Harry's Place

Who’s being decorated by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh for services to the terrorist group?

It’s Kevin Ovenden, a trustee of Viva Palestina, yesterday at a convoy ceremony hosted by Hamas in Gaza.

Haniyeh was grateful for the support:

“The arrival of the Viva Palestina Lifeline 5 convoy, organized by the UK-based charity Viva Palestina, in Gaza is a blow to the Israeli siege and international organizations which remain silent,” Haniyeh said on Friday.

He further pointed out that the convoy “represents condemnation of the [UN] Security Council and the international community, which remain quiet on the siege. It carries support for the Palestinian position of holding onto their land and rights.”

“There will be no recognition of a Jewish state, because the occupation is void,” he noted.

And who’s the bearded man with the brown cloak in the pictures? It’s Mahmoud Zahar, a notorious Hamas hardliner. His line during the Gaza war was this: kill Jewish kids anywhere in the world.

Fighting intensified on the northern outskirts of Gaza City yesterday as a Hamas leader warned that the Islamists would kill Jewish children anywhere in the world in revenge for Israel’s devastating assault.

“They have legitimised the murder of their own children by killing the children of Palestine,” Mahmoud Zahar said in a televised broadcast recorded at a secret location. “They have legitimised the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people.”

In an earlier ceremony in Rafah, the convoy was welcomed by another Hamas leader, Ahmed Youssef. You can see him at the podium in the picture below.

Youssef too approves of murdering civilians. You can see him at it in this BBC interview, where he justifies a Hamas attack on settlers in the West Bank. One of the murdered was a pregnant woman. The aim of the attack was to disrupt the latest round of peace talks.

You see, he knows how evil the Jews are. They even did 9/11:

Anyone who considers the events of 9/11 cannot say that the Muslims gained anything. There’s another dimension, which some people may have noticed. No one could have captured the pictures [of the attacks] so perfectly except for the cameras in the hands of several Mossad agents, who were near the scene of events and succeeded in filming the scene so that it will always serve Zionism to remind the world of the Arabs’ and Muslims’ crimes against America. These pictures were filmed very expertly, so that they would be a constant reminder to America and the Western world that Islamic terrorism is a threat to their culture, their ideals, and their values.”

Host: “Regardless of who the perpetrators were…”

Yousuf: “Today, there is much evidence casting doubt on the ability of these Muslims, with their meager means, to carry out such an operation, and there are others… Who profited from this operation more than the Zionist movement? Since the end of the Cold War, Israel has been trying to attain a position that would allow it to direct American policy, because Israel found it impossible to confront the Islamic enterprise and the Islamic resistance. Therefore, it had to drag America into the region. This was the grand scheme – and American right-wing forces may have participated in it, and evangelical Christians agreed to it. All of them agreed that this scheme should be carried out in this way in order to push America into war.

Going back to the picture, smirking behind Mr Youssef is Muhammad Sawalha, one of the most important Hamas operatives in Britain. He wants to annihilate Israel:

“We will always be ready to come to Gaza because Gaza leads the international struggle for freedom and deliverance from [the control of] Zionism. Victory and dismantlement of the racist state are near,” Sawalha said. “

Will anything be done about Viva Palestina repeatedly breaking sanctions law by funding Hamas?

Of course not. The UK is a great hub for terrorist finance and the Charity Commission is determined to do absolutely nothing about it.

Meanwhile Viva Palestina has the backing of the so-called Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), which has a contingent of its own on the convoy. So does the trade union Unite.

And on November 2, according to the PSC, Viva Palestina will be hosted in Westminster by Labour MP Andy Slaughter.

Why doesn’t Mr Slaughter start that session with an inspirational video.

Gene adds: There were reports that during the 2008-09 Gaza war, Hamas raided UN humanitarian convoys and sold the goods to the highest bidders. What guarantee is there that Hamas will not seek to profit from this latest aid?

The Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez at Generation Y has a nice tribute to Guillermo Fariñas, winner of the 2010 Sakharov prize from the European Parliament.

A former member of an Interior Ministry paramilitary unit who fought in Angola, he broke with the government after the 1989 execution of Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa on drug smuggling charges. He has been jailed three times and staged two dozen earlier hunger strikes to protest various government actions.

The European parliament awarded the prize, named after the late Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov, to Cuban activist Oswaldo Payá in 2002 and in 2005 to the Ladies in White — female relatives of political prisoners.

Fariñas ended a 135-day hunger strike in July after the Cuban government agreed to free 52 political prisoners.

I have no idea if she knows what she’s talking about, but Anne Applebaum, a London-based columnist for The Washington Post, says the French and the British are living up to their national stereotypes in their respective reactions to their governments’ austerity plans: that is to say, the French are taking to the streets as they so often have done in the past, while the British “have stiffened their upper lips.”

Socialist Workers Party members in the UK will be pleased to know that Applebaum mentioned their newspaper while downplaying the British reaction to the government’s massive spending cuts.

After Osborne’s budget speech, protesters did gather here outside Downing Street. They looked suspiciously fringe, however, and many waved signs advertising the Socialist Worker, a newspaper nobody reads.

Finally, recognition in a major American newspaper! Well done, comrades.

From my perspective as an American, and from what I’ve been able to glean, the British have much more cause to be protesting than the French. Raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 doesn’t seem so intolerable, especially when people are living much longer and healthier lives than they once did. But Applebaum says the French reaction has a basis in other recent events:

For most of the past year, scandal has dominated the French media: ministers who spend government money on expensive cigars and private jets, rich widows who misplace their Picassos and hide their money in tax shelters, accountants who stuff envelopes with cash for bribes. With politicians behaving like so many Marie Antoinettes, is it any wonder voters object to being told they must work harder?

By contrast, the British budget cuts are being carried out by a recently elected government, one that hasn’t been in office long enough to be caught up in financial scandal. More important, it’s a coalition government, made up of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, two parties with very different voter bases. Conservative conservatives don’t like everything about this arrangement and neither do liberal Liberal Democrats. But the pool of people whose sympathies lie one way or another is much broader, and thus the number of people who will accept budget cuts — however resentfully — is broader, too.

As we Americans say: is Applebaum in the ballpark?

This is a guest post by Amjad Khan

Over the last few years, entry level Islamist organisations, certain sections of the far-left, and a handful of academics and policy wonks have been advocating a theory, now commonly referred to as ‘Lambertism’, named after it’s most vocal proponent, Robert Lambert. This theory essentially advocates governments building closer ties with non-violent Islamist groups and hard-core Wahabis in an effort to defeat violent Islamist extremists. In essence, let’s work with non-violent extremists to defeat violent extremists. Advocates of this approach would argue that non-violent extremists are best placed to deal with violent extremists. In this article I hope to explore some of the implications of this approach and the motivations behind some of those advocating it.

Firstly, this approach is based on a high degree of moral relativism and those advocating it obviously have very low expectations for Muslims. There are many Muslims who are not Islamists nor Wahabis who can be used to tackle violent extremists and are highly capable of doing so. Why are they being ignored and side-lined? Lambertism assumes that all Muslims are extreme in one form or another so they just pick the best of a bad bunch. It’s as if they think ‘we can’t expect those backward Muslims to live up to universal human rights standards’. Again this completely undermines and alienates genuinely moderate Muslims who don’t view their faith as their primary identity marker and don’t wish to use their religion as a political tool.

Secondly, this approach is very colonial. Fighting extremism is about uniting people under common decent values and challenging those who seek to divide and cause tensions in communities. It is not about playing a chess game, where human rights and common decency are trampled on in the pursuit of short-term gain. This is exactly the game that was playing in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in British India in the 19th century and on both occasions it proved a spectacular failure.

Thirdly, it just doesn’t work. Non-violent extremists in many cases galvanise their violent fringe by confirming their worldview. Let’s not forgot that it is non-violent extremists who spawned violent extremists in the first place. Jihadism is merely a symptom of the failure of Islamists to achieve power. So do we really want to be mainstreaming Islamist thought when we know that there will always be a minority who will seek to achieve the vision through more violent methods? Promoting Islamism increases the pool from which violent extremists recruit.

In short this theory is akin to saying let’s fund and support the BNP because they are best placed to deal with more violent far-right extremism. What Lambertists fail to understand is that the threat we are facing from the likes of al-Qaeda, is not only problematic because it is often violent. Yes that is a key factor and makes most people take notice. We are involved in a battle of ideas. On one hand you have those that seek to suppress and subjugate all others through a theocratic state that doesn’t tolerate diversity of belief or lifestyle. And on the other hand you have those who are seeking to foster pluralistic, liberal and democratic societies. Also this is a struggle that has been taking place in the Muslim world for almost a century now and we in the West can’t afford to lend support to the regressive strand and alienate those moderate Muslims around the world who are struggling for freer, open and pluralistic societies.

So who on earth is advocating this insane approach? Essentially we are dealing with three types of people.

Firstly, non-violent extremists themselves, who are seeking government support and acceptance in the hope of mainstreaming their ideology. Secondly, loonies, sometimes with a background in far-left politics, who in some cases are funded directly by Islamist groups to spout this nonsense. Those on the far-left also believe that Islamists are their bosom-buddies in their struggle against the evil capitalist world order. They obviously don’t realise that they will perhaps be the first to be persecuted under an Islamist state, as happened in Iran in the 1980s. And thirdly, lazy colonially minded civil servants who can’t be bothered to reach out to mainstream Muslims beyond London. Such civil servants generally hold lower expectations for Muslims in general and adopt what has been referred to as the ‘zoo complex’, i.e. they view Muslims as ‘good monkeys’ and ‘bad monkeys’ rather than full citizens. Hence, they feel they should empower the ‘good monkeys’ since we can’t expect Muslims to be normal just like us. They are also generally clueless about this whole area and don’t really care since they will be given a different portfolio in a few months time.

All in all, this approach is racist, lazy, colonial and ineffective. Instead of preventing violent extremism it actually makes it more likely and galvanises support for the far-right and all those who promote the thesis that Europe is being over-run by marauding Muslims. All advocates should hang their heads in shame.

Expect to hear much more about this over the coming months.

As Hugo Chavez completes yet another fraternal visit with Ahmadinejad in Iran and moves on to yet another fraternal visit with Assad in Syria, yet another collaboration is scheduled in London between Khomeinists, “Palestine Solidarity” types and officials of the Bolivarian Republic.

Entitled “The Outbreak of the Intifada: Turning Back the Empire,” the event– scheduled for November 6 at the Venezuelan embassy– celebrates the tenth anniversary of Arafat-approved outbreak of violence which for years eliminated any possibility of a negotiated settlement leading to a Palestinian state.

The panel of speakers is:

*Leila Khaled [retired plane hijacker] (20min video talk exclusive and specific to this event)

*Statement of support from Venezuelan Ambassador – Samuel Moncada

*George Galloway

*Massoud Shedrajeh (Islamic Human Rights Commission)

*chair – Sukant Chandan

You may remember Massoud Shedrajeh from this video. Asked about the brutal government repression against the opposition in Iran, he replies with a smirk, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The announcement of the event warns: “The organisers reserve the right to eject anyone causing distress or disruption to the event. There will be friendly but firm security at the event.”

Which is a bit ironic, considering that the chair of the event, Sukant Chandan, was among those who caused distress and disruption at a Gil Scott-Heron concert last April.

Hands up all of those who unconditionally condemn all Palestinian terrorist organisations. Now, hands up all of those who praise what others refer to as a terrorist organisations as “freedom fighters” in a just battle against imperialism.

Below, I copy the full text of an advertisement, written by Ben Hecht, a famous American screenwriter and novelist, that was published on page 42 of the May 14, 1947 edition of the New York Post.  The text of this advertisement caused a controversy. The British Ambassador to Washington informed the State Department that the British government viewed the advertisement as an incitement to murder British officials in Palestine. (New York Times, May 20, 1947.)

Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine

My Brave Friends,

You may not believe what I write you, for there is a lot of fertilizer in the air at the moment. But, on my word as an old reporter, what I write is true.  The Jews of America are for you.

You are their champions.

You are the grin they wear.

You are the feather in their hats

In the past fifteen hundred years every nation of Europe has taken a crack at the Jews.

This time the British are at bat. You are the first answer that makes sense—to the New world. Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts. Not all the Jews, of course. The only time the Jews present a United Front is when they lie piled by the millions in the massacre pits. I shenck you this front. I like yours better.

Historically, the corpses of the Jews are very impressive as to numbers. But they are not a monument to Jewish valor. They are a monument only to the brutality of the Europeans who piled them up. The Jews of America are for you because the corpse of an Irgun soldier is a unique and very high class type of Jewish corpse. The corpse of Dov Gruner hanging from a British gallows is not a monument to the British brutality that strangled him. It is a monument to the Hebrew valor that fights for a home- land of its own—and for the dignity of all Jews such as myself who have a homeland elsewhere. Read more »

This is a must read article for all Labour Party members and supporters.

Here is an extract:

But I was reminded of why Labour needed to be out there when I was sent off to get out the vote with a young third generation Bengali girl. I learned how she had been sent to a pupil referral unit, but had sorted herself out and now had ambitions to go to college or university. With her beehive hair, long nails, fags and attitude, she was like many teenage girls. As we turned onto a new street suddenly she called in alarm and explained that she couldn’t be seen walking along there smoking a cigarette. “They’re traditionalist round here”, she explained taking lots of puffs and stubbing it on the pavement. “Women like me shouldn’t be smoking”. The traditionalists, she said, “take one look at me with my clothes and my hair and don’t think I’m proper Bengali”. I felt like I’d been transported back to the 1960s and my feminist blood boiled.

Later on I listened to a call she made to a friend. “I’m with two whites, and I’m sick of the dirts I’m getting from all the Asian men”, she said. I self-consciously enquired why it was a problem for her to be seen with white people and she said it just wasn’t the done thing. As I looked around I noticed it was true. Everywhere we walked she got daggers and I was overcome with second wavism.

So did Lutfur Rahman represent the traditionalist view in this election, I asked? She nodded and said that was why she was campaigning for Labour. It certainly gave me extra reason to keep marching up those last few staircases of the knock-up.

Also, read David Prescott who calls for Ken Livingstone to be suspended from the Labour Party:

This is a defining moment. You want a Clause 4, Ed?  Ken’s just given you one.

Finally, this Lutfur Rahman leaflet illustrates why Lord Ahmed has no future in the Labour Party.

This is a cross-post from Student Rights

On the FOSIS London calendar, we can see that their ‘Isoc Revolution’ event took place at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) last week. With very little information about the event besides ‘equipping Islamic societies to build a mini-Ummah on campuses‘ — we thought we’d try and find out just what kind of revolution FOSIS are planning.

SOAS Islamic Society hosted Muhammed Al-Shareef just yesterday at ‘The Leadership Attitude’. Due to these events being so close in time (just a week apart) and on the very same campus, we’ll use this as an example. The audience will of course be similar at both events.

Again, with very few details about what the speaker will be discussing, we’re left to do some digging ourselves about Muhammed Al-Shareef and draw conclusions from his previous speeches. This leads us to the AlMaghrib Institute, founded by Al-Shareef and providing speakers such as Abdullah Hakim Quick, described by AlMaghrib as, “one of our greatest additions to the AlMaghrib Instructor lineup, an addition that has grabbed the attention of people worldwide.” Read more »

This is a press release from Peter Tatchell

The Quilliam Foundation’s latest briefing paper, Radicalisation on British University Campuses:  A case study, cites incidents at City University in London during the last academic year (September 09 – June 10) to show how a mainstream academic institution in the UK can become an incubator for extremist, intolerant and potentially violent forms of the political ideology of Islamism.

Links to an executive summary and the full report are listed below. Read more »

Read Luke Akehurst’s take on yesterday’s victory by the Islamic Forum Europe candidate, Lutfur Rahman.

In particular, he asks the following questions:

Some questions for people to comment on:

• How does Labour (or any of the other parties) stop itself being used as a playground for rehearsing communal faction fights that are nothing to do with Labour politics, or as a vehicle for well-organised ethnic or faith communities to take over and seize control of local authorities and their resources?
• How do we tackle communalism – the unhealthy and undemocratic practice of people voting along ethnic or faith lines rather than judging parties and candidates on their policies and merits?
• How do we give democratic selection rights to genuine party members in a local context where organised groups are “branch-stacking” and trying to buy their way to victory?
• What action can we take to ensure Ken sticks to the same rules and basics of behaviour that every other Labour member has to? (It’s our fault – we readmitted him – which I argued against at the time – knowing he was Labour only when it suited him)
• Given London Labour members have picked Ken as Mayoral candidate so he’s the only one we’ve got, how do we rebuild his relationship with a loyalist activist base in Tower Hamlets and the wider London Party who will now feel extremely reluctant to go out and work to get him elected?

I’m keen to know what people think as this will be a big issue at the next NEC meeting on 30 November. Read more »