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Month April 2009

I can’t believe he said that

Groups of people all over the world call­ing them­selves “news organ­isa­tions,” such as The Times, con­tinue to spread myths about Mah­moud Ahmad­ine­jad, such as that he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” or that he denies the Nazi Holocaust.

In the mean time the Israeli Deputy Prime Min­is­ter has been quoted as say­ing “What Iran is try­ing to do right now is not far away at all from what Hitler did to the Jew­ish people just 65 years ago.”

Sorry, what the fuck?

So on one hand you have an oil-rich nation — Iran — that has never attacked another, let alone with nuc­lear weapons, and has just had its oil-rich neigh­bour invaded and occupied.

On the other you have a nation that has invaded and occu­pied Iran’s neigh­bour and is the only nation in the world to have attacked another with ther­mo­nuc­lear weapons, along with another nuclear-armed quasi-nation — Israel — which can’t stop get­ting into wars with its neigh­bours, bru­tally represses those in its midst who don’t belong to the right race or reli­gion, and openly dis­cusses attack­ing Iran, along with its part­ners in the crime the U.S. and a group of European nations, all of whom helped cre­ate the racist state in the first place.

If you believe Iran is the bel­li­ger­ent party in all of this and is about to pull an Adolf Hitler on us, then you are a stu­pid fuck.

Landshare launches their website

You might remem­ber my post about a new pro­ject in the UK called Land­share. Well they’ve just launched their new web­site.

How the image of UK police took a beating

G20 protests: how the image of UK police took a beat­ing:

It has been a bad month for the thin blue line … it’s no won­der that senior officers this week­end are call­ing a series of crisis meetings.

But they may already be too late. Pub­lic opin­ion appears to be turn­ing against Britain’s police. Just as con­cerns over cli­mate change and the global eco­nomy have been turn­ing the most con­ser­vat­ive of people into polit­ical act­iv­ists, law-abiding people who have never had any exper­i­ence in deal­ing with the police are now ques­tion­ing their beha­viour and the reach of their powers.

Nick Hard­wick, chair of the IPCC, said the typ­ical com­plain­ants were middle-class. “If you think the police are all bas­tards, you don’t bother to com­plain because you think it will get you vic­tim­ised,” said Hard­wick. “If you are Mr and Mrs Sub­urban who have a good view of the police and think they do a good job, and they stop you and swear at you, then you are shocked and you complain.”

What next now that Damian Green has been cleared?

New Zealand’s No Right Turn has some thoughts:

Now that Green has been cleared, atten­tion must focus on those respons­ible: the Speaker of the House, who allowed police to search a Par­lia­ment­ary office without a war­rant, the Home Sec­ret­ary, whose com­plaints led to the raid, and the Cab­inet Office, which inflated the import­ance and sens­it­iv­ity of the inform­a­tion in order to force a police response. These people have all either delib­er­ately attemp­ted to under­mine the UK’s demo­cracy, or (in the Speaker’s case) failed to do their duty to defend it. And they should be held accountable.

You can’t trust the BBC on the Middle East

Robert Fisk, writ­ing for The Independent:

… why is it that Haaretz’s1 top cor­res­pond­ents — Amira Hass and Gideon Levy — write so much more cour­ageously about the human rights abuses of Israeli troops (and war crimes) than the BBC has ever dared to do? Whenever I’m asked by lec­ture audi­ences around the world if they should trust the BBC, I tell them to trust Amira and Gideon more than they should ever believe in the wretched broad­cast­ing station.

I can cer­tainly advise view­ers to turn to Sky TV’s infin­itely tougher cov­er­age of the Middle East and … I can recom­mend the cour­age with which Al-Jazeera Eng­lish cov­ers Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian-Israeli war.

My exper­i­ence is that you can’t trust the BBC on the Middle East either. While I was in Iraq on the human shield action, the BBC — some­what to my sur­prise — turned out to be one of the most fac­tu­ally incor­rect and least object­ive news source report­ing on the action. In fact I remem­ber at one point read­ing more object­ive stor­ies on the Fox News web­site, a pro­pa­ganda chan­nel for the Repub­lican Party of the U.S.

I doubt any­thing will change there until the place is cleansed of people like the mor­ally cor­rupt Mark Thompson, the BBC’s dir­ector general.

Notes:
  1. Haaretz is Israel’s old­est daily news­pa­per. []

Videos of UK police running amok

Grow­ing cata­logue of G20 protest videos show­ing the UK police run­ning amok.

Baghdad: City of walls

Bagh­dad: City of walls:

In this unique four-part film, award-winning Guard­ian for­eign cor­res­pond­ent, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi journ­al­ist and pho­to­grapher, takes us back to his home city of Bagh­dad. In the week of the sixth anniversary of the US-led inva­sion, this film, made by Guard­i­an­Films for the Arab news net­work Al Jaz­eera, gives an insider’s view of the real impact of the inva­sion on Bagh­dad as it became ‘The City of Walls’.

Do you feel safe yet?

The new UK reg­u­la­tions that man­date the track­ing of all your tele­phone calls and email.

It cer­tainly makes me feel safe to have a party of war crim­in­als and their police force track­ing every citizen’s com­mu­nic­a­tions (includ­ing whistle-blowers and journalists).

Bill O’Reilly: a mouse by any measure

Robert Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times writes to Bill O’Reilly.

That reminds me of the fam­ous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was float­ing on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approach­ing the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection!

(via Dar­ing Fire­ball)

I’m beginning to like this guy

Rus­sell Brand head-to-head with some of the more nefar­i­ous amongst us:

I demand Jack Straw pays the 7bn pounds he squandered on the Iraq war that we didn’t want. No won­der his son has to toke him­self to sleep.