If there's a more perfect picture of Nick Griffin than this one out there, I'd certainly like to see it. It currently accompanies the story which is splashed across the front page of the Guardian today, about the Oxford Union's invitation of the BNP leader, along with the prominent Holocaust denier David Irving, to a debate on free speech.

The invitation is open to question of course - does free speech mean offering a platform to fascists? Or, as Paul Gilroy argued recently, in an era when we are in danger of failing to recognise racist ideology for what it is, do people in fact need to hear what a genuinely fascist argument actually sounds like?

Whatever the ins and outs of this debate, at least we can be reassured that the Oxford Union takes such a strong, principled line on free speech. According to the Guardian,

The union's president, Luke Tryl, said the forum, which has prompted several speakers to withdraw from other union events, including defence secretary Des Browne, MP Chris Bryant and TV presenter June Sarpong, would go ahead. "I find the views of the BNP and David Irving awful and abhorrent but my members agreed that the best way to beat extremism is through debate," he said.

He denied the event was a publicity stunt. "It's absolutely not. It would have been much easier for me to have a term as president in which I didn't try to uphold this principle."

Luke Tryl - a man of high principle. Except, that is, when it comes to allowing figures like Norman Finkelstein - an internationally-recognised scholar on the Israel-Palestine conflict, who has garnered numerous accolades from the leading scholars in the field - to come and speak. When he comes under pressure for inviting this man to the Oxford Union, it would seem his pious professions quickly evaporate, as Avi Shlaim has recently documented.

Perhaps the double-standard is not that surprising. Demonstrating a willingness to countenance the appearance of the BNP at one's debates allows for the adoption of all sorts of public posturing about one's devotion to the cause of free speech. Actually acting on such professions with any consistency, on the other hand, is clearly a tougher proposition, particularly when it treads on the wrong toes. And so it is that in this instance, Tryl has bottled it. He could at least have the decency not to keep flaunting his "principles" in public.

From the Irish Independent:

The British army says violence in Basra has fallen by 90% since it withdrew from the southern Iraqi city earlier this year.

Around 500 British soldiers left one of Saddam Hussein's palaces in the heart of the city in early September and stopped conducting regular foot patrols.

A spokesman says the Iraqi security forces still come under attack from militants in Basra, but the overall level of violence is down 90% since the British troops left.

Compare this with what the BBC's Matt Frei wrote earlier this week. In Iraq, he claims, "many of the festering problems in the past, most notably Falluja, took root in the fact that the US simply didn't have enough boots on the ground to finish the job and provide enough security."

It's instructive to recall what the "boots on the ground" did accomplish in Fallujah - largely the mass killing of civilians and the provocation and fuelling of a violent insurgency, despite (or because of?) an almost unbelievable application of military force which essentially gutted the city. Only "half the houses in the city ... destroyed and another quarter ... damaged; almost every mosque, school or public building ... destroyed or damaged"? Would that they'd "finish[ed] the job", eh?

This -

- is the rather nice Ben Pimlott building at Goldsmiths College London. Note the big squiggle on the right-hand side, representing creativity (or something). A number of students at the college sought to exercise their creativity yesterday, with some encouraging results. See what you think.

(Hope these pictures work - please tell me if they don't, and I'll try and rectify things.)

Stage One: Preparation

Stage Two: The Hanging

Stage Three: Stop The War's Die-In

Stage Four: A Small, Impromtu Street Party

According to the FT, the government has just unveiled plans for its third runway at Heathrow, which could “increase the number of take-offs and landings at Europe’s most congested airport from the current 473,000 a year to around 700,000 by 2030”.

Here’s one practical use to which we’re putting these flights.

Here - and here - are some of the anticipated effects.

The sheer horror of what we’re doing is almost impossible to comprehend. What can one say about a government which knowingly and willingly colludes in the mass killing of hundreds of millions, if not billions of people? What are we even doing it for? “[T]he economy”, says Ruth Kelly. Says the chief executive of British Airways, “If we as a country turn our backs on expanding Heathrow, then we are throwing in the economic towel – and must prepare ourselves for the consequences of a low-growth or perhaps no-growth economy in the future”.

He speaks (rather ironically in the circumstances) as if such a scenario effectively means the end of the world – but what benefit do we derive from this growth? In terms of our happiness, none. Indeed there is some compelling evidence that the inverse might be the case. According to a Nuffield Foundation report on adolescent mental health from 2004, in the UK “rises in mental health problems seem to be associated with improvements in economic conditions”. As Clive Hamilton writes:

“Modern consumer capitalism will flourish as long as what people desire outpaces what they have. It is thus vital to the reproduction of the system that individuals are constantly made to feel dissatisfied with what they have. The irony of this should not be missed: while economic growth is said to be the process whereby people’s wants are satisfied so that they become happier—and economics is defined as the study of how scarce resources are best used to maximise welfare—in reality economic growth can be sustained only as long as people remain discontented. Economic growth does not create happiness: unhappiness sustains economic growth. Thus discontent must be continually fomented if modern consumer capitalism is to survive.”

One other clear example in particular is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. British obesity rates are now the highest in Europe, with all the attendant health crises that implies – and the marketing and promotional industries’ role in pushing the food environment that fuels this crisis is stark.

The ethicist Peter Singer once wrote of a question he poses to his students on the morality of saving life at a small cost to yourself, with the analogy of passing a drowning child in a shallow pond on your way to a class. As he framed the scenario:

“To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.

“I … ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do.

“Once we are all clear about our obligations to rescue the drowning child in front of us, I ask: would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost – and absolutely no danger – to yourself? Virtually all agree that distance and nationality make no moral difference to the situation.”

We are now, every one of us, in precisely this situation – letting the child die to save our sneakers – but with a couple of essential differences. We are deriving no benefits from this trade-off, and quite possibly the opposite. There are alternatives: the Centre for Alternative Technology’s Zero Carbon Britain report “demonstrates that Britain is capable of rapidly reducing its fossil fuel dependency while supporting high levels of well-being for the population.” The level of suffering that will be visited on countries around the world if we fail to act, on the other hand – particularly on the poorest and most vulnerable people – will be absolutely enormous.

As Arthur Miller put it, “Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.” The denial has to stop. We must face up to the fact that we are not living in a sane society. Rather, we are in the position of violent addicts, smashing and burning the world to get our fix, without regard for the suffering we cause. Shame on the government – and shame on us for letting the unthinkable happen with such easy, passive quiesence.

There have been some understandably troubled responses on t’internet to George Monbiot’s piece on Iran and Israeli nuclear weapons yesterday. Much has been covered already elsewhere, but here’s a run-down of some major points that undoubtedly need addressing:

1.
“Iran isn’t starting an atomic arms race, it’s joining one” was the tag-line. An extraordinary statement of fact which is simply not supported by empirical evidence, as I’ve noted before. This line is not an invention of the Guardian’s – it is included as an assumption in Monbiot’s last paragraph: “When,” he asks, “will [our governments] admit that Iran is not starting a nuclear arms race, but joining one?” As David Wearing recalls, there is actually some important evidence against this position – the fatwa against the stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons by the man who controls Iranian foreign policy, for example, being one of the most significant. Also important is the clout which the potential for obtaining nuclear weapons gives a state – and the possibility, recalled by Jamie Stern-Weiner recently, that Iran has, in actual fact, “been exaggerating” the extent of its nuclear programme cannot simply be written off.

2.
“Yes,” writes Monbiot, “Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. The president is a Holocaust denier opposed to the existence of Israel.” But it’s not the President who controls Iranian foreign policy – it’s the aforementioned Supreme Leader. Is this not worth pointing out? Isn’t describing the country as being “under” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in fact, a rather serious distortion of the truth? According to the BBC, “The role of Supreme Leader in the constitution is based on the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini, who positioned the leader at the top of Iran’s political power structure.” Here, on that other hand, is what it says about the President:

“The constitution describes him as the second-highest ranking official in the country. He is head of the executive branch of power and is responsible for ensuring the constitution is implemented.

“In practice, however, presidential powers are circumscribed by the clerics and conservatives in Iran's power structure, and by the authority of the Supreme Leader. It is the Supreme Leader, not the president, who controls the armed forces and makes decisions on security, defence and major foreign policy issues.”

What about “a dangerous and unpredictable state”? At the very least, it’s deeply questionable. According to a report by the Royal Institute for International Affairs, published last year,

“Iranian regional foreign policy, which is often portrayed as mischievous and destabilizing, is in fact remarkably pragmatic on the whole and generally aims to avoid major upheaval or confrontation. …

“Even though Iran is frequently depicted as a manipulator and instigator of violence in the broader Middle East, … the Iranian regime is wary of provoking generalized chaos in the region because it is essentially conservative and seeks to maintain the status quo.”

However, “Were Iran to feel seriously threatened by outside forces, it does have the potential to inflame the region yet further.” Iran is “dangerous and unpredictable”, in other words, only to the extent that the West chooses to start poking it with a sharp stick.

3.
At least as important as what Monbiot includes on Iran, though, is what he misses. According to Israel’s defence minister, Iranian nuclear weapons would not pose an existential threat to Israel – a point worth emphasising as often as possible. I hope he’ll be willing to take it up, along with these other points, in his next column.

Ronan Bennett has written an excellent piece for the Guardian on Martin Amis, and our apparent inability or unwillingness to confront his racism. Writes Bennett:

“I can’t help feeling that Amis’s remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines.

“And I can’t help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.”

Shame indeed. But we need to extend our outrage far beyond the lunatic fringe of figures like Amis. A film has just been produced, for instance, on Jack Shaheen’s classic study of the portrayal of Arabs in cinema, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. A great, illuminating excerpt from the film and interview with Shaheen were recently broadcast on Democracy Now!, revealing a frightening normalisation of racist imagery in popular culture. Says Shaheen:

“The humanity is not there. And if we cannot see the Arab humanity, what’s left? If we feel nothing, if we feel that Arabs are not like us or not like anyone else, then let's kill them all. Then they deserve to die, right? Islamophobia now is a part of our psyche. Words such as “Arab” and “Muslim” are perceived as threatening words. And if the words are threatening, what about the images that we see in the cinema and on our television screens?

“… as Goebbels said, if you take the same images and you repeat them over and over again, and the images teach us to hate a people and to hate their religion, what happens is that we, in spite of our intelligence, our innate goodness, actually turn around and let these images despise and vilify an entire people.”

Shaheen’s work trawls through a vast back-catalogue of Hollywood imagery and allusion, finding again and again the same tropes emerging – of Arab barbarism, irrationality and violence, untrustworthiness and decadence. What is most frightening of all is how entirely natural they seem to have become. There can be little doubt that Amis deserves our outrage and condemnation – but we also need to be turning over our own ingrained ideas, our own prejudices, and the institutional support they enjoy in our mass media and popular culture. The Democracy Now! extract provides an excellent example of the kind of de-familiarisation and critical examination that will help do so – I thoroughly recommend it.

As the liberal media continues its headlong plunge into warmongering propaganda (“Decision time for US” prompts Julian Borger, helpfully, writing that the IAEA report “brings closer a moment of truth for the Bush administration” - is life imitating satire?), the best commentary and analysis continues to lie outside the mainstream media.

[U]sing force against Iran is backed by just ... 11 percent in the U.K.
- Harris Interactive poll

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.
- Shelley

1. Event Info

Name: DAY OF ACTION on Iran
Tagline: Join the on campus anti-war activities!
Host: Goldsmiths Stop-The-War

Time and Place

Date: Thursday, November 22, 2007
Time: 12:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: Goldsmiths University - ALL OVER CAMPUS (main entrance/backfield/secret locations)
Street: Dixon Road, Goldsmiths University
City/Town: London, United Kingdom

Contact Info

Phone: 07950193820
Email: jennifer_h_Jones@hotmail.co.uk

(Also on facebook.)

2. A Poster

Made for use by different local groups. Print, adapt, use and circulate. For Londoners, I'm suggesting Parliament Square as a sit-in spot. If it comes to it, let's make it happen.

Is it possible we are being dragged into yet another war founded on lies? Certainly the danger does not seem to have abated. Seymour Hersh’s claim that Brown was “on board” with a US plan to attack Iran – credible enough in itself – has now been independently corroborated by the Telegraph. In public, meanwhile, Brown has refused to rule out involvement in such an attack.

The propaganda war also continues, with some not inconsiderable successes. As former CIA officer Phillip Giraldi observes,

“In the intelligence community, a disinformation operation is a calculated attempt to convince an audience that falsehoods about an adversary are true, either to discredit him or, in an extreme case, to justify military action. When such a campaign is properly conducted, information is leaked to numerous outlets over a period of time, creating the impression of a media consensus that the story is true, as each new report validates earlier ones.

“We’ve been here before: the leaking of unreliable information to New York Times reporter Judith Miller was just one example of disinformation used to make the case for the invasion of Iraq. More recently, Iran has been on the receiving end of what appears to be an officially orchestrated but poorly executed disinformation campaign regarding its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

http://amconmag.com/2007/2007_10_22/article2.html (Thanks to David Wearing for the link.)

And US public opinion appears to have bought it: though opposition to war seems to be fairly solid, 77% believe Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons; 82% that it is funding Iraqi insurgents.

In the real world, the laughable case for war gets even thinner. The Israeli Foreign Minister has privately admitted that Iranian nukes would pose no threat to Israel. There is still no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, according to the IAEA. Yet the mainstream media continues its descent into la-la land, including commentators in the liberal press. Writes Max Hastings in the Guardian, “It is unlikely that anyone in the chancelleries of Europe supposes that sanctions will cause the Iranians to stop building their bomb.” According to the leader-writers of the same paper, “letting Iran pursue its nuclear ambitions would be no less cataclysmic” than a US attack; for “the arrival of the Iranian bomb would set off an arms race among the Sunni states in the Gulf unparalleled in the history of nuclear proliferation.” The fact that the Iranians are “building their bomb”; that “the arrival of the Iranian bomb” is their ultimate “nuclear ambition”, requires no substantiation: it can simply be assumed, apparently.

So how is it, one wonders, that the liberal press can continue to promulgate the very same mythology on which the pro-war right feed, even after their cataclysmic failure in the build-up to the Iraq war? When can we expect to hear a genuine declaration of independence from the official line from these people?

Don’t hold your breath. But don’t wring your hands, either. Instead, why not share your thoughts with them. This man is the editor of the Guardian. This woman is the “readers’ editor”. I am sure they would both love to hear from you.