Mick Hartley

Standing up for our values

The reaction of the Foreign Office to Asia Bibi - urging the Home Office not to grant her political asylum in the UK out of fear for the safety of UK consular staff - was something of a disgrace, if not unexpected. So this is welcome news:

Three British imams have joined calls for the UK to offer asylum to Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian woman recently acquitted of blasphemy.

It comes after former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, and other politicians, urged the government to help her.

Prominent British Muslims, including three imams - Qari Asim, Mamadou Bocoum and Dr Usama Hasan - have written a letter to Home Secretary Sajid Javid asking him "to make a clear and proactive statement that Britain would welcome a request for sanctuary here".

The letter, also signed by MPs from across the political divide, goes on: "We are confident that action to ensure Asia Bibi and her family are safe would be very widely welcomed by most people in Britain, across every faith in our society.

"If there are intolerant fringe voices who would object, they must be robustly challenged, not indulged."

The head of government agency the Commission for Countering Extremism also said granting Ms Bibi asylum was "right thing to do".

Sara Khan said: "This is an opportunity to send a clear message to extremists that our country will stand up for our values."  [...]

Boris Johnson was reported in the Daily Mail as saying "we cannot allow the threat of violence to deter us from doing the right thing."

In a letter to the home secretary, he went on: "I do not think it is a dignified position for the UK, given our historic links with Pakistan and the extent of our influence there, to look to others to do what we are allegedly nervous to do ourselves."

Agreeing with Boris Johnson? It can happen.

Lea houseboats

By Stonebridge Lock, Tottenham Marshes:

China crackdown

Given the extraordinarily brutal and comprehensive crackdown by the Chinese state in Xinjiang, it's no surprise that the same heavy-handedness is being applied closer to home:

Fear is sweeping through the campuses of China's elite universities following a nationwide government crackdown aimed at silencing left-wing student activists, who had been campaigning for greater rights and protections for ordinary workers.

Since August at least nine young Chinese labor advocates have been forcibly detained in major cities across the country, a sharp escalation in Beijing's campaign against student activism on university campuses.

"The whole of Peking University is like under the white terror now, (the security guards) will come after you even if you were just at the scene where the student activists were distributing leaflets," a student at the prestigious Peking University told CNN Tuesday.

On Friday, one graduate, Zhang Shengye, was attacked and dragged into a car at the Beijing university by several people in black jackets, according to a widely circulated open letter.

"Someone used his arm to put me in a headlock and pushed me forward ... My glasses were missing in the chaos, and I was pressed to the ground," the letter writer and fellow activist, Yu Tianfu, said. "I struggled to say, 'Who are you? Why can you do such a thing?' A man pointed to my head before I could finish and said ferociously, 'Stop shouting otherwise I will beat you again.'"

A grassroots student movement, led by activists labeling themselves Marxists and calling for greater workers' rights, has become a growing problem for the Chinese government in recent years.

Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing has increasingly cracked down on all forms of dissent, including human rights activists, labor groups and religious organizations.

Activists and analysts have pointed out the irony of the socialist Chinese government, led by the theoretically pro-worker Communist Party, cracking down on young Marxists.

Indeed.

Xi in particular has been enthusiastically pushing the country to embrace its Marxist roots following his ascension to the head of the Communist Party in 2012.

Ah, but perhaps Xi has a better understanding of Marxism than the callow students. 

Hate crimes

American Jews are subject to 60% of religiously motivated hate crimes, despite being just 2% of the population:

Today, the FBI published its annual report cataloging hate crimes for the previous calendar year. This year, as has been the case every year since the bureau began collecting these statistics in 1992, Jews topped the list. And it wasn’t close. Of 1,564 anti-religious hate crimes in 2017, 938 targeted Jews. In other words, Jews were subject to 60 percent of anti-religious hate crimes, despite constituting just 2 percent of the American population.

These numbers mark a 37-percent increase from 2016, when Jews were the targets of 54 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes and 684 incidents. While this indicates that anti-Semitic crimes have increased since Donald Trump’s election, it also isn’t exactly a historical aberration. In fact, anti-Jewish attacks comprised 60 percent of all such crimes in 2014, 61 percent in 2013, 61 percent in 2012, 63 percent in 2011, 67 percent in 2010, and a whopping 71 percent in 2009. In other words, it’s not that American anti-Semitism has reached unprecedented levels under Trump; it’s more that people are finally starting to notice it....

At the same time, in more welcome news, the FBI found that anti-Muslim incidents had dropped in 2017, from 307 to 273, after spiking in 2016.

Suburban night

From photographer Todd Hido's series “Houses at Night” - on show at the Huxley-Parlour Gallery on Swallow Street off Piccadilly, as part of an exhibition This Side of Paradise: Narrative, Cinema and Suburbia in the Work of Miles Aldridge and Todd Hido:

[Photos © Todd Hido]

Hido’s photographs in This Side of Paradise are from his ongoing “Houses at Night” series, which depicts isolated suburban homes in America, photographed at night, replete with voyeuristic undertones and implied narrative. Hido’s work is concerned with themes of urban isolation and interior lives. His compositions are often bereft of human presence, although a singular lit window or an empty car become signifiers of stories left untold.

Slave-like conditions

A couple of years back, Vice News put together a powerful report on the subject of North Korean forced labour in Poland:

We were able to confirm that North Koreans are employed as manual workers in multiple locations across the country with their salaries apparently traveling through a network of companies directly into the pocket of the dictatorial Workers' Party.

VICE gained access to confidential documents such as service contracts, payment records, registers of persons, passport copies, and excerpts from a population register smuggled out of North Korea, the latter indicating a Polish company may be being run by a high-ranking member of the North Korean military.

Now, in a potentially significant new development, a North Korean labourer who worked in a shipyard in Poland for several years is suing a Dutch shipbuilding company, accusing them of exploitation in "slave-like conditions".

A law firm representing the worker - who has not been named for his safety - has asked the Netherlands’ public prosecutor to file a case against a shipbuilder it says knowingly benefited by buying items that were cheaper due to the use of forced labor....

“Dutch law offers a unique provision which criminalizes the act of profiting from exploitation,” said Barbara van Straaten, a lawyer with Prakken d’Oliveira, a law firm in the Netherlands that specializes in human rights cases and filed the complaint.

“This opens the possibility to hold companies accountable which are not direct perpetrators in the labor exploitation, but which nonetheless knowingly profit,” van Straaten said.

The Dutch shipbuilder, which is not being named to avoid undermining a possible prosecution, employed Polish shipyard Crist SA despite knowing it subjected workers to “inhumane, slave-like conditions” to lower costs, the complaint alleged.

The worker behind the complaint said he endured 12-hour working days in unsafe conditions and had much of his earnings seized by the North Korean government, according to his lawyers.  [...]

Activists say North Korea sends tens of thousands of workers worldwide and takes their pay to earn foreign currency to offset the impact of U.N. sanctions over its nuclear weapons program.

Many work in Polish shipyards, construction sites and farms, but face widespread exploitation and send up to 90 percent of their salaries back to the hermit state, according to the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea (EAHRNK).

Poland issued nearly 3,000 work permits for North Korean workers between 2008 and 2016, according to the LeidenAsiaCentre, a research institution in the Netherlands which has linked dozens of Polish companies to their employment.

As the world strives to meet a U.N. global goal of ending modern slavery by 2030, businesses face growing regulatory and consumer pressure to ensure their supply chains are slave-free yet campaigners say companies are rarely penalized for abuses.

According to a Dutch academic, the workers get something like $27 a month - roughly a dollar a day - for working daily shifts of 12 to 16 hours in Polish shipyards, with most of the money going straight to Pyongyang:

Prof. Remco Breuker of Leiden University in the Netherlands told Voice of America on Saturday, "After the obligatory expenses, they would be left with about 27 dollars a month. That's what they would be able to send home."...

The North Korean regime typically takes 70 to 90 percent of the wages of laborers it sends overseas to earn hard currency.

"North Korea can give something to Poland that it desperately needs, which is welders. The best Polish welders are no longer to be found in Poland because they left Poland for better paying jobs in Norway or the U.K.," Remco said.

He said the North Korean workers also undergo daily self-criticism and peer-criticism sessions. "You have to do it all the time. It's like the North Korean system exported to Poland," although Poland is in the EU.

The Heath revisited

More autumn, eight days on:

With a total devotion to the love of the country and its people

It's been difficult to know how to refer to Kim Jong-un. The Young Marshal? Chairman? Supreme Commander? His grandfather, Kim Il Sung, was the Great Leader. His father, Kim Jong-il, was the Dear Leader. And now it looks as though a suitable title has at last been found for the latest - and fattest - of the Kim dynasty. It is....oh yes....Dear Great Leader. 

From the Daily NK:

The North Korean regime has been focusing on shoring up the growing personality cult around leader Kim Jong Un. Seeking to place him on the same pedestal as Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Un and emphasizing his “greatness,”  the authorities are bolstering his image as a leader who loves his people and enacts the legacies of his predecessors.

Daily NK recently obtained a propaganda and agitation document that has surfaced in the country. The document, referred to as the “Notebook of an Agitation Official,” documents evidence that the regime is trying to build domestic solidarity by raising loyalty toward Kim. The notebook, which was distributed by the regime in July, promotes the “greatness” of Kim and places him behind his grandfather Kim Il Sung and father Kim Jong Il but in front of his grandmother Kim Jong Suk, while also giving him the status of the only leader who can continue the legacies of North Korea’s past leaders.

The regime has been using propaganda and agitation officials in all sectors of the government to promote Kim’s authority and justify the Suryong (Supreme Leader)-led regime. Ultimately, these political propaganda efforts are being used to increase solidarity toward the regime by encouraging the people to be loyal to Kim and be “ideologically armed.”

The notebook, around 90 pages long, begins with a section on “Documents [Showing] the Greatness of the Great Suryong Comrade Kim Il Sung” before moving to similar sections on Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un. Kim Jong Un is referred to as the Dear Great Leader instead of just the “Great Kim Jong Un,” and at only nine pages, his section is shorter than those devoted to his father and grandfather. However, it is abundantly clear that the section is focused on promoting his own cult of personality....

“With a total devotion to the love of the country and its people, the Dear Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Un’s unique leadership has made it possible for miracles to occur throughout the land and cries of ‘Mansae’ (hurray!) for the Party and for socialism shakes the heavens and earth,” the document reads....

The document also emphasizes Kim’s “wise” quote, “There is no greater patriotic act than to cultivate the strength to build the motherland into a strong and prosperous country,” continuing, “The Dear Great Leader Comrade’s wise sayings must be etched into our hearts and made to improve each of our own agricultural efforts so that this year, the 70th year since the founding of the Republic, will be known as one that witnessed an increase in grain production.”

On November 4-6, North Korea unveiled a large portrait of Kim Jong Un as events welcoming Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel to the country drew international attention from the press. This marked the first time such a portrait has been revealed to the public.

North Korea's ballistic missile program

Predictably enough, the great nuclear breakthrough that Trump proclaimed after his meeting with Kim Jong-un has proved to be something of an illusion:

North Korea is maintaining more than a dozen missile launch sites, according to new research, in a further sign that the summit diplomacy pursued by Kim Jong-un has not led to any significant disarmament.

Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have portrayed the US president’s June summit with Kim in Singapore as an unprecedented breakthrough, and pointed to the partial dismantling of a nuclear test site and a missile engine test area as side of progress towards North Korean disarmament.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) thinktank in Washington however has published satellite photographs of a short-range ballistic missile operating base near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) capable of accommodating medium-range missiles and threatening US forces in the region. The CSIS researchers said the base was still being maintained and improved, and was one of 13 it had identified out of an estimated 20 in total.

From South Korea's Chosun Ilbo:

North Korea continues a ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases, commercial satellite images show according to the New York Times on Monday.

The images suggest that the North improved more than a dozen missile sites whose existence it has never admitted even as it offered to dismantle one major launch site. The missile bases were identified in a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In the report titled "Undeclared North Korea," the CSIS singled out a base in Sakkanmol, North Hwanghae Province where it identified the entrances to several underground tunnels and mobile launchers.

The base "conceals seven lengthy tunnels that can accommodate up to 18 transporters that move the missiles. Each is typically fitted with one warhead," the daily said. "The base runs through a narrow mountain valley over an area of three square miles. Each tunnel entrance, the report says, is protected by a neighboring berm of rock and dirt about 60 feet high and two outward-opening doors about 20 feet wide. They are meant to protect the tunnel entrances from artillery fire and aerial attack."

"It's not like these bases have been frozen," Victor Cha at the center told the daily. "Work is continuing."

Falling foul of Prevent

The late much-missed Norman Geras, of normblog, stands accused of incitement to terrorism at Reading University. 

An essay by a prominent leftwing academic that examines the ethics of socialist revolution has been targeted by a leading university using the government’s counter-terrorism strategy.

Students at the University of Reading have been told to take care when reading an essay by the late Professor Norman Geras, in order to avoid falling foul of Prevent.

Third-year politics undergraduates have been warned not to access it on personal devices, to read it only in a secure setting, and not to leave it lying around where it might be spotted “inadvertently or otherwise, by those who are not prepared to view it”. The alert came after the text was flagged by the university as “sensitive” under the Prevent programme.

Nick Cohen in the Spectator:

As for the condescension, consider that the university tells students reading Geras that they must not allow these supposedly dangerous texts to be seen ‘inadvertently or otherwise, by those who are not prepared to view it’. Is philosophy now such a dangerous subject students cannot tackle it before their minds have been programmed in resistance techniques? Should undergraduates who inadvertently read Geras’s arguments against the Holocaust be sent on deradicalisation courses?

The university justifies its behaviour by saying that it has to warn about the potential dangers of Geras’s writings as part of its programme ‘to prevent students being drawn into terrorism’. In doing so, the university not only insults the memory of Norman Geras and the intelligence of all of us who have learned from his work, it shows its enormous condescension towards it students. They are in their superiors’ eyes so stupid and susceptible, they may be drawn into terrorism by a writer from the just war tradition who condemned without exception or equivocation the deliberate targeting of civilians.

Do we laugh, or cry?

Black and white

Birds on a girder, over the Lea:

Is America different?

Paul Berman looks at the growth of left antisemitism in the UK and France, and wonders if the same fate awaits the left in America:

The crisis of the democratic left all over Europe is typically presented as a product of modern economics, arising from excessive fluidities of labor and capital, and from social democracy’s inability to keep afloat amid the turbulence. But the crisis has had its cultural dimension, too, arising from still other pressures, one of which, larger perhaps than is sometimes recognized, emerges from a tide of political Islam, or Islamism, across several swaths of the world. This is the pressure on the Western left to accommodate, in the name of anti-racism and Third World solidarity, as many Islamist principles as possible, in regard to blasphemy, gender roles, and the iniquity of the Jews—a pressure on the left, that is, to temper or creatively adapt various of its own historic fundamentals.

Of course anti-Zionism has already become a major force on the left fringes, and on campus, in America:

And in the United States? No one will have failed to notice the accumulation of anti-Zionist energies, toying with the idea of calling for Israel’s exit from the scroll of nations, viz., the many BDS campaigns among university students; and the American Studies Association, whose professors have elevated anti-Zionism into an American Studies priority; and the National Women’s Studies Association; and the philosopher Judith Butler and her adepts; and the Presbyterian BDSers; and the Democratic Socialists of America, who, in becoming popular lately, have been taken over by a younger generation of anti-Zionists (“From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free!” chanted some of the delegates at last year’s DSA convention) and, even so, have begun to attract election-winning young politicians, here and there; and the victorious congressional candidate from Detroit, Rashida Tlaib, a new-style DSAer, who turns out to be a one-state proponent of Israel’s demise; and Angela Davis; and the Dyke March leaders in Chicago; and Leslie Cockburn, the defeated congressional candidate in Virginia with a distinguished career in the anti-Zionist book-writing field; and Keith Ellison, the newly elected attorney general of Minnesota, who has never been able to clarify his relation to Louis Farrakhan. And onward to Farrakhan himself, and to Farrakhan’s followers in the leadership of the Women’s March and among the California Democrats. And thus to the noble immigrants at Times Square several months ago, whose own chant, in Arabic, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud, jaish Muhammad saya’ud,” pretty much amounts to “From the river to the sea!” except with the military implications openly proclaimed (because Khaybar was the seventh-century battle in which Muhammad’s army definitively crushed the Jews of Arabia, with the rest of the chant going: “O Jews, the army of Muhammad is coming”).

But the question has always been about trans-Atlantic equivalences. Do the many American campaigners, student councils, minor and major politicians, immigrant activists, distinguished intellectuals and vigorous chants add up to the kind of political force that anti-Zionists have amassed within the radical left in Britain and France (and elsewhere in Western Europe)? Is there a possibility that, having assembled a great many supporters, the newly cheerful left-wing anti-Zionists in America will succeed in hollowing out whole portions of the culture of the traditional liberal left in the United States, on the European model? Or is anti-Zionism in our own country mostly an annoyance, perhaps larger and friskier than a university fad, but not vastly so, and easily brushed off? Is America, in short, different?

I'm not so sure that the political cultures in the UK and the US are that different in this regard. It's just that, through a series of unfortunate and improbable turns in the Labour Party - among them Unite leader Len McCluskey's interference to ensure Ed Miliband's disastrous leadership, and the decision to allow easy party membership, allowing mass infiltration from left activists - a hard left leader was elected to the leadership who has proved totally unsuited to the job. He was previously notable only for the number of times he rebelled against the party whip, and had shown no signs whatsoever of being capable of, or interested in, leading the party. And, like so many on the hard left, a support for Palestinian rights was a defining characteristic - perhaps the defining characteristic - of his political beliefs.

It's true, I suppose, that American Jews are a more powerful political force than Jews in the UK. We'll see how that works out....

Foggy night

More Jack Delano. January 1941. "New Bedford, Massachusetts. Street at night during a fog."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration]

The Turbine Hall revisited

What's the story now with Tate Modern's latest Turbine Hall project, where - you may recall - Cuban artist Tania Bruguera invites us to "Experience a community-driven response to the global migration crisis"? 

The heat-sensitive floor - under which is a portrait of a migrant - is now, effectively, a play area, where kids take their shoes off and slide about, while parents watch over the crawling infants.

No one betrays any interest in uncovering the immigrant portrait. 

The lengthy explanation nearby, meanwhile, stands forlorn and unread:

The disconnect between the artist's intentions and the actual experience could hardly be more total. 

A marked lack of interest also characterises the small room off to the side, where an unpleasant chemical, not unlike that Vick's VapoRub you smear on to relieve nasal congestion but stronger and nastier, makes your eyes water. This is what the artist describes as ‘forced empathy’.  It's a desperate and cynical  acknowledgement of her failure to produce art that comes anywhere close to producing some sort of emotion or fellow-feeling towards these refugees.

What a crock.

Jack Delano

June 1940. "Trucks in service station on Bladensburg Road, Washington, D.C., U.S. Route 1."

December 1940. "Grocery store window in Bath, Maine:

[Photos: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration]

The "Face Rump" sign above the woman with the grim expression is an amusing touch.