the otley terrorist

you better come clean how could anybody be so mean?

2005-07-22T14:12:00.000+01:00

"new" Orange Juice, the postcard years compilation out. I remember buying the 7" of Poor Old Soul with the lovely free cat postcard, now sadly lost. Edwyn is getting better, there's a great picture of the band in today's Guardian, they look very Velveteen. I'm simply thrilled...

Ian McEwan on Iraq, Stop the War etc...

2005-07-21T13:01:00.000+01:00

Very good piece by McEwan in Der Speigel. Have a read...

Ken Livingstone

2005-07-20T17:15:00.000+01:00

Ken Livingstone being interviewed on TV last night stated:
"Palestinians don't have jet fighters, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In that unfair balance, that's what people use."
He then backed Yusuf Al Qaradawi statement:
"We must realize that the Israeli society is a military society - men and women. We cannot describe this society as civilian. We cannot say that the casualties were innocent civilians. They are not civilians or innocent."
The hairs immediately stood up on the nape of my neck. It's not a large step from saying Palestinians only have their bodies to saying disenfrachised British Muslims only have their bodies. His earlier condemnation rings rather hollow now. He's beginning to sound like Gerry Adams when he would not condemn the killing of civilians by the IRA.

More interesting comments at Harry's Place

on the origins of "the otley terrorist"

2005-07-14T13:48:00.000+01:00

After the events of last week and the news that the bombers came from West Yorkshire I feel compelled to elaborate on my nom de blog.
The Otley Terrorist was conceived in the early 1990's whilst living in Leeds. The term came up in a conversation with a friend about the thick-necked rugby playing students who went drinking both in Otley and along The Otley Run. I flippantly stated that such people were Otley Terrorists and immediately conceived of a post-situationist fanzine called The Otley Terrorist modeled on a broad sheet newspaper. As with the majority of my ideas it languished at the back of my mind as a term that would be occasionally brought up in conversation but never becoming concrete. At the time I was an MA student at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Leeds University and dabbling in a inchoate form of postmodern nihilism and, of course, a lot of narcotics.
Then Blogging entered my field of vision after reading Salam Pax's Baghdad Blog in print form rather than on the net (Salam makes irregular appearances here.), and The Otley Terrorist arrived. I hope to be a bit less serious in future - I have a number of bug bears, stoppers and isalmofascists being two of them (my thanks to Harry's Place and Normblog for providing such good reference points on my initial blogs). Hopefully I'll be blogging on the wider field of pop culture pretty soon and expect a blog by blog account of The Tapestry Goes West festival at the end of the month.
Garstang

from Khalid Mahmood MP for Birmingham Perry Barr

2005-07-14T13:05:00.000+01:00

"We have to recognise these people are in the equivalent of a religious cult. They are brainwashed. Many of them go into higher or further education where they have a thirst for knowledge and religion, and are seized on by these people. They are a cult in just the same way as some of these American cults that end up suffocating one another."The extremists have no negotiating demands. They are not like Hamas or the IRA. They don't have a foreign policy agenda save hate and some kind of revolution. These organisations are not just operating in Britain. They are in Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They have been operating well before the invasion of Iraq. Many of the organisations that get hold of these youngsters are involved in criminal network though corruption or credit card fraud. We need more people to confront these organisations and challenge their thinking. It is too easy to go [with] the flow, so all Muslim leaders have a responsibility."We also have a big problem with much of the religious education that goes on in mosques after school. It is totally unregulated and much of it is of low quality. None of the teachers are subject to any normal child protection regulation, yet this is where many people's minds start to be shaped."

a camden street

2005-07-12T16:27:00.000+01:00

I walk along parts of this thoroughfare everyday of the week from Euston to Hampstead.

nuff said

2005-07-12T14:26:00.000+01:00

a utopian thought for the day

2005-07-12T14:22:00.000+01:00

Vigil - Thurday 14th July - Trafalgar Square

2005-07-12T09:19:00.000+01:00

Message from Ken Livingstone:
"At 6pm Londoners are invited to a vigil in Trafalgar Square to remember those who died, to show that London will not be moved from our city's goal of building an open, tolerant, multi-racial and multi-cultural society showing the world its future and to thank the heroes of the transport and emergency services who saved so many lives last Thursday."

Please try to make it if you can.

Twats

2005-07-07T16:13:00.000+01:00

The SWP

"The British government cannot avoid its responsibility for these terrible attacks, which are a
consequence of its support for war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Can terrorists not be responsible for their own actions?

Galloway - Bigger Twat

"We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings"

demonstrate against terror

2005-07-07T15:58:00.000+01:00

This weekend demonstrate against terrorism

another strike for Islamo-Fascism

2005-07-07T13:48:00.000+01:00

I hope everyone in London is OK - A goon at work stated that Tony Blair was to blame! It's high time we all called this terror by it's real name and stop pretending it's our fault because of Iraq/Palestine/The Crusades - It's Fascism and should be opposed wherever it rears it's head.

Copied from normblog:

Nick Cohen on Terror and Liberalism by Paul BermanAlthough I like to present myself as an open and rational chap, I can remember very few times when I've admitted being in the wrong. Not wrong in detail, but wrong in principle. In my experience the politically committed rarely do that. We change imperceptibly and grudgingly, while all the time pretending we haven't changed at all but merely adapted to altered circumstances.Actually, 'very few' is a self-serving exaggeration. The only time I realised I was charging up a blind alley was when I read Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism. I didn't see a blinding light or hear a thunder clap or cry 'Eureka!' If I was going to cry anything it would have been 'Oh bloody hell!' He convinced me I'd wasted a great deal of time looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I was going to have to turn it round and see the world afresh. The labour would involve reconsidering everything I'd written since 11 September, arguing with people I took to be friends and finding myself on the same side as people I took to be enemies. All because of Berman.The bastard.Terror and Liberalism is an essay rather than a history and its arguments come from the almost forgotten tradition of the anti-totalitarian left. Its central point is that Islamism and Baathism are continuations of Nazism and communism, not only in their fine points - founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Baath Party were admirers of Hitler and Franco - but in their fundamentals. Once again we had the promise of earthly paradise, but now the paradise wouldn't be the paradise of unexploited labour or the paradise of an Aryan Europe, but the paradise of the early days of the prophet or a reunified Arab nation, pure and free. Once again there were great leaders who were semi-divine as they led the faithful into cosmic struggles. And once again their programmes were insane.Berman begins by evoking Albert Camus and other leftish writers of the mid-twentieth century who had broken out of the prison of Marxism to examine the deranged movements which had turned Europe into a charnel house. Cleverly, he treats his targets very sympathetically. Readers who want to disagree with him, as I did, are seduced because he understands why they believe what they believe and more often than not expresses their ideas better than they can. He follows Camus by showing how the original Russian terrorists who began the violence which finished with the slaughters of the communists were morally scrupulous, decent and brave. They wouldn't throw a bomb into the coach of the Grand Duke Sergei, because there were children on board, or risk the deaths of passers-by. True, they had no ideas beyond death, their own and others, no plan for society which could possibly succeed, but that didn't hide the desperation which had driven sensitive and high-minded young men and women to rebel. Similarly, Berman is so angry about the collapse of European civilization into the barbarism of the First World War that you could imagine him joining the communist party or becoming a Nazi, and he is so sympathetic to the intellectual currents buffeting Sayyid Qutb that Qutb's transformation into the intellectual founder of a cult of death appears the most natural of developments, one you might make yourself in the circumstances.His avoidance of the usual polemical style has a purpose which is obvious on a second reading. Berman is trying to overcome the resistance of Western readers who have watched the Iranian revolution and the murder of millions and the enslavement of whole African tribes in the Sudan and the destruction of every last remnant of freedom in Afghanistan and not understood that what they've seen is a totalitarian movement going about its business.A chapter - 'Wishful Thinking' - explains why so many are reluctant to see clearly and in their blindness end up on the far right. It deals with the Chomskys and the creeps who were to dominate the anti-war movement; but to my mind the best part of the chapter and the book is when he uses the history of the French Socialist Party in the 1930s as a parable for our time.Leon Blum, the leader of that party, knew that the Nazis had to be fought. But a large faction, supported by the teachers' unions and many left-wing intellectuals, was horrified by the prospect of a conflict which could exceed even the carnage of the First World War.If they had looked the Nazis in the face, they would have realized that war was inevitable. Rather than see clearly they allowed the best of motives to convince them that the German people hadn't fallen for an insane cult. Why would they? Wasn't it almost racist to believe that they were anything other than as rational and decent as the French?Take Hitler's demands to expand the German Reich. In a certain light these could be seen as a menacing expansion of the Nazi state, but (the anti-war socialists asked themselves) was it not the case that the Treaty of Versailles had imposed punitive conditions on Germany at the end of the First World War? Was it not reasonable for Hitler to ask that Germans should be freed from control by the Poles and the Czechs and returned to their mother country? Hitler may have been from the extreme right and they may have been from the democratic left, but an argument wasn't necessarily wrong just because Hitler made it.Many socialists were therefore enthusiastic supporters of the Munich agreement which dismembered Czechoslovakia and brought the German-speaking Sudetenland back under Nazi control.They believed, says Berman, in the 'simple-minded optimism' of nineteenth century liberalism - a liberalism of denial. Human beings were essentially rational. Politicians and polemicists who pretended otherwise were the tools of the arms corporations that were leading France into an unnecessary pre-emptive war.
The anti-war socialists gazed across the Rhine and simply refused to believe that millions of upstanding Germans had enlisted in a political movement whose animating principles were paranoid conspiracy theories, blood-curdling hatreds, medieval superstitions and the lure of murder. At Auschwitz the SS said "Here there is no why." The anti-war socialists in France believed no such thing. In their eyes, there was always a why.There was a price to pay for rationalism. Obviously, the socialists couldn't begin to show solidarity with the German socialists who were being persecuted by Hitler. How could they protest at their treatment or organize parliamentary debates calling attention to their plight when they were making excuses for the Hitler who was doing the persecuting? Then there were the Nazis' Jewish victims. As good men and women of the Enlightenment, the anti-war socialists couldn't tolerate anti-Semitism. Yet they were determined not to let their sympathies get out of hand. Weren't the Jews always showing their wounds and trying to make others feel guilty for their past suffering? Hitler might be going a bit far, but wasn't it true that a disproportionate number of industrialists and financiers were Jewish? And wasn't it also the case that their leader, Leon Blum, who was urging France to enter a bloody and worthless confrontation with Germany was, well, Jewish, too?It was a short step from this line of reasoning to asserting that war was being forced on them by Hitler's victims rather than Hitler. In 1940, Hitler gave irrefutable proof of his intentions when he invaded and occupied France. The French extreme right under the leadership of Marshall Pétain proposed a collaborationist government. Blum and some socialists opposed the humiliation of France, but many of their colleagues accepted the occupation and, as Berman concludes, went the whole hog.
Among the anti-war socialists a number of people, having voted with Pé‎tain, took the logical next step and on patriotic and idealistic grounds accepted positions in his new government, at Vichy. Some of these socialists went a little further too, and began to see a virtue in Pétain's programme for a new France and a new Europe - a programme of strength and vitality, a Europe ruled by a single-party state instead of by the corrupt cliques of bourgeois democracy, a Europe cleansed of the impurities of Judaism and of the Jews themselves, a Europe of the anti-liberal imagination. And in that very remarkable fashion, a number of the anti-war socialists of France came full circle. They had begun as defenders of liberal values and human rights, and they evolved into the defenders of bigotry, tyranny, superstition and mass murder. They were democratic leftists who, through the miraculous workings of the slippery slope and a naïve rationalism of all things, ended as fascists.
Long ago, you say? Not so long ago.Indeed not. To see the old process at work, one only has to look at how a large chunk of the world's liberal opinion has got itself into the position where it can't support Iraqi and Afghan liberals, socialists and feminists. You think the worst thing in the world is the developed countries because they brought the First World War, which to be fair is a charge worth making, or globalisation and McDonalds, which to be fair is a charge that is infantile. You are confronted with totalitarian movements, which are worse, and your first thought is to blame them on the West. Your second is to make excuses for them. Your third is to betray your comrades. Your fourth is to go up to the totalitarian movements and shake them by the hand.Because I'd grown up in a time when there was no left worth speaking of, I'd rather blithely assumed that its remnants were filled with decent people and that the worst thing in the world was New Labour.In part because of the evidence of my senses and in part because of Paul Berman, I know better now.

A Matter of Principle

2005-07-05T11:42:00.000+01:00

I've been reading this book on the humanitarian arguments for the war on Iraq. A must for anyone who has colleagues/friends of the Stop the War ilk who state, as a co-worker of mine did, "the Iraqi's would have been better off with Saddam"!

the heath's newest addition

2005-06-25T15:34:00.000+01:00

I think I'm going to head here for a picnic tomorrow. If only The Arlenes were still in London to immortalise this newest addition to the heath in song (as they did with the lido).

pot kettle black part one

2005-06-25T15:21:00.000+01:00

"Iraq creating new breed of jihadists, says CIA"

The potential of the Iraq insurgents to expand and foment violence and destabilsation in other middle eastern states, as claimed in the leaked CIA report prompted the folowing comment from Jamal Khashoggi, the media adviser to the Saudi ambassador in London:
"It will be worst than Afghanistan. We are talking about a very brutal type, a very weird version of Islam in Iraq. It is very scary."
So, from this a we to presume that the Wahhabite/Salafist strand of Islamic thought that underpins the Saudi state isn't brutal, isn't weird, isn't scary?

Ban God - Now!

2005-06-22T14:08:00.000+01:00

With the proposed new law on the incitement to religious hatred looking likely and Frank Dobson stating that the law will also protect those with no religious beliefs, I look forward to the schisms in the satanic churches coming to a court near you soon with the Church of Satan vs Temple of Set and if Frank is right I'm gonna be first in line to sue all the major religious establishments for calling me an infidel, gentile, heathen, etc etc. Let's hope we'll get some cases taken up by the Humanist Association.

the man from CIA

2005-06-21T12:33:00.000+01:00

Harry Mathews - the first non-French member of Oulipo has a great new "novel" out My Life in CIA. He'll be in the UK on 12th July at the London Review of Books Bookshop. I only wish I wrote this post with constraints...

political correctness gone mad!

2005-06-21T10:33:00.000+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1510150,00.html

what is is, what it ain't

2005-06-20T19:04:00.000+01:00

contrarian views from the mind of a pharmaceutically challenged imbecile
misinformed politically unsound mithering
pop tones!
my sordid life in easily digestible chunks
hermeneutics in action
musings from a diseased heart
an intelligence diet in 8 weeks!
my own business...

an ode to begin...

2005-06-20T18:56:00.000+01:00

...and here we are folks! I hope it's gonna be an enjoyable, informative ride!