Mick Hartley

Rivages

More shore scenes from Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert (previously):

Ostend, Belgium. 1988

Malo-les-Bains, seaside resort. Nord department, Nord-Pas de Calais. France. 1984

Dominic Republic. 1991

Tokyo, Japan. 1996

Tunis, Tunisia. 1985

Nice, France. 2004

Venice beach. Los Angeles, USA. 1982

Biarritz, France. 2000

Alexandria, Egypt. 1993

Côte d’Opale, France. 2016

County Kerry. West coast, Ireland. 1988

Biarritz, France. 2000
[Photos © Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos]

From a new edition of his book Edges.

An essential part

Dorothea Lange, August 1939. "Pelican Bay Lumber Company. The burner is as characteristic of the Northwest landscape as grain elevators are to the Plains. There are many types of variations. It is an essential part of the sawmill. Disposes of sawdust and waste. Near Klamath Falls, Oregon."

[Photo: Shorpy/Dorothea Lange]

The broad churches are demolishing their aisles and becoming narrow sects

Yesterday Alan Johnson explained why he was staying in the Labour Party, to fight. Today David Aaronovitch in the Times (£) explains why he's leaving:

Not that it’s significant to anyone but me, but I’ve been a Labour member for 15 years now. I joined on the day George Galloway left. I was supremely inactive, doing the very occasional speech at an event and otherwise just paying my dues. Mostly because I think that though journalists are entitled to their affiliations, too close an association makes you reluctant to tell comrades what they don’t want to hear.

I quietly voted for the losing sides in the last three leadership elections, then for the losers in the national executive committee, where Momentum swept the board. That winning slate included a man who had recently dismissed Jewish worries about antisemitism in Labour as got up by people who were Trump supporters.

But you know, keep a toe in, things might change, what’s the harm? Then last week I heard about the man who chairs the constituency Labour Party for Wavertree in Liverpool. That’s the seat Luciana Berger holds. The CLP was to discuss a motion of no confidence in her; senior Labour people, including shadow chancellor John McDonnell, went on air to say that the motion had nothing to do with antisemitism. Was not (they actually said) the chairman of Wavertree CLP himself Jewish? Almost immediately it transpired that this same person, Dr Alex Scott-Samuel (however Jewish he might or might not be) had been very much involved in campaigning against those worried by antisemitism. Furthermore he had appeared on several editions of an online conspiracist chat show linked to the virulently antisemitic self-styled Messiah, David Icke. While there, just two years ago, Scott-Samuel had delivered himself of the view that “the Rothschild family are behind a lot of the neo-liberal influence in the UK and the US. You only have to google them to look at this.” Over his words the producers had laid a graphic from a notorious American antisemitic website.

I’m not paying for that. Or to sustain anyone who tolerates it. Not a penny. Yesterday, in the immortal words of Private Eye, I cancelled my subscription. No one will care but me, but then that’s true for most of us.

Heaven knows I understand the “stay in and fight thing”. First there’s the power of inertia. Then there are your friends and comrades. Mike Gapes’s hardest conversation, he told me yesterday, was with a Labour councillor he first met at a party summer school in 1970. Finally there’s the hurdle of becoming an effective electoral force, given that the political duopoly has to agree to damage itself in order for there to be reform of the voting system. And what cartel votes to allow new businesses in?

I see other excellent MPs: Ben Bradshaw, Stella Creasy, Dominic Grieve, Mary Creagh, Hilary Benn, Philip Lee, Jess Phillips, Keir Starmer and dozens of councillors and thousands of ordinary members too and I want to say: “I respect whatever you decide to do, but tell me, how do you think you’re going to win it back?” Because the broad churches are demolishing their aisles and becoming narrow sects and today millions of people feel politically homeless. And wouldn’t it be better to work for things you believe in rather than spend your time guarding your back against those who hate you?

An ugly thing to behold

We find ourselves - as I noted back in 2017 - with a "perfect storm" of useless leaders. An incompetent Prime Minister is increasingly at the mercy of the Tory no-deal Brexit hardliners. Corbyn is....well, Corbyn, watching over the death throes of a once proud Labour Party. And all this as we approach one of the most significant political events in our recent history.

Terry Glavin looks, with some sadness, at the complete mess that we British have made for ourselves.

“If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

That was the clinching rallying cry of a thundering oration Winston Churchill let fly at his wavering and whimpering cabinet on May 28, 1940. He’d been Britain’s wartime prime minister for only 18 days. On the French coast, at Dunkirk, a vast fleet of English boats of every description was in the midst of an ignominious evacuation of more than 300,000 Allied troops in a panicked retreat from the advancing German army....

But in any event, here we are in 2019, and at the rate things are going, if Britain’s long story is to end at last, it will not end in the bloody death throes of some epic last-stand gallantry. It will end in the catastrophic incompetence of Prime Minister Theresa May and the macabre ensemble of backbiting yobs and halfwits in her own barely governing Conservative party. It will end in the bedlam of fruitless entreaties, clanging Irish backstops and the twilight zone of May’s no-deal negotiations with Brussels....

You might think that after everything that has happened, Labour would be blessed with a massive popular-opinion advantage over May’s Conservatives, who cling to hung-parliament power only by the thread of an alliance with a handful of Arlene Foster’s 17th-century No Popery Here marching flute players from Ulster. The trouble is that Labour has been taken over by a hodgepodge of creepy Judeophobes, neo-Stalinists and Home County dullards in bespoke suits. The venerable and pioneering working-class party of Keir Hardie and Clement Attlee has been transformed into a weird personality cult constructed around the talentless allotment-gardener Corbyn. The reason Corbyn can’t seem to get ahead of May in the public opinion surveys is simply that he doesn’t deserve to. And it’s not just because Labour can’t seem to articulate where it stands on Brexit, or what Labour’s standpoint might be on the pressing question of whether a new Brexit deal should be put to another referendum vote.

It’s because of a gangrenous anti-Semitism that sets Corbynite politics apart from every brave and decent tradition the Labour party can rightly claim for itself. Just this week, eight Labour MPs bolted from the party, citing not only the party’s incoherence on Brexit among their reasons, but notably, the Corbynites’ anti-Semitism as well....

It is not as though anyone lies “choking in his own blood upon the ground” in any of this. But something old and gallant and British is ending here, and it’s an ugly thing to behold.

The world’s deadliest infrastructure failure ever

News to me - and to almost everyone else, it seems. Apparently some 230,000 people died as a result of the collapse of China's Banqiao Dam in 1975 - a dam that Chairman Mao forced through despite warnings from hydrologists.

Chen Xing, one of China’s foremost hydrologists, had followed the construction of Banqiao in 1952 with concern. Chairman Mao Zedong, eager to modernize the country, ordered hundreds of dams built, which put people to work, provided electricity and tamed rivers as part of his brutal Great Leap Forward. After swimming across the Yangtze River in 1958, Zedong penned a poem about his obsession with dams: “Great plans are being made/ Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west …The mountain goddess if she is still there/ Will marvel at a world so changed.” Decades later, ignoring warnings from scientists and environmentalists, the Chinese government initiated construction of the Three Gorges Dam — the world’s largest power station — on the Yangtze.

Xing was one among many who feared the country was building too fast and too recklessly. When he designed the Suya Lake Reservoir in 1958 — at the time the largest reservoir in Asia — he was admonished for trying to add more sluice gates. Labeled a “right-wing opportunist,” he was eventually fired for being a vocal critic.

According to an account of the Banqiao Dam by a Chinese journalist writing under the pseudonym Yi Si, on Aug. 8, as workers stared curiously at the retreating water level of the reservoir, a voice in the dark called out: “The River Dragon has come!” And suddenly the dam ruptured, unleashing 600 billion liters of water and destroying an entire village. By Aug. 17, reports Si, 1.1 million people remained trapped by flooding with 50 to 60 percent of food air-dropped into the area floating in the murky waters. It would take weeks for the waters to drain, revealing bloated corpses dotting the landscape in the late summer sun.

The government kept news of the disaster from being broadcast nationally, and there hadn’t been any international observers present. But when China’s Ministry of Water Resources and Electric Power released a study in July 1989, it reported that the dam breach caused more than 85,000 people to die instantly. Two years earlier, “On Macro-Decision Making in the Three Gorges Project,” a study conducted by eight Chinese water science experts who probably had access to censored government reports, estimated the number of total dead — from flooding and the resulting epidemics and famine — at 230,000.

Although the disaster is thought to be the deadliest of its kind anywhere in the world, it’s not common knowledge even inside China. When the dam broke, the Communist Party’s control of the media was near absolute, explains David Bandurski of the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project. “Generally speaking, disasters of all forms, whether primarily natural in cause or human in cause, have been viewed by China’s leaders as highly sensitive,” he says, with the government loathe to concede culpability.

There's a useful Wikipedia entry.

Officially, the dam failure was a natural as opposed to man-made disaster, with government sources placing an emphasis on the amount of rainfall as opposed to poor engineering and construction. The People's Daily has maintained that the dam was designed to survive a once-in-1000-years flood (300 mm of rainfall per day) but a once-in-2000-years flood occurred in August 1975, following the collision of Typhoon Nina and a cold front. [...]

The resulting flood waters caused a wave 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) wide and 3–7 meters (9.8–23.0 ft) high in Suiping (遂平) that rushed onto the plains below at nearly 50 kilometers per hour (31 mph), almost wiping out an area 55 kilometers (34 mi) long and 15 kilometers (9.3 mi) wide, and creating temporary lakes as large as 12,000 square kilometers (4,600 sq mi). Seven county seats, Suiping, Xiping (西平), Ru'nan (汝南), Pingyu (平舆), Xincai (新蔡), Luohe (漯河), and Linquan (临泉) were inundated, as were thousands of square kilometers of countryside and countless communities. Evacuation orders had not been fully delivered due to weather conditions and poor communications. Telegraphs failed, signal flares fired by Unit 34450 were misunderstood, telephones were rare, and some messengers were caught by the flood. While only 827 out of 6,000 people died in the evacuated community of Shahedian just below Banqiao Dam, half of a total of 36,000 people died in the unevacuated Wencheng commune of Suipin County next to Shahedian, and the Daowencheng Commune was wiped from the map, killing all 9,600 citizens.[4] Although a large number of people were reported as lost at first, many of them later returned home. A 2005 book compiled by the Archives Bureau of Suiping county reports that more than 230,000 were carried away by water, in which 18,869 died. It has been reported that 90,000 - 230,000 people were killed as a result of the dam breaking.

Fighting for Labour

From Alan Johnson's piece in the Telegraph today - Labour is now institutionally anti-Semitic - it has one last chance to save itself - on why he won't be leaving the Labour Party, and what should be done to save it:

The decent majority needs to say three things and it needs to say them in its own name: auto-emancipation is needed.

First, that antisemitism regularly shape-shifts throughout history, has done so again, and the party does not ‘get’ this. While antisemitism always involves a core demonology about ‘the Jews’ as a malign group, the precise form supposedly taken by this Jewish malignity, and the language in which ‘the Jew’ is condemned, changes radically with the times and the needs of the antisemites: God-Killer, Rootless Cosmopolitan, Rothschild-Capitalist and Untermenschen have all served as code words marking out the Jew for destruction. Today, in the era of the modern Jewish state, the code word is all too often ‘Zio’ or ‘Zionist’.

Labour does not have a neo-Nazi problem. It has a problem, mostly, with modern anti-Zionism, excessive, obsessive and demonising, which has co-mingled in an internet age with an older set of classical antisemitic tropes, images and assumptions to create antisemitic anti-Zionism. In short, that which the demonised Jew once was in older forms of antisemitism, demonised Israel or 'Global Zionism’ now is in contemporary antisemitic anti-Zionism: still alien, still powerful and all-controlling, still the hidden hand, still acting in bad faith, still the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, still uniquely malevolent, still full of blood lust, still uniquely deserving of punishment, and so on. All this must be understood and rooted out.

Second, the subculture of denial and victim-reversal must be challenged and ended.

Third, the party needs a positive values-based alternative to the professional ‘anti-Zionists’ and boycotters. Members should demand a campaign for party policy, ‘two states for two peoples’; opportunities to express their solidarity with the brave peacebuilding groups and trade unions that exist on both sides of the conflict, and a national political education drive to educate the party about contemporary antisemitism and so erect an intellectual firewall between legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy, of which they can be plenty, and illegitimate hate-filled demonization of Israel, Israelis and ‘Zionists’.

Mike Gapes will always be a political friend. But I have a story too, around which my mother and father, factory and shop workers like Mike’s, also hover. My father fought with the armored brigade of the 8th Army that stopped the Nazis in their tracks at El Alemein. When he got home, Attlee’s reforms transformed the lives of his children, just as Blair’s and Brown’s reforms made his own last years easier. So am I going to leave the party and the country to a Wykehamist-Stalinist-Hamasnik like Corbyn’s Director of Communications Seamus Milne? As if.

Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize

From the Telegraph on Sunday:

President Donald Trump has claimed that Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, has written a “beautiful” letter nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize for opening a dialogue with North Korea.

Mr Trump made the assertion during a press conference at the White House on Friday in response to a question about his expectations of a second summit with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, in Vietnam in late February.

Mr Abe gave him “the most beautiful copy of a letter that he sent to the people who give out a thing called the Nobel Prize”, Mr Trump said. “He said, ‘I have nominated you, respectfully, on behalf of Japan. I am asking them to give you the Nobel Peace Prize’ “

That's all very moving, of course, but the way the Japanese press are reporting the story - and here it begins to make a lot more sense - it was in fact Trump who pressured Abe to nominate him. 

The U.S. government had sounded Abe out over the Nobel Peace Prize nomination after Trump's summit in June last year with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the first meeting between a North Korean leader and a sitting U.S. president, the Asahi said, citing an unnamed Japanese government source.

A spokesman for Japan's Foreign Ministry in Tokyo said the ministry was aware of Trump's remarks, but "would refrain from commenting on the interaction between the two leaders."

It does provide some background for Trump's continued efforts to maintain a high-profile for his forthcoming summit with Kim.

South Korea's Chosun Ilbo, in an editorial today, make their concern quite clear:

U.S. President Donald Trump asked Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to recommend him for the Nobel Peace Prize, in another of the grandiose gestures that have characterized his presidency. Appearing in parliament, Abe did not directly admit it but did not deny either.

According to the daily Mainichi Shimbun on Tuesday, Trump telephoned Abe in August of 2018 and asked him for his recommendation, apparently pointing out to him that no North Korean missiles have flown over Japanese airspace since the U.S.-North Korea summit in June last year. This must be the first instance since the Nobel Peace Prize was launched in 1901 that an aspiring winner practically twisted the arm of another country's arm for a recommendation, certainly in the so-called First World.

In an editorial entitled, "Prime Minister Abe, Are You Kidding?," the daily pointed out the U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore last year in fact only resulted in a halt to joint U.S.-South Korean military drills but not the scrapping of North Korea's ballistic missiles or nukes.

Trump's lack of self-restraint does not need dwelling on. What is unnerving is that he is trying to use the North Korean nuclear crisis to feed his greed for the Nobel Peace Prize. He sounded confident when he said last year that the North would scrap its nuclear weapons, but now it seems he does not care any more and says he is in "no rush" to see North Korea denuclearize. This raises fears that Trump has given up on prodding North Korea to scrap its nuclear weapons and is simply trying to dream up ways to get his Nobel Prize with a quick fix of some kind. This means that the upcoming U.S.-North Korea summit could end up becoming a geopolitical performance aimed at dazzling the Nobel committee....

If Kim Jong-un sits down with Trump with little preparation from the U.S. and flatters Trump enough, South Korea's national security will plunge to the bottom of the priority list. Trump has long treated any war on the Korean Peninsula as a foreign matter. Staging a fake nuclear meeting aiming to win the Nobel Prize will jeopardize the safety of South Koreans. Yet President Moon Jae-in said he believes Trump "is well-deserving" of the gong. Who then will prevent South Koreans from becoming hostages of a nuclear-armed North Korea?

Not Trump, it seems.

Desecrated with swastikas

Back to France. 

Some 80 graves at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France have been desecrated with swastikas, local officials say.

The damage was discovered on Tuesday, ahead of nationwide marches against a rise in anti-Semitic attacks....

Local authorities say the damage was discovered on Tuesday morning in Quatzenheim, a village in Alsace close to France's border with Germany.

Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic slogans were spray-painted on the graves.

One tombstone was defaced with the words "Elsässischen Schwarzen Wolfe" ("Black Alsatian Wolves"), the name of a militant far-right group active in the 1970s and 1980s.

The group burned down a museum at Natzweiler-Struthof - a former Nazi death camp - in 1976.

Handsworth self portrait

In 1979 Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon created a pop-up photography studio on the street outside a terraced house in Grove Lane, Handsworth, Birmingham.

They invited passers-by to take their own image, giving them the shutter release so they could control the moment when they were ready for the picture to be taken.

In 1979, way before the age of selfies, the opportunity to photograph yourself was relatively unheard of outside of more formal contexts such as passport photographs and weddings.

Handsworth Self Portrait © Bishton, Homer & Reardon

Handsworth Self Portrait © Bishton, Homer & Reardon

Handsworth Self Portrait © Bishton, Homer & Reardon

Handsworth Self Portrait © Bishton, Homer & Reardon

Handsworth Self Portrait © Bishton, Homer & Reardon

Handsworth Self Portrait © Bishton, Homer & Reardon

Handsworth Self Portrait © Bishton, Homer & Reardon

Handsworth Self Portrait © Bishton, Homer & Reardon

Handsworth Self Portrait © Bishton, Homer & Reardon

Now, 40 years on, a new exhibition at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) presents 44 of the original photographic prints made by John Reardon at the time, with more than 200 images curated from the original negatives by Derek Bishton which have never before been seen in public.

Derek Bishton: "For most people who took part it was just a bit of a laugh. As photographers, we had a serious intent because we recognised that Handsworth, at that time, was undergoing a radical change in terms of the demographics of the area. It was really the UK's first multicultural suburb, and we wanted to make a record of that moment and give the people a role in creating that record.

"We wanted to challenge the negative representation of Handsworth people in the local and national newspapers and give people a chance to literally and figuratively put themselves in the frame, to represent themselves. I think one of the great joys, when you look back on the self-portraits, is seeing how well people of all ages and backgrounds presented themselves. How good they look."

Busy sky

Over Hackney Marshes.

Jewish genius had feminized the black male

A reminder of what Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan stands for. And why it matters that Women's March leader Tamika Mallory calls him The Greatest of All Time, and refuses to condemn the man.

Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam teamed up with a Holocaust denier and anti-Semitic ideologue to attack the Jewish religion and blame numerous ills of modern society on Jews, during the keynote event at the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviours' Day conference in Chicago.

Speaking before a crowd of several thousand at the United Center and an unknown number on a livestream, Farrakhan was preceded by Michael A. Hoffman II, who suggested that ancient Jewish texts are equivalent to teachings “from the church of satan.” Hoffman is a well-known Holocaust denier who has denounced belief in the “fake homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau,” though he did not reiterate those beliefs at this event.

When he took the podium, Farrakhan unleashed a torrent of attacks on Jews, claiming that anti-black racism “was started by Jewish rabbinical leaders” in ancient times, and that Jewish racism towards Africans is ultimately responsible for the “enslavement… colonization…dehumanization…[and] denial of self-determination” to black people throughout history. Farrakhan based much of his mischaracterization of Judaism on a distorted reading of the Talmud, an ancient compilation of legal and ethical debates among rabbis. Attacks on the Talmud were first instigated by Christian and Muslim polemicists in the early Middle Ages, and have become a staple of extreme anti-Semitic ideologues. Tonight Farrakhan claimed that Talmud created “the poisonous belief that justified and guided the entire institution of the transatlantic slave trade and the continuous exploitation of our people.” He also attempted to sow ill will between Jews and African Americans by saying that “sharecropping can be traced to the Talmud.”

Farrakhan reiterated classic anti-Semitic beliefs about Jews and money, claiming for example that Jewish principles “have exploited the American people through institutional usury and predatory lending practices.” He rehashed the tired cliché that the federal reserve is run by “a family of rich Jews.”

Farrakhan also blamed Jews for “pervasive rape culture…sex trafficking and prostitution,” and for emasculating black men. The latter theme was elaborated upon in an earlier speech by NOI official Brother Wesley Muhammad, who said that “Jewish genius had feminized the black male. The NOI is standing in between the demasculazination of the black man… this is why they hate Farrakhan.” Farrakhan outrageously claimed that ancient Jewish texts condone pedophilia, and that “pedophilia and sexual perversion exercises in Hollywood can be traced back” to Jewish religious texts....

Referring to the controversy over the struggles of Women’s March leaders Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, and Carmen Perez to forthrightly condemn Farrakhan and his anti-Semitic bigotry, Farrakhan claimed that “the wicked Jews want to use me to break up the women’s movement.”

Update: you can see Wesley Muhammad's speech at MEMRI. It is Jewish genius, he claims, that is responsible for the "scientific production of homosexuality and transgenderism among black people" and the "weaponizing" of marijuana to "feminize" the black American male.

Also, Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist Michael A. Hoffman.

In February 2018, the research department of the Nation of Islam – the scholars who are responsible for the magisterial revisionist history titled "The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews" – alerted me to a segment of Louis Farrakhan's Saviours' Day speech concerning the Babylonian Talmud. In that speech, he made the controversial claim that the Talmud, which is the holiest book of Orthodox Judaic believers, contained the teaching that Jesus, the Lord and Savior of the estimated two billion Christians on Earth, was in Hell being perpetually boiled in excrement. This is a thing so foul that one encounters it in no other theology or creed on this planet, unless it were to emanate from the Church of Satan. No other religion teaches anything approaching what the rabbis of the Talmud have so savagely and pornographically taught about the Messiah of Israel.  […]

They order the women [of the Women's March] to repudiate Minister Farrakhan, but when will the followers of the Orthodox rabbis be asked to repudiate the Babylonian Talmud?

Not forgetting the man himself, The Greatest of All Time:

The Federal Reserve ain't no governmental operation. It's a family of rich Jewish people who print the money that got the picture of Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, George Washington. […]

[The] pedophilia and sexual perversion [that are] institutionalized in Hollywood and the entertainment industries can be traced to Talmudic principles and Jewish influence. Not Jewish influence – Satanic influence under the name of Jew. […]

Members of the so-called Jewish community brought our fathers out of Africa, owned the ships, owned the plantations, were the number one buyers and sellers of slaves. […]

The wicked practices that govern their industries are largely justified and influenced by such Talmudic principles. The pervasive rape culture, Hollywood's casting couch, sex trafficking, and prostitution. […]

Jewish professor of film studies Nathan Abrams, to a Jewish audience at the University of Nottingham – his quote is: "Anal sex is a Jewish sex." […]

Grown men that have played masculine parts in the movie, and the next thing you know, they're bending down and somebody is having anal sex with them, to please the dirty-minded master. Then he gives them a play, he gives them a movie role, he books them in theaters.

Even Jeremy Corbyn might be able to recognise the antisemitism on display here.

It’s becoming grotesque

More from those charming gilets jaunes in Paris, as they shout antisemitic abuse at French Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut. From Charles Bremner in the Times (£):

Mr Finkielkraut, a member of the Académie Française, France’s most august intellectual body, and an initial supporter of the yellow vests, was called a “dirty Jew” and “bloody Zionist” in video broadcast on television....

The philosopher, whose support for Israel and hostility to Islam has generated controversy in recent years, said he had gone to watch the protests on the Boulevard Montparnasse. “I felt absolute hatred and, unfortunately, this is not the first time,” he said. “I no longer back these demonstrations, it’s becoming grotesque. It’s a movement that no longer knows how to stop.”

His abusers appeared to have been a mixture of old-school, far-right antisemites and people from the banlieues who supported the Palestinians, he said. “I’d be surprised if these were original yellow vests because I was one of the only intellectuals to have supported the movement at its start,” he added....

Many in politics condemned the verbal attack on Mr Finkielkraut, who was escorted to safety by police. Hard-left politicians, whose figurehead is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of Unbowed France, withheld criticism, with some dismissing the event as “fake news” because they said the crowd had been denouncing Zionism, not Jews.

Ha! Quelle surprise! Obviously "dirty Jew" is not at all antisemitic, but is rather a cogent and heart-felt critique of Zionist oppression against the Palestinians.

A survey by Ifop last week found that 44 per cent of people who identified themselves as yellow-vest supporters believe that a global Zionist conspiracy manipulates the world. That compared with 22 per cent of the wider public. Many protests have featured banners and chants claiming that Mr Macron is a “puppet” of Jewish masters. Antisemitic acts rose 74 per cent last year, the government has said.

Part of its broader campaign of indiscriminate violence

The Global Public Policy Institute (GGPI) has published a devastating report on the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime - Nowhere to Hide: The Logic of Chemical Weapons Use in Syria - which really leaves no room for doubt as to the culpability of Damascus, and Assad's determination to punish the civilian population of Syria:

Our research found that there have been at least 336 chemical weapons attacks over the course of the Syrian civil war – significantly more than has commonly been known. Around 98 percent of these attacks can be attributed to the Assad regime, with the Islamic State group responsible for the rest. Approximately 90 percent of all confirmed attacks occurred after the infamous “red line” incident of August 2013....

It is clear that the Syrian military has consistently prioritized striking population centers over rebel positions on the frontlines, even in the face of defeat on the ground. Indeed, the Syrian regime’s persistent and widespread use of chemical weapons is best understood as part of its overall war strategy of collective punishment of populations in opposition-held areas. Chemical weapons are an integral component of its arsenal of indiscriminate violence, alongside sieges and high-explosive weapons such as “barrel bombs.”

We show that the Assad regime did not merely “get away” with its use of these banned weapons, but succeeded in using them for strategic ends. More than two-thirds of Syria’s population are internally or externally displaced, and opposition-held communities have been buckling and surrendering under the cumulative weight – and eventually the mere threat – of violence, including the use of chemical weapons.

The full study (pdf) can be read here.

From the Washington Post:

'The more we looked at the patterns associated with their use, the more we came to understand chemical weapons not as some special, separate evil, but as a key capability of the Syrian military as part of its broader campaign of indiscriminate violence', said Tobias Schneider, who led the GPPI research team....

In interviews with The Washington Post, doctors described the chaos they sparked.

'It felt like psychological torture. We just couldn’t keep up', said one who had worked in the opposition-held town of Jobar, before it was recaptured by the Syrian government in March.

'The bombs were bad enough, but when those other attacks started, we didn’t know what to do'.

Chemicals, he said, brought a different type of fear.

Reports that another town had been hit would glue colleagues to their phones, with WhatsApp messages rolling in and describing symptoms the doctor already knew well.

'We learned what chemicals do to a body and why we should fear them. They made people crazy. They made people terrified. You know, it broke the spirit', the doctor said.

According to the data, Syria’s army has consistently prioritized striking population centers over front lines, even in the face of defeat on the ground.

'The strategy worked', said Schneider. 'It's hard to imagine other regimes facing similar challenges, looking at places like Sudan, are not studying the Syrian example closely'....”

The family round the table

Jack Delano. August 1941. "The family of Mr. Dan Sampson, father of 11 children. The Sampsons are moving out of their small unproductive farm in the Pine Camp expansion area to a 240-acre dairy farm in South Rutland, N.Y., obtained through the New York Defense Relocation Corporation. Near Sterlingville, New York."

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

Lovely portraits - especially of the girl and the boy at front. 

For what he did to the Jews

Mohamed Gad El-Zoghby is an Egyptian researcher and a poet, with a master's degree in shari'a and law from Cairo's Ain Shams University. And he thinks a statue should be erected to Hitler "for what he did to the Jews":

Interviewer: Who was worse – ideologically and in practice – Hitler or Khomeini?

Mohamed Gad El-Zoghby: Objectively, or just as far as we are concerned? Objectively speaking, Hitler wins. But as far as we're concerned, we should erect a statue of Hitler for what he did to the Jews. Khomeini allied himself with the Jews, whereas Hitler was their enemy and fought them. In addition, Hitler met with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Al-Husseini, and he completely supported the Arab cause in Palestine. We must never forget this.

Indeed we must not. Husseini spent much of WW2 in Berlin, where he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi cause, and - it's fairly clear - knew and approved of Hitler's plans for the extermination of European Jewry.