Taking A Bullet for Dave - The Armchair Arrogance of Corporal Cameron

At least Adolf Hitler had some combat experience, even being deocrated on the recommendation of his Jewish Company Kommandant.

As he presides over the "war-in-Libya" but not "war-with-Libya", British Premier Dave Cameron, a man who has never served in a war but happily makes one, yesterday gave vent to his frustration with military commanders who have expressed concern that British forces are overstreteched between their commitments in Afghanistan, Germany and now Libya.

"You do the fighting and I'll do the talking", he admonished them bravely via the living hell of a Downing Street press conference. His ire came as it was revealed that the Libyan adventure - very much his initiative back in February when he rushed round Europe lobbying for a euphemistically titled "no-fly-zone". So far, the conflict has cost over quarter of a billion pounds of UK taxpayers' money. Each £800,000 Tomahawk missile fired by UK forces at Gaddafi's forces on behalf of the shadowy rebel alliance is the equivalent of a full-equipped NHS hospital ward being lobbed into downtown Tripoli.

Not a sum to be sniffed at, and our Dave has the guts to make clear that this must be seen through to the end. He's ready to have Our Boys get on with the shooting and killing (and being killed) around the globe if needs be. While he will chip in with his gaseous utterings to anyone unfortunate enough to have to listen.

It is fortunate to be alive in Britain now: for 60 years we have been spared a major war. Unlike previous generations, slaughtered in the trenches or mowed down on the beaches of Normandy, relatively few of us have tasted real combat. And even fewer among our political class, most of whom have not even changed a light bulb let alone a bayonet during their graceful ascent from public school via Oxbridge to the Boardroom and Cabinet Office.

It is a well-observed nostrum that in the annals of peacemaking that many of the most fervent advocates of peace are former soldiers. Few who have been in a war will willingly entertain another one for any but the most necessary reasons. Notably, in the conflicts in the Gulf in 1991 and 2003, it was politicians rather than military who were the strongest advocates of war - "Stormin" Norman Schwarzkopf, the US commander in Desert Storm, argued that the military could and should wait for up to two years for UN sanctions to force Saddam out of Kuwait. But President Bush Snr wanted his glory, as did Junior a decade later, in spite of his own draft-dodging past. And let's not even think about Blair, who wouldn't know one end of a gun from another, but seemingly just loves the smell of gunpowder in the morning.

Yet aren't they so tough, these proud men? Like the later Roman Empire in its sharpest decline, where the bureaucracy and senatorial class adopted military uniforms but simulataneously banned themselves from army service, our politicians are full of other men and women's bravery, ready to take the toughest of decisions from the safety of their offices, the bloody consequences of their actions far out of sight and out of their timid minds.

They are of course put in power and sustained by a massive military-industrial complex, as brilliantly covered by Simon Jenkins in a recent Guardian article here. This shows how, in spite of the removal of the Soviet Bloc and the relatively trivial threats to national security in recent years, the West continues to spend more and more on weapons and, having acquired them, can't quite fight the urge to find somewhere, even anywhere, to use them. And with the rise of automatic weaponry like drone planes, the ease with which these can be deployed is increasing exponentially.

Dwight Eisenhower

We were warned, sixty years ago. By a politician, yes, but one with spades of military combat experience in the Second World War. President Dwight Eisenhower warned darkly of the rise of a military machine that, in time, would consume both the industrial and political classes, suborning them to the objective of war.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.  

 ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

As Dave Cameron contemplates his next brave speech, ducking the slings and arrows of verbiage hurled by his suited and sitted opponents across the floor of the Commons, he might do well to reflect, when he does the talking, on just how empty his own words really are.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time. (W. Owen)

Do You Know This Man? The Police and their Agent Provocateurs

I have been on demonstrations and marches for a variety of entirely peaceful causes in my time. What has frequently been striking is the heavy-handedness of the policing of these - even when no violence occurs, you are filmed by cops in full body armour. On the anti-Iraq War protest way back in early 2003, the most sinister aspect of the day was the men in black outfits on rooftops with long lens cameras snapping at citizens exercising a legitimate, democratic right to call on the Government not to go to war in our name. But yet again, without permission or explanation, thousands and thousands were filmed, photographed and filed.

The police use face recognition software to identify people, categorise them and eventually act against them. The "anti-terror" laws brought in both in the UK and the USA following 9/11 were allegedly to protect us from wild-eyed bearded mullahs intent on wrecking our "civilisation". The Bush Administration even spent many hours with a speak and spell working out a handy acronym for the new laws called the PATRIOT Act. Geddit? Anyone opposing that was immediately a suspicious potential spy or traitor. And Obama of course has done nothing to reverse these rules, and nor have the supposedly freedom loving Con Dems in the UK.

And in consequence, who have these rules really been used against?

No, not al-Qaeda, its supposedly James Bond-villainesque web of power a largely fictitious invention - indeed, isn't Bin Laden increasingly akin to the "Emmanuel Goldstein" hate figure Orwell warned of? Far more a foil to shut up opposition rather than any real threat? Even Colonel Gaddafi finds him a useful bogeyman to invoke.

The anti-terror laws have instead been used to criminalise political opponents of the British Government. There have been some ludicrous examples in 2005, the arrest of Holocaust-survivor Walter Wolfgang for daring to boo the Home Secretary during a debate at the Labour Conference; Derby Council used the laws to allow them to tape record "noisy" children in secret; and the case of the man arrested and prosecuted as a terrorist for tweeting a joke about his frustration at an airport delay. There was even the recent case of a 12 year old boy pulled out of his class to be warned off picketing outside PM David Cameron's constituency office about cuts to his local youth centre, with the threat of armed police attending if he want ahead. These represent dreadful breaches of human rights and the right to privacy, and they are far from the only instances the laws are also being deployed to remove the right to dissent and freedom of speech.


Not exactly "good evening all" any more.

For example, the laws are written in such a way that the cyclist groups that sometimes meet to "reclaim the streets", especially in London, by undertaking mass cycling to protest about city motor traffic, can be declared terrorists. Indeed, environmentalists as a whole have increasingly become a target for police using the terror laws, in spite of the almost entirely pacific nature of the green movement. Mirroring developments in the USA , including the appalling case of Marie Mason, jailed for 22 years, British laws have been deployed to convict people with "crimes" such as reading out the names of the British soldiers killed in Iraq at the London Cenotaph , or to restrict environmental protesters at energy plants.

Even more insidious of course have been the agent provocateurs embedded by the police in the green movement. The most well publicised case was the recent one of Mark Kennedy. Kennedy infiltrated the movement, encouraged and organised protests and worked to up the ante in terms of potential violence, before calling his police mates to come and arrest people who were then charged with planning violent activities, even although none of them had been involved in discussing any such with Kennedy. The trial collapsed at great cost to the taxpayer after Kennedy himself had a change of heart, but it then emerged that there were five more of his ilk, hidden in the green movement, plotting and winding up aggressive protests to the chagrin and opposition of many of the people they were seeking to get charged. One of them had even married someone he was spying on - the Stasi would bow down to the sheer gall of the British police.

This may be but the tip of the iceberg in terms of police manipulation of protesters. In both the student demonstrations before Christmas and the recent anti-cuts demonstration, many of those taking part have described strange groups of people and individuals who suddenly turned up, fomented violence against the police, and then vanished. Organisers of the protests insisted these were police agents, but what little coverage was given to their claims was met with howls of derision from the Government and the media - the BBC being especially complicit in this.

And yet the footage below, broadcast live by the BBC, suggests the truth of the organisers claims. Watch how one of the protesters is particularly aggressive towards the police, then steps back for a moment, then walks up to a policeman, shows him a card, receives a pat on the back and goes through the police line to stand at the back.

The implications, if this footage is what is appears to be, are immense, though in the light of previous cases, hardly surprising.The Police Commissioner of London on the same day called for more police powers to handle the "mob", even although by any standards it had been a fairly peaceful day - with just 200 arrests out of 250,000 people taking part.

But of course, if the gentleman in question would come forward, perhaps he could be eliminated from suspicion, along with some of the concerns of peace and freedom loving citizens as to just where this is all heading.

From the USA, an even more obvious attempt to infiltrate a G20 demonstration fails spectacularly:

"Muscular liberalism" - just fascism with a smile?

British Premier David Cameron made a frankly bizarre speech in Munich yesterday, but one packed with prejudice, lies, ignorance and danger.

In summary, after the standard coda that he wasn't referring only to Islam when he talked about extremism and terrorism, he pretty much referred only to Islam when he talked about extremism and terrorism. Sounding rather like an advocate for the odious English Defence League, which was holding one of its biggest ever rallies on the same day, Cameron set out his views on racial and religious relations in Britain.

EDL members expressing themselves.

As EDL members paraded round Luton, a town with a significant Muslim minority, shouting "Allah, Allah! Who the fuck is Allah!", Mr Cameron was busy claiming that white people are essentially persecuted for expressing any vaguely racist views. By contrast, he felt Asians and other ethnic minorities are allowed to express any prejudice or call to violence they wish. Consequently, without being particularly clear about what he intends to do other than cut funding for Muslim community groups, Cameron proclaimed the death of multiculturalism - music to the ears of the fascist street thugs as they proceeded on their demo. In its place, he wants something he referred to as "muscular liberalism".

There is nothing but lies and myth to sustain this worldview. Some racists have been prosecuted in the UK, and rightly so. Some have been white (though BNP leader Nick Griffin was famously acquitted for calling Islam a wicked faith - not much suppression of his speech there, then); but Muslims like Sheik Omar Bakri have been expelled from Britain for their hostile comments; and the infamous Abu Hamza remains in jail for incitement of racial hatred. Meanwhile, the Islamist group Al-Muhajroun was banned by the last Government for glorifying terrorism, along with Islam4UK, Call to Submission, The London School for Sharia and Islamic Path. In all, 46 groups are proscribed, the substantial majority of them Islamic.

So where is this impunity from the law apparently enjoyed by Muslims? Perhaps somewhere other than in the anti-terror realm?

Is it in other criminal cases? Do Muslims enjoy immunity from prosecution for drug dealing? Theft? GBH? As Muslims are 2.7% of the British population, but account for over 12% of the prison population, it seems if you are Muslim you are actually six times more likely to be in jail than if you are white. And indeed, black and Asian people combined, although making up around 6% of the general populace, compose nearly 20% of those in jail. Of course, you'd not know that from the press or the EDL, but you might expect better from the Prime Minister.

So perhaps it is in making comments that Muslims are allowed to say things that whites are not allowed to say? Maybe they can make remarks that white people can't. Perhaps white people aren't allowed to criticise aspects of Islam they don't like? Well, one couple did get into bother from being frankly very insulting to a Muslim guest at their bed & breakfast by calling her headscarf a form of bondage, but when a prosecution followed, they were acquitted - although I suspect no one seeking a pleasant stay would visit their establishment.

Other vicious comments by whites go unchallenged, and not only those made by the likes of the EDL and BNP. Just this week, the BBC's Andrew Neil asked his studio guests what they thought America and Britain could do to stop the pretty moderate Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt. Undeterred by the somewhat more informed words of journalist Rageh Omar, Neil pondered ominously, "Should we not be fearful of the revolution being hijacked by the forces of darkness?" (@ 7 minutes in)

Anti-Muslim comments aren't allowed. Apparently.

The Egyptian crisis has shown the lack of understanding of Muslims by Cameron and his Government. Britain and its allies have maintained the brutal Mubarak for 30 years, contentedly supporting his suppression of any opposition and conniving with his attempts to portray the Muslim Brotherhood as the likely successor regime should he fall.

Although yesterday Cameron attempted to mollify his critique of Islam by pointing to the demonstrations in Cairo as proof of shared Muslim and western democratic values, this morning, his Foreign Secretary William Hague, carefully sidestepped questions about whether Mubarak should resign. Insisting yes, he really does support change, it seems Hague wants Mubarak to stay in power while previously banned liberal parties have time to develop and organise so they can challenge the Muslim Brotherhood in any elections. In other words, elections will be fine as long as the result is what Britain wants.

And that is basically where Mr Cameron's domestic muscular liberalism sits: you are free to be whatever you want to be, as long as you are what we want you to be. It is contradictory, warped and false. It is a design intended simply to bolster the Tories' falling poll ratings via scapegoating demagoguery rather than genuinely address real difficulties in inter-community relations.

But we live in a world where reality is set aside whenever it challenges perception, rather than the other way round. As my wife witnessed in our local town centre one day, when an Asian man parked on a double yellow line and went off inside a shop. A traffic warden came along moments later, remonstrated with the returning driver and placed a parking fine ticket on the windscreen. Next to my wife, an elderly (white) woman turned to her and, bewildered by what she had just observed, said,"That warden will be in trouble now. They're not allowed to fine Asians, you know. My son told me."

9/11 Remembered: LET FREEDOM RING!

Nine years ago, on 11 September 2001, three hijacked airliners slammed into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Had it not been for the bravery and prompt action of passengers, a fourth flight was destined for either the White House or Congress but ended up crashed in a field with all on board dead. As the Towers imploded and the defence centre at the Pentagon burned, 2,996 lives, including those of 19 hijackers, came to premature and terrible, violent ends.

As they say, the rest is history. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of deaths and one invasion of Iraq later, the so-called "War on Terror" continues under the new US President, Barak Obama. At the dawn of the 21st century, incredible as it may seem, religious conflict has re-emerged as a defining issue across the planet in a way unparalleled since Pope Urban preached his fateful sermon in 1095 declaring Holy War on Islam because "God wills it!"

And in New York, by the "Ground Zero" site of the former Twin Towers, a new battle rages. No explosives have been used, but the invective and hatred expressed by many more than compensates.

The Cordoba Initiative, an Islamic charity dedicated to interfaith conciliation and named after the Spanish city which, in the Middle Ages, was a haven of multi-religous tolerance, co-operation and learning has proposed to build a cultural centre dedicated to reconciling the Christian and Muslim faiths. Its leader, Imam Faisal, has stressed that "Not all Muslims are terrorists, and terrorists actions are certainly un-Islamic." He has received support from President Obama and from New York Mayor Bloomberg, both of whom have stressed that if the concept of America was built on anything, it was religious freedom.

But the Amercian Right has piled in, decrying the idea of the centre as an affront to the dead, a "Victory Mosque" (even although it is not a mosque!). It is as if the Caliphs have been resurrected and turned up in Manhattan ready to build their own Islamic Triumphal Arch. Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the odious Glen Beck have decried it. Backed by calm, open-minded, reasonable people like this man - Youtube videoblogger "drinkingwithbob" (who to my mind gives the distinct impression of having spent a little too much time too much with Bob and leaves you mildly concerned about the state of his heart muscles), they have argued the old mantra that such a thing would not be granted to Christians or Jews in Muslim countries.

And here is the thing. Many people in the West assume that once you leave Greece and head east, you don't find another church until you reach Australia. From primary school onwards, the Islamic states are portrayed as a great totalitarian montolith. From Morrocco in the far west of North Africa in a great arc through the Middle east down to Indonesia, it is alleged that no other faiths are permitted and a theocracy of dour mullahs holds sway. And if they have their way, the Muslims are all engaged in a Great Conspiracy to turn countries like Britain and America into similar Muslim fiefdoms.

The West has long lived in fear of The Other. In the 1900s, it was the "Yellow Peril", the Chinese, who were portrayed as slanty-eyed non-Christian devils, cleverly positioning themselves to take over London via the cunning disguise of laundry operatives and waiters. Around the same time, German rightwingers were hawking the fictitious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the alleged blueprints for the Jews to take over the world: a conceit that was eagerly spread throughout Europe by the Right and one which persists even now.

Now, with significant Muslim minorities in most west European countries, it is their turn to be tarred with the same brush of alleged hostility and ill intent. With their Arabic script and bearded priests, they are painted as foreign, strange and, inevitably, not to be trusted. Their actual beliefs are largely ignored, their similarity and common origins with Christianity and Judaism unmentioned and even unwelcome as they too clearly challenge the prevailing image of them as strange and alien. Instead, a mosque is set on fire in the USA and a church group proposes to have a "Burn a Koran Day", on the anniversary of 9/11.

So, were we to turn to the Islamic world, would this drab, monlithic, extreme picture be what we would see? Are there really no churches after Istanbul? No tolerance of The Other by these universally blood-thirsty jihadis?

Let's take a quick tour: starting in Turkey, a firmly Muslim country. Its largest city, Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), was the seat of the Patriarch (the head)of the Greek Orthodox Church in the days of the Christian Byzantine Empire. And it still is.

Lets move on south and east to Syria, at one stage threatened by the US with invasion following the fall of Iraq. Here, this summer, the government banned Islamic veils on university campuses, not great for individual freedom but hardly the actions of a theocratic regime. With nearly 1.2 million Christians living and worshipping freely in Syria, about 10% of the population, however, it seems Syria does not fit the Rightwing/Evangelical stereotype of an Islamic state. Perhaps though, with its socialist Baath party regime, it isn't typical.

South to the Lebanon. There was trouble there in the past but...what's this? An elected Parliament with two opposing blocks in it: on one side a pro-western/free market grouping composed of Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Catholic Christians, Maronite Christians and Druze; opposed by a pro-eastern, slightly social democratic grouping composed of...the same mixture of faiths. The President is a Christian. 40% of the MPs are Christian, as is a similar proportion of the population. Beirut is a bustling metropolitan city...

Not there. So how about Jordan, with its 400,000 Christians (7% of the populace), or Egypt, where one in five people worship in the ancient Coptic Christian Churches. Or among the Palestinians, where 75,000 Christians, are honoured by their Muslim neighbours as "The Living Stones" owing to their ancient traditions. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, denounced by the West as a Muslim terrorist organisation, was in fact founded by a Christian, George Habash. More recently Hannan Ashrawi was a prominent female Christian legislator elected to the Palestinian National Assembly.

Christians are smaller in number in North Africa beyond Eqypt, but there are churches of ancient provenance all the way across the Maghreb to the Atlantic shores. And in the opposite, eastern direction, 300,000 Iranian Christians worship at over 70 churches - although in Iraq the once substantial Christian community has ironically largely fled the country following the violence that accompanied the arrival of the US and British forces there in 2003. In Pakistan, nearly 3 million Christians hold to their faith, exempted from many of the laws on clothes and behaviour that are imposed on Muslims and even enjoying a free ration of alcohol from the government each week.

And so it continues, on into Malaysia and Indonesia, where millions more Christians worship, normally untroubled by their Muslim neighbours.

I am not saying that all is sweetness and light. There is real restriction and persecution of people who think the wrong way or don't conform to very restrictive rules in countries like Saudi Arabia - although the Wahabist regime there owes much to western oil companies and governments for its rise and continuation in power. States with sharia law do impose restrictions which we do not see in the West, though they are not of the magnitude imagined by many Americans and Europeans - nor are they necessarly specifically or solely targetted at Christians. As in many other parts of the world following other faiths, politics often twists and manipulates religous belief to cause fracture and discord quite at odds with the core principles of the faith in question.

There has been and is violence and interfaith conflict and in all too many places religion keeps people apart, living parallel rather than joint lives. But this is as common between Christian communities such as the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland or the Catholics and Orthodox in former Yugoslavia as in the Muslim world. And unlike both Judaism and Christianity, Muslims specifically are enjoined in the Koran to protect the followers of the other two faiths as being "Peoples of the Book" as Muslims are also.

And so, to portray Muslims as either monolithic or totalitarian is plainly wrong. Their faith is interpreted by believers in many different ways. Many of their leaders have issued fatwas (decrees) condemning violence and terrorism as plainly un-Islamic - yet efforts by people like Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri and the 1,300 young Muslims at an anti-terrorist Muslim conference in the UK are simply ignored outside the liberal press.

And likewise the Cordoba Initiative in New York. It is not a mosque and is not on Ground Zero, but rather several blocks away. (There are in fact already two mosques closer to Ground Zero than the proposed centre).
And, anyway, what if it was?

Over 70 Muslims were inside the Twin Towers and died in pain and innocence alongside the other victims. These were ordinary people, like 35 year old Sarah Ali from London, who had taken a job there just three weeks earlier and whose father was harassed in the street by rightwing thugs vowing revenge for the "Muslim" attack. Is her death somehow less than the death of her fellow Britons and others who perished? Was she, as a Muslim, somehow collectively culpable?

If this was the case, then by logical extension, are all Christians therefore culpable for the appalling massacre of 7,000 Muslim men and boys by Serbian paramilitaries (who were formally blessed by their Christian priests before carrying out their slaughter) at Srebrenica in July 1995? Or for the 33,000 Muslim civilians killed in the same war (80% of all civilian casualites)?

No one is their brother's keeper. And no one is defined purely by one aspect of themselves. In his wonderful book, "Identity and Violence", Amartya Sen argues that harmony can only come when we start to see each other as individuals first, shaped to some extent by our cultures and faiths, but not helpless victims, or unchangeable automatons. We are each complex and worthy. Only when we recognise that and rise above our apparent desire for simplistic tribal identities that define us so one dimensionally - white or black; Muslim or Christian; man or woman; gay or straight;golfer or tennis player (!)- will we reach a point where we can value and be valued for the multi-faceted humans we are.

There is no war by Islam against the West. There should be no war by the West against Islam. There are many competing interests. Some of them are dark and powerful and selfish. Some of them want to oppress others, force a single world view on everyone else. These can all be found in all countries and among people of all faiths and none. It is only by reaching beyond the simplistic, self-limiting barriers these forces create that we can reach a point where there is true understanding, genuine stability and real, lasting peace.

So, America, be the Leader of the World. Let the Cordoba Initiative build its centre and, in the words of one of the greatest American Christians, "Let freedom ring!"