A huge controversy has blown up in the UK after a couple of comedians made a lewd phone call and it was broadcast on BBC radio. The broadcast received two single complaints on the day but after The Mail on Sunday lead with the story a week later that eventually ballooned into the tens of thousands.
As of tonight one of the comedians has resigned, one is suspended for twelve weeks and a senior BBC manager has also resigned.
The public outrage has more to do, probably, with their obscene pay packets than the anything else but what I find so repulsive about all this is the contrast between the accountability of people involved in a petty prank and the accountability of people involved in the unspeakably more horrendous matter of the invasion of Iraq.
Here we have a silly but ultimately harmless prank gone wrong. A few complain and people are apologising and resigning left right and centre.
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and mob launch a war of aggression, the ”supreme war crime,” on a pack of lies, resulting in the destruction of a country and untold people’s lives destroyed or ended. The largest protest in human history ensues and not only have these people never apologised, resigned or been brought to justice but a plurality of British voters re-elected them.
Despite the Israeli government’s threat to forcibly stop them the Free Gaza group made a second successful sailing to Gaza Strip today. Their first sailing, on 24 August, made them the first people to freely enter Gaza Strip in forty-one years.
Israel has imposed an immoral and illegal blockade on Gaza Strip since June 2007, in an attempt to undermine Hamas, who won the elections in January 2006, and as collective punishment of Gazans for electing them.
The blockade means Gazans have been unable to travel in or out of Gaza Strip to see family members or go to universities they’ve been accepted into, or receive medical care. It also means an increasing lack of things like spare machinery parts and all the other things that go into running a civilised world.
This kind of cowardly collective punishment has been carried out before in this part of the world and that is estimated to have cost the lives of a million people, half of whom were children.
Let’s hope Free Gaza is just the beginning of the breaking of this siege.
Notes:
With New Labour’s neo-liberal agenda and long record of socialising costs and privatising profits it comes as a surprise to me that Alistair Darling has turned to Keynes in the face of recession. I had assumed until now that they’d use this recession and the recent handout to bankers as an opportunity to cut back on social spending. Maybe we have the absence of Tony Blair to thank?
While I’ve increasingly been hearing news of architects being laid off over the past few weeks, the firm I’m employed by works nearly exclusively in the social housing sector, so it’s certainly good economic news for me:
The chancellor said housing, energy and small businesses would benefit in his new spending plans.
And I couldn’t agree more with Darling on this statement:
This is a time when you have to support the economy. You will see us switching our spending priorities to areas which make a difference.
It’s just a shame he includes in this the entrenchment of the military-industrial complex and the myopic decision to upgrade Britain’s nuclear weapons.
… plans for two aircraft carriers and a new nuclear deterrent would go ahead.
I might add that a decision to upgrade Britain’s nuclear weapons is a direct violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, something the UK and U.S. governments have been falsely accusing Iran of over the past year or so.
Jonathan Cook on Dr. Shlomo Sand’s new book:
Dr. Shlomo Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation—whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel—is a myth invented little more than a century ago.
In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today’s Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel and that the only political solution to the country’s conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.
… he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched … in the United States next year.
In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly supportive, at least curious about his argument.
Shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 I wrote this opinion piece, which was published in my hometown newspaper, Hawke’s Bay Today, in New Zealand. It prompted this response, by way of letter to the editor, from Hardie Martin:
After reading his Opinion in Hawke’s Bay Today on April 12, it occurs to me that anyone seeking a Minister of (dis)Information of the same calibre as Iraq’s Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, need look no further than Christiaan Briggs.
I wonder what Hardie Martin would make of today’s occupation of Iraq:
US using debts to blackmail Iraq:
“Baghdad is under pressure by Washington to accept the security deal in exchange for clearing all of Iraq’s debts,” Iraqi lawmaker Mohammed Kamid al-Humedawi told Press TV on Wednesday. The US will be allowed to set up permanent military bases, if Iraq signs the agreement. Under the deal the US forces will also be granted immunity from legal prosecution inside their bases in Iraq.
Iraqi government fuels ‘war for oil’ theories by putting reserves up for biggest ever sale:
The biggest ever sale of oil assets will take place today, when the Iraqi government puts 40bn barrels of recoverable reserves up for offer in London. BP, Shell and ExxonMobil are all expected to attend a meeting at the Park Lane Hotel in Mayfair with the Iraqi oil minister, Hussein al-Shahristani. Access is being given to eight fields, representing about 40% of the Middle Eastern nation’s reserves, at a time when the country remains under occupation by US and British forces. Two smaller agreements have already been signed with Shell and the China National Petroleum Corporation, but today’s sale will ignite arguments over whether the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a “war for oil” that is now to be consummated by western multinationals seizing control of strategic Iraqi reserves.
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