Mick Hartley

Intermission

Off for a week. Back Sunday the 4th.

Adventures up the Lea

Boats and stuff, up through Tottenham Marshes:

 

More vulgar analysis

Terry Glavin suggested a couple of days back that, with Manchester, we were seeing a change in the usual vulgar analysis that sees Islamist terror as blowback from Western actions in the Middle East. Alas, he spoke too soon. We hear that Corbyn - no surprise - is going to make just that connection in a speech today. And, again no surprise, Simon Jenkins at the Guardian is behind him - Corbyn is right: of course Manchester was linked to British foreign policy:

Whenever al-Qaida or Isis seek to explain their atrocities, reference is usually made to British intervention and the military killing of innocent Muslims. It is mendacious to try to sanitise our overheated and jingoistic response to domestic terrorism by pretending that it is unrelated to British foreign policy. It was we who made the link, and before the terrorists did.

Um...no. 9/11 in 2001? Before Iraq.

Muslim victimhood is the sea in which these people swim. No need, for god's sake, to confirm them in their unhinged paranoia.

But why bother? The man - as Norm Geras frequently pointed out - is a journalistic disaster area. 

Islamophobia watch

From today's Times (£):

The Manchester bomber was in an Arabic-speaking “clique” at school which accused a teacher of Islamophobia for criticising a suicide bomber in class, The Times has learnt.

Salman Abedi, 22, who grew up on council estates in south Manchester, was viewed in his school days as an angry young man who did not quite fit in.

During his time at Burnage Academy for Boys between 2009 and 2011, Abedi is believed to have been among a group of boys who took issue with a teacher who had “asked what they thought of someone who would strap on a bomb and blow people up,” a source said. “A group went to complain to their RE teacher saying it was Islamophobic.”

White Rabbit

I don't believe I've ever posted this. A search for "white rabbit" on my site brings up something altogether different. So here we go - in bright psychedic colours, of course. 

The only really great song, in my opinion, from that whole San Francisco summer of love era. Driven by Grace Slick's extraordinarily powerful contralto - isolated, to great effect, here.

Black and white version, introduced by the very annoying Dick Clark on American Bandstand.

Still going at the age of 77, but it hasn't always been easy:

During Jefferson Starship's 1978 European tour, Slick's alcoholism became a problem for the band. The group had to cancel the first night in Germany because she was too intoxicated to perform, causing the audience to riot. Slick performed the next night with the band, but was so inebriated she could not sing properly. She also attacked the audience, mocking Germany for losing World War II, and groping both female audience members and bandmates. The next day, she left the group. That same year, Slick was dragged off a San Francisco game show for abusing the contestants. She was admitted to a detoxification facility at least twice, once during the 1970s at Duffy's in Napa Valley, and once in the 1990s with daughter China.

Adventures in colour

Markfield skateboard park - still life with orange:

Yellow-eyed woman:

The circular logic of the Islamist victimhood narrative

More on what I called the "by-now familiar Muslim grievance schtick" from Alaa al-Ameri, the penname of a British-Libyan writer, at Spiked:

Salman Abedi was a British Libyan. So am I. His parents were given refuge in the UK, and so were mine. His grandparents and great grandparents were saved from German and Italian fascists by the sacrifice of British soldiers, as were mine. Details are now emerging that suggest Abedi fought in the Libyan revolution alongside his father. If true, then he will have depended for his life upon the actions of British, French and American airforces.

Abedi was not disenfranchised. He was not rejected by British society. He was taught to reject and hate it, despite everything it gave him and his family. His older sister has reportedly said that Abedi was looking for ‘revenge’ for the ‘ill-treatment’ of Muslims in the UK and Syria. This is the circular logic of the Islamist victimhood narrative that almost every Muslim growing up in the UK will have been exposed to at one time or another. Western governments, and therefore Western societies, are to blame for all instances of intervention in Muslim majority countries, and are equally culpable should they fail to intervene.

Manchester and Birmingham are home to some of the most militant Islamists in the UK. They mingle and operate throughout local Muslim communities with relative impunity, and maintain networks up and down the M1 motorway to London. They also have a significant presence online with which they extend their influence globally. At the level of propaganda, at least, they’re not an underground movement. They are out in the open.

While living safely under Britain’s rule of law, they nonetheless view British society as beneath contempt. They don’t want to be part of it, and they teach people like Salman Abedi that it’s a mortal sin for them to want to be part of it. Anything that happens to a Muslim anywhere in the world, once passed through the Islamist victimhood filter, becomes an anti-Muslim act for which the guilty must be punished. And so it seems that Abedi’s actions were the result of this solipsistic staple of Islamist indoctrination....

Britain has a long history of (relatively gradual) immigration and, most importantly, assimilation that has been, as much as anything, the result of acceptance by host communities – mostly at the levels of the working and lower middle classes.

The rise in nationalism is blamed by the chattering classes on some inherent intolerance on the part of these same communities that have been the raw material of assimilation for decades. Yet these communities understand something that is lost on their accusers.

We can have all sorts of differences in class, outlook and background, as long as there is some common thread, some notion of shared interest, history and destiny that binds us together as a community. This is what Islamists and their apologists both reject. One because it violates their claim to govern humanity in the name of God, and the other because it sounds uncouth and parochial....

Islamists, for decades, have regarded Britain not as a family, but as a place to eat and sleep on their way to somewhere else. While the privileged wring their hands and wonder what they might have done to offend their exotic guests, those to whom the house belongs are beginning to pipe up and object. Whenever they do – for example, when their kids are murdered at a pop concert – their more sophisticated relatives seem mostly preoccupied with the desire to avoid a scene.

Openly discussing Islamism is not an attack on me or any other British Muslim. We are the hostages of Islamism and its vampire preachers who weaponised Salman Abedi and used him to slaughter 22 innocents, in the midst of their joy, out of sheer spite. Speaking frankly and honestly about this horror is the only hope we have of emerging from it as anything resembling a cohesive British family.

Also...that Manchester mosque that made the news with its vigorous condemnation of the attack. Well, it's not all good news.

Decline and resilience

Back in 1988 Chris Killip published In Flagrante, his acclaimed book of photojournalism on the effects of de-industrialisation on the north-east. It was re-issued last year in larger format, with a slightly different selection, as In Flagrante Two.

Now there's a new show at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles looking at the making of Killip's study. It "offers a wider view of Killip’s dark and poetic study of decline and resilience in the North of England, and offers a behind the scenes look at the making of an iconic body of work."

Can you get further away culturally from Teesside and Tyneside than LA? These images of post-industrial England in the Seventies and Eighties must seem darkly exotic in the sunshine and blue skies of southern California.

"Two girls, Grangetown, Middlesbrough, Teesside," 1975

"Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside," 1976.

"Youth on Fence, Middlesbrough, Teeside," 1975

"Father and Son Watching a Parade, West End, Newcastle," 1980.

"Angelic Upstarts at a Miners' Benefit Dance at the Barbary Coast Club, Sunderland, Wearside," 1984.

"'Leso,' 'Blackie,' 'Bever,' ?, David and 'Whippet' ('Leso' and David Were Drowned off Skinningrove on July 29, 1986), Skinningrove, North Yorkshire," 1982 - 1983.

"'Leso' at Sea of Skinningrove, North Yorkshire," 1983.

"Gordon. Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland," 1982.
[Photos © Chris Killip]

How dictatorships start

Cevheri Guven, former editor of Turkish magazine NOKTA, is now another exile from Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule:

A day after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared an electoral victory, 10 police officers stormed our office. The first order of business after the elections was to raid NOKTA, a critical news magazine that I headed. They detained my deputy and me.

As the police transported us to a prison in a van, they loudly played marches featuring Erdogan to send me a message that it was the president who wanted my arrest. I already knew that....

 

The prison I stayed was crowded with journalists, musicians, judges, prosecutors, police, army officers, and academics. Hundreds of very well-educated individuals stayed in cells around me, but I could not talk to any of them.

Charges against me were frequently changed throughout the investigation. I was released pending trial after spending 2 months in prison. They seized my passport and I had to report myself to the police every week.

The 14th Istanbul High Criminal Court that released me and some of my colleagues angered Erdogan. Similar to how he threatened me prior to my arrest, he was now threatening the court for releasing us.

Judges on the bench were first dismissed from their posts. Then one of them was arrested. My lawyer was also arrested. New charges were pressed against me and newly appointed judges handed down 22 years and 6 months in prison sentence this week. My crime: Publishing a news magazine cover.

I am 38 years old today. When I leave the prison, I will be 60 years old. My daughter will likely be married. Perhaps she will meet me outside the prison with her kids. My son will be in the early years of his professional career. I actually don’t want him to be a journalist, to be honest.

I am not writing these sentences from a prison cell. Before they came for me, I gave all my life savings to a smuggler, who snatched me out of the country in the dead of night. I rescued my wife and my kids from Erdogan regime’s hell.

I am a refugee now…

This is how dictatorships start. First journalists and intellectuals pay the biggest price. Our lives would either be destroyed in prisons or we would leave the country....

The concept of a “Turkish refugee” is a confusing notion for Europe. I can guarantee that they will face with thousands of them in a short period of time. There is no room for anyone in a regime that Erdogan is building except Islamists. Not Kurds, not Gulenists, not Alawites nor Kemalists.

It is not really about the mass crackdown on Turkish opponents. This is someone who believes that he is the leader of the Islamic world and that he is the chosen one. Considering Turkey’s power, the danger is grave enough that we cannot ignore.

Vulgar analysis

Does the reaction to the Manchester bombing show a change from the usual claptrap? Terry Glavin thinks so:

At the time of the London bombings, Jeremy Corbyn, then just a boring, offside Labour MP, joined with London Mayor Ken Livingstone (recently suspended from the Labur Party for his dalliances with anti-Semitism) and the disgraced former Labour MP George Galloway (a fancier of Syrian genocidaire Bashar Assad and a Hezbollah enthusiast) in blaming the London attack on Western foreign policy.

Corbyn is now the leader of a bitterly divided and vastly diminished Labour Party that is expected to be trounced by Prime Minister Theresa May in the June 8 parliamentary elections. You won’t hear Corbyn blaming the wicked former U.S. president George W. Bush for Monday night’s outrage in Manchester. It would be suicidal. Things have changed.

The Manchester massacre occurred four years to the day after Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers was butchered by “lone wolf” jihadists in the streets of Woolwich. Rigby’s throat was opened with a crude knife and he was nearly decapitated, with a meat cleaver. As recently as 2013, it was still fashionable to utter imbecilities lightening such murderers’ burden of guilt by resort to the “blowback” defence.

At the time, the famous American fantasist/documentarian Michael Moore declared that Rigby’s slaughter was understandable, because Westerners “kill people in other countries.”

This sort of vulgar “analysis” has been largely excised from respectable conversation and appears now to be confined to the sewers of public debate, where it belongs. On Tuesday, the Kremlin propaganda channel RT News found some “experts” who took up the line. So did the viciously homophobic and anti-Semitic British Hizb ut-Tahrir group, which is about as popular among British Muslims as Galloway is among Britain’s Labour Party MPs....

Another stupidity that was once considered a clever response to jihadist terror in “dar al-harb” was to point out that more North Americans (or Europeans) die from falling in their bathtubs than by getting killed by terrorists. It’s probably true. But bathtubs have not happily slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Muslims in recent years, and bathtubs have not deliberately murdered more than 400 people in horrific attacks in Europe since 2015.

The scores of hideous mass murder plots successfully foiled by European authorities over the past two years were not being plotted by bathtubs. Britain’s MI5 is currently monitoring 3,000 extremely dangerous jihad hobbyists. French intelligence agencies are trying to keep tabs on about 15,000.

The people of Manchester are not unfamiliar with the horrible implications of “radicalization” among young Muslim men. The Muslim leadership in that city has been acutely concerned with the implications of jihadist recruitment and grooming for some long while.

Throughout Europe and North America, we seem to be finally shedding a lot of sappy platitudes and bigoted hysteria about the problem. Manchester is showing us how it’s done.