Author: Mick Hartley

ng a special women’s category?

The championships will be held next in 2007, in Brighton. Time to get those whiskers growing.

concentration camp. In addition, I have a number of documents proving that the gas chambers are merely a myth and a legend.”

Later, we learn more from Bardash’s book:

“In the final hours of the war, typhus was killing many in the Nazi concentration camps, and was exacting a daily toll from among the prisoners and their jailers. This posed a great challenge for the commanders of these camps. Those in charge of health in the camps proposed two solutions:

“First, to disinfect the clothes and personal effects of the prisoners with Zyklon B gas, in order to get rid of lice – the main cause of this endemic disease. Before the war, this gas was often used to protect German-made fabric from moths.

“The second solution was to cremate the corpses of those who were sick to prevent the spread of the disease. This cremation took place in closed places, or, in other words, chambers. Thus, the ovens, which later became known as crematoria, were built, and this was exploited by the Jewish media.

But already the Mossad agents are closing in. Such truths cannot be allowed to be disseminated. Bardash is strangled in his Paris apartment……but his fate is seen by Marie, a journalist at the Al-Mufakkar newspaper.

Now the Mossad agents are after Marie. (Don’t miss the scene where an anguished Marie, collapsed on her bed, looks up at a picture of Jesus – another hero who spoke the truth but met the same fate as Bardash, to be murdered by the Jews.) They break into her house, shoot one of the residents, then slowly climb the stairs towards Marie’s room. Just as the door knob turns and the door creaks open…..Marie wakes up. Allah be praised! It was just a nightmare.

Can the lovely Marie survive to expose the murderous Jewish thugs? Will the world finally wake up to the truth about the so-called Holocaust? MEMRI promise to release more clips later this week.

enturies, we lived on the lands of an empire [i.e. the Ottoman Empire] that included many ethnic groups. We intermarried. We lived as neighbors and became also relatives.

“[…] In such a nation that lived in harmony, tolerance and peaceful relations, that can set an example for many other nations in the world, how can anybody go back, search, and find ‘pure blood’?

“[…] Those who have recently gone searching with a magnifying glass for Armenian blood in all those they dislike remind me of […]Nazi Germany. Because what ended in concentration camps and gas chambers there started exactly in this manner.

“As a society, we must raise our voices against a new kind of fascism.”

Post-war Germany acknowledged its guilt for the Holocaust. No German politician would now dream of smearing an opponent by accusing him of having Jewish blood, and working to a Jewish agenda against the interests of the German people. In the absence of any acknowledgement by the Turks for their responsibility for the Armenian Genocide, the same old poisons, instead of having been faced and expunged, are still circulating, ready to be called up by any unscrupulous politician.

On one level they are a retro-chic, Latin-based, classy easy-listening outfit, specialising in charming and melodic cocktail lounge ballads, before veering off into anything and everything from brooding European balladry and operatic mood pieces to ragtime or the Far East.

Hmm, not my sort of thing at all, but someone gave me this as a present, and I liked it a lot. So I googled around, found they were coming to London, bought some tickets, and went to see them last night. Oooh, wonderful! China Forbes has a stunning voice and stage presence to match, the level of musicianship is phenomenal, they write songs good enough that you can’t tell which are theirs and which are old standards….Broadway show tunes, sambas, Cuban son, French torch songs, Japanese pop. What’s not to like?

Perhaps the most famous of the “Ritual Abuse” cases which hit the headlines in the Eighties was the McMartin pre-school scandal:

In 1983, the mother of one of the Manhattan Beach, California preschool’s young students complained to the police that her son had been sodomized by her estranged husband and by McMartin teacher Ray Buckey, the grandson of school founder Virginia McMartin and son of administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey. Her belief was based on the fact that her son suffered from painful bowel movements, though he denied her suggestion that preschool teachers had molested him. In addition, she also claimed that people at the daycare had flown and had sexual encounters with giraffes. Ray Buckey was questioned, but was not prosecuted due to lack of evidence. The police, however, sent a letter to about 200 parents of students at the McMartin school, stating that their children may have been forced into sex, and asking the parents to question their children.

Several hundred children were questioned, and by spring of 1984, 360 children had been identified as having been abused. A doctor concluded that 120 had been sexually abused. No physical evidence was found to support these allegations. The mother who made the original complaint was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia the same year.

Now one of the children admits he was lying:

I remember them asking extremely uncomfortable questions about whether Ray touched me and about all the teachers and what they did—and I remember telling them nothing happened to me. I remember them almost giggling and laughing, saying, “Oh, we know these things happened to you. Why don’t you just go ahead and tell us? Use these dolls if you’re scared.”

Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. It was really obvious what they wanted. I know the types of language they used on me: things like I was smart, or I could help the other kids who were scared.

I felt uncomfortable and a little ashamed that I was being dishonest. But at the same time, being the type of person I was, whatever my parents wanted me to do, I would do. […]

But the lying really bothered me. One particular night stands out in my mind. I was maybe 10 years old and I tried to tell my mom that nothing had happened. I lay on the bed crying hysterically—I wanted to get it off my chest, to tell her the truth. My mother kept asking me to please tell her what was the matter. I said she would never believe me. She persisted: “I promise I’ll believe you! I love you so much! Tell me what’s bothering you!” This went on for a long time: I told her she wouldn’t believe me, and she kept assuring me she would. I remember finally telling her, “Nothing happened! Nothing ever happened to me at that school.”

She didn’t believe me.

We had a highly dysfunctional family. We argued and fought all the time. My mother has always blamed anything negative on the idea that we went to that preschool and were molested. To this day, she believes these things went on. Because if they didn’t, how can she explain all the family’s problems?

(via ALDaily)

an.

So we should do nothing, and say nothing, in the hope that they’ll calm down, like sensible chaps.

Here’s something you wouldn’t want to miss: the 3rd European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, in London from the 3rd to the 6th November. Registration fee a snip at £270. Honorary President is Bernardo Bertolucci, a walking advert for the benefits of the Freudian method. He started analysis in 1969, and is still going strong:

He’s on his fourth analyst. “Unfortunately, they die. I go with quite ageing shrinks,” he says. “The first two died. And there was another who I changed . . . maybe because (he goes quiet) I don’t know. I needed to start to do it with a woman. I had been so obsessed with the father, the father, the father.”

Well, it can happen.

So…how’s it going?

“I take pills for anxiety, panic attacks, depression. Depression is the worst,” he says.

I suppose it’s hoping for too much to expect to find sense in the increasingly bizarre and self-centred pronouncements of Harold Bloom, but even by the standards of the literary world, this (via ALDaily) is special:

Of course, the United States is in a terrible condition, we have a kind of fascist regime here – I think it’s the real truth about it and you can quote me on that. A few years ago, when I was in Barcelona receiving the national prize of Catalonia, I remarked when somebody asked me a question about president George Bush: “He is semiliterate at best, to call him a Fascist would be to flatter him.” He has now sufficiently grown in depth that you are no longer flattering him by calling him a Fascist – it is simply a descriptive remark.

It’s almost a parody of the self-regarding man of letters – “when I was in Barcelona receiving the national prize of Catalonia”. Oscar Wilde reincarnated as a witless narcissist. I love “you can quote me on that“. Hold the front page! Literary Giant Calls Bush a Fascist!

He thinks there’s still some hope for the US in its Asian immigrants – the new Jews – but not for us English: the reviews of his “Hamlet: Poem Unlimited” weren’t good enough, apparently:

This is still a vibrant and living culture, whereas the English are incorrigible. They have no minds at all. That little book had a mixed reception in the United States, a terrible reception in England, a very good reception in other countries. The Italian, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Scandinavian readers want to understand me, the English don’t. I really don’t want to go there again, it’s an absolutely dead culture. It no longer has any poets, it no longer has any novelists, it cannot produce a composer or a painter anymore. The French are not much better.

Well, that’s us told.

c research to all aspects of society. Finally is the control that scientists continue to exert over how their history is told. Past diversions and failures remain largely hidden, resulting in an airbrushed picture of ‘progress’ otherwise absent from human affairs.

The pursuit of knowledge? The fact that it works? Nah. Don’t feature.

He then passes quickly over the actual details of the case:

an obscure American physicist, Alan Sokal, published an article designed [to] expose what he regarded as the absurdities advanced by our field…

and suggests that scientists have wilfully misunderstood what science studies is all about:

When science studies says…Science is socially constructed.

Scientists read…Science is whatever enough people think it is.

Well, certainly science is socially constructed, but that isn’t all it is, for God’s sake. It’s hard to credit that someone who’s read Popper can so completely miss the point. It’s as though someone carried out a study of fishing, noting the way that different methods were adopted by different classes – coarse fishing for the proles, fly fishing for the toffs – and proposed that fishing was all about confirming social status and maintaining the power of the privileged elite, without ever having grasped that the main point of fishing is to catch fish.

Affirmative action for fringe ideas – as though it’s all about power. As though the only difference between a successful experiment and a failed experiment is that the successful experimenters shout louder, or have richer backers, or have established a hegemonic discourse. Hey, whatever, let’s give astrology a chance, or homeopathy, or Kirlian bioenergetics…..or Intelligent Design.

I imagine he’s confusing science with cultural studies, where you can indeed get away with anything.

Update: see this account of Fuller’s testimony (via Butterflies and Wheels).

According to Dr. Fuller, belief in genetic mutation and natural selection has a tendency to make people just “sit around and wait to die” instead of questioning, studying and testing ideas. On the flip side, he said that cultures in which people believe they were “crafted in the image and likeness of God” have historically been more inquisitive and have developed a larger body of scientific knowledge than other cultures. He suggested that these people felt “like God” and therefore had the confidence to believe that they could figure out how life works.

ied, confidently. “My fiancée doesn’t mind the memorabilia at all. In fact, she says that she quite likes it.”

That’s when I had to break it to him about women. “That’s not how women work,” I explained. “In a year’s time you will have decided that you don’t want all that stuff any more. That’s how women work.” Twelve months later, in an attic somewhere near Fulham, a poster of John Pertwee duly lay, slowly curling, leaning against a mouldering model of a Dalek.

Since the Government first proposed its invidious religious hatred legislation there has been a great deal of coverage about the circumstances in which people will be prosecuted. Ministers argue that the threat posed to free speech is very small, since any prosecution will have to be sanctioned by the Attorney General. It will be impossible for religious fanatics to use the law to persecute their critics.

Let me break the news gently to the Government, as I once so tactfully did to my science-fiction-loving friend. Prosecutions are irrelevant. That’s not how laws work. […]

The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill may not produce many court cases. Even on the rare occasions when the police and crown prosecution services decide to act, the Attorney General may intervene to avoid a political controversy. But this doesn’t mean that the legislation will have no impact on free speech.

Of course it will. It will have an impact every time the the local arts centre decides that perhaps it had better not book a certain act, or a cinema chain decides not to show a certain film, or a school decides not to hire out its hall to certain speakers. It will have an impact every time the wording of a council leaflet is changed or the local church changes its mind about the topic of its study evening.

In myriad ways, little by little, our freedom will be eroded. And most of the time we won’t even notice.

Pretty soon we’ll come to think that it was our idea, that we like it this way.

Laws, you see, work like women.