« July 2006 | Main | September 2006 »
... but Orange's community affairs manager isn't.
Inigo Wilson describes people who are Islamophobic as:
"anyone who objects to having their transport blown up on the way to work"
Feedback regarding Orange's Community Affairs programme can be made here.
Hat tip to Al in the comments.
UPDATE: Al reports that Orange have now suspended Wilson while an investigation takes place.
Translation:
To the Lebanese citzens residing south of the Litani River
Read this document with full comprehension and do as it orders.
The IDF will escalate its activities and will hit with the most excessive force terrorist elements that uses you as human shields and fires rockets/missiles from inside your houses in the direction of the state of Israel.
Every car including any type that moves south of the Litani river will be bombed because it is suspected in transporting rockets/missiles and military and ruining equipment.
It is your duty to do so as every person in any car is placing their life in danger.
State of Israel
Via Angry Arab, hat tip
I've been informed that Israel's 5-8th place semi-final has gone ahead today. This time it's not just behind closed doors, but at RAF Lossiemouth.
So yet again, our military bases are being used to help Israel.
The point cannot be lost though, that extreme lengths had to be gone to in order to accomodate Israel. By way of illustration, click on the map below for how far they had to travel in order to play because of the protests. It's in Scotland, but only just.
For background go here and here
William Rees-Mogg comments on the recent claims by Irwin Stelzer, Rupert Murdoch's go-between with Downing Street and the White House, that Jack Straw was removed as Foreign Secretary after Condoleezza Rice was alarmed at the amount of Muslims in his Blackburn constituency during her touchy feely visit there a month before he got the boot.
This presents the country's Muslims with a great opportunity. Surely it is now a religious duty to move to Sedgefield? In fact, this calls for a mobile tactical team of thousands to be assembled, threatening ministers that unless they toe the line, they will move into their constituency.
Jon Snow, considered one of the more thinking broadcasters, has said that Muslims are not integrating in a Sunday Times article.
His evidence is that we are practising our religion more:
We were attempting to delve behind the results of the most comprehensive survey to date of Muslim opinion in Britain. Conducted by NOP for Channel 4’s Dispatches, one of its most startling results suggested that Muslim integration into British society has effectively come to a halt.
Immigrants have usually tended to become more secular and less religious than their parents by the second generation. But the survey shows Muslims have gone in precisely the opposite direction.
Israeli cricketers were forced to play behind closed doors in Glasgow yesterday. It's a further success in the Scottish actions to show that Israel is not just another respectable member of the family of nations.
A delegation including former Glasgow Lord Provost Alex Mosson met with the Norwegian team before the match in an attempt to have them refuse to play. They had a choice between joining a fine tradition of sporting boycotters, or to be like Gooch and Gatting who toured racist South Africa. They sadly chose the latter.
Pro-Israelis have tried to paint the events of this week as Scotland bowing to Muslim pressure. The truth is that they are groping for things to say after being comprehensively rejected by Scots up and down the country.
Nor is the issue of boycotting Israel something unique that we are asking for. In 1980, the US boycotted in the Moscow Olympics in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 2006, Israel has launched a war of aggression on Lebanon.
The Garnethill Synagogue in Glasgow had the word "Hizbollah" daubed in paint on the pavement outside it on Monday.
Whoever did this should keep religion out of this issue. One of the biggest myths out there is that it's about irreconcilable differences in faith. Sure, one side of the Middle Eastern situation is Jewish and the other Muslim and Christian, but this is really about land and politics. Whatever religion the two sides happened to be, or if they had none, there would still be dispute based on injustice.
As a Muslim, given our experience over the last few years, I can sympathise with what happened. Idiots have targeted not just mosques after 9/11 and 7/7, but our women have been attacked and our young people bullied.
That is even after we condemned the bombing atrocities loudly and clearly. The synagogue attack was wrong, I hope we see no repeat, but I would have more sympathy if the Jewish leaders representing it also condemned the civilian deaths in Lebanon. Instead, we get justification for it, and defence of the US and Israel flights landing at Prestwick:
Melanie Reid has hit out at Fergal Keane's reporting for the BBC in Lebanon yesterday, in an extraordinarily heartless article in the Herald:
There was one particularly ghastly example of Keane as emoter-in-chief last week, when he followed the plight of a Lebanese family wrenched apart while fleeing their country by sea. In the turmoil of embarking, the family were separated: the mother got on a ship for Cyprus; her children did not. We were subject to offensive, lingering camera work of the two crying little boys, as close as I have seen the BBC go to the pornography of grief. Moreover, the report failed to make clear that the boys were all the time in the company of their father. It reminded me, strikingly, of one of those manipulative, tear-jerking clips shown on Red Nose Day: the ones designed to make people reach for their credit cards.
Even the most ardent supporters of Israel manage to pause, no matter how insincerely, to acknowledge the suffering in Lebanon. Reid herself described tales of woe in the most vivid manner, but airily dismissed it all as an inconvenience and blot on her television screen.
Without the coverage of Keane and others, the news agenda would surely have moved on elsewhere by now. Because of it, at least there is some international talk of a ceasefire.
I also happen to think what we've seen from Beirut, Tyre and Qana, is exactly what has happened in Kabul, Kandahar, Baghdad, Fallujah and countless other towns and villages in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last few years. It's just that now reporters aren't embedded with US and UK troops - they're off the leash and telling people what the horror of war is. Hopefully it will go some way to stopping it.
Much has been made today of Tony Blair's apparent nod to soft power in his World Affairs Council speech in LA:
This is not just about security or military tactics. It is about hearts and minds about inspiring people, persuading them, showing them what our values at their best stand for.
But persuade them of what? Immediately preceeding this oft-quoted statement, he gave his analysis of the Lebanon situation:
I, and any halfway sentient human being, regards the loss of civilian life in Lebanon as unacceptable, grieves for that nation, is sickened by its plight and wants the war to stop now. But just for a moment, put yourself in Israel's place. It has a crisis in Gaza, sparked by the kidnap of a solider by Hamas. Suddenly, without warning, Hizbollah who have been continuing to operate in Southern Lebanon for two years in defiance of UN Resolution 1559, cross the UN blue line, kill eight Israeli soldiers and kidnap two more. They then fire rockets indiscriminately at the civilian population in Northern Israel.
It is a hectic period for campaigners for justice and peace in the Middle East.
For one, we've had this issue of US bombs for Israel to all-the-better-to-kill-the-Lebanese-with, flying via Prestwick Airport. Things were set to get worse with more flights, and visits from the Israel Air Force itself (click on picture above from Sunday Express). Protests were held and outrage abounded amongst opposition parties and the media.
The point was quite rightly made that Ireland had refused these flights, so why were they now coming to Scotland? Fearing the nationalist reaction, Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander apparently intervened, and now Margaret Beckett, who launched a fake protest about the issue last week, has them going to military airports in England.
We've not heard the last of it in Scotland though. Aamer Anwar is launching a court case against the guilty parties. I'll be speaking at the press conference tomorrow.
But for now, over to you England. Will you do the same as Scotland and Ireland and drive this outrage from your country?
It needs to be noted that the government has said that these bomb flights will not now be using civilian airports - just military ones. This is significant. With the UK's military resources at the disposal of Israel, does this mean that the UK is effectively also at war with Lebanon?
The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has meanwhile managed to get the Edinburgh International Film Festival to return sponsorship money from the Israeli embassy. They threatened to picket all their events unless the money was returned.
Amongst all this, we also have the visit of the Israeli cricket team to Glasgow this week for a tournament. The European Cricket Council has refused to cancel the match, and it looks all set for mass protests this Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
Following meetings, the police earlier today decided to relocate the match to another venue in Glasgow which could hold more people. However at 9pm tonight we've been told again that the venue has changed. Except no decision will be taken to where that will be till the morning.
Intriguing. I shall keep you posted.
UDPATE 02/08/06: Victory! Tomorrow's Israel cricket match has been cancelled. The police say they could not find a venue large enough to hold the protest.
However, they're saying the matches on Saturday and Sunday are still on. I'm having difficulty in seeing how they're going to build an even bigger venue by then. We shall see.
UPDATE: 04/08/06: Make sure you're at the cricket matches this weekend. More info
Israel justifies its killing of Lebanese civilians by saying that Hezbollah fire their rockets deliberately in built up areas so to ensure Israel causes casualties amongst their own people. A Mitch Prothero article at Salon.com (ht) article gives the lie to that one. Why would they do that when there are so many spies and collaborators there?
Israel claims it's justified in bombing civilians because Hezbollah mingles with them. In fact, the militant group doesn't trust its civilians and stays as far away from them as possible.
Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.
But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.
Continue reading "The "hiding among civilians" myth (updated)" »
