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.

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…

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… Read More→

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!

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?

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

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.

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…