The Students' Union at Goldsmiths College London, where I'm currently based, have organised what looks set to be a really amazing event - bringing students and staff together for an anti-war "teach-in", happening next Wednesday. Among those participating from my own department (Media and Communications) will be Natalie Fenton, who has written on social movements, civil society and the mass media, Des Freedman, co-author of War and the Media, and prominent feminist cultural theorist Angela McRobbie. If you can make it, do come along.

‘Stop the War teach-in’
Organised by Goldsmiths Students’ Union
E-mail: campaigns-su@gold.ac.uk
Phone: 07834 828 292

Wednesday 24 October from 1pm
Goldsmiths Students’ Union (GSU) will turn the College into an anti-war space for a day! Come to alternative lectures and seminars to debate and discuss the continuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the threats of military action on Iran, the Israeli oppression of Palestine and the ‘War on Terror’.

1pm-2.30pm:

Truth: The first casualty of war (RHB355):

Peter Lee–Wright (Media) - Reporting the war
Des Freedman (Media) - Silencing the media
Natalie Fenton (Media) - The media and mobilisation

Demonising Islam (RHB139):

Suhail Malik (Art) - Visual representations of Abu Ghraib
Bart Moore-Gilbert (English and Comparative Literature) - Representations of
fundamentalism
Les Back (Sociology) - The War on Terror and the politics of misrecognition

3pm-4.30pm:

Palestine under occupation (RHB355):

Kay Dickinson (Media) - Resistant media in Palestine
Ahmed Masoud (English and Comparative Literature) - Education in Palestine
Eyal Weizman (Visual Cultures) - De-colonising architecture

The war at home (RHB139):

John Hutnyk (Cultural Studies) - Anti-war hip hop and the 7/7 bombings
Angela McRobbie (Media) - War in the domestic context
Nirmal Puwar (Sociology) - Memorialisation and violence

5pm-6.30pm: Small Hall (Cinema), RHB:

Troops out now: Don't attack Iran

Stop the War Coalition speaker
Alberto Toscano (Sociology)
Mehraj Miah (Black & Ethnic Students Officer)
Grace Lally (Campaigns Co-ordination officer)
Chair: Hannah Bullivant (GSU President)

We all know Martin Amis is an idiot. We also know he’s virulently Islamophobic. What I didn’t personally know, until recently, was just how far he was prepared to take this latter tendency. Terry Eagleton has just provoked a flurry of tiresome comment in the press about the potential common room spat between himself and Amis (both men are now based at the University of Manchester), whom he criticised harshly in a recent book for comments he made on the Muslim community. Oddly enough, this “human interest” story attracted rather more attention than the actual substance of the criticism – namely, the marked fascist tendencies of Manchester’s latest literary don. The words Eagleton criticised Amis for are the following (quoted in the London Review of Books):

“There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part.”

Again, let’s imagine Amis’s foci were Israeli terrorism, the pro-Israeli policies promoted by high-profile American Jewish groups, and the target of his comments the Jewish community. Is it too outlandish to suggest he would not now be teaching at a major British university? Is it possible certain sectors of the intellectual establishment would have labelled him anti-Semitic? Who knows.

It’s worth noting that one Nick Cohen proudly quoted Amis on his own website in February. In an interview with the Times, Amis apparently said that “[h]e found Cohen’s book What’s Left?, a controversial and scathing critique of modern left-wing incoherence, spoke to his own politics directly” (my italics). Nick will be proud, I’m sure, that commentators of avowedly out-and-out fascist sympathies found that his book “spoke to” them.

Swashbuckling defender of “decent left”-ism Christopher Hitchens goes even further than Cohen. He cites the passage I’ve just quoted above, and goes on to laud Amis’s solid moral character. He is “profoundly humanistic”, Hitchens tells us directly after this paragraph. So profoundly, apparently, that he feels a “definite urge” to “hurt” and humiliate “the whole [Muslim] community”. If this is humanism, one has to wonder what the hell racism would look like.

Of his ideological opponents, Hitch wrote in 2001, “I have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully and without heat, as soft on crime and soft on fascism.” For Amis, who criminalises an entire ethno-religious group, he has nothing but praise. How are the “decent” left inclined to confront a “fascist” enemy? If Martin Amis is anything to go by, apparently with more of the same.

UPDATE: The Stop the War Coalition are now collecting pledges of civil disobedience in the event of an escalation towards war. Please sign up on their website.

ROADBLOCK is a recent initiative I have tried to get going on facebook. It's still in its very early stages, and needs support and publicity. If successful, this project can serve the useful function of gathering and aggregating the pledges of geographically-dispersed activists throughout the UK willing to undertake non-violent direct action to stop British collusion in a war with Iran. If you can, please sign up here, and ask others to do likewise:

http://yorkuk.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5167094389&ref=mf

The US government may well be preparing for an attack on Iran. Britain may well be preparing to support them.

Veteran New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh revealed this week:

“During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” …

“The bombing plan has had its most positive reception from the newly elected government of Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh?printable=true

The fact that such credible reports have been made should be deeply disturbing for British citizens. It is widely assumed to be almost inconceivable that Britain would provide support for an attack on Iran; this is now far from certain.

As Seumas Milne writes:

“The likelihood of a Brown government directly participating in an attack must be small after the debacle of Iraq. But the possibility that logistical or political support might be offered is more serious. The need to step up public pressure to make sure that does not happen could not be clearer.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2184230,00.html

The time to step up that pressure is now. This group is for all those who are ready and willing to take whatever non-violent direct action they can to disrupt the normal functioning of the country in the event of British support for, or acquiescence in, an American attack on Iran. By joining, you are signalling your readiness to participate in such actions, and showing others who support them that they are not alone. None of us wants a war with Iran, least of all one in which Britain is complicit; but no-one else can stop one from taking place.

Please join, and ask as many other people as you can to join – time is very short.

Michael Albert writes forcefully on the paralyzing effects of fatalism in a recent piece:

We the fatalists say to ourselves, not even explicitly, but in some subterranean channel of mind, hey, self, there is no better world. Pay attention now, self - there is nothing good that you can do outside our small circle of friends. More, if, self, you make our deep down buried horror at what we see all around us apparent to others, apparent even just to me, you will in that act impose on me the almighty sacrifice of looking different, of not fitting, of being dissident, and, well, gee, what's the point of suffering such an incredible loss of comfort and continuity merely to protest jackboot repressive trends at home and international mayhem abroad, merely to protest the daily assault against all wage slaves, not to mention the cooking of the planet unto drowning, when if I instead celebrate all that, or I just ignore all that when celebration is beyond my capacity for hypocrisy, or I even just calmly bemoan it all for a minute or two before getting on with other business, I can prosper nicely...

Being a lemming following the crowd over a cliff saying hooray for crowds and cliffs is pretty pitiful. How much more pitiful is it to go over a cliff, barreling along like all the rest, but moaning about how unjust it is, how painful it is, how un-lemming like it is, nonetheless churning away, cliffward and then over, right to the end.

Read the full thing here.