Whack or Wipe?

Blogs your brain can whack-off to.

Another Angry Voice

Words on the Street

Snowblog

The blog is a an awkward place – part journalism, part rant, part poetry, part diary. Anyone can start one and spend time and words on useless outpours, unregulated, slanderous, inaccurate nonsense which no one reads or cares about – my own blog is testament to that. But occasionally you come across a blog which is worth more than its weight in bits. Here are a few that I've come across lately.

Another Angry Voice, a blog by Thomas G. Clark, is a triumph of blogging potential, a go-to resource whenever some silver-tongued suited politician starts patronising you with oh-so-much conviction. Informed and measured, yet perfectly outraged by political manipulation, hypocrisy and ignorance, Clark's approach is to dissect issues and expose the rarely mentioned trickery that goes on behind politics are presented by the likes of Nick Robinson and his journalism-lite colleagues. AAV treats his readers with intelligence, going into details that most media outlets assume are beyond us, using facts and a generally egalitarian social position to present some views. Most of it makes you sick of the political establishment – the difference between AAV and the general media is that it gives reasons and examples which explain why you should be disgusted, rather than a lazy and sweeping 'they're all the same' cynicism which instead serves to blunt critiques, and continue the norm by infusing a sense of powerlessness in everyone. See Zizek on cynicism for more on this.

CLark describes his political leanings as 'angry'. Observers would naturally put him on the left, and they'd be correct. Thomas would say 'libertarian-left'. By my mind, considering that contemporary political consensus has moved to the right over the last few decades, an intelligent critique has to come from what would be considered the 'left'. More idiotic critiques of contemporary politics make issues with things like social equality, the demise of empire, climate change, and superficial political scandals (see the Daily Mail, Niall Ferguson, James Delingpole and the Daily Mail again for examples). These people are evidently disappointed that Thatcherism, globalisation and post-colonial geopolitics hasn't yet stopped the poor from being able to breed, and want to convince you to endorse their crazy march towards dystopian elitism.

While AAV investigates party politics, party funding, fascism in the UK, the media, etc. Thomas's general target is the pervasive and little-understood ideology of neoliberalism which informs much of the socio-political landscape, so if I could endorse just one article from this blog it would be What is Neoliberalism, from September 2012. Get educated!

A Facebook friend offered up a link of Words on the Street, stating that it was the best blog in town. Ian Beetlestone is a London cabbie. No, not like the ones you get in Stewart Lee's anecdotes, which are all true, of course. In fact, Ian defends the image of the cabbie, pointing out that he's gay, socially liberal, and left-wing.

But with such a rarely heard voice, it's no surprise that many people have unfair preconceptions of cab drivers – they're used as a synonym for 'the man on the street', and a Sun-reading one at that – a vehicle (if you'll pardon the pun) for unreasonable bigotry and monosyllabic conversations. Ian Beetlestone is here to put that right.

Driving a taxi isn’t just about taking passengers from one place to another – in fact, that’s secondary. No, driving a taxi is about drawing lines on a map. It’s art, and it can be beautiful at times.

In the post where this is taken from, from March 2014, our cabbie talks about driving from Kings Cross to Wimbledon Park at midnight, some quite passenger in the back. Some of the landmarks I know, some I don't, but that doesn't really matter. You wind through dark and dusty London streets at a comfortable pace, just absorbing stuff, as he fondly describes the journey. It's refreshing to see someone so at ease with what he does, so at home in the city where he lives.

And especially for this week, Jon Snow's Snowblog. Few news anchors do their job with such a well measured combination of sensitivity and tenacity. Eddie Mair scores high for sensitivity; Paxman for tenacity. Snow's got both. Thankfully, Channel 4 allows him to use it to great affect on many occasions, and during the current Gaza conflict has been no exception. He has been bullish towards the Israeli politicians who he's interviewed, and sometimes gets over excited. But Jon is only human and, as this blog post shows, it is Jon's deep sense of humanity which makes him such a righteous dude.

This is humankind’s most grievous cancer, for its cells infect conflicts in every corner of the world. We fail as humankind if we do not devise a coming-together. Our leaders, as a vast priority, have to try and try again to use every mechanism in our rare animal capacity - our considerable intellects – to bring these peoples to resolution whatever the cost.

He was writing about being in Gaza over the last few days, somewhere few of us would wish to be, but somewhere we all feel like we know intimately as we've watched the death toll resolutely climb. While many, including Jon himself, issue polemics, tirades and accusations in the cyclone of self-righteous commentary which surrounds the Israel-Palestine conflict, this small article, despite the token words of what must be done, had interwoven throughout it one man's sense of hopelessness.

I feel guilty in leaving, and for the first time in my reporting life, scarred, deeply scarred by what I have seen, some of it too terrible to put on the screen.

And a blog you can wipe your arse with.

FrontPageMag

While writing this post a few days ago I came across FrontPage Mag, which boasts the utterly inspired subheading "Inside Every Liberal Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out". Time to prepare for some sweeping paranoia...

The rant that caricatured every Israeli critic as a racist Islamophile Marxist caricature was by Daniel Greenfield, but he is only one of many paranoid columnists for FrontPage. The mag itself is published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. "Freedom" is a word that always has to be qualified, used as it is by those who appear to endorse their own freedom over that of others. Freedom for the Palestinians, for example, wouldn't quite fit the Horowitz definition. The thrust of FrontPage arguments seem to be about avoiding the subject matter at hand, and taking aim at the left's assumed hypocrisy on the subject. This tactic leads to articles such as The Left isn't pro-Gay – It's Pro-Power and #BringBackOurGirls and the Left's Empty Moral Outrage.

Horowitz, like other disappointed young hippies, like Melanie Phillips and Jon Voight, made the charged leap away from socialist principles to self-interest and fear as they aged. Disastrous legacies of badly executed communism is enough to tar the entire left with the same brush; legacies of capitalism go unexamined, perhaps because these individuals have privately benefited...

In a choice article from April 2007, Michael Reagan, son of neoliberal maestro Ronald, laments that the real culprit of thirty-two recent deaths at a school are the laws that prohibited "the students and faculty from exercising their Constitutional right to protect themselves and others by bearing arms on campus." I had to read that twice! Yes – more guns! In schools! To solve the problem of on-campus shooting! 

Well you, sir, are a racist!

Argument: Protesters whine about Israel, but ignore other examples of large-scale bloodshed. Implication: anti-Israeli demos are anti-Semitic.

Oh yeah, well I dropped my toast butter-side down this morning – where was your protest then! #hypocrite.

Since the recent strife in Gaza kicked off, those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have been taking to the streets. Not everyone agrees with these protester's demands. Let's explore some of the responses to Israeli criticism by way of two of the most treasured darlings of the right, Douglas Murray and Melanie Phillips, and a few others.

Douglas Murray's article in the Spectator most neatly summed up the right-wing grievance with pro-Palestine protesters. He first states that they were a 'non-diverse crowd', with women in burkas and headscarves. This off-topic jolly into passive-aggressive Islamophobia neatly reminds the reader what they are supposed to think about Muslims. The pics on this pro-Israel blog, which also labelled the protest anti-Semitic, show a pretty diverse crowd, much like London itself. Anyway, Murray returns to the meat of the problem – hypocrisy and anti-Semitism. It's a two-pronged accusation that is levelled energetically by those that support Israel, used gleefully by journalists and netizens alike. Here it is in action... 

1. #hypocrites!

In his article, Doug spake thus: 'These are the people who stayed at home throughout the Syrian civil war, stayed at home when ISIS rampaged across Iraq, stayed at home when Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab carried out their atrocities across central Africa and showed no concern whatsoever when the Muslim Brotherhood was running Egypt into the ground. Yet they pretend to care about Muslims.' That guy from ConservativeHome agrees...

Even Stan Collymore got put in his place!

The joke being that there is no protest against Assad!

This is my personal favourite.

2. #Anti-Semites! 

Doug: 'I suppose some of the people in London today might still try to pretend that they don’t hate Jews.'

And introducing... Melanie Phillips! Compared to Murray's sweeping accusations, Phillips is a little more measured, giving the illusion that she's thought about it. The caveat she provides is that the protesters are 'accessories' to anti-Semitism.

Mel in this article says: 'When London demonstrators and British intellectuals declare that Israelis are the new Nazis, colonizing land to which they have no historic connection and which they have stolen from the Palestinians, they make themselves accessories to an infernal creed which is inciting violence and murder against Jews.'

Bonus Bigot basher! 

Daniel Greenfield's article, 'It's Another "Death to the Jews" Weekend', is one big impassioned declaration that pro-Palestinian protesters are anti-Semites. It's a full-steam-ahead veritable parade of left-wing and Islamic stereotypes. Here are some randomly selected fragments... 

'At the Israeli embassy, the hipsters imagine that they’re guerrilla fighters. They scream themselves hoarse about oppression, duck into a Starbucks, come out with a few cinnamon lattes and then begin screaming again.'

'Bored Yemeni teenagers peel off to throw stones at a synagogue. The Marxists get into an argument over the Fourth International. Someone begins loudly reading their own self-published poetry through an unauthorized megaphone. ISIS sympathizers fly the black flag of the Jihad over the crowd where it tangles with a Hezbollah flag.'

'Max Blumenthal shows up to lead a Students for Justice in Palestine protest while shouting about colonialism. Then he tags himself on Instagram.'

'Khaybar Khaybar Ya Yahood,' cry the Muslims. 'Down with Zionist Supremacism,' scream the Marxists. 'Death to the Jews," shouts everyone else.'

Beyond this relentless hyperbole, this imaginary 'Day in the Life of critics of Israel', the article says nothing.

Who are you people?

Murray is a devout neoconservative. Neoconservatives believe that Western liberal democracy, such as it is, is by definition superior to all other forms of governance. It takes this position as morally absolute, and evokes notions of freedom, liberty and justice of which the west is supposed to be exemplary. It seeks to radically encourage parts of the world which do not share this view to adopt it. It does this with neoliberal economics and war. For a neoconservative, the fact that the Iraq war was based on lies is irrelevant, for it is the West's role to spread democracy; the fact that this magical democracy didn't arrive, and Iraq has plunged into deeper problems is also irrelevant because the West has its duty and that is that.

Neoconservatives in America are the people who preach libertarian values and despise socialist values. Then they endorse protectionism for their own agriculture, state funding for the military, and you can bet they were the first to propose bailing out the banks. It is hence a double-standards nationalistic ideology with its interests favouring capitalist leaders over the ordinary Western folk in who's interest they claim to be acting. 'Foreigners' are little more than dangerous and simple-minded scum until they can be made to work for the benefit of Western corporations.

Murray is the Associate Director of the Henry Jackson Society, the people who came up with the oxymoronic Inclusive Capitalism love-in a couple of months ago.

In this article, Murray bewilderingly puts Occupy London to rights by pointing out that the Church of England is much older than Occupy. Take that, anti-capitalists! He also paints them as having a sense of 'entitlement', seemingly because they take an issue with economic hegemony, and selfishly point out social problems such as '"youth unemployment," "women's unemployment," "police racism," "racism" in general, an alleged rise in "Islamophobia," the failure of the market economy, insufficient freedom for sex workers and terror suspects..."'

Occupy London, for Murray, wasn't a heterogeneous group of disaffected citizens with different concerns and different ideas attempting to engage in the national debate from which they are so often excluded. Oh no, they were apparently part of a culture 'of all sorts of narcissisms, special-interests groups and organizations actively devoted to the destruction of our society.'

Destruction, no less! Of our society. Who is this 'we'? one wonders. What mostly comes through from Eton and Oxford-educated Murray's articles is his derision for the uneducated, i.e. ordinary, citizen, whom he assumes is ill-positioned to have an opinion on anything beyond primetime TV and cinnamon lattes. He speaks for the elite, and his unquestioning conviction of the superiority of the West is matched only by his unquestioning conviction of the superiority of himself.

Melanie Phillips writes for the Times, but still has the Daily Mail flowing through her veins. People from all political stripes will know her because she appears to make ridiculous statements simply to irritate the left – '[The traditional family] has been relentlessly attacked by an alliance of feminists, gay rights activists, divorce lawyers, and "cultural Marxists" who grasped that this was the surest way to destroy Western society' – and exploit the prejudices of the right – 'the potential for tipping into outright calamity what is an already socially disruptive situation — with illegal Romanian shanty encampments even in the middle of London’s Mayfair, for heaven’s sake — is very high.'

Her Jewish faith is something she refers to frequently in her articles, and whilst being Jewish doesn't make anyone a Zionist, Phillips is an avid one. King David having built the Old City in Jerusalem in the 11th century BC (in Biblical history) is reason enough for all Jews to have claim to Jerusalem. Elsewhere, I'm sure she supports Mexican's claiming Texas or New Mexico, or Native American wishes to expel the newcomers from the Old World, and if I went to Scandinavia and chucked some family out of a house where I'm sure my Viking relatives lived, I assume she'd support that too. Hey, why don't we all go back to where our ancestors lived!

Phillips wrote a book called Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within, a hysterical rant which is happy to allow its readers to assume that Islamic extremism is Islam's default condition. We hope she's proud of her fascist spawn, Britain First, who have been threatening mosques and facing down curry restaurants in Brick Lane.

Melanie Phillips cares little for those who take to the streets, like those pesky teachers and their damned union representatives. How dare they demand pensions and stuff, while 'the harm the striking teachers will cause children by disrupting their education is, of course, not acknowledged'? For a day off school is second only to a thorough beating on the child abuse scale. 

She also deplores 'greedy' doctors who went on strike, stating that the 'public' will never trust them again. Or perhaps she was telling the public not to trust them again... Needless-to-say, all other professions who strike, or go on anti-cut demos, Occupy London – they're all idiots who you should hate. Phillips's poisonous diatribes routinely seek to condemn ordinary people by way of cajoling other ordinary people into despising them. How can she sleep at night? you might ask – well all that hatred must be exhausting!

And, as with all of Phillips' outpours, it comes back to the shocking demise of the country – in terms of moral clarity and absolute power – at the hands of conspiratorial leftie ideologues who've infected the political class with their sick relativism. Nothing, apparently, can't be solved with a good old time machine.

So...

The offending accusation is that the pro-Palestinian protests are singling out one aggressor (Israel) while ignoring others (Boko Haram, ISIS, Assad, etc.) As Mehdi Hassan points out in an article addressing this very argument, it's strange that supporters of Israel would categorise themselves amongst the likes of explicitly murderous groups, just to take a pop at anti-war protesters.

If Mehdi's aricle is a little too polemic, this article by Brian Whitaker also seeks to explain the reasons for the appearance of a 'singling out' of Israel by western critics. In it, Brian opines that the central reason is that the standards that Israel is supposed to uphold, as a Liberal Democracy vehemently supported by the West, are higher than those of Putin, Boko Haram, ISIS, Assad, etc. I would add, and this is the thrust of Hassan's argument, that a large scale protest in the UK is intended to draw the attention of our own elected leaders, to hold them to account, and to make demands for change. One suspects that Douglas Murray and his reactionary bandits of neoconservative privilege have never quite understood why anyone might need to protest, and I guess that's where the confusion lies.

If hypocrisy wasn't enough, the critic of Israel is also charged as an anti-Semite. Some brainless individuals just hate Jews, sometimes for religious or cultural reasons, sometimes because they're simply Nazis. Laura Penny, who is half-Jewish, no friend of the right and no Zionist, made the worrying observation...  

But for some every criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, as Penny argues in this article today. It's not just simple-minded everyday citizens on Twitter who level this accusation, but also right-wing journalists who, alas, command influence. This sweeping argument is not unlike when criticism of a black person is said to be simply racist, or when criticism of a woman is assumed to be simply sexist. Sometimes they are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic, but not by definition. This is the 'finger in your ears shout "prejudice!"' argument, both sides do it to shut down debate, and it's lazy and stupid.

When critics of Israel evoke the upsetting memories of the Holocaust, Hitler or swastikas they do so to (crassly) point out a grim irony, an irony that should make a Jewish state pause for thought – Israel, founded as it recovered from such horrors, was founded on the principles of racial prejudice and religious intolerance. The fact that these principles underline the Israeli raison d'etre means that Netanyahu's claims of pragmatism and proportionality in attacking Gaza are treated with a hefty dose of suspicion. Indeed, if the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, the stranglehold on Gaza, and the regular deaths of Palestinians is anything to go by, a Zionist drive to expand trumps any logic of self-defence. 

Opposition to Zionism is also assumed to be support of Hamas, which is to see things in a very binary fashion. Hamas is a complicated organisation born of a complicated situation, but most pro-Palestinians would see its position as a voice for Palestinians as unfortunate at best. When they rightly point out that Hamas are Islamic fundamentalists, Zionists show themselves to have a massive blind spot. Such attitudes expose the truth of the overriding aim for fundamentalists on both sides, the unquestionable superiority of their own faith, land, people and blood.