Cormac McCarthy’s harrowing The Road, and it has left me deeply disturbed. The moral dilemmas presented therein are highlighted in the following section from a review by Michael Chabo in the New York Review of Books (while the passage presents the dilemmas in the context of relations between the novel’s protagonists, an unnamed father and son, they are equally applicable to any loved one).
The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child’s own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father’s guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.
While McCarthy is addressing the consequences of social breakdown, in the following article, George Monbiot looks developments in the present that may lead to the realization of the bleak future envisioned in the novel.
A powerful novel’s vision of a dystopian future shines a cold light on the dreadful consequences of our universal apathy. Are we already shutting our minds to the consequences of climate change?
By George Monbiot. The Guardian 30 October 2007
A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.
Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.”(1) McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.
All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do?: the only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.
Palestinians Must Learn Media Skills
May 28, 2008
Ron Prosor the PR tosser with Manuel Hassassian
Stuart Littlewood argues that ‘Israel is [the] easy winner in the propaganda game’ and that the solution is for Palestinians to learn more media skills. I have to agree, often I’m dismayed by Palestinian representatives I see on television: usually its poor English or poor ability to counter Israeli propaganda. In the above clip we can see how ill prepared Palestine’s chosen representatives are. Rather than condemn Israel for its genocidal siege of Gaza, the Palestinian representative, a Fatah loyalist’, instead joins his Israeli counterpart in shifting the focus to Hamas and its take over (no mention of the planned US/Fatah military coup). When you have 5 minutes to speak I think you should concentrate on countering Israeli propaganda, not repeating it, or wasting time on fratricidal point scoring. Obviously Palestine can’t fund the kind of promotional organisations that make Israel’s UK PR offensive so slick but I see no reason why the Arab States or the scores of well-to-do Arabs and Palestinians residing in Britain can’t.
Some time ago Hamas complained that the Palestinian Authority was not getting its message across thanks to “poorly qualified or unqualified spokespersons with inadequate political and linguistic abilities”.
Diplomacy had failed and the Palestinians needed “professional spokespersons with excellent knowledge of the world and mastery of foreign languages, especially English, to tell the world in a straightforward manner that Israel is a murderer, liar and land thief…”
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
May 28, 2008
We Feed the World
May 28, 2008
We Feed the World is a film about globalisation and scarcity amid plenty.
Western Delusions
May 27, 2008
Jean Bricmont on ‘The Violent Folly of Humanitarian Interventionism‘.
One can understand why some people might have sincerely thought that the Iraq war would be a “cakewalk”. First, consider WW2 ; the US mercilessly bombed Germany and Japan, including their civilian populations, then occupied those countries militarily, imposing almost total control. Yet, today, Germany and Japan are among the world’s most faithful allies of the US. How deep this alliance really is and how long it will last remains to be seen, but for the moment it is a reality.
Now, consider the Cold War. Remember that, once upon a time, governments from Poland to Bulgaria were hostile to the US. Now, they want nothing more than integration into Nato, advanced US anti-missile shields and participation in the occupation of Iraq. Or consider, even more surprisingly, Vietnam, where US investors are now welcomed with open arms, while, in a not so distant past, the US was ferociously bombing Vietnam, killing millions of people and poisoning the environment.
Even after the bombing of their little country in 1999, the Serbs behaved as desired, by voting out Milosevic and by accepting, at least for a while, pro-Western governments approving implicitely if not explicitely the bombing of their own country.
Will Cheney Get His War?
May 27, 2008
Gareth Porter: The military is against it, but there is more support in Congress for an attack on Iran. More here.
The Lobby’s McCarthyism
May 27, 2008
‘Barack Obama supporter accuses Jewish lobby members of McCarthyism,’ reports Alex Spillius in Washington. ‘A foreign policy expert consulted by Senator Barack Obama, the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, has accused members of the American Jewish establishment of “McCarthyism” in its attitude towards critics of Israel.’
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser, said that the pro-Israel lobby in the US was too powerful, while the slur of anti-Semitism was too readily used whenever its power was called into question.
Presenting a solution for the Middle East, he listed historical compromises that had to be made by Israelis and Palestinians but accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) – the largest and most influential Jewish lobby group – of obstructing peace efforts.
He said: “Aipac has consistently opposed a two-state solution and a lot of members of Congress have been intimidated and I don’t think that’s healthy.”
