Englishman in New York

A number of bloggers are discussing racial profiling at the moment. But what if the enemy is in disguise? Simon’s Brain ponders the imponderable!

What if the Hasidic guy was an Islamist in disguise? I knew the absurdity of what I was thinking but I also new I was onto something. The guy had a bag on the floor and a large rucksack on his back. I looked up to see his face. He was fairly dark skinned. I started wondering how dark Jewish people can be. I knew I was being stupid and ignorant and probably racist but the thoughts kept coming. Wouldn’t dressing as a Hasidic Jew be the perfect disguise? Who would ever stop you and check your bag? And what about all those mad clerics who believe in Zionist plots to take over the world? They’d have a field day when they saw the CCTV footage on the news. Oh brain, please, no more!

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Why Do You Stay Up So Late?—a Poem. (Via Boingboing.)

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Brownie of Harry’s Place fame appears to have had a slightly frustrating time on the UK’s Question Time programme.

Don’t be cowed by the loud-mouthed membership of the UK branch of Baathists Abroad. Give them both barrels, deride their isolationism, be appalled at the apologia, heap scorn on their childish anti-Americanism, and be proud of the fact that you believe people you will never meet, living in a country you will never visit, deserve a chance to experience the democratic and free existence that is the birthright of every last one us.

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If the Daily Ablution gets any better I think it will explode…Not only has the Guardian’s executive editor for news now resigned over the Aslam affair…

But the Ablution also points out that the newspaper published a comment and analysis piece today by a black reporter about the racism of British policemen shooting Brazillian Jean Charles de Menezes who was, unfortunately for the Guardian reporter, white!
Read it and weep.

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On London appeared in Danish today—in one of Denmark’s national newspapers Weekendavisen! Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, so none of you can laugh at the stupid headshot that accompanied the piece, which was taken at 8am the morning after too much red wine the night before. I had to trim about 400 words off the original post and tweak a few things to make it fit for print, but it is essentially the same piece…

It also completely slipped my mind to mention that if you are in the Boston area between now and January, 2006, you can check out an audio tour I wrote for the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. The exhibition is called Sounds of the Silk Road, and covers musical instruments from across Asia: Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, Tibet, India, and Turkey. One of the highlights of the exhibition (apart from the audio tour) is a Javanese gamelan, a traditional Indonesian orchestra, which will be performing every other Wednesday evening between July 13 and December 14, from 7 pm to 9 pm in the exhibition gallery, culminating in a gamelan concert in January 8, 2006. The tour was a lot of fun to write and has some excellent music on it…

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This just in from Dover…

Family appeal for tortoise’s swift return
A FAMILY have been left distraught after their tortoise, which was a family
heirloom, was stolen.
Speedy was taken from a cottage in Station Road, Martin Mill, some time
between 9pm on Tuesday, July 19, and 7.15am on July 20.
His owner, Lynn Parker, said Speedy belonged to her aunt, who asked her to
look after him shortly before she died.
“I am just gutted he has gone,” said Mrs Parker.
“He was in his pen, and I did not see him when I left for work, and we would
just like him back.
“I live in the middle of a field and we hardly have any visitors, so someone
must have known he was here.”
Anyone who may have Speedy or has seen him is urged to contact police on
01304 240055. He may have traces of white paint on his shell, and Mrs Parker has
another way of identifying Speedy from other tortoises.
Dover Mercury, 28 July 2005

(Via the Chief)

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There seems to be a constant murmuring going on among more extreme Muslim elements that there is still no proof the London bombings were the work of Islamic extremists and that they are being victimized. For example, here is Mohammad Naseem, the chairman of Birmingham’s Central Mosque, speaking last Thursday (via Harry):

Muslim bashing seems to be more earnest than the need for national unity and harmony. Terrorists can be anybody - we will have to see [whether the bombers are Muslims]. The process is not open; the process is not transparent; the process is not independent. I do not have faith in the system as it stands.

And here is the latest statement, released last week by our friend Aslam’s Hizb ut-tahrir group:

A few hours after the bombings on Thursday 7/7/2005; before any investigation and before revealing even the reality of the bombings as to whether they were planted or human bombs, the hateful crusader comments began to be made: Blair immediately pointed to ‘extremist’ values while hinting at Islam. Others declared that Islam is, “an evil and brutal religion.” In this manner their crusader hatred of Islam and the Muslims has appeared. They know that many explosions have been carried out by extremists from their own countrymen though they did not describe them in this way nor did they describe their religion, values or culture in an inappropriate way but confined their discussion to the individuals involved (sic).

Yet at the same time, in the eyes of groups like Hizb uh-tahrir, there is every good reason for the bombers to attack us, as their same statement helpfully continues:

O Muslims:

You can see these states, especially the colonialist states and those which have ambitions over our countries, may disagree on everything but they are united against you and against your Deen. Here they all move in one direction; they want to keep the issue of the Muslims in a state of crisis, separated and disconnected; they want the Muslims to be under their sphere of influence and under Jewish influence, so that, as they themselves admit, they can prevent the Muslims from returning as one Ummah in one state; the Khilafah Rashidah which will put the world in its right place and give back the rights to its people, and spread goodness to all corners of the world.[…]

Hizb ut-tahrir is steady in following this path, it will not undertake material actions nor does it view that as a correct solution. It does not accept the killing of civilians or the harming of those who have security. But despite this, it takes the view that because the powerful nations spill the blood of Muslims, violate their honour and desecrate their sanctities, that these are the real reasons which produce these material reactions. If the big nations wanted to put a stop to these actions they would have thought and reflected on the questions that we mention above - but we know that the arrogance of these states will stop them from thinking in a sound manner and following the correct path.

So there’s no proof that extremist Muslims did it. But it’s obvious why they did it.

PS To the Guardian NUJ members, is this the kind of minority representation your newspaper needs?

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Theirs is not just a war against the Egyptian economy and government, it is a war against the entire Egyptian people, as it is against all the people of Britain, of Spain, of Lebanon, of Iraq, of Indonesia, of the US — of everywhere. The terrorist is at war with the entire world.

It is not enough to hunt down and destroy these men of evil. The thinking that drives them must also be destroyed. That puts a special responsibility on decent human beings everywhere. These fanatics claim to act in the name of Islam. That has to be shown to be a lie.

Their vision of the faith is so warped, so twisted, that it has nothing to do with Islam. They pollute it, they make it feared, even hated elsewhere in the world, they bring shame and humiliation to the faithful. They have departed from Islam. Muslims here and elsewhere must tell the world, not just once but again and again, every time the fanatics attack, that they have nothing to do with Islam, that they have been cast out.

Editorial in Arab News. (Via someone but I forgot who!)

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Do I need to keep pointing you in the direction of the Daily Ablution? Or is everyone going there automatically now?

In the latest installment the Guardian claims in an interview with a French newspaper that it did not sack Aslam because of the blogging furore but rather because it had been carrying out an internal inquiry of its own into Aslam’s links with Hizb’ut Tahrir.

As the Ablution points out, if they were already carrying out an inquiry into Aslam’s links with an extremist group why ask him to write the piece in the first place?

Meanwhile Harry reports that Aslam appeared at a special NUJ chapel meeting on Tuesday where he expressed surprise that his article had caused offence. He also failed to adequately answer questions about the anti-semitism of Hizb’ut Tahrir. Nevertheless a vote to condemn his sacking was still narrowly passed. Apparently NUJ staff thought it was important to have representative voices from ethnic communities on the paper.

I agree. But where do you stop? Here, here, or here? Some minority voices are not worth listening to let alone printing.

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Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian (via Harry of course!) takes issue with Ken’s defence of suicide bombings in Israel and opposition to it at home…

So when Livingstone offers this as some kind of defence - that Qaradawi is against 9/11 and 7/7, but in favour of “martyrdom operations” against Israeli civilians - I am not comforted. I am fearful of the dark place he has entered.

And yet that was not the end of it. In that same interview, the mayor noted what he regarded as a double standard. Why, he wondered, was it legitimate for “a young Jewish boy in this country” to join the Israeli army “and end up killing many Palestinians” while a “young Muslim boy in this country” who wants to defend his “Palestinian brothers and sisters … is branded as a terrorist”?

Imagine these cases for a moment. A British man emigrates to Israel; a few years later he might get called up for military service; he might even end up in an operation that results in the killing of civilians. And then there is another British man who arrives in Israel for the sole purpose of staging a suicide bombing. (This latter case is not hypothetical: Britons Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif did exactly that in 2003.) Is there not a moral difference between these two actions? Why does Livingstone say they are equivalent?

More importantly, what is the mayor doing talking like this? He must realise how incendiary it is to bring the Middle East conflict directly to these shores, pitting the “young Jewish boy” against “the young Muslim boy”. How reckless to encourage one community to see the other as would-be recruits for the bitter war of Israeli and Palestinian. “They seek to turn Londoners against each other,” Livingstone said of the terrorists on July 7. Yet what was he doing last week?

I agree wholeheartedly with Freedland’s sentiments here, although I think (and I can’t believe I am saying this) that he is missing the point when Ken talks about “young Jewish boys” doing military service. I think Ken is talking about those young Jewish men and women in the UK who volunteer to do military service in Israel—not people who emigrate and are later conscripted.

Even so. Freedland is still right. Those volunteers do not leave with the intention of “killing Palestinians.” Unlike suicide bombers whose mission is specifically to kill as many people as possible.

Again, if Ken’s short, twisted logic were followed to its natural conclusion then young British men would be in much the same position. After all, aren’t they the ones being sent to foreign lands like Afghanistan and Iraq? And as Freedland points out:

Let’s say Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were angered by the occupation of Iraq or even 80 years of western imperialism, as Livingstone himself has suggested. What weapons would they have against the mighty arsenals of Britain and the US? Those men from Leeds had no jet planes or tanks. They too “only have their bodies”. Under Qaradawi’s logic, so generously explained by the mayor, they too must have a legitimate right “to fight back” by attacking the civilians of the imperialist power: in other words, you and me.

Which of course brings us back neatly to the brillaint argument that we should never be in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place. That if we just left them alone they wouldn’t bother us. That it’s our fault they are acting like this in the first place. Maybe if we just reasoned with them…

I say we reinstate Saddam, put the Taliban back where they were and have a good old chinwag about what they want. Perhaps if we gave them Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel (of course). Make them promise not to bomb us any more. (Well, just the Americans—and just a little.) Who knows? We might achieve peace in our time…

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EINY reader Danny sent me these facts. Number 12 intrigues me. And I’m convinced that number 17 is of great philosophical value. The rest you can judge for yourself…
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More blog excellence a la Aslam from The Daily Ablution.

One thing that occurred to me last night though.

In the US, the blogosphere claimed the scalps of a Senate Majority Leader, CNN’s head of news, and CBS’s top anchor Dan Rather. I hope it is not rude to see the funny side in the fact that the British blogosphere’s first scalp is that of a trainee journalist with the Guardian!

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I find myself thinking of my country and my industry - and what I see confuses and confounds me. This is a tiny little country that remains a world power, one of the few trillion dollar economies in the world. It has 50% take-up of broadband, some huge telecommunications companies and thousands of people working on and around the internet. But still our industry seems dominated by a few moribund and clumsy giants leading a culture that’s inarticulate, unadventurous and profoundly constrained. There’s something very wrong here.

Some interesting thoughts from Tom Coates at Plasticbag.org about why Brits aren’t doing better.

I sometimes wonder a similar thing myself. How have I managed to start a freelance career in the United States from scratch? And why do I think it would have been so much harder in the UK despite the advantage that I have so many contacts there? Why is America full of rags to riches stories? And why do so many people in Britain still sneer at success?

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Super Dooper response from the Daily Ablution to L’Affaire Aslam!

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Since 2000 New York City’s Hate Crimes Task Force has investigated nearly 2,000 crimes and determined that 95 per cent of them were motivated by hate.

New York Times, page one Inside teaser, Sunday, July 24.

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So trainee Aslam has been shown the door. You may remember Aslam from my post here. It’s probably not worth dwelling on for long since it has already been picked up, rolled over, and munched here, here, and here. But I would still like to emphasize the Guardian’s stupidity in its reporting of its own story.

Announcing the departure of Aslam under the headline Aslam Targeted by Bloggers an anonymous staff writer writes:

Rightwing bloggers from the US, where the Guardian has a large online following, were behind the targeting last week of a trainee Guardian journalist who wrote a comment piece which they did not care for about the London bombings.

The story is a demonstration of the way the ‘blogosphere’ can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed.

Number 1. That article was offensive to bloggers from the left, the right, the center, and the moon.
Number 2. What’s all this about a large online following in the US? Is that a plug for the paper in the intro? I fail to see the relevance.
Number 3. “A comment piece which they did not care for about the London bombings.”—That’s a great way to describe an insensitive article written a few days after a terrorist attack by a supporter of a radical Islamic group.
4. The blogosphere is not “used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed”. That implies some kind of guiding force and is about as absurd as saying the media is used to mount obsessively personal attacks. The blogosphere is a collection of individuals writing about whatever they see fit. If they honed in on Aslam it was for a reason. And if it was not a good reason then why has the Guardian let him go?
5. What would have happened if this article had been published before the blogosphere had found its feet? Would it be better if we all wrote letters to the editor?

The article was hopelessly wide of the mark on its assessment of the blogosphere with its foolish reference to bloggers who spend time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian—as though their location has anything to do with it. My god, these guys work from home!

But it was also surprisingly poorly written with weak or clumsy turns of phrase like “trainee Guardian journalist who wrote a comment piece which they did not care for about the London bombings”, or “The episode was a striking illustration of the way that blogs and bloggers can heat up the temperature and seek to settle scores”, which made me wonder which other trainee journalist they had assigned to write this piece? And why didn’t they get a proper reporter to write a more intelligent account of the whole affair? It looks to me like they are fighting fire with lighter fluid.

PS Also interesting to note how the Independent on Sunday is claiming it was first to reveal a story that was broken in the blogosphere. Excellent. Well done chaps. Exclusive to a newspaper near you…

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Warrington Wolves 22 46 Leeds Rhinos

Last week I said that playing at Warrington, Leeds would have to really concentrate for the full 80 minutes. Well that is what they did at last. Warrington were third in the league and had not been defeated at home for three months. The Rhinos were clearly ready for the test and put on a marvellous display, probably their best of the season. They ran at the Wolves in defence and in attack they flung the ball wide, forcing the Wolves to run across the field and waste energy.

Every player was on top form but outstanding was Rob Burrow. It is hard to realise that he is only 22 as he has been playing for the first team since he was 17, but he is now showing real maturity. Yet he has probably another two or three years in which to add experience and perhaps a little more weight. If this happens then it is frightening to think what he can achieve. Not only did he continually change the direction of attack, tackle well and score one of the tries of the match but he also kicked 7 goals, some from the touch-line.
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