Author: Mick Hartley

The extreme anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews of Neturei Karta, who believe that the Jews were originally driven into exile for their sins, and only God – rather than Theodor Herzl – can return them, have a history of stirring things up in a serious way. Recent stunts include a prayer vigil for the dying Yasser Arafat outside his Paris hospital, a letter of congratulations to Hamas on their recent triumph in the Palestinian elections, and now, interviews on Iranian TV (clip 1060).

From Al-Alam TV, March 5:

Neturei Karta spokesman Rabbi Dovid Weiss: The issue of the Holocaust has to do with the Zionist use… The Zionists are using this issue. We, the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust, do not use the Holocaust as a tool for promoting our cause. […]

We reiterate that there are Jews throughout the world – hundreds of thousands of Jews – who remain loyal to the rejection of Zionism, and who say that Zionism is not Judaism but a political movement.

We want a dismantlement not only of the 1967 areas, but [of the entire Palestine], so the lands will return to Palestine, and we will live side by side.

Of course, we are forbidden to have a state. Zionism was founded by Mr. Theodor Herzl, and these people were going against God. That is why Mr. Livingstone condemned this. He was right. He is not anti-Semitic. We supported him when Sheik Al-Qaradhawi came to England. We said to him: “You did good.”

We welcome this because these people are not anti-Semites, but they oppose this illegitimate political movement called “Zionism,” which does not represent so many hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world, and maybe millions, who still believe only in Judaism, and do not accept the State of Israel.

From Jaam-e Jam1 TV, March 5:

Reporter: He [Rabbi Aharon Cohen, British Neturei Karta] took part in an international religious conference in Tehran where he expressed his anti-Zionist views. The Rabbi said Zionists are involved in almost every major crime worldwide but unfortunately claimed to be speaking for the Jewish community.

It looks like Ken’s strong anti-Zionist (but of course not anti-semitic) line is bringing him all sorts of nice new friends.

ics to “Baa baa, happy sheep”.

Interesting that these people think black is a term of abuse, on a par with dwarf. But why do they have such tin ears? Rainbow sheep? Happy sheep? Black‘s one syllable: you need a one-syllable replacement for chrissake. If you’re going to bowdlerise, at least do it properly.

The Loch Ness monster is actually….an elephant. Well of course – whyever did no one think of that before?

Oh dear – here’s Joan Baez:

[N]ow I’ve gone back very much to my roots musically. As it turns out, politically it is absolutely the right thing to do: rather than try to find new songs to deal with the state of the world, which unfortunately this country is leading in a disastrous direction, the songs from 40 years ago are coming back very comfortably. Dylan wrote With God on Our Side before Americans started fighting in Vietnam, and that’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

No it isn’t. It’s not at all amazing. The first step to political awareness is when you start to question why your country’s always presented as being in the right (well, it used to be: nowadays teenagers brought up reading their parents’ Independent presumably struggle to some kind of political maturity with the realisation that the West isn’t always in the wrong). Dylan managed to capture that feeling, but there was nothing amazing about it. It’s powerful, but in Dylan terms it’s a fairly trite piece of work, aimed at the smugness of the Cold War rhetoric of the Fifties and early Sixties rather than the Vietnam era.

I think many people are pretty well stymied by the state of affairs here, and I think that this country, like any country that’s about to fall, says: “Oh, it couldn’t happen here.” And I think it’s happening. It’s getting deeper every day: wiretapping and people getting frightened for their jobs and their reputations, and all that stuff. My mom says that when I was 14 I was reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I came out of my bedroom and announced that the same thing was going to happen to the US as what happened to the Third Reich. I’d forgotten that, and when she told me I thought: “Well, do I gloat because I was clever, or do I despair? Because it’s devastating news.”

There’s something so fatuously narcissistic about this comparison of current-day US with Nazi Germany. Meant to show that she has some kind of heightened sensitivity, some special antennae picking up the fascist vibes that the rest of us are too blind to notice, all it really demonstrates is that she doesn’t have a clue: that she’s never given any serious consideration at all to what life might have been like back then. The gangs of Nazi youths roaming the streets, the smashed store fronts of the Jewish shops, the sudden disappearance of those Jewish neighbours, the Gestapo thugs….and that’s before the horrors of war, before the Holocaust truly started up. It’s a monstrous piece of conceit to pretend that her concerns bear any comparison with the victims of the Nazis. It trivialises the sufferings of those who lived through that period. And what are Joan’s concerns, in BusHitler proto-Nazi America?

My favourite dinner is a whole, crispy-cooked fish, and I love to eat with my hands. I won’t usually have wine: sometimes if I’m eating out I’ll think, “That would be nice,” and then I drink about half of it and forget it’s there.

Meanwhile here’s Kurt Vonnegut, speaking at the Ohio State Union (via):

“Well,” says Vonnegut, “I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.”

The students seem to agree.

“The only difference between Bush and Hitler,” Vonnegut adds, “is that Hitler was elected.”

“You all know, of course, that the election was stolen. Right here.”

Nick Cohen, on Rowan Williams’ trip to Sudan:

Fashion matters and today the fashion is to ignore genocide. Quite rightly, the crimes of American, British, European and Israeli democracy are dissected and denounced. But an intellectual blockage – a Chinese wall in the mind – prevents the critics applying universal principles to far greater outrages.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, made my point for me in Sudan last week. Anyone who had heard the Church of England’s censure of Israel might have expected to see a primate filled with righteous wrath. Consider his opportunities. While he was there, the genocide was continuing in Darfur. The victims were black Muslims, but strangely, the Muslim world has not revolted against the Islamist murderers and torched Sudanese embassies.

In the name of inter-faith solidarity, Dr Williams might have found the words of reproach they lacked. If he didn’t want to talk about Darfur, there was the decades-long civil war, which has seen the enslavement of the Christian Dinka tribe in the south and two million dead, more than in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo combined.

On a visit to a church in Khartoum, the fearless archbishop told the congregation: ‘It will be a joy to share with fellow Christians in Britain what… I have learnt from you.’ What he had learnt was a history of massacre, slavery and second-class citizenship, but he didn’t mention it.

The next stop was the Sudan Inter-Religious Council in Khartoum. This might have been the place to lay into the dictatorship’s murder and persecution of Sudanese Christians. Instead, he confined himself to saying: ‘We are at peace with God when we face our failings with honesty.’ And so it went on. He travelled through a country torn by religious mania and genocide without mentioning religious mania and genocide.

ty extreme. And it gets better:

Should a Muslim who seeks martyrdom be compelled not to maintain her [head] covering in order to carry out the important thing that she has undertaken [i.e. martyrdom], she will commit no crime. One of the principles of Islam is that in time of need, some prohibitions become permitted…

It depends what you mean by need, of course. It’s almost four years since the 15 schoolgirls died in a fire in Saudi Arabia, when the Muttawa, the religious police, refused to let them out of the burning building because their heads were uncovered. Clearly that wasn’t a time of need. Now if only they’d been heading off to commit mass murder somewhere….

Dutch news from Expatica:

Immigration minister Rita Verdonk says gay asylum seekers from Iran should be sent back home. Six months ago she had refused to send them back because two gay Iranian men had been executed there.

Verdonk said in a letter to the Second Chamber that there was no question of anyone being executed or sentenced to death purely on the basis of their being gay, although she did concede that gay sex was punishable by death by Iranian interpretation of Islamic law.

Even so, gay asylum seekers should be returned, she said, based on information from the Foreign Office about the actual situation in Iran. The two gay men were executed not for their sexuality but because they had robbed, kidnapped and raped a minor.

The gay rights organization COC described Verdonk’s decision as “revolting” and based on incorrect information about the Iranian regime.

Verdonk says that asylum-seeking Iranian Christians who have converted from Islam, who also face strong societal disapproval, can also safely be sent back.

Michael Totten’s post from Suleimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan, is well worth a read, especially his visit to the old Baathist torture chamber and prison, since turned into a genocide museum (via Norm).

10,725 people were killed in this one building alone. All died during torture. Formal execution actually took place in Abu Ghraib.

As a commenter at Althouse writes,

It is so depressing to me that it requires a man like Totten to tell these stories, because (forgive what has become frustratingly cliche) the main press has not.

I am in shock.

I have never known all of this information…

Iraqi Kurds are clearly eager to show Western journalists the horrors of their recent history. You’d think it was a story worth publicising. For the mainstream media, apparently not.

In the spirit of this post, here’s some more industrial photography. Lots of grimy goodness, like, for instance, here, here, here, here, and……well, you get the idea.

Update: the links to this site shift, so the photos you see may not be the ones I originally selected.

Firm action indeed! Never again will Pattison enter a car park, except as a passenger. Well he wouldn’t dare, would he? He’d be breaking the law.

Next thing they’ll be making general Asbos which’ll apply to all of us: like for instance, it’ll be against the law to break into someone else’s car and drive it away, or, it’ll be against the law to break into someone else’s home and steal their property. If it catches on, before we know it there’ll be no crime at all.