Mick Hartley

The space you are about to enter is an artwork: please do not touch anything

I was persuaded, against my better judgement, to go to the Hayward Gallery's 40th anniversary show,  "Psycho Buildings". The clincher was the prospect of boating on the roof, with a view of the London skyline. So we turned up, to be informed that the boating was off:

We very much regret that we need to carry out essential maintenance work on Gelatin's Normally, Proceeding and Unrestricted With Without Title, 2008 (the boating lake).

Well, what are you going to do? We went in anyway (no reduction, mind). And, though it may be true that I wasn't well disposed by now, what a poor exhibition I thought it was.

The sub-title gives the game away: "artists take on architecture":

Psycho Buildings brings together the work of artists who creat habitat-like sculptures and architecturally inflected installations. These include structures that are designed to be explored psychologically, as well as environments that we can engage with physically.

So, nothing to do with architecture, but a lot to do with artists being self-indulgent.

By turns visceral, pungent, meditative, absurd, threatening, atmospheric, the art works in Psycho Buildings probe the ways in which built structures shape our imaginative and physical lives.

Installations: a word to send fear into the heart of all exhibition visitors. What it means is that each room is given over to an artist to create some kind of environment: an adventure playground for adults. The first gallery, for instance:

Ernesto Neto's walk-in environments are 'life experiences', to be entered and explored in what he describes as a 'mind-body continuity'. Evoking anatomy and the body's internal architecture, Life fog frog...Fog frog also has the effect of making space palpable.

The work summons up a range of opposites; macrocosm and microcosm, airiness and weight, the nebulous and the clearly defined. It also draws our attention to the relationship between the figure and its background, and between inside and outside. Within the tent-like body our experience can be intimate, sensual and personal. Seen from outside or above ..., the encounter is more detached: people moving inside the dome become phantoms; remote figures performing in a shadow theatre.

Speaking of the fragile fabric membranes from which his works are constructed, Neto says: 'I believe that we as human beings are subjected to certain corporeal and temporal boundaries, and that the skin serves as a container in a culturally and physically determined world'. He adds, 'This is where happiness lies, the region of occurrences where the relationship between human individuality and the world unfolds - physically, psychologically, and mentally.' About our interaction with the work, he notes, 'movement and the experience of scents are important, but so is contemplation: just looking and breathing'.

This is either fatuously obvious - "we as human beings are subjected to certain corporeal and temporal boundaries" - or almost entirely devoid of meaning. The actual work is a tent made of two layers of netting over a skeletal wooden frame, with some bags hanging down inside. One bag contained cloves, so everyone had a good old sniff: "the experience of scents are important, but so is contemplation: just looking and breathing". Oh fuck off. It's that combination of hectoringly condescending art-speak with the total banality of the work on display which just gets me every time. How do they have the nerve? Mind-body continuity? Making space palpable? What? It's a fucking tent with a bag of cloves hanging down inside. Can I have my money back please?

Next up was Michael Beutler's untitled piece, consisting of walkways through coloured paper. Really. My mood didn't improve.

Michael Beutler's sculptures are interventions within specific places, in which they interact physically and visually with their surroundings. Starting with the gallery space itself, he works in a spontaneous way, loosely responding to the architecture.

Again, this says nothing. He could have laid a turd in the centre of the room and it would be an intervention within a specific place, interacting physically and visually with its surroundings. It would have also that added olfactory dimension (the experience of scents are important, remember) as well as being a suitably spontaneous and indeed appropriate way of loosely responding to the environment. What it is, we're presented with a series of semi-transparent walls covered in coloured paper which we wander through for all the world like some primary school presentation, or perhaps what some indulgent parents might have knocked up for their little girl's 8th birthday party, for the guests to walk through and spot the balloons or whatever. Again that question, how can they get away with this? And charge for it? The catalogue vainly attempts to cover up the total vacuity of the actual work:

Constructed at great speed from florist's tissue paper bonded onto mesh panels, the panels - which incorporate all sorts of accidental litter and sweepings from the 'factory' floor - are then shaped and distressed by being jumped upon. The tears and holes that inevitably result give the material its particular characteristics. It is yet to be seen how these panels will materialise into particular forms, but what is certain is that the final result will be a playful environment that exerts an influence on the way in which we perceive and negotiate this space.

The work hadn't been finished when the catalogue was written: not that it stopped them writing about it. What should have happened, but I'm quite sure didn't, was that on completion the curators wandered through the installation and told Michael Beutler that his piece was a complete pile of shite, and they were withholding payment. But being an artist means never having to say you're sorry.

It gets better, but not much. There's an exploding kitchen, with cinder blocks and bits of furniture caught in mid flight. As the artists (Los Carpenteros!) explain:

[W]e are interested in the fact that violence exists and that we have to deal with it, as with just another part of your everyday life, like going to the kitchen.

Eh? Well anyway, nice idea guys, but it's been done already.

Rachel Whiteread has a darkened room full of dolls houses, with little lights inside:

No two houses in this carefully arranged diorama are exactly alike. What they have in common is their unexplained emptiness, and their collective abandonment.

Unexplained emptiness? They're dolls houses, for Christ's sake. It would have been considerably more disconcerting if they hadn't been empty and abandoned. Loads of tiny little people sitting in their tiny little rooms wondering where the hell Rachel Whiteread's got to....

Upstairs there's a gallery given over to Doh Ho Suh's Staircase - V, a red gauze strip across the room with a red gauze, um, staircase. Yep, that's it, in its entirety, in the picture there. Talk about subverting one's understanding of architectural space!

Then there's Mike Nelson's To the Memory of H.P.Lovecraft, which has the gallery ripped apart as though by some unnameable beast:

In experiencing the aftermath of some hideous unexplained adventure, Nelson would like us to slip into a 'meditative state where the act of movement and viewing absorb to the point where the visitor is reading the work subconsciously or storing the information to be re-read later, maybe within a context that makes sense of the information at some time in the future.'

Well, the meditative state eluded me. Nice idea, but it should have stayed an idea. Once again the weakness of the art is obscured by the artist's lengthy and impenetrably abstruse explanation, and any failure to be duly transported by what's on offer is blamed on us poor suckers who fail to respond in the requisite manner. If I'd come across this in a random building I happened to be visiting, I might well have had a sense of impending and nameless terror....but in an art gallery?

There's a little cinema showing short films. As we entered, it was showing pictures of huge steel girders being dropped into wet concrete. The shluyrrpp sound was very pleasing; the high point of the exhibition for me. Well, in todays' art world you take your pleasures where you can find them. But it did nothing to dispel the feeling of kids being let loose in the playground.

Which was reinforced by the final exhibit, Tomas Saraceno's Observatory, Air-Port-City. It's a plastic sphere with a transparent floor two-thirds of the way up. You take your shoes off and go inside the bottom of the dome, while others queue to climb some stairs and clamber out, two or three at a time, onto the plastic floor above, where they flounder around and lie face down making faces and waving at their partners sitting below with cameras ready. It's play time: the men go up and release their inner little boys, and the women sit down below and do what women always do - smile indulgently at the show-off antics of their husband or children.

Asked about the utopian nature of his project, Saraceno remarks: 'Utopia exists until it is created. A hundred years ago was it not considered to be a utopian thought that people could travel by aeroplane? Now, five hundred million people fly every year... The idea of utopia is in constant mutation and changes according to the era. My work tries to explore and interpret the present reality, using technological innovations for new social objectives.'

So utopia is people floundering around on plastic sheets? Well I don't know, maybe it is. After an hour and a half of this, I didn't really care any more. Personally I prefer art for grown-ups.

Here's a slide show of images from The Guardian (from which I've taken the pictures shown here). Plus a couple of reviews, from The Times and the Telegraph; both mystifyingly positive - to balance out my possibly jaundiced view.

In Memory of Ben Kinsella

Stabbed to death at 16. At the top of North Road, on York Way:

The Chorley Councillor

From The Times:

A female Muslim councillor has been subjected to a hate campaign by Muslim men in her ward, leaving her unable to visit some of the streets that she represents.

Hasina Khan, 38, the only Muslim councillor in Chorley, Lancashire, said that she had suffered a barrage of threatening phone calls, verbal abuse and insulting graffiti because the men objected her public role.

Mrs Khan, a mother of three, said: “I've had to totally change the way I go about my job. I used to do ward walks all the time, but now there are some streets I can't even walk down.”

The local imam was helpful:

Dukandar Idris, the imam of Chorley's Dawat ul Islam mosque, said that Mrs Khan should have taken her grievances to the mosque's elders, rather than speaking out.

They'd have been deeply concerned, of course. 

He said that, as imam, he could not forbid Muslim women from standing for election, but he would be entitled to forbid his wife.

Corrupt on the Earth

It may be about to get even worse for Iranian bloggers:

Iran's parliament is set to debate a draft bill which could see the death penalty used for those deemed to promote corruption, prostitution and apostasy on the Internet, reports said on Wednesday.

MPs on Wednesday voted to discuss as a priority the draft bill which seeks to "toughen punishment for harming mental security in society," the ISNA news agency said.

The text lists a wide range of crimes such rape and armed robbery for which the death penalty is already applicable. The crime of apostasy (the act of leaving a religion, in this case Islam) is also already punishable by death.

However, the draft bill also includes "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy", which is a new addition to crimes punishable by death.

Those convicted of these crimes "should be punished as "mohareb' (enemy of God) and "corrupt on the earth'," the text says.

Under Iranian law the standard punishments for these two crimes are "hanging, amputation of the right hand and then the left foot as well as exile."

In that order?

The bill -- which is yet to be debated by lawmakers -- also stipulates that the punishment handed out in these cases "cannot be commuted, suspended or changed".

The Secret of Armageddon

An Iranian TV documentary series looks at the Protocols, the role of the British in the Great Zionist conspiracy, and....well, you get the idea.

Iranian university lecturer Ali-Reza Karimi: What is known worldwide today as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion contains the plans and policies of the elders of this sect to conquer the world and establish a global Jewish government, which were discussed at the 1897 [Zionist] Congress in Basel, Switzerland.

Narrator: These plans, which exposed the views and designs of the Zionists, were edited and collected into 24 protocols. They deal with political, educational, social, economic, and legal strategies, which they planned to use after the destruction of the culture, civilization, and religions of other nations. These strategies will be carried out using dishonorable means and conspiracies, leading to the establishment of a global Jewish kingdom.  [...]

Iranian researcher Shams Al-Din Rahmani: The goal of the Zionists is the total destruction of Islam. They know that this destruction will not be achieved easily, and therefore, they are trying to Americanize the religion of Islam.  [...]

According to historical documents, it was the Rothschilds who instilled the idea of Palestine as the Promised Land in the minds of the wealthy and enlightened Jews, and insisted on making it happen. At the time, most of the Jews did not have a specific country in mind, and some even considered America or South Africa to be the Promised Land. It was due to the economic and political power of the Rothschilds that this plot was realized. [...]

The British government, which was controlled by the Zionist empire, led by the Rothschild family, committed itself to the realization of the Zionist aspiration.  [...]

Narrator: If we take another look at modern history, we realize that with the Balfour Declaration from November 2, 1917, England officially began to serve the World Zionist Organization's policies. Thus, the implementation of some of the main clauses of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became the agenda of some British politicians, who were connected to the Zionist societies.  [...]

Iranian researcher Shams Al-Din Rahmani: Oliver Cromwell, the dictatorial prime minister of England, placed England entirely at the service of the Jews in the 17th century. This [policy] became so deeply engrained that by the early 18th century, the Jews had a colonialist empire, which reached as far an India. They launched the slave trade, which is a Jewish trade par excellence. Most of the slaves back then were black Muslims from Africa. This was part of their evil plan to eradicate Islam in Africa. This plan was guided entirely by the Jews.  [...]

Iranian historian Mohammad-Taqi Taqipour: As soon as news about the Balfour Declaration reached the leaders of the Iranian Jews, they held conferences and established the Iranian Zionist Organization, also known as the Central Committee of the Zionist Organizations in Iran.  [...]

The Zionists and their organizations in Iran devised a plan, which was signed in 1931 by Rabbi Azizullah Naim, chairman of the Iranian Zionist Organization. This plan included eight clauses. In brief, according to this plan, Reza Shah's regime must permit Jews from all over the world to enter Iran and settle wherever they wish, in accordance with the plan that they themselves devised. In addition, these Jewish immigrants would be granted liberties by law, and no one could deny them these liberties. There would be equality between Jews and non-Jews in Iran – most of whom are Muslims. Fertile lands throughout Iran would be allocated to these Jewish immigrants free of charge. After two years, they would be granted citizenship, and a visa from the government also free of charge.

Iranian University Lecturer Ali-Reza Karimi: They planned to take over large parts of Iran, and to establish concealed camps, which would be populated by Jews from around the world, and especially Europe. This way, they wanted to gradually take over Iran, like they did in Palestine.  [...]

Narrator: Is it possible that according to the schemes of the global Zionist empire, Iran was meant to become another Israel, like in the case of Palestine?  [...]

Iranian researcher Shams Al-Din Rahmani: The sole reason the Reza Shah and the Pahlavi dynasty were brought to power was to enable the Jews and the Freemasons to take control of Iran. Reza Shah was brought to power during World War I, and was deposed during World War II. Movies, TV series, and so on about that period demonstrate how deeply Israel, the Jews, and the Freemasons managed to penetrate Iran.  [...]

Abbas Salimi Namin, head of an Iranian history research center: In the days of Reza Shah, the Zionists succeeded in destroying our entire heritage, which could have been a source of pride for our nation – our architecture, our [traditional] clothing, and anything you could imagine as a source of pride for our nation.  [...]

Iranian university lecturer Ali-Reza Karimi: Historical documents point to a connection between the leaders of the Bahai sect and the Rothschild family, who financed and led the World Zionist Organization.  [...]

The Bahai way of thinking is very similar to that of the Zionist Jews. Just like the Zionists considered Palestine to be their promised land, the Bahais talked about Iran as the promised land. Out of their desire to take over the land and to destroy Islam and the Shia in Iran, they had many dreams and wrote many history books, but with the grace of Allah, none of those dreams have come true.  [...]

Narrator: A shocking SAVAK document, dated April 22, 1971, is just one example of the anti-Islamic and anti-Iranian conspiracies of this Zionist [Bahai] cult. This document quotes one of their leaders in Iran as saying: "We have received explicit instructions from America and London to spread [Western] fashion and immodesty in this country, so Muslim [women] will remove their veil. We will bring suffering upon the Muslims in Iran and other Muslim countries by means of fashion and advertisements, so they will no longer be able to claim that that imam Hussein was the conqueror of the world, and that Ali ruled the world. Weapons and ammunition are manufactured in Israel by our youth. Ultimately, these Muslims will be destroyed by the Bahais, and the world of Bahaullah will flourish."  [...]

Iranian researcher Sayyid Hashem Mir-Louhi: There is a genocidal Zionist Jewish plan for the genocide of humanity at the hand of the Zionist Jew-boys. Even though the Jew-boys sometimes talk about a "Greater Israel," their real goal is world domination.  [...]

Narrator: Today, there are many indications that the "hidden hands" of world Zionism were involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack. According to a large group of Western intellectuals, the Zionists are the real rulers of the United States. According to irrefutable documents published by independent American media outlets, the Zionists used intelligence agents and spies, with the full cooperation of agencies with the country, to carry out this terrorist operation in full view of the world, in order to prepare the ground for taking over Afghanistan and Iraq, and to realize the dream of a greater Israel.

Commiserations for Their Suffering

Zimbabwe - an African problem, to be solved by Africans:

A defiant Robert Mugabe has sailed unchallenged through the first test of his presidency by his peers.

Freshly sworn in after a single candidate election, he received a leader’s welcome when he strode into the African Union summit in Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday and emerged unfazed, his authority intact.

He dined at a lavish luncheon given by his Egyptian hosts, hugged heads of state and other diplomats in the corridors and stayed at the Peninsula Hotel, one of the most luxurious in this Red Sea town. “Mr Mugabe is staying there as a courtesy by the Egyptian Government,” a hotel spokesman said...

The African Union’s public response to Mr Mugabe’s seizure of power was seen as a key measure of the organisation’s commitment to democracy after Zimbabwe’s violent run-off elections. However, protest from African leaders at the summit was muted, even as Western leaders from France, the United States and Canada joined Britain in ratcheting up pressure on the organisation to reject Mr Mugabe’s authority.  [...]

African leaders sidestepped any criticism of tainted elections. President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania said: “We would like to congratulate the Zimbabwean people for their successes but we would also like to express our commiserations for their suffering.”

Wicked!

From The Times:

Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.

One pupil who wrote “f*** off” was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.

And what does the marker responsible, chief examiner Peter Buckroyd, have to say for himself? He told The Times, "It would be wicked to give it zero". Yeah! Obviously he was tempted, then. Oh, hold on...

It would be wicked to give it zero, because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for – like conveying some meaning and some spelling.

Is wicked really the word he wants here? Shouldn't it be sensible maybe, or inevitable? But then he is chief examiner of English for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance.

The choice phrase, given in answer to the question “Describe the room you’re sitting in”, on a 2006 GCSE paper, was not punctuated. “If it had had an exclamation mark it would have got a little bit more because it would have been showing a little bit of skill,” Mr Buckroyd said, “We are trying to give higher marks to the students who show more skills.”

Ryan Rhymes with Zion

They've deconstructed Chicken Run; now the Iranian TV series on Zionist themes in Western movies gets to grips with Private Ryan:

Dr. Majid Shah-Hosseini, an Iranian film critic: [In "The Matrix"], Zion symbolizes the utopian Jewish Zionist land. These are the roots of Zionism. How come in such a popular and seemingly fictional American film, the utopia of liberty and humanity, which heralds the era of modernity – in the technical, rather than theoretical sense – is symbolized by a Zionist name – "Zion"? Moreover, names may be selected for their rhyming value. "Zion" sometimes becomes "Ryan," as in "Saving Private Ryan." They exploit even the similarity of names. The Jewish Steven Spielberg, whose previous film, "Schindler's List," reflected Zionist goals, and who turned the false story of the holocaust into an influential movie, is now making a new movie, about Private Ryan. [...]

Murtaza Ali-Abbas Mirzai, an Iranian documentary filmmaker: In "Saving Private Ryan," one sees that they are the ultimate plunderers. The scene in which the officer puts some earth from various countries into cans was just a preview of what they are doing now – taking the land of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the European countries. [...]

Narrator: While the blacks and other minorities protest the fact that Hollywood ignores their role in American history, but to no avail, prominent films like "Saving Private Ryan" highlight the role of Jewish soldiers. By exaggerating this role, the Zionists seem to be trying to achieve legitimacy for their post-war actions. In the military cemetery shown in the opening scene of the film, the picture has been edited to draw attention to the Jewish graves among others. [...]

Among the more unpleasant scenes of the film are the scenes in which a Jewish soldier directs his rage towards German POWs. When he sees some German soldiers wearing jewelry with symbols of his religion, this soldier has a fit of rage and attacks them. In these scenes, the film director presents a completely sympathetic view of this soldier's rage towards the helpless POWs. It seems as if this cry of rage is the cry of Zionism validating the crimes perpetrated by Zionism after the world war.

This would be a delicious skit on intellectuals and film critics, if it wasn't for real.

Underestimating Religion

The leader of Barnet Council speaks out on religion (via b&w):

Religious leaders on official business in part of north London will be able to park for free using special permits.

The scheme, introduced by Barnet Council, will allow holders who have bought the passes to park in residents' parking bays.

The scheme is open to applicants of all faiths including Baha'i, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism and Rastafarianism.

Applications from worshippers on faith business will also be considered.

It will cost £40 a year for the first permit and £70 for the second or third.

Mike Freer, leader of the council, said: "The importance of religion to many Barnet residents cannot be underestimated and the council has acknowledged this with a policy that will assist spiritual leaders when engaging with people in times of illness or crisis."

"Cannot be underestimated"? I'd like to think he meant what he said, but somehow I doubt it.

Making Decisions

Here's an article on an experiment purporting to show that we - our brains - make decisions before we're consciously aware of them, thus casting doubt on the notion of free will. Yes, again:

"We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."

Through a series of intriguing experiments, scientists in Germany, Norway and the U.S. have analyzed the distinctive cerebral activity that foreshadows our choices. They have tracked telltale waves of change through the cells that orchestrate our memory, language, reason and self-awareness...

To probe what happens in the brain during the moments before people sense they've reached a decision, Dr. Haynes and his colleagues devised a deceptively simple experiment, reported in April in Nature Neuroscience. They monitored the swift neural currents coursing through the brains of student volunteers as they decided, at their own pace and at random, whether to push a button with their left or right hands.

In all, they tested seven men and seven women from 21 to 30 years old. They recorded neural changes associated with thoughts using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and analyzed the results with an experimental pattern-recognition computer program.

While inside the brain scanner, the students watched random letters stream across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge, they pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button.

Studying the brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision, the researchers identified signals that let them know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.

I find this very unconvincing. 10 seconds? That kind of gap suggests that there's a problem with the way they're measuring the moment when the decision became conscious. Which of course is always going to be a problem, because it's not a black-and-white situation, and it may not be a "moment". But 10 seconds is surely way too long to be plausible, and suggests that the whole experiment's flawed.

Benjamin Libet was the man who pioneered this avenue of research, though the gaps he was reporting were of the order of half a second. I've posted about this before, here, and here. I don't think any of this shows that we don't have free will, though it may show that we're not always conscious of our decisions. Even if the psychologists are right, and you can measure neurological signs of the decision prior to the awareness, it's still our decision. We're not just a spark of Cartesian awareness in a great mass of neurons. The neurons are us. Whatever part of me can be measured as showing a correlation with a decision, well, it's still me making that decision, whether it's neurons in my frontal lobe or a twitching tendon in my foot.

The way they describe this research is bizarre:

Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for some choices we make are understood only by our cells.

What a horribly confused sentence. As though it's our cells which understand: get the relevant input, weigh the pros and cons, make the decision and then, some 10 seconds or so later, tell us, which is to say that little flicker of awareness stuck in the pineal gland or wherever.

It's as though experimenters were to find neurological activity in the visual pathways before any sight of the object being looked at was reported by the subject, and concluded that it's a myth that we see things: things are seen not by us but by the cells in our visual cortex.

Or, as Louis Jordan might have said, "Ain't nobody here but us neurons".

An Inevitable War

Here's historian Arthur Herman, reminding us what we all knew pre-2003, but seem to have forgotten since (via Solomonia):

According to an April 2008 poll in U.S. News & World Report, fully 61 percent of American historians agree that George W. Bush is the worst President in our history. Some of these scholars cite the President’s position on the environment, or on taxes, or on the economy. For most, though, the chief qualification for obloquy lies in Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

In this, of course, the historians are hardly alone: five years after the launching of Operation Iraqi Freedom, both the mainstream media and America’s political elites treat the Iraq war as a disaster virtually without precedent in our national experience. But while politicians and journalists are not necessarily expected to be adepts of the long view, for professional historians the long view is a defining necessity. As the English historian F.W. Maitland wrote more than a century ago, “It is very hard to remember that events that are long in the past were once in the future.” Hard it may be, but the job of historians is not only to remember it but to judge events accordingly.

In this light—that is, in light of what was actually known at the time about Saddam Hussein’s actions and intentions, and in light of what was added to our knowledge through his post-capture interrogations by the FBI—the decision to go to war takes on a very different character. The story that emerges is of a choice not only carefully weighed and deliberately arrived at but, in the circumstances, the one moral choice that any American President could make.

Had, moreover, Bush failed to act when he did, the consequences could have been truly disastrous. The next American President would surely have faced the need, in decidedly less favorable circumstances, to pick up the challenge Bush had neglected. And since Bush’s unwillingness to do the necessary thing might rightly have cost him his second term, that next President would probably have been one of the many Democrats who, until March 2003, actually saw the same threat George Bush did.

Worth reading in full.

96 Tears

The year's 1965, and here's legendary Latino beat combo Question Mark & The Mysterians:

Well, why not?

Sunny Tottenham

The River Lea at Hastingwood Industrial Estate, Edmonton:

Smart Goal

It's a pity that wasn't a Turk against Jens Lehmann last night.

(Via)

The Key to Reconciliation

After David Cesarani's article at CiF on the expulsion of the Jews from Arabic lands, where he expressed the view that it would be "quite obnoxious" to claim a quid pro quo with the plight of the Palestinians, here's Lyn Julius, arguing the case for exactly that:

The exodus began 60 years ago when Arab states, hell-bent on crushing the new state of Israel militarily, also turned on their peaceful Jewish communities. Street violence killed over 150 Jews. Within 10 years, more than half the Jews had fled or been expelled, following discriminatory legislation , extortion, arrests, internment and executions. Those who remained became subjugated, political hostages of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Today 99.5% - all but 4,500 - have gone. As the historian Nathan Weinstock has observed, not even the Jews of 1939 Germany had been so thoroughly "ethnically cleansed".

The displacement of Jews from Arab countries was not just a backlash to the creation of Israel and the Arabs' humiliating defeat. The "push" factors were already in place. Arab League states drafted a law in November 1947 branding their Jews as enemy aliens. But non-Muslim minorities, historically despised as dhimmis with few rights, were already being oppressed by Nazi-inspired pan-Arabism and Islamism. These factors sparked the conflict with Zionism, and drive it to this day.

The Jewish "Nakba" - Arabic for "catastrophe" – not only emptied cities like Baghdad (a third Jewish); it tore apart the cultural, social and economic fabric in Arab lands. Jews lost homes, synagogues, hospitals, schools, shrines and deeded land five times the size of Israel. Their ancient heritage - predating Islam by 1,000 years – was destroyed.

The Jewish state, which struggled to take in 600,000, many of them stateless, is both a response to Arab antisemitism, and the legitimate political expression of an indigenous Middle Eastern people. Half Israel's Jewish population is descended from refugees from Arab and Muslim lands.

Arab governments have never admitted committing mass violations of Jewish human and civil rights, much less apologised or offered restitution. Over 120 UN resolutions deal with the 711,000 Palestinian refugees; not one refers to the greater number of Jewish refugees. Although peace initiatives have been worded to refer generically to the "refugee problem", Jewish and Arab, Israel has been reluctant to politicise the Jewish refugee issue, having successfully integrated them as full citizens: Arab denial has thus conspired with Israeli silence to airbrush Jewish refugees out of the picture, leading to obfuscation, distortion and decontextualisation.

This April, JJAC [Justice for Jews from Arab Countries] scored a major success, however, when the US House of Representatives adopted its first resolution on Jewish refugees; future resolutions mentioning Palestinian refugees must refer explicitly to Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

The resolution is about recognition, not restitution, although Jewish losses have been quantified at twice Palestinian losses. Such resolutions could lead to a peace settlement by recognising that there were victims on both sides. Thus justice for Jews is not just a moral imperative, but the key to reconciliation.

Moreover, a major hurdle to peace could be removed if the Palestinian "right of return" were counterbalanced by the Jewish right not to return to Arab tyrannies, recognising a de facto population exchange of roughly equal numbers.

"Half Israel's Jewish population is descended from refugees from Arab and Muslim lands." Not, I would imagine, a statistic that's very well known.