I remember a few years ago I was asked to contribute to a paper about about citizenship and identity (can’t remember who for, now), and I looked at how other western democracies dealt with multiculturalism.

One of my main points was that whatever a country does, it should avoid being like Germany – where immigrants were deliberately excluded from being Germans for decades.

Under previous German law, children born to foreigners in Germany were not entitled to German citizenship[citation needed] because the law was based on jus sanguinis, in other words on a blood connection. This was modified in 1991 and in 1999 German citizenship law recognised jus soli whereby people born in Germany could now claim citizenship.[86] In 2000, legislation was passed which conferred German citizenship on the German-born children of foreigners (born after 1990), and the naturalisation process was made easier, though dual citizenship is still not tolerated and any person possessing it by virtue of birth to foreign parents must choose between the ages of 18 and 23 which citizenship she or he wishes to retain, and forfeit the other

And now Angela Merkel, desperately trying to shore up her dire political situation, claims that German multicultural society has failed.

Well blow me down with a feather. You treat Turks like second-class citizens for most of their lives and then you expect them to integrate?

I wonder if this has anything to do with the German Greens now polling nearly as much as the ruling [Merkel's] CDU party.
hat tip @ImanQureshi

News agencies are reporting that Angelina Jolie has been been banned from filming in Bosnia-Hercegovina.  Rumours about Jolie’s latest film project, first  printed in Variety, have been reported in Bosnia-Hercegovina and have inflamed women’s groups.  The government has quickly taken the opportunity to use rape victims to express their outrage.

Now, I haven’t read the script of Jolie’s film, and neither has anybody else outside the project so all I can do when looking at this story is consider the backgrounds of both parties.

Jolie has supported human rights all around the world.  She is  a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR and has visited refugee camps in many countries, including Bosnia-Hercegovina and talked to thousands of victims.  Jolie has used her position to highlight injustice, and her money to help.  Obviously she could have now decided to make an incredibly insensitive film about victims of rape.  The producers say not – “The stories about the film which have recently been circulated are incorrect.”

The government of Bosnia Hercegovina don’t even know how many victims of rape are in their country.  The victims of rape or the children who were conceived from rape have never been supported in any meaningful way.  In 2002 rape victims were offered monentary compensation.  The victims of rape camps were offered half the amount of the victims of war camps.  Because they had been ignored for so many years there were ‘problems’:

“In a traditional society with a huge stigma attached to rape it is unusual for women to report it, and at a later stage it is difficult to establish it medically,” says Slobodan Nagradic, Deputy Minister for Human Rights and Refugees. “So now women are coming forward and we have no way of knowing if they have really been raped or not. There are no living eyewitnesses and 10 to 12 years later it is difficult to establish the authenticity of these women’s claims. Many are very poor and may just be doing it for the money.”

There are ‘living eyewitnesses’ – the women and men themselves.  The victims who live in poverty as a result of being cast out or as a result of their injuries, both physical and psychological.  A very tiny proportion of rape victims receive this compensation.

Marijana Senjak, a psychologist working for the NGO Medica in Zenica, which assists women who have been abused, says ‘ A lot of politicians have taken advantage of the women’s plight and used the issues of war rape for their own ends. The state has done nothing to organise a unified response to women’s needs.

“It has used war rape as a political tool and a means to get money, nothing else.’

The government of Bosnia-Hercegovina are grasping at straws trying to defend rape victims.  If this film is insensitive to rape victims then Jolie will be judged on that – we have to wait and see.  We already have the evidence of how Bosnian rape victims have been ‘living’ for the last 15 years.

H/T: Women’s Views On News

Last night I noted that a BBC story on Migration Watch’s latest “report” on how foreign students were going to place considerable “strain” on our education system didn’t bother with any balance at all. It just regurgitated the MW press release and contained only their comment.

By this morning, the report had been updated to include a comment by Tim Finch of ippr. There’s a rebuttal here by Phillipe Legrain:

1) By using cumulative figures. If you add up spending on anything over a long period of time, it looks much bigger than it really is. Using a single year’s statistics, 2009, and MW’s deeply flawed methodology, the cost of schooling the children of migrants who have arrived since 1998 is £4.6 billion, out of an education budget of £88 billion.

2) By counting children who have one parent who was born abroad as half due to migration. Since Nick Clegg has a Spanish wife, they include half the cost of educating their kids as being due to migration. Excluding that dodogy use of statistics, the cost in 2009 falls to £3.6bn.

3) By ignoring the taxes that migrants pay. Research by the Home Office, IPPR, Christian Dustmann at UCL and others show that migrants pay more in taxes than they take out in benefits and public services. Allowing for that, it is not UK-born taxpayers who are paying to educate migrants’ children, it is migrants who are subsidising the education of the children of people born in the UK.

Will you see any of this basic analysis in the BBC report? Of course not. Their job is to just convert press releases into stories, and let others offer soundbites. The BBC’s reporting has become a joke.

Update Actually it gets worse. Full Fact report:

Moreover, MigrationWatch say that their figures are based on “the ‘principal projection’ by ONS of UK population over the period 2008 – 2033, projects a total of births of 19.8 million, of which 2.3 million are projected to occur, directly or indirectly, because of net migration”.

But after much searching and head-scratching, Full Fact was unable to discover any ONS projections which broke down predicted birth rates by the parents’ place of birth.

A call to the ONS confirmed that no such statistics exist: “”We certainly don’t publish population projection data by country of migrant or any kind of ethnic background,” said a spokesperson, “the sums themselves won’t have been done by us.”

But you wouldn’t get the BBC report pointing that out either, because they can’t actually be bothered to ask some basic questions.

The Independent have picked up the Sharia Council leader story I blogged yesterday. I hope the Muslim cleric has to resign – his views blatantly contradict UK law and should not be tolerated by an authority that claims to dispense justice.

All manner of people constantly cite voting records to justify their outrage. In some cases this is relevant, in many other cases it’s not.

Yesterday, not a single Libdem MP voted for PR. You might look at their voting record and think – why would they vote against PR, it’s absurd! The amendment was put forward by Caroline Lucas, who wanted PR on the referendum question. But Nick Clegg had made a deal with Cameron so the only question on the ballot would be for AV. And so you have the bizarre scenario of Libdems voting against the one thing they’ve always been steadfastly for.

Another example. I went to a public meeting yesterday where Caroline Lucas gave a short speech. She said the Westminster amendments and voting system was archaic and confusing (not to her, but outsiders). She pointed out that sometimes people would table amendments to a specific bill. But there was no guarantee it would be debated or voted on – that was entirely under the discretion of the person in charge of dealing with amendments. They could let through completely irrelevant amendments while ignoring important ones, they didn’t even have to give a reason.

Furthermore, she said, you could have several things attached to each other. So a vote on spending more on renewable energy could be coupled with another amendment for investing more in nuclear energy. And so you couldn’t vote for one while voting against the other – you had to vote on them together. And if you didn’t vote, then it looked like you couldn’t be bothered to turn up to Parliament to vote.

The point I’m making here is that people who use voting records as an indicator of what that person thinks, or will do in the future really annoy me. It is embarrassing to watch people make that argument.

This is astounding. The excellent blog The Samosa have done an interview with the head of the UK’s Islamic Sharia Council, Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed. Note – this isn’t an official body, they just call themselves that. Nevertheless, they do handle case where both parties have agreed to have their civil dispute dealt with by a Shariah court in the UK.

Chaminda Jayanetti reports:

I asked Sheikh Sayeed whether he considered non-consensual marital sex to be rape. “No,” he replied. “Clearly there cannot be any ‘rape’ within the marriage. Maybe ‘aggression’, maybe ‘indecent activity’.”

He said it was “not Islamic” to classify non-consensual marital sex as rape and prosecute offenders, adding that “to make it exactly as the Western culture demands is as if we are compromising Islamic religion with secular non-Islamic values.”

The Islamic Sharia Council handles very few cases of alleged marital rape – Sheikh Sayeed said there had only been two or three such cases since the Council was founded in 1982. It is therefore unlikely that the Council’s views on this issue, or those of Sheikh Sayeed himself, directly impact upon a significant number of marital rape victims.

He claims there have only been two or three cases, but there may have been more, which are quietly buried. And this is the problem I have with Shariah courts: unless they at least mirror national criminal and civil law on the important issues, there will be abuses like this.

A Muslim woman raped within marriage, especially one afraid to go to the police or to courts, could be pressured to just go to a Sharia court where the offence may be buried. And who would know or do anything about it?

Sayeed goes on to say:

Because within the marriage contract it is inherent there that man will have sexual intercourse with his wife. Of course, if he does something against her wish or in a bad time etc, then he is not fulfilling the etiquettes, not that he is breaching any code of sharia – he is not coming to that point. He may be disciplined, and he may be made to ask forgiveness. That should be enough.

I’m sorry but regardless of his interpretation of Islamic law – British law is clear that even within marriage, a man does not have automatic right to have non-consensual sex with his wife. Such a stance is in blatant contradiction of British law. The head of the Sharia Council needs to resign.

These are the people who came to the streets to oppose the English Defence League in Leicester last weekend.
A marked contrast, don’t you think? (organised by Hope Not Hate and One Leicester)

In response to the Andrew Marr comments, I think there is only thing to say:

It’s a curious remark coming from a journalist who used the ‘rumours on the internet’ excuse when asking Gordon Brown if he was popping pills. Marr clearly reads political blogs and even absorbs the rumours. So it’s absurd to turn around and caricature them now.

And that I love drinking and blogging. #longlivewhisky

Glenn Greenwald:

In 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld commissioned a task force to study what causes Terrorism, and it concluded that “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies”: specifically, “American direct intervention in the Muslim world” through our “one sided support in favor of Israel”; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, “the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan” (the full report is here).

Now, a new, comprehensive study from Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor and former Air Force lecturer, substantiates what is (a) already bleedingly obvious and (b) known to the U.S. Government for many years: namely, that the prime cause of suicide bombings is not Hatred of Our Freedoms or Inherent Violence in Islamic Culture or a Desire for Worldwide Sharia Rule by Caliphate, but rather. . . . foreign military occupations

The report is summarised by Laura Rozen at Politico. She says:

Pape and his team of researchers draw on data produced by a six-year study of suicide terrorist attacks around the world that was partially funded by the Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. They have compiled the terrorism statistics in a publicly available database comprised of some 10,000 records on some 2,200 suicide terrorism attacks, dating back to the first suicide terrorism attack of modern times – the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 U.S. Marines.
…
Based on his findings, Pape does not advocate a “cut and run,” precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, but what he calls “off-shore balancing.” In Afghanistan, he recommends a two-to-three-year plan, that would in the first year freeze the number of U.S. forces in the country while intensifying political and economic development efforts in particular in Afghanistan’s Pashtun south and east, followed by a U.S. military drawdown over two to three years — similar to the strategy in Iraq.

I tell you I’m absolutely shocked.

The Guardian reports:

The Heritage Lottery Fund and Boris Johnson today announced £5m funding for a centre for black history and culture in Brixton, south London.

The lottery fund will provide £4m and the mayor of London £1m under the plans to develop the Black Cultural Archives.

Johnson said he was pleased to support the development of the centre, “which will house a wealth of historical material about the contribution of black people to British society. It will be a wonderful new cultural centre for London, but also for the UK, giving scholars a greater understanding of our country’s rich heritage and inspiring people of all ages and communities.”

I’ve said before that essentially, for all his libertarian-right talk, Boris Johnson is quite centrist. And so he has continued celebrating multiculturalism in London through Diwali in the Square, Eid in the Square, Vaisakhi in the square etc. And now this.
Can’t wait to see what the wingnuts make of this. A bit of rage at Boris from the right would be hilarious.

From the EDL demo/riot in Leicester. Thanks to @SamTarry

Reading the Sunday Times Money section, I was surprised to learn that not only is the East India Company still trading, but that it is owned by an British-based Indian, Sanjiv Mehta. Mr Mehta bought the rights to the name in February, and currently runs the East India Company as a shop selling luxury items.

Mr Mehta claims to have bought the name in part because of brand awareness- according to one survey over two billion people had heard of the East India Company. Given its involvement in, amongst others things, the 1770 Bengal famine (millions dead) and the opium trade, I am not so sure it is a particularly good brand to have. Nevertheless, it does bring to mind the old adage about India ultimately absorbing its conquerors.

An article in the Observer today by Jon Cruddas says: English Defence League is a bigger threat than the BNP:

A thousand English Defence League supporters protested in Leicester yesterday, the latest in a wave of anti-Muslim activity across the country.

Last week, 40 EDL followers protested for three days outside a KFC restaurant in Blackburn which was trialling halal meat. A fortnight before, 30 EDL followers in Gateshead held an impromptu demonstration outside a police station after six of their friends were arrested for burning the Qur’an; a similar number attacked a leftwing meeting in Newcastle. On the anniversary of 9/11, there were EDL actions in London, Nuneaton, Leeds and Oldham.

The EDL is a much bigger threat than the BNP, consumed by infighting and debt since its crushing defeat in May’s local elections. It also poses the biggest danger to community cohesion in Britain today. Its provocative marches, “flash demos” and pickets are designed to whip up divisions between communities and provoke a violent reaction from young British Muslims.

The rise of the English Defence League, Jon Cruddas rightly contends, is a result of increasing disconnection and confusion about national identities.

He says the left must get organised. True. But first the left must also recognise that national identities matter, and we’re going through a flux in identity, which gives rise to these people.

The problem, for me as well as people like Jon, is that we’re then faced with lefties who are uncomfortable with old-left notions of community and solidarity, and want to blame everything on capitalism.

So I’ll be intrigued to see where Jon Cruddas takes this. All this confirms the point I’ve always made: that identity politics (whether class or race) has been integral to British politics for centuries. The rise of the EDL is merely the latest reincarnation.

An Israeli driver runs down a masked Palestinian youth, standing amongst a group of children throwing stones at Israeli cars in Silwan, a neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. NYTimes

Channel 4 have come under heavy fire after announcing the screening of a drama showing Prince Harry being kidnapped by the Taliban and forced to take part in propaganda videos. Some of the criticism is misplaced, as it is unlikely to give succour to the Taliban, or make a kidnap attempt on Prince Harry more likely. The problem is that Prince Harry is a real person.

There is no problem per se with a drama showing a fictional soldier being kidnapped. It is topical, it happens, and is something which needs to be exposed. The issue is that Prince Harry is real. Take a similar type of drama; let’s say a programme focused on the rape of a woman and the subsequent aftermath. If the person was fictional, it might be defensible. It would show viewers the brutality of rape, the lack of support the woman faces in the aftermath, how her friends and family react, and the physical and psychological damage.

Now imagine if Channel Four gave the previously-fictional rape victim a real identity, and the programme followed the rape of Theresa May, the Home Secretary. Ms. May would not have given consent for this, yet the programme would imagine, in graphic detail, what it would be liked if she was raped and the aftermath. Not that I am try to say that rape and kidnapping are equal (drawing equivalence between crimes, particularly one as horrific as rape, is always dangerous), but rather I wanted to use it as example to show how wrong the programme is.

This is more an observation that needed to be written down somewhere. A couple of days ago right-wing loon Guido Fawkes said this in a blog-post about Sadiq Khan:

With the rise of Red Ed, his most loyal follower looks set to be rewarded. His extremist views rule him out of the FCO, and quite extraordinarily, Labour are talking about putting another expenses cheat in the Home Office brief.

Extremist views? So I actually bothered to follow the link. It said:

Khan’s outspoken foreign policy views rule him out of the FCO or defence. In a message to Ed Miliband supporters during the campaign Khan said Britain needed to support “a more independent foreign policy”, the subtext of which is in line with his rant last year that the UK’s relationship with the US was “poison”.

The “rant” turned out to be him pointing out that drone attacks on civilians in Pakistan was turning people against the US military. Shock horror! God forbid the UK might have its own foreign policy objectives independent of the US. Clearly the words of an extreeeeeemist! He’s brown, he’s Muslim: the E-word comes easy to smear merchants like P Staines.

I only point this out because some of these things have a bad habit of becoming received wisdom without anyone know how it originated and from where. Now that Sadiq is elected to the shadow cabinet, I hope he gets a strong shadow portfolio like Home Affairs, Justice or even the FCO. Results our later today. The Labour Uncut site have tipped him as one to potentially replacing Ed as potential leader of the party. I’ll drink to that.

Update: Sadiq Khan is rewarded with the post of shadow Lord Chancellor and justice secretary. He will also be responsible for shadowing Nick Clegg over his constitutional and political reform programme. Excellent stuff.

Via One Day On Earth & Human Rights Watch:

On October 10th, Human Rights Watch asks you to help us put a face to the human rights issue that confront us. Take the day to reflect on what human rights mean to you, and to society in general, and make a video that expresses your vision. Footage that you create will potentially be used in a feature film, as well as a short film created for Human Rights Watch and will live in perpetuity on One Day in Earth’s global archive.

Guidelines
1. Consider the question: what makes us human? Is it your ability to express yourself? To make decisions? To love? To vote? To go to school? To ask officials for help without paying a bribe, regardless of your ethnic group or religion? To express your gender or sexual orientation freely? What’s most important to you?

2. Answer this question to camera. Consider placing yourself in a location relevant to your answer.

3. Feel free to go further. Visually document the basic human rights that you enjoy, or the human rights that are being denied to you, or to others. Seek out images or interviews related to the topic of human rights.

Might be a fun thing to do with the kids on a rainy Sunday.  Unicef UK has a range of resources about human rights on it’s website as part of their Rights Respecting Schools Award initiative.

I’d encourage people to listen to this. James Pinkerton is a conservative, but an extremely idiosyncratic one. He was anti-war for example and his ideas on economic development are interesting. Some of the arguments he makes on these points are probably in line with what lefties in the UK are/should be making.

by Iman Qureshi

Equating the Quran with Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf, calling Islam a “retarded” religion, and demanding a “head rag tax” are just a few examples of how Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, has succeeded in catching the attention of many media headlines, as well as a Dutch court.

Wilders, whose trial is set to resume this week, is facing five counts of giving religious offence and inciting hatred against Muslims—particularly those immigrant to the Netherlands which are of Moroccan origin—through his comments to the public and media, as well as his short film, Fitna, which can be viewed on YouTube:

Wilders’ arguments make the scaremongering right wing press in America look moderate. His appearance on Fox News is almost amusing in its juxtaposition of an interviewer who clearly agrees with Wilder on many issues, but doesn’t quite have the balls or endorsement to say so out loud.

Indeed, Wilders’ is acutely aware of his unconventional and outspoken discourse. He dismisses theories of multiculturalism, cultural relativism and political correctness. They have no place in a Western liberal-democratic society, he argues. And nor does Islam and its proponents.

Dr. Mitu Khurana, whose case Pickled Politics covered extensively here and here, is facing new obstacles in the fight to gain permanent custody of her two daughters, Guddu and Pari.

Dr. Mitu has been battling her husband and in-laws for years. Her troubles began when she refused to have an ultrasound (which is illegal in India due to the fear of female foeticide if the mother is found to be pregnant with girls); this upset her in-laws, who poisoned her and took her to a hospital in order to have the ultrasound done. When it was found she was pregnant with twin girls, she was pressured to have an abortion. She refused, and when they were born, she was expected to give them up for adoption. She did not want to, so her in-laws started conspiring against her, with her mother in-law pushing her then four month old daughter down the stars on one occasion.

Dr. Mitu eventually left the house with her daughters for good, and filed a complaint under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PC-PNDT) Act, the first individual to do so. Since then her in-laws have taken her to court in order to gain partial custody of her children, an action she believes is merely a ploy in order to get her to drop the complaint against them and the hospital. Numerous officials she has encountered have been unsympathetic or downright hostile. A high court judge even told her to reconcile with her husband and in-laws after they had tried to kill one of her daughters.

Now, with the court case dragging on, Dr. Mitu was shocked to find that her husband has applied to take custody of the now five-year old twins, whom Dr. Mitu is forced to bring to every court session (about once a month) for no apparent reason.

Rita Banerji has been coordinating a petition in support of Dr. Mitu.

Further to the recent PP article about the influential Fox News anchor Glenn Beck, there has been an interesting article in the New York Times providing more information about Beck’s background and his activities. As previously discussed on PP, his fellow Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly has described Beck as “the leader of the Tea Party movement”. The Tea Party itself has of course recently been exposed as being bankrolled & manipulated right from the start by the Right-wing billionaire Koch brothers, who have links to both the Republican Party and Fox News. Beck himself also has ties with the Republican politicians & potential 2012 presidential candidates Newt Gingrich (whose own racist remarks about President Obama were discussed on PP here) and Sarah Palin.

Readers are strongly advised to familiarise themselves with the previous PP article about Beck if they have not done so already. One of the best ways to further understand the various problems with Beck’s worldview and behaviour is to view footage from both his Fox News show and his various radio shows. Some of the following videos are very disturbing indeed.

1. Glenn Beck’s racist diatribe about Indians

He begins by attacking Indian doctors, and follows it with a lengthy bigotry-and-stereotype-riddled sneering rant about India itself, at one point even describing the River Ganges (sacred to hundreds of millions of Hindus) as a name that “sounds like a disease”.

Beck’s remarks may be placed into further context by the fact that he has unashamedly promoted viciously racist books by two Nazi-sympathising authors, one of whom (Elizabeth Dilling) not only attended Nazi party meetings in Germany along with speaking at rallies by Nazi groups in the US, but also described non-white, non-Christian people as “savages” along with calling Hinduism and Islam “debasing and degrading”. Beck himself has explicitly described Dilling as one of his ideological predecessors, ie. “people who were doing what we’re doing now”.

by Iman Qureshi

Probably around the time that then US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage infamously informed President Pervez Musharraf that he would bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if it didn’t comply with American demands, the following correspondence between the two countries, recently declassified and published by the National Security Archive on 13 September 2010, took place.

These documents reveal that the US voiced to Pakistan their refusal to engage in any discourse with the Taliban, and instead forge straight ahead with military action.

US Ambassador to Pakistan tells President Musharraf that “there was absolutely no inclination in Washington to enter into a dialogue with the Taliban.”

The US further put to Pakistan a list of seven non-negotiable demands:
1. To stop al Qaeda at the border;
2. Provide the US with blanket landing rights to conduct operations;
3. Provide territorial and naval access;
4. Provide intelligence;
5. Publicly condemn terrorist attacks;
6. Cut off recruits and supplies to the Taliban;
7. Break diplomatic relations with the Taliban and help the US destroy Osama Bin Laden.

This is how Andrew Buncombe introduces ‘Endhiran’:

In Mumbai, the print of his film was driven at dawn to a temple by horse-drawn carriage in order for it to be blessed. In Chennai, the 4am showing of the film sold out, forcing fans to hustle to get tickets for the 5am slot. In Milton Keynes, movie reviewers were charmed, and in the US, hard-to-get tickets were reportedly selling for up to $40 (£25).
…
This weekend, the 61-year-old veteran of more than 150 films is earning even more money. The star’s latest film, Endhiran – English title The Robot – opened to good reviews and huge, adoring crowds who queued overnight outside cinemas across the nation to watch the latest, high-adrenaline adventure. Inside, the audiences shouted and cheered at their hero’s unlikely moves while outside fireworks were set off and drums played.

But this movie is different for several reasons. Not only is it the most expensive Indian movie in history, costing around 1.6bn rupees (£23m), a vast sum for a film in this country even if it’s nothing compared to Hollywood. But the film was also simultaneously released globally at more than 2,000 cinemas, the largest ever distribution for an Indian film and a decision that underscores the star’s appeal with south Asian communities around the world.

Watch the trailer – it does look a bit insane, and worth watching just for the comedy value (PS, I can understand Hindi, but not a word of Telugu).