FuturePresent

Cruel or Blasé Britannia, or both?

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A cartoon by Steve Bell published in The Guardian on July 9, 2009 © 2009 Steve Bell 

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Philip Challinor, wrote the following piece in The Curmudgeon (25 November 2009: 19:34), in response to Cruel Britannia: British Complicity in the Torture and Ill-treatment of Terror Suspects in Pakistan (a report by Human Rights Watch, 24 November 2009):

Flawed Intelligence

A report by Human Rights Watch claims that there is clear evidence of the British government's involvement in the inexpediently enhanced interrogation of its own citizens, and that the British government has thus placed itself in a "legally, morally and politically invidious position". Irrelevances aside, it is not altogether clear what the legal and political consequences might be - the empty suit at the Ministry of Justice may be put on trial, and then again it may not - but doubtless the Glorious Successor will make some effort to smooth things over in the next few days by inquiring after the health of a minor celebrity. The Foreign Office sent out a spokesbeing to give out a prepared denial; representing Her Majesty's Loyal and Complicit Opposition, William Hague huffed and David "Liberty or Death" Davis puffed, while a spokesbeing for the Ascended Incarnation of the Vicar of Downing Street gave out a prepared denial.

The Human Rights Watch report is partly based on the testimony of Pakistani intelligence agents who were doing a crucial job under difficult circumstances and who stated that British agents were grateful that "all means possible" were being used to extract information - accuracy being at best a secondary consideration in the War Against the Abstract Noun. It is not known whether the Pakistani agents were motivated by envy of our freedom and prosperity, or whether they were themselves tortured into accusing the British intelligence services of including the sort of people whose actions Tony Blair would not condone.

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non-transparent partisan politics and its influences

Shoes left outside Downing Street during the 'Hands Off Gaza: Stop The Bombing: Free Palestine', UK National Demonstration, London, 3 January 2009
This follows a trend began by the Iraqi journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi (correspondent for Al Baghdadia, an independent Iraqi TV station), who threw a shoe at President Bush during a news conference in Baghdad with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on 07 December 2008 (Meyers and Rubin, New York Times, 14 December 2008)

cc cláudia gabriela marques vieira
part of the i heart peace set on flickr

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Last night Channel 4 broadcast Dispatches: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby, the results of an investigation by Political commentator Peter Oborne into pro-Israel lobbying to Westminster and the media. The programme proved a disturbing document of the non-transparent ways in which pro-Israel lobby groups, primarily the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), flex their 'financial muscle'  and 'exercise their influence' over UK foreign policy and news coverage in the Middle East, in the interests of the State of Israel (Oborne, 2009).

Oborne suggests that the CFI alone (which claims 80% of Conservative MPs as its members) has donated more than £10 million to The Conservative Party over the last eight years. So, here's another case of political corruption. So, what's new? Lobbying, of course, is an established part of the UK political scene. As David Cesarani argues in The Guardian's Comment is Free, the same accusations of secrecy and undue influence could readily be applied, say, to Michael Ashcroft, Rupert Murdoch, the arms industry - and the list goes on (17 November 2009).  Yet, as Oborne and Jones emphasise in another article for The Guardian's Comment is Free, 'Friends in high places', Oborne's is not a antisemitic conspiracy theory:

It is important to say what we did not find. There is no conspiracy, and nothing resembling a conspiracy (Oborne and Jones, 16 November 2009).

Rather than breaking news necessarily, the documentary highlights exactly how the pro-Israel lobby is able to yield its influence by 'active[ly] defin[ing] the debate in order to limit the options' MPs have over Middle East policy to those that 'would be acceptable' to the interests of the State of Israel (Sir Richard Dalton, Former British Ambassador to Iran 2003-2006, Oborne, 2009).

The documentary focuses in on just how pro-Israel lobbyists manipulate the 'highest level of British politics' (Oborne, 2009). It refers back to William Hague's response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July 2006, following the firing of rockets by Hezbollah militants at Israeli border towns as a diversion for an anti-tank missile attack on two armoured Humvees patrolling the Israeli side of the border fence. In a speech in the House of Commons on 20 July 2006, William Hague, then Conservative Shadow Foreign Sectretary, is filmed as saying that, 'elements of the Israeli response are disproportionate' and 'damage the Israeli cause in the long-term'. Oborne claims that Lord Cairns, Treasurer of the Conservative Party, and a leading donor for CFI, was 'outraged and threatened to withdraw funding to the party...no further donations were received by William Hague from CFI board members' (Oborne, 2009).

Yet, Israelis are far more heterogenous in their perspectives to Israeli politics than the more 'right-winged' factions of the pro-Israel lobby would admit. Rabbi David Goldberg (Rabbi Emeritus, Liberal Jewish Synagogue) asserts that pro-Israeli groups such as CFI and the LFI do not represent the views of all British Jews. Goldberg claims that there is an apartheid state in Israel that defies international law on human rights. When asked by Oborne how he thinks the pro-Israeli lobby will react to his 'conversation in this film', Goldberg laughs and says,

They'll say there goes Goldberg, the anti-Zion self-hating Jew again, you know (quoted in Oborne, 2009).

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For me, the part of the investigation focusing on media coverage of Middle East politics is more disconcerting still. Oborne documents the consequences of the axiom pro-Israeli discourses have drawn between the BBC and The Guardian in specific and anti-semitic, partisanism, with regards to Middle East politics. Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian, asserts that,

It would be a terribly dangerous thing if the British press were made to feel that they couldn't criticise Israel because they'd be hauled up as anti-semitic...It's a very disreputable argument' (quoted in Oborne, 2009).

Yet, Charlie Beckett, former BBC Editor, now Head of POLIS, a journalism and society think tank, a joint initiative from LSE and The London College of Communication, claims the repercussions of suspected bipartisan media coverage are that the CFI exert 'direct pressure, specially on the BBC'. This has resulted in the censorship of BBC journalists, restrictions on journalists' entry into Israel, the banning of the BBC from Sharon's visit to Downing Street in 2003 and Mark Thompson's controversial decision not to broadcast the DEC Gaza Appeal 2009.

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For an alternative perspective, see Jonathan Hoffman's response to Dispatches: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby on the CiF Watch website, whose mission is to track anti-semitism on The Guardian's 'Comment is Free': Inside Channel 4’s Conspiracy Factory

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Today I tweeted the following on @Futurepresent:

@conservatives @DowningStreet @BBC_HaveYourSay How do you plead to Oborne's allegations in 'Dispatches: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby'?

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And suddenly, I'm being followed by @HomelandSecNews. In the rare event that there'll be any form of response to my audaciousness, I'll post it here.

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positive realization

living green
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part of my 'most interesting' set on flickr

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No one ever really taught me that we're able to emanate positive focused energy and emotion, nor that each of us are what we believe we are. These are ways of thinking I've zoned in and out of from time to time, though it's taken me over thirty years to realize.

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'Feed your head'.

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screenshot of I Met the Walrus (2008)
director: Josh Raskin
illustrator: James Braithwaite
soundtrack: Jerry Levitan's interview with John Lennon (1969)

This animation features in 'profound whatever' on FuturePresent

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transience

On the 20th Anniversary of The Fall of The Berlin Wall
The lessons we don't learn from history: leaving a temporary mark on what remains of The Wall, East side, Berlin
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'profound whatever'

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death 1.1
a butterfly in the pool, La Luna, Tuscany
CC cláudia gabriela marques vieira

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I've just began re-reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1985) after sixteen years: thinking about Nietzsche's idea that we exist between 'eternal return' and 'absence of return'. 

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times...the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht)...Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes [us] to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and [our] earthly being, and become only half real, [our] movements as free as they are insignificant (Kundera, 1985: 2).

A friend of mine, Iain Mackie, introduced me to Josh Raskin's I Met the Walrus (2008), the soundtrack of which is Jerry Levitan's interview with John Lennon (1969). I think Lennon may have had this dichotomy in mind, when he referred to the "profound whatever" (interview with Jerry Levitan, 1969). Could it be that we live in, "a world that rests essentially on the non-existence of return, [where] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted" (Kundera, 1985: 4)? Or, refuting Parmenides' dialectical thinking, do we exist at once through the 'lightness' and 'heaviness' of being, until the two become ambiguously deceptive. Indeed, from a certain perspective, transience and infinity may be perceived as one, made both of 'heaviness' and 'lightness'.

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When Nietzsche Wept: Eternal Return (2007)

director and writer: Pinchas Perry
script based on Irvin D. Yalom's When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession (1992)

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I met the Walrus (2008)

director: Josh Raskin
illustrator: James Braithwaite
soundtrack: Jerry Levitan's interview with John Lennon (1969)

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sand storm

sand storm
Worms Head from Rhossili Bay, The Gower, Wales, UK
CC cláudia gabriela marques vieira

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"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. 

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. 

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about." 

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (2005)

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Click here to access the Murakami site at Random House

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absolute freedom is a misnomer

Pedn Vounder, Treen, Cornwall
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