Fortress Britain
June 26, 2008
By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, Variant, Issue 32, Summer 2008; Spinwatch, June 23, 2008; Scoop (New Zealand), June 25, 2008; UK Watch, June 25, 2008; Media Monitors Network, June 25, 2008; Dissident Voice, June 27, 2008
“The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.
The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.[1] Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits form Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.
In the post-September 11 world, Naomi Klein writes, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’”. Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land – and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity – and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism – absent the real thing, fear should suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.
Read the rest of this entry »
The American Dream
June 26, 2008
George Carlin (1937-2008), the sage, on the “American dream”.
New Labour’s Tax Cut Mania
June 5, 2008
‘A mania for tax cuts at any cost defies public opinion’, writes Seumas Milne. ‘The political class wants a smaller state and clings to a free-market model that is falling apart. Who is listening to the voters?’
As Gordon Brown lurches from self-inflicted crisis to crisis, the consequences of his failure to carve out an agenda of his own are becoming painfully clear. Not only is he tying himself in knots over discredited and unpopular New Labour policies - from the extension to pre-charge detention to his business secretary John Hutton’s edict against any more legal protection for workers, to yesterday’s plans to hand over entire NHS hospitals to private companies - even more alarmingly, the political vacuum he has created is being eagerly filled by others who want to push the government yet further to the right.
The past week has seen a veritable Blairite insurgency in response to Labour’s month of electoral misery. One former acolyte of the lost leader after another has lined up to kick down the last pillar of the social democratic-Tory political divide, demanding tax and spending cuts and a smaller state.
The Assault on Academic Freedom
May 27, 2008
Further reporting from Polly Curtis and Martin Hodgson on the student held for six days for researching al-Qaida tactics. (thanks Shahbaaz)
A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the “psychological torture” he endured in custody. Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.
The case highlights what lecturers are claiming is a direct assault on academic freedom led by the government which, in its attempt to establish a “prevent agenda” against terrorist activity, is putting pressure on academics to become police informers.
The Lysenko Syndrome
April 9, 2008
The Fanonite contributor Michael Barker uncovers another classic Alex Carey article: ‘The Lysenko Syndrome in Western Social Science’ (Australian Psychologist, Volume 12 Number 1, March 1977).[1][2]
As long ago as 1927 Bertrand Russell, observing how greatly the results of experiments carried out by psychologists were influenced by the personal beliefs and attitudes of the experimenters, remarked:
One may say broadly that all the animals that have been carefully observed have behaved so as to confirm the philosophy in which the observer believed before his observations began. Nay, more, they have all displayed the national characteristics of the observer. Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness (Russell, 1927, pp.32-3).
This kind of influence from personal and cultural values on the conclusions and theories which scientists extract from their data is not new and is not confined to social scientists.
For a thousand years, from the 5th to the 15th centuries, even the greatest among European thinkers who studied the natural world never ceased in their attempts to interpret the evidence they gathered so that it would support beliefs approved by the most powerful authorities and institutions in their societies. Thus it was accepted for 1000 years that all observations about the sun and the stars had to be fitted in, however difficult the task may prove, with the biblical belief that the earth is at the centre of the universe and the Aristotelian belief that all heavenly bodies move only in perfect circles.
Want a McDegree with that McJob?
February 15, 2008
London (UK), February 2008 - The British Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) has awarded McDonald’s, Network Rail, and Flybe awarding-body status. For the first time, commercial companies are now able to award nationally accredited qualifications to employees. The move was announced by Prime Minister Gordon Brown at an event attended by McDonald’s CEO and President, Steve Easterbrook, and Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, David Fairhurst.
Free Speech?
February 7, 2008
In his unpublished preface to Animal Farm, Orwell wrote that it is easy to satirize Soviet Union, but things at home aren’t all that different. Whereas in the USSR it takes coercion and the threat of violence to keep people from voicing dissenting opinions, in Britain people don’t do it because they know ’it will not do’. ’Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness’ he wrote.’ A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.’
So here we have the case of Martin Amis, a known racist with particularly intolerant views towards Muslims, being called on his Islamophobia by Terry Eagleton, one of the world’s finest literary critics. How does the UK establishment respond? In a disgraceful decision Eagleton faces the axe from Manchester University, whereas Amis is being rewarded with a plum position receiving £80,000 for 28 hours a year of teaching! Eagleton ought to have know better: ‘it will not do’ to criticize a practice engaged in by everyone from the (former) Prime Minister to the Littlejohn. It is also interesting how Amis’s original vile comments failed to generate any controversy; it is only when he was called on it did it make headlines.
Racism apparently runs in the family. Kingsley Amis, the father, had this advice for Apartheid South Africa: ‘You should shoot as many blacks as possible.’ Eagleton couldn’t have been nearer the mark when he wrote: ‘Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase‘.
I believe it was Mark Twain who said, free speech is great, so long as you are not using it.
Michael Burawoy on Public Sociology
January 14, 2008
The room was packed so I was squeezed into a very awkward corner. I apologize for the quality of the video, but this is an immensely interesting lecture from one of the world’s leading Sociologists.
Professor Michael Burawoy is the former President of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and former head of the Department of Sociology, University of California-Berkeley. He spoke at the Department of Geography & Sociology of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow on the Past, Present and Future of Sociology. Professor Burawoy, when President of the American Sociological Association in 2004 sparked real debate with his call for a public sociology. Burawoy’s thesis has animated much discussion about the social role and purpose of sociology in particular, and the social sciences in general. This seminar addressed some of the main themes that have emerged since his presidential address in 2004, and included some reflections on the lessons learned and future possibilities for public sociology. Read the rest of this entry »
Dershowitz Exposed — Yet Again!
November 3, 2007
For a long time now Zionist extremist and windbag-extraordinaire Alan Dershowitz has been denying he put any pressure on Norman Finkelstein’s publishers to suppress the latter’s book Beyond Chutzpah which is an expose of his plagiarism and extensive scholarly misconduct. The letters have finally been made public, and the professor of torture has been caught with his pants down once more. Finkelstein writes:
When it was announced in early 2004 that I would publish a study rebutting Professor Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel and documenting that extensive passages in his book had been plagiarized, Dershowitz and his attorneys entered into a protracted correspondence with my publisher (originally New Press and subsequently University of California Press) and other interested parties such as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dershowitz has emphatically maintained that he did not seek to suppress publication of my study Beyond Chutzpah, yet he has refused to release his correspondence – indeed, falsely claiming that he had released it. Several months ago a resourceful young man named Shankar Ramamoorthy obtained much of this correspondence via a California Public Records Act (CPRA) request to the University of California Press. Readers can now judge for themselves whether the famed civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz sought to suppress publication of Beyond Chutzpah. It will be noticed that Dershowitz was particularly exercised by the appendix in my study that conclusively demonstrates his plagiarism. For example, a June 1, 2005 letter from his lawyer to University of California Press reads: ‘An appendix is a vestige of some previously needed function in the body. There is no legitimate need for it in your book. The only reason for you to have an appendix is to sell books. But your appendix — if it is not removed before publication — is going to lead to painful surgery for the Press.’
The New McCarthyism
October 26, 2007
More from Larry Cohler-Esses on the Israel Lobby’s intellectual terrorism.
Meet Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, a notorious Barnard College professor now up for tenure who:
§ claims the ancient Israelite kingdoms are a “pure political fabrication,”
§ denies the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE and instead blames its destruction on the Jews,
§ does not speak or read Hebrew yet had the temerity to publish a book on Israeli archaeology that demanded such expertise,
§ is so ignorant of her topic that she quotes one archaeologist on how a dig might have damaged the ancient palaces of Solomon–oblivious to the fact that those palaces, if they existed, were far from the site in question.
None of these charges are true. You could look it up. I did, in El-Haj’s book Facts on the Ground, about which these charges are made. The statements for which a network of right-wing critics assail her book are not there.
