The Fanonite

The founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, Rick Falkvinge, explaining the European (and US) copyfight in terms of Copyright Vs. Civil Liberties.  In short, for the media industry to prevent breach of copyright they must remove all previously held privacy laws and monitor everything you do online.  To prevent this Falkvinge launched the Pirate Party to battle in the Swedish polls.  For more on Rick try this video presentation.

Chances are you’ve never been welcomed in front of an audience with “Arrrr!” Chances are, however, that you are not the founder of the Pirates Political Party. It’s a rapidly growing group located in Sweden. The name was chosen to represent piracy, or “stealing” copyrighted products because the Party is firmly against corporate ownership.

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Tony Benn’s principled support for David Davis’s reelection. (thanks Tom)

Libertarians from the Left and Right sometimes meet in the middle against an authoritarian state. In 1961, having served for 10 years as an MP for Bristol South East, I was declared disqualified because my father had been a peer and he had died. It was argued that I had inherited his peerage.

A by-election was called, and, despite my disqualification, I decided to contest it to argue a point of principle. Winston Churchill, the former Conservative Prime Minister, sent me a letter of support for which I am, to this day, most grateful.

I must be the only Labour candidate who has ever circulated 30,000 copies of a letter from a Tory leader to my constituents. The law that prevented me sitting in the Commons was later changed as a result of that by-election.

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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.
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European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana is seen meeting with then Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres, October 2006.

Israel has had its relationship with the EU upgraded.  The following by Arjan El Fassed co-founder of The Electronic Intifada:

During her sixth visit to Israel since last November’s Annapolis summit, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complained that the thousands of new housing units, built in Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land were damaging the peace talks with Palestinians. Meanwhile, at a joint press conference with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in Luxembourg, the same day, Slovenia’s Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, announced that the EU had decided to upgrade its political and economic relations with Israel. Rupel, who chaired the EU-Israel Association Council meeting, the body overseeing the relationship, stated that the EU and Israel are “elevating” their relations to a new level of “more intense, more fruitful, more influential cooperation.” Israel has now been granted the highest level of relations available to a non-member state.

The cooperation is based on the European Neighborhood Policy Action Plan, an initiative launched under the Dutch EU Presidency in 2004, aimed at bringing the neighboring countries closer to the EU. This European move might seem surprising since a progress report on the implementation of the European Neighborhood Policy stated clearly that “little concrete progress” has been made on issues raised between Israel and the EU, such as restrictions on movement, the construction of the West Bank wall (its route ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice), administrative detentions, the dismantling of settler “outposts,” and the expansion of Israeli settlements.

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Welsh Assembly Presiding Officer Dafydd Elis-Thomas is to be commended for urging colleagues to boycott a visit by Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor. In a leaked email he is quoted as saying “I am unwilling to accept the invitation to meet the ambassador because of my objection to the failure of the state of Israel to meet its international obligations to the Palestinian people of the Holy Lands. I would invite other colleagues to do the same.” This call has generated a lot of press: I count at least 9 newspaper articles including the Daily Mail, BBC, Jerusalem Post, Jewish Chronicle, AFP, Wales Online, etc. All of them negative I might add.

The BBC counters Mr Elis-Thomas’s email with 6 spokesmen and you’ll notice they quoted no-one who was in favour of the boycott. One of the 6 was Rodney Berman, the leader of Cardiff council, who believes Wales’ Jewish community would be shocked at the “strident tone.” He then adds “If AMs have concerns, as I do myself, about policies followed by the Israeli government then surely it’s better to use this event to talk about those concerns rather than to put up barriers which can only promote further misunderstanding.”

Frankly I was very impressed with the email and am delighted to hear that Dafydd is “standing by what he had written.” What Rodney Berman is missing is that there has been talk for the last 40 years of occupation and it has solved nothing. Israel has refused to obey International Law, as judged most recently in 2004 by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and ignores countless UN resolutions. Israel knows well that it’s failing these commitments and we now need less talk and more political pressure to force positive action. I congradulate Dafydd Elis-Thomas for his stand - it would seem there are still some decent people willing to put their necks out for a just cause. Also Berman presumes that all Jews would be shocked, many I know would be delighted by this stand. The only people that will be shocked are pro-Israel supporters (Jewish or not) whose bias prevents them from acknowledging the horrendous Israeli human rights and legal record.

What’s more curious is why a Muslim member of the assembly invited Prosor in the first place? Mohammed Asghar claims that he knows a lot from the Palestinian side but not a lot from the other side. I would advise him that the Ambassador / Hasbara goon Prosor is not the best source for an objective opinion.

Of further interest is how fast Mr Elis-Thomas’s wikipedia page was edited. Is this a part of the information “war” launched by pro-Israel lobbying group CAMERA? The added content is certainly bias: including choice quotes such as, his objections target “a country that has withdrawn from 89 percent of the land it conquered in 1967, and he fails to deal with the complexity of a Gaza Strip controlled by ruthless radicals who mete out death penalties to gays.” This is ignoring Israeli’s legal obligations as judged by the ICJ and is rather crude propaganda.

Will Europe unconditionally upgrade relations with Israel? It seems likely as Europe ‘which holds high the standard of human rights and liberty, is boycotting the occupied entity.‘ So why not go another step further in support of the aggressor? Why are Europian Governments so keen to befriend Israel and ignore suffering Palestinians? Why are they ignoring Europian public opinion which is sympathetic to the Palestinians? Is it just because of Europian obsequiousness to the United States. We all know where US unquestioning support comes from: pro-Israel lobby groups. One thing is certain - this blind support is terrible for peace in the region. The following from Gideon Levy of the Haaretz:

How pleasant it is to be an official representative of Israel in Europe right now. It hasn’t been so pleasant for a long time. And not just because of the spectacular spring in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, the crowded pubs in Athens or the young people sunbathing nude in Stockholm. This is about the fresh sympathy for Israel blowing in from almost every capital. French newspapers went all out for our 60th anniversary, Israeli women soldiers starred on the covers of magazines, and even the Swedish papers lost a little of their interest in the Palestinians’ suffering, which had for years won such deep sympathy.

Last week, when the Olof Palme International Center in Stockholm held a symposium on peace in the Middle East, a scandal broke out because the organizers dared invite a professor of Islamic studies, Azam Tamimi, a Hamas sympathizer from London. Even in Sweden. This sympathy for Israel, along with seething antipathy for Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, includes, of course, active European participation in the boycott of Gaza and Hamas, which may reach new heights this week. The Council of Foreign Ministers of the European Union is slated tomorrow to discuss upgrading Israel’s standing in the EU, and later in the week ministers of the EU member states will also do so. It only takes opposition by one country to prevent the upgrade of ties, which would have significant economic ramifications for Israel.

But there is a good chance that exactly as Europe decided unanimously to boycott Gaza, it will say yes to an upgrade of Israel’s ties with the EU. For official Israel, this is excellent news. Perhaps for the first time, a very strange set of circumstances prevails: Europe, which holds high the standard of human rights and liberty, is boycotting the occupied entity. As if that were not enough, it is even upgrading its ties with the occupier. While Europe is perceived by most Israelis as hostile to Israel, not to say anti-Semitic, its governments are uniting to support Israel almost no matter what it does.

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Today’s guest editorial from my friend toni solo on recent developments in Latin America and the ominous push back by global capital.

Recent remarks by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez on the civil war in Colombia and Ecuador’s decision not to join the Alternativa Bolivariana de las Americas (ALBA) solidarity based cooperation initiative [1] shows progressive leaders are taking stock on Latin American integration. President Rafael Correa suggests his government’s decision is linked to efforts to revive the Andean Community of Nations (CAN) group which Venezuela abandoned when the Peruvian and Colombian government’s insisted on negotiating bilateral “free trade” agreements with the United States.

Aporrea.org reports Correa as admitting that he told Chavez in 2007, “you return to the CAN and Ecuador will immediately join ALBA”. Venezuela’s government may well be quietly relieved, since Ecuador’s decision is very ambivalent, keeping its options open and continuing to develop close bilateral trade links with Venezuela. It may well suit the ALBA countries — Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Nicaragua and Venezuela — to consolidate gains so far and to develop ALBA’s closely linked PETROCARIBE preferential energy and trade programme covering most of the Caribbean and much of Central America.

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Lo and behold! Gordon Brown, the man who has been forlornly playing the pipe still wet with Tony Blair’s spit, has failed to lure many vermin with his call for for more draconian legislation. So when finally a rat does come out, it bears a Muslim name. According to the Daily Telegraph, Brown’s call for 42-day detention — a political move according to Jacqui Smith to present the Tories as soft on terrorism — has received the endorsement of one Khurshid Ahmed, Chairman of something called the ‘British Muslim Forum’. ( It is worth reading the current article in conjunction with this article by Gareth Peirce; it provides necessary context about the draconian “anti-terror” legislation in Britain). My friend Paul de Rooij comments:

The British government is seeking to pass a law allowing 42-day-detention without trial for “terror suspects”. Note, that Britain already has draconian “anti-terror” legislation in place from the days it fought Irish nationalists. All the recent measures added to this legislation are specifically targeting Muslim “terror suspects”, and thus it is truly bizarre to find a Muslim organization favoring the government’s proposed measures. It is a bit like an organization of turkeys popping up stating that they are in favor of Thanksgiving.

The history of terrorist arrests in the UK is appalling. Many wrongful convictions, brutality in prison and under questioning, horrendous conditions in jail causing prisoners to lose their minds… and the cases that led to many arrests and were trumpeted in the media resulted afterwards in the release of suspects without charges and without any apology. And there are other frivolous cases: imprisoning a woman who wrote a poem lauding the resistance fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan…

‘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.

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‘From the start New Labour was pledged to consolidate the Thatcherite paradigm rather than offer anything different,’ writes Tariq Ali.

Power can shape “truth”, but not for ever. That is one lesson that could be learned from the series of electoral defeats that mark the end of New Labour’s weightless hegemony. There is something grotesque about the daily denunciations of Brown by hardcore Blairites in parliament and their media acolytes, who barely uttered a word of criticism as the country was dragged into two wars and New Labour prettified the Thatcherite social and economic agenda, now calling for the removal of Brown. As if his removal and replacement by a robotic Blairite (Miliband senior, Purnell and, amusingly enough, even Milburn is mentioned in this regard) would do the trick.

The litany of own goals scored by Gordon Brown is endless and has been well-documented. That one of these could lead, sooner rather than later, to the independence of Scotland, is ironic, but all this is beside the point. Brown was fully implicated in the New Labour project and funded its hyper-militarism. He is too weak to even mimic Zapatero in Spain and Rudd in Australia by withdrawing British troops from Iraq. Instead, one of his zombies devised the pathetic idea of Armed Forces Day to celebrate militarism and encourage school-leavers to take up killing foreigners as their main subject and graduate or die in the university of the world.

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