Mick Hartley

Total loyalty to the Communist Party

In the wake of the recent show of force by the People’s Liberation Army in Hong Kong, and the "new depths of cruelty" which Amnesty has accused the Chinese government of showing in its treatment of dying prisoner of conscience and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Terry Glavin looks at Beijing's increasingly despotic rule:

Three months ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has taken on greater dictatorial powers than any Chinese tyrant since Mao Zedong, instructed China’s major news organizations that the “news” they produce must express “total loyalty” to the Communist Party. A flurry of complaints was made to quickly disappear. The business magazine Caixin published three articles about censorship in a row, all deleted by Beijing’s censors.

On June 1, the new rules laid down by the Cyberspace Administration of China came into effect: editorial managers overseeing online media platforms — websites, web logs, discussion forums, search engines, messaging applications and news distribution — must be approved by Beijing. Editorial staff are to undergo training by central government authorities to ensure their party loyalty. June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre passed with little notice, because public discussion of the 1989 slaughter of demonstrators is banned. The microblogging site Weibo was cut off from the outside world for three days.

In Xinjiang, homeland of the Muslim Uyghurs — who are prohibited from growing long beards or giving their children overtly-pious Muslim names — the authorities ordered restaurants to remain open to discourage the practice of dawn-to-dusk fasting during the month of Ramadan. Xinjiang is like occupied Tibet, but without the Dalai Lama to plead its case.

Last week, Beijing banned any depictions of gay people in online videos, extending last year’s ban on any television depictions of same-sex relationships. Beijing’s censors consider homosexuality as “abnormal” as incest. Gay “conversion therapy” is commonplace in China, and the popular lesbian social media platform Rela was shut down.

Also last week, China’s culture ministry told the e-commerce and internet giants Alibaba and Tencent, along with the Baidu search engine, to shut down more than 200 mobile video platforms — it isn’t easy to monitor and censor “livestreaming” applications. A few days earlier, Beijing’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television ordered Weibo, iFeng and ACFUN to shut down all their video and audio streaming platforms. Weibo alone hosts 340 million users.

Following orders from Beijing, one of China’s biggest virtual private networks (VPNs), Green VPN, ceased its operations on Monday. Like other Chinese VPNs, Green was being used to access news and information on the free-world side of Beijing’s “Great Firewall,” like The New York Times and Facebook.

Last Friday, The Hong Kong Journalists Association issued its annual report, titled “Two systems under siege: Beijing turns the screws on Hong Kong media.” The HKJA noted that a flood of “red capital” into the media sector is, predictably, stifling honest journalism. Takeovers by mainland Chinese interests over the past year have placed eight of Hong Kong’s 26 major media organizations under Beijing-beholden ownership and control, determined to “muzzle dissenting voices.”

A Reporters Without Borders analysis released last week concluded that media freedom in the former British colony “has never been so low.” In the organization’s World Press Freedom Index, Hong Kong has fallen from 18th place in 2002 to 73rd place today....

Street view

Jacqui Kenny searches Google Street View for interesting pictures, looking especially for desert locations where the skies are blue and the world is bathed in a bleached hazy sunshine. She posts them on Instagram, at Agoraphobic Traveller. 

These are from the New Yorker:

Durango, Mexico.

Waiting at a Soviet-era bus stop, Issyk-Kul region, northeastern Kyrgyzstan.

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Guellaia, Medenine, Tunisia.

Sun City, Arizona.

Chasing the Google car, Tacna, Peru.

Tacna, Peru.

Bolivia.

Quilmana District, Lima, Peru.

Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Morning church

Road sweeper outside the Church of the Virgin Mary in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam:

[Photo © Tuan Nguyen Tan]

A man supported by and invited by UK left wing organisations has been unequivocally judged to be guilty of racist hate speech

An interesting development in the anti-Zionism/anti-semitism debate, from Jeff Samuels in the Times of Israel:

How often when you encounter thinly veiled or indeed naked anti-Semitism are you met with the riposte: “It is not anti-Semitic to be anti-Zionist; it is legitimate criticism of Israel; you are only raising the false charge to stifle debate/criticism of Israel or to smear the left”, and so ad nauseam? 

Well, a significant development occurred this week which may have a considerable bearing on the debate around these issues but has been met by near total obliviousness by friend and foe alike. The reason for the near silence in the press and on social media alike is unclear but maybe because it all occurred thousands of miles away from Israel, the UK and the US. 

On 29th June Mr. Justice Moshidi, a high court judge, sitting in the South African Equality Court delivered his judgement in what has been referred to as the Bongani Masuku case. Perhaps because it runs to 56 pages of largely legalistic discourse around the relevant legislation it has not made the impact it might otherwise have done.

As someone with a lifetime in the law behind him coupled with a comparably durable study of anti-Semitism i have been asked to assess the significance of the judgement in an (hopefully) accessible fashion.

In short, Bongani Masuku, the International Relations Secretary of COSATU (the SA equivalent of the TUC) made a number of statements in 2009 at Palestine Solidarity Campaign meetings that were clearly antisemitic, though always cloaked in the familiar anti-Zionist rhetoric of the PSC. A complaint was made to the SA Human Rights Commission, and the judgement has now been handed down to the effect that, yes, Masuku was indeed guilty of racist hate speech.

On a side note (but one not without significance) some years ago, and in full knowledge of the statements made by Masuku, the University and College Union together with BRICUP (an organisation comprising a number of prominent left wingers) invited Masuku to the UK to deliver a number of lectures. Efforts to have the invitation cancelled were rejected and dismissed as racist. The annual conference of UCU stood by Masuku and declined to condemn his statements.   [...]

This is a significant and powerful judgement from an impeccable source. It nails the lie that as long as you say Zionist and not Jew it is and cannot be anti-Semitic.

A man supported by and invited by UK left wing organisations has been unequivocally judged to be guilty of racist hate speech.

It demolishes the stock defence that there was no anti-Semitic intent. The test is an objective one. What the maker of the statement says of his intention is irrelevant to the assessment.

In the battle for the truth about anti-Semitism this powerful judgement should be welcomed, applauded loudly and disseminated widely.

Poets' Corner

So farewell then, Heathcote Williams - the William McGonagall of the revolution:

In 1871 the Paris Commune declared Paris
To be the site of a “permanent festival”.
With their autonomous liberated city still haunted by the guillotine
This was considered more preferable.

In 1968 the revolutionary festival spirit broke out once more,
Enhanced by the Situationists’ declaration
That it was the revolution’s job to serve poetry
Not the job of poetry to serve the revolution.

And now interconnected activists
Tuned to a global brain
Can operate horizontally, without leaders,
To derail the hierarchical train

That drives a system dominated by oligarchs –
The corporate oligarchs of the one per cent –
Whose wealth spawns the tent-cities of the homeless
And who rule with no one’s consent. 

And where property prices guarantee that the poor
Find themselves economically cleansed;
Where the disabled are deliberately disconnected
And the animal kingdom’s condemned.

The idea of revolution is essentially poetic,
Coming out of the soul like a rocket,
From something within that’s barbaric and wild –
To make the most exciting thing on the planet.

Like poetry, revolution gives you permission
To live on a higher level
And its reward is the sensation of challenging
The world, the flesh and the devil.

Working in the lab

October 1942. "Colorado School of Mines at Golden."

[Photo: Shorpy/Andreas Feininger, Office of War Information]

"Chemical prospecting for oil becomes more important as the war goes on and the demand for oil increases. Petroleum engineers call chemical prospecting the first scientific approach to the detection of oil in the earth. The big glass condensers, with which these engineering students are working with a professor of geophysics, are used in a soil analysis test. The percentage of wax left as residue at the end of the experiment indicates the nearness of petroleum to the site from which the soil sample was taken."

Red boats

On the Lea at Hackney Wick:

Al-Quds in NYC

Some highlights, via MEMRI, of New York's International Al-Quds Day anti-Israel hate-fest from last month:

It's instructive to see the first speaker start out with the old line about the "Hasbara" agreement, with the Nazis and the Zionists colluding, which as we know only too well is a favourite subject of Ken Livingstone. He then goes on to proclaim that the Zionists are behind ISIS ("you will find that ISIS stands for Israeli Secret Intelligence Service"), that Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was a Mossad agent, and that the Zionists assassinated John F. Kennedy because he opposed Israel's obtaining nuclear weapons.

Oh dear. Perhaps, like Hitler (according to Livingstone), the speaker went mad. Or perhaps this is the kind of milieu where such ideas are given currency.

Update: another Al-Quds Day speaker, London 2012.

Head

By the Lea, below Bow Roundabout:

 

Machine colour

South of the river - Surrey Quays and Deptford:

Involving vegetables

Meanwhile, near San Antonio:

A Texas man with a history of sex acts involving vegetables was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday.

San Antonio Express-News reports Charles Ransier was sentenced to life in prison on charges of drug possession and tampering with evidence.

Ransier was charged after a Texas state trooper found him sitting in a pickup truck with meth-filled syringes, male enhancement pills, children’s clothing, rope, Barbie dolls, balloons, and a cooler of frozen cucumbers, the paper reported.

He was only wearing a pair of jeans and had melted candle wax on his chest, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

When a state trooper asked for permission to search his car, Ransier tried to break a syringe that he had in his hands, police said. That syringe later tested positive for methamphetamine.

It was not Ransier’s first arrest involving a vegetable.

In 2014, Ransier was arrested near a baseball field while “engaging in a deviant sex act” with a vegetable while wearing women’s stockings. And in 2012, he was found naked alongside a road committing a sex act “involving a squash.”

Concrete forms

The architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright - born 150 years ago - photographed by Ezra Stoller:

"Marin County Civic Center, Frank Lloyd Wright, San Rafael, CA," 1963.

"Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bear Run, PA," 1971.

"Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, NY," 1959.
[Photos © Ezra Stoller]

The Third Israel-Lebanon war

A build-up of Hezbollah forces on the Israeli border suggests that the next Israel-Lebanon war may not be far off. As Fred Maroun argues, none of the standard justifications - the Shabaa Farms, or revenge for the previous wars - bear scrutiny:

The Lebanese terrorists also sometimes opportunistically extol the Palestinian cause, but one would be naïve to think that the Lebanese are motivated by brotherhood with the Palestinian people. Even Al Jazeera, hardly a friend of Israel, admits how badly Palestinians are treated in Lebanon, “Palestinians still live in the 12 UN-registered camps and 42 other so-called gatherings across Lebanon. Lebanon is their home but any chance of becoming a genuine part of the communities they live in is constantly undermined by strict laws “protecting” Lebanese citizens’ rights, general safety and wellbeing.” The Lebanese would not even share their better jobs with the Palestinians, let alone give up their lives.

No, the only reason for this is good old straightforward antisemitism.

Every Arab war against Israel is preceded by a whipping up of hatred one notch above the usual antisemitic hatred promoted in the Arab world. While the Lebanese terrorists’ phenomenal arsenal pointed at Israel is indication enough, the whipping up of hatred may be an even stronger indication that Hezbullah is itching for another war with Israel and is preparing its people for the sacrifices required to fight the hated Yahudi (Jews).

As reported in the Jerusalem Post, Lebanese terrorists have planted “an array of enemy symbols” near the border with Israel, including a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini with the words “We are coming” in Hebrew and Arabic.

The most hateful and sickening display may be a billboard celebrating the killing of Israelis. “In Metulla [Israel] there is a memorial for the 12 Israeli soldiers killed in the March 10, 1985, suicide bombing, while just across the border a huge billboard celebrates the massacre.”

As a Lebanese person, I am mortified by the appalling hatred emanating from my native country, but I also recognize that we as Lebanese people cannot escape responsibility. Wherever each one of us might live, it is every Lebanese person’s duty to speak up.

The main reponsibility, though, lies with Hezbollah's backers, Iran, emboldened by their deal with Obama to continue their proxy war against Israel.

But no one outside of Israel shows any concern.

Here we have a situation of impending war that is purely based on antisemitic hatred and totally preventable by those who can influence or curtail Hezbullah, yet there is no significant effort to prevent it. Not by Russia, not by the Lebanese government, not by the United Nations, and not even by those who recognize that Hezbullah is a terrorist organization. All that Israel can do is to prepare for it, and for the first time, Israel is considering evacuating civilians when the war breaks.

The prospect of Jews being chased from their own homes by antisemitic hordes should shake everyone to the core. It would not be happening in Nazi Europe but in the independent state of Israel, within the green line that is recognized internationally. It would not be happening in 1943 but well into the twenty first century.

Despite Israel’s military might, Jews will be killed, some will be displaced, and many will be terrorized. The world media will show gruesome pictures of dead Arabs and question the right of the Jewish state to defend itself. The Jewish state will be demonized by self-appointed “peace” activists who will blame it for the deaths of Arabs that Israel will have done everything to avoid, short of committing suicide. The jailing of the Jewish state’s leaders will be demanded by thugs marching in the streets of Europe and America. From their comfortable sofas, politicians will pontificate about proportionality before cutting Israel’s self-defense at the knees through the UN Security Council....

The future of Hong Kong

Beijing has announced that the Sino-British joint declaration which led to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong is “now history” and no longer has “any practical significance nor any binding force”. All that the British government's managed so far by way of response is some inoffensive muttering from Boris Johnson about hoping "that Hong Kong will make more progress toward a fully democratic and accountable system of government". Even that proved too much for foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang, who attacked Boris for what he called his “incorrect” and “sour” stance.

The humiliation of Britain is of no matter, of course, compared to what's being done to the people of Hong Kong.

Some photos from last week:

"Soldiers react as Chinese President Xi Jinping (unseen) inspects troops at the People's Liberation Army Hong Kong Garrison as part of events marking the 20th anniversary of the city's handover from British to Chinese rule, in Hong Kong, on June 30, 2017."
[Photo: Damir Sagolj / Reuters]

"People's Liberation Army soldiers prepare for the arrival of China's President Xi Jinping at a barracks in Hong Kong on June 30, 2017."
[Photo: Dale De La Rey / AFP / Getty]

"A kindergarten student wears a military costume with a PLA badge on her hat as she performs with a toy rifle on stage during a graduation ceremony in Beijing, China, on June 23, 2017."
[Photo: Andy Wong / AP]

"China's President Xi Jinping (center) waits to meet with Hong Kong's chief executive Leung Chun-ying at a hotel in Hong Kong on June 29, 2017."
[Photo: Dale De La Rey / AFP / Getty]

Totalitarian-style military parades reminiscent of North Korea; indoctrination of young children straight out of the Hamas schoolbook; Mafia-style intimidation by grim men in suits.

That's what Hong Kong's future looks like.

Intersectionality revisited

It's not new, this intersectionality business. Take Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, for instance, aka the Mufti of Jerusalem. He practiced intersectionality long before its current vogue on the left. Arab nationalism, Islamist extremism and Nazism, he realised, were intersectional. Seth Frantzman in the JP:

The story of the British-appointed mufti of Jerusalem’s collaboration with Hitler is known. Muhammad Amin al-Husseini was appointed mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 and also became leader of the Supreme Muslim Council. He played a key role in fanning Arab nationalist and Islamist extremism and encouraging riots and pogroms against Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron and elsewhere in 1929. He bridged the gap between politics and religion, uniting both nationalist extremists of the early Palestinian movement and religious bigots who hated Jews, and he was personally responsible for encouraging that hatred.

After supporting a rebellion against the British in Palestine, Hajj Amin fled to Iraq where he was a passionate supporter of Rashid Ali, a local nationalist leader. It is not a coincidence that antisemitic riots and a pogrom called the Farhud broke out in June 1941. The mufti supported attacks on Iraq’s Jews. He then fled via Persia and Turkey to get to Nazi Germany. That is how he ended up meeting Hitler and touring Nazi concentration camps....

The mufti would have liked today’s concept of “intersectionality” where various social movements are connected. In his view Arab nationalism, Islamist extremism and Nazism were intersectional. They opposed the existence of Jews and they opposed the British and had common interests in the Middle East. For the Nazis the mufti was also intersectional. Here was a Middle Eastern leader who would give their movement legitimacy. When he was in Iraq he had been a consumer and supporter of Nazi propaganda. The mufti also helped recruit Bosnian and Albanian collaborators to aid the Nazi cause. Photos of him inspecting troops in 1943 are online for all to see.

The mufti would have liked today’s concept of “intersectionality” where various social movements are connected. In his view Arab nationalism, Islamist extremism and Nazism were intersectional. They opposed the existence of Jews and they opposed the British and had common interests in the Middle East. For the Nazis the mufti was also intersectional. Here was a Middle Eastern leader who would give their movement legitimacy. When he was in Iraq he had been a consumer and supporter of Nazi propaganda. The mufti also helped recruit Bosnian and Albanian collaborators to aid the Nazi cause. Photos of him inspecting troops in 1943 are online for all to see.

But the mufti wasn’t the only one doing intersectionality with Nazism. The Croatian Ustase, which blended Croatian ethnic nationalism, antisemitism and Catholicism, worked with the Nazis and committed vile genocide against Jews, Serbs and others. There were collaborators all over Europe, from Vichy to the Caucuses.

Some of them were genuine Nazi types, others views the Nazis as allies against the Soviets.

Today these collaborationist regimes are reviled. People protest streets named after Marshall Philippe Petain, the leading Vichy collaborator. Many people, especially on the Left, opposed Sebastian Gorka’s role in the US Trump administration, claiming he had “ties to Nazi-allied group” or “Nazi group links.” His “links” were through his family to an alleged collaborationist Hungarian group.

For some reason, alone among all the collaborators with the Nazis, the mufti and his cause have not been tarred by his actions. In the aftermath of the Second World War, he was greeted as a hero in the Arab world. In Cairo and Damascus he led efforts to encourage an attack on Israel when it declared independence in 1948.

He was only sidelined because other leaders, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, tired of him. He continued to lead an “all Palestine” government first in Gaza, then Cairo, and then moved to exile in Lebanon where he died in 1974. He wasn’t some marginal character, but a center of Palestinian Arab affairs and one whose views were praised by Palestinian leaders.  [...]

There is an intersection between the mufti and his Nazi camp visits and today’s hatred of Israel and Jewish symbols. The intersection is that we turn a blind eye to the mufti’s disgusting racist politics, excusing it and even hiding his collaboration, while refusing to demand Palestinian nationalism reject him. At the same time, for too long the cause of “anti-Zionism” has been allowed to infiltrate every organization involved in liberal and progressive activism, such that Jewish symbols are not even allowed, as activists claim they cannot tell the difference between those symbols and Israel.

Every other religion and state in the world is accepted, no other symbol is thus conflated. They can tell the difference between 1,000 other symbols and flags, except for one. This is today’s tragic intersection.

Just as in 1942 the mufti found willing collaborators throughout Europe, hatred of Jews and Israel finds willing collaborators today.