The idiot left will be suffering double cognitive dissonance given that Castro said in addition: “the Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore”.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/08/report-castro-says-cuban-_n_709563.html

Castro is a neocon stooge

Honestly, this is a relief. I’ve no romantic attachment to Castro’s Cuba, which is a dictatorship whatever positive socialist achievements it has made, but Castro is undeniably ‘of the Left’ and left-wing critics of clerical fascism are few and far between.

And this is no opportunistic conversion either: he has spoken out against Catholic anti-semitism in the past. I have no reason to doubt his sincerity.

Tony Blair and George Bush were liberal heroes in the Middle East…

Perhaps I’ve stumbled into an infinite improbability drive…

The world has turned upside down, at least that was what we thought.

I suggest that, if you find your worldview being repeatedly shaken to the core by epic, earth-shattering WTF?!!?! moments, that it’s probably not the world that is upside down.

This is a slippery slope, Sunny. Today it’s Packman, but tomorrow it could be Cohen or even Aaronovitch. Before you know it it’ll be like Harry’s Place in here.

Nip it in the bud, yeah?

Castro’s still alive?

Good article. The mollycoddling of Ahmedinijad by some on the left (hi there Chavez) has been pretty repellant so Castro’s statement is welcomed, if only – as you say – because so many on the left still look up to him for some reason (personally I think it’s a generation thing).

What the fuck?

“The world has turned upside down, at least that was what we thought. Tony Blair and George Bush were liberal heroes in the Middle East while some on the left back home were doing their best to excuse Islamic fanaticism as a response to imperialism.”

Is this meant to be fucking ironic, or something?

Carl, i’ve noticed in the past that you have an unhealthy tendency to massively oversimplify everything into neat and clean narratives and then chuck around your own devised shorthand as though it were the building blocks of reality itself – I suggest you try and stop doing that in future.

Alternatively, carry on living in the Imaginary World of Nick Cohen and Chums. It’s cosy in there, I hear. But in future Standpoint magazine – or indeed Harry’s Place – would be a better venue for these sorts of myopic fits of prose.

Alternatively, carry on living in the Imaginary World of Nick Cohen and Chums.

This.

Gwyn/Paul,

What is it with you and a strand of left-wing opinion that you don’t like represented by Harry’s Place and apparently Carl? You seem to think that it should not be heard on this site, and is wrong, but assume this fact is self-explanatory and that Sunny will have to agree with you without making the case.

Now, unless there is some cleverly hidden sublimal message in this piece, what Carl was saying is that it was good to see a prominent international left-wing figure criticise the Iranian regime. I presume you’d agree with this, and do not prefer to support a clerical regime, with no respect for human rights, simply because its (no longer democratically-elected) leader pays lip service to socialist ideals (but considering that the rich and middle classes in Iran do far better than the urban or rural poor, clearly doesn’t achieve anything). So I assume this is some sort of blind political posturing, complaining about the messenger without considering the message. Exactly the sort of thing that Carl was actually suggesting was a bad idea in fact.

Of course, you could be the sort of person that Harry’s Place seems to specialise in digging up(/inventing?) who cannot bear any criticism of Islam or Islamic regimes for reasons that I cannot comprehend, but I prefer to think better of you than that. So I am at a loss to understand your problem.

I thought it was Mahmoud AhMADinejad; the clue is in the name…

I’m desperately upset to find that many of you think I authored the idea that Tony Blair and George Bush are liberal heroes – I noted the world being turned upside down, at a time when two politicians could invade a country under the banner liberal interventionism – the war in Iraq was, in my opinion, neither liberal nor liberal interventionist, it was an error on a massive scale.

My point about the world being turned upside down made note of a time when the there was some consensus about the Iraq mission being called liberal – which I disagree with. I deliberately put this alongside exemplifying leftists allying with theocrats (Chavez and Ahmadinejad being one case in point) because I think both are batshit crazy.

These two things never made sense to me – this was my point.

Paul Sagar (8) – goodness me, have you had that pent up for a while?

Watchman (10) – I agree with you, and though I don’t agree with being likened to Harry’s Place in the way that daft liberals mean it (that is to say being a “decent leftist” which borders into Islamophobia) I like that website, I read it for information I’m often unable to find on your average left wing blog through fear of being called Islamophobic by the very same daft liberals.

I also read pickled politics for the very same reason – they too have no problem with criticising Islamism (perhaps with the exception of earwicga) from a left wing perspective.

The problem with HP is that it will sometimes go slightly too far, but it’s important to remember that it is multi-authored.

One last thing, the 9th paragraph on my entry, the line should actually read: “it certainly does restore faith that international leftism does not imply a catch-all attachment to the underdog “. It was quite lumpily written anyway, but the “not” makes all the difference.

Watchman,

It’s the illegal wars based on lies, fearmongering about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, hypocrtical self-serving garbage about women’s rights and Enlightenment Values, asserting that killing fuckloads of innocent people is the Liberal and Decent thing to do, kow-towing to the worst US president in history and a batshit crazy Republican party hellbent on blood, destabilising the middle east and, again, killing hundreds of thousands of people that basically gets up our nose.

Oh, that, and then being told that we’re shits for not supporting this lunatic clusterfuck orgy of death and that if we were really Liberal and Left Wing and Descent and Torchbearers of Enlightenment Values then we too would support an insane retarded redneck president’s ill-planned, under-resourced and frankly batty ideological war in which, again, hundreds of thousands have died.

Those two factors, combined, they make people like us a wee bit irritated. Does it come as a surprise?

that should have been illegal war, not wars.

“The problem with HP is that it will sometimes go slightly too far, but it’s important to remember that it is multi-authored.”

!!!

Re have I had it pent up?

Sort of. I often feel as though you say what you think will fit a certain niche stradling enough zones of the blogosphere – descent left, Liberal Conspiracy type left, socialist left a-la-Though Cowards Flinch – in an effort to get widely read and noticed, and in the process don’t think enough about whether what you are saying is actually right and whether you really believe it.

Sorry, that’s pretty harsh.

I’m having a bad day, and you just had to walk into it I’m afraid…

In Iran, Paul, they’d call you feminine

Castro is 84, and has recently overcome several years of debilitating illness – to my mind his words sound like somebody looking back in the search of meaning for events taking place in the here and now?

In this context the unfolding nuclear tensions between Israel, Iran and America (primarily) echo the last time nation states squared up to each other with weapons capable unleashing unimaginable destruction.

Isn’t Castro’s biggest fear that the world is sleeping walking into this sort of apocalypse, and the idea that anybody will be in control (once we get beond a certain tipping point) is entirely illusory?

Castro is a past master in brinkmanship so perhaps he recognises similar reckless traits in Ahmadinejad (hence his criticism of him).

According to Aunty, “The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu constantly stresses what he sees as a potential existential threat from Iran. Israel has reportedly carried out a major air force exercise, seen as practice for a raid on Iran. It is sceptical that diplomatic means will force Iran to stop (uranium) enrichment and does not want to let Iran develop even a theoretical capacity to make a nuclear bomb”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4031603.stm

From the same item, “Experts believe that Iran could enrich enough uranium for a bomb within a few months. However, it has apparently not mastered the technology of making a nuclear warhead. In theory Iran could leave the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty with three months notice and it would then be free to do what it wanted. However, by doing that it would signal its intentions and leave itself open to attack. If it tried to divert material for a bomb in secret and was found out, it would lay itself open to the same risk”.

10. I hate on Harry’s Place because it’s really bad. You should too!

The thrust of this piece is fine by me, but it’s the other bullshit buzzwords being oh-so-nonchalantly thrown around (liberal apologists this, Lefty Vince Cable that) without examination or analysis that sets my teeth on edge.

Get it right, or get out.

‘It’s the illegal wars based on lies, fearmongering about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, hypocrtical self-serving garbage about women’s rights and Enlightenment Values, asserting that killing fuckloads of innocent people is the Liberal and Decent thing to do, kow-towing to the worst US president in history and a batshit crazy Republican party hellbent on blood, destabilising the middle east and, again, killing hundreds of thousands of people that basically gets up our nose.’

Apart from ‘hypocrtical self-serving garbage about women’s rights and Enlightenment Values’ that’s a fair assessment of HP’s main contributors – but there’s nothing ‘hypocritical’ in their support for womens rights unless they oppose them in the West – they don’t – and huge swathes of the ‘Left’ do oppose enlightenment values as ‘colonialist’, etc.

@Shatterface

I think the point is it’s hypocritical to defend women’s rights when depriving those same women of the right to life, home, electricity, etc.

Hypocrtical was the wrong word. Cynically opportunistic would have been more accurate.

Maybe I can be of assistance here, kohai. Bear with me though, it’ll take a minute…

As noted, Carl seems to regard Castro’s statement as a great surprise in this topsy-turvy, up-is-down, black-is-white world. I don’t find it surprising at all but then, I am an obnoxious smartarse. Maybe if I write down why I’m not surprised, we’ll arrive at a reasonable conclusion sooner.

Firstly, I’m aware that the awful leftist/Islamist alliance – referred to by Carl as “those whose oiled-gloves are trying to juggle egalitarian principles with Islamist horse feathers” – amount to Three Commie Blokes And An Islamist Dog, plus a Gaggle Of Internet Fuckwits With Blogs.

I’m aware of this because I watched as the pro-war faction (in the sense of pro-war as a tool of general foreign policy) in Britain grabbed the only organised opposition to the Iraq war as its model for all opponents of most wars, and started bigging them up as a baleful threat to democracy.

Usefully for the warfans, the only opposition was organised by Three Commie Blokes And that Islamist Dog (plus, a Gaggle of Internet Fuckwits…), which made them easy to quote-mine for fuckwitted pronouncements. And so, as our various military disasters have circled the plughole, the hellish threat of TCB&AID (PAGOIFWB) was inflated and puffed to comical proportions.

Secondly, I’m aware that strongman populist/bullshitter Hugo Chavez has two priorities – bigging himself up, and annoying the Americans. This means that when Hugo meets Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I conclude that he’s doing it because he is bigging himself up and trying (successfully) to annoy the Americans.

Thirdly – and this is the important bit! – when these two events happen concurrently, I’m able to recognise them as “A bunch of twats acting up” rather than “A hideous global conspiracy of Left/Fascist IslamoTerrorists conspiring in baleful confederacy to destroy the universe and genocide Israel”.

This puts me at a considerable advantage when, say, Fidel Castro ticks off Ahmadinejad for Jew-baiting racism, because I’m aware that Castro is an geriatric, Commie ex-tyrant, and not a Pillar of a hideous global conspiracy of Left/Fascist IslamoTerrorists conspiring in baleful confederacy to destroy the universe and genocide Israel. In fact, it’s no more surprising than, say, Vladimir Putin declaring that he likes kittens and disapproves of mass crucifixion.

And so, back to Carl and the various other characters who struggle to make sense of this mad, upside-down, kerrayzee world in which Castro can condemn anti-semitism, when it just doesn’t make sense, damn it!

As I said earlier, if a person keeps experiencing astonishing, blinding WTF!!?!?!! moments when events just blow them away and rock their worldviews to their foundations, it probably isn’t the world that’s upside-down. There’s a simpler and more plausible explanation.

Flyingrodent;

Well done.

It’s not three commies and a dog, it’s amnesty International making a poster boy of Moazzam Begg at the expense of feminist Gita Sahgal; it is Ken Livingstone exemplifying Yusuf al-Qaradawi as an exemplar of Islamic progressivism; it is left wing protesters holding placards by the Muslim Association of Britain and “we are all Hezbollah now”.

It is George Galloway supporting Ahmadinejad.

We got nowehere with your reading.

I recognise that Chavez is a posturer, but that his allegiance with Iran has been formed on the logic of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ – hopefully this all has put a stop to that shite.

My own world was not turned upside down, I’m a socialist and I’ve always been a socialist.

It’s not three commies and a dog, it’s amnesty International making a poster boy of Moazzam Begg at the expense of feminist Gita Sahgal; it is Ken Livingstone exemplifying Yusuf al-Qaradawi as an exemplar of Islamic progressivism; it is left wing protesters holding placards by the Muslim Association of Britain and “we are all Hezbollah now”.

And that, in short, is why people erupt into the thread demanding to be told what this sub-Harry’s Place, guilt-by-association guff is doing at this website. It’s also the reason why your head goes all funny when events like Castro’s statement occur.

Back to the drawing board, Carl.

@25 – FlyingRodent

I’m no fan of Harry’s Place, but I’m mainly in agreement with Carl – though I’ve not reached a strong conclusions on the AI/Sahgal/CagePrisoners thing.

It was very disheartening to be on the Gaza rally with chunks of the far left shouting frankly, anti-Semitic chants.

On student campuses, the SWP’s rhetoric is now no longer distinguishable from that of Hizb-ut-Tahrir a decade ago. This was a deliberate strategy to create loyal members who could no longer be incorporated into a wider centre-left coalition. It gives right-wingers carte blanché to label all opposition to say the Israeli occupation of Palestine as anti-Semitic.

The left should have been building bridges with liberal Zionist organisations and parties, such as Meretz and Peace Now, who identify strongly with an Israel in liberal democratic terms, but are dead-set against current Israeli state behaviour. Instead all we have is extreme polarisation.

[26] “Instead all we have is extreme polarisation” – a sign, perhaps, that there is little prospect of satisfying all, or even any of the protagonists (either on teh net, or more importantly on the political scene)?

Even the cigar chomping bete noir of the west said he understood Iranian fears of Israeli-American aggression but in his view, American sanctions and Israeli threats will not dissuade the Iranian leadership from pursuing nuclear weapons. “This problem is not going to get resolved, because the Iranians are not going to back down in the face of threats. That’s my opinion,” he said. He then noted that, unlike Cuba, Iran is a “profoundly religious country,” and he said that religious leaders are less apt to compromise.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/fidel-to-ahmadinejad-stop-slandering-the-jews/62566/

Proliferation of nuclear weapons in one of the worlds hot spots (on the back of a disastrous foreign policy) – I’m not surprised people are shouting at each other!

“logic of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ – hopefully this all has put a stop to that shite.”

If that surprises you then I suggest you take a course in international relations theory, in particular the section on “bandwagoning”, and “how alliances are formed”.

Carl,
“It’s not three commies and a dog, it’s amnesty International making a poster boy of Moazzam Begg at the expense of feminist Gita Sahgal; it is Ken Livingstone exemplifying Yusuf al-Qaradawi as an exemplar of Islamic progressivism; it is left wing protesters holding placards by the Muslim Association of Britain and “we are all Hezbollah now”.
It is George Galloway supporting Ahmadinejad.”
OK, let’s go over the boring basics with some of this stuff, in which I shall blow my own trumpet as well as that of The Rodent.
On Moazzam Begg, it helps to read things other than Nick Cohen’s Observer column. I recommend instead Flying Rodent’s
definitive piece on the matter.
Or Sunny over at Pickled Politics.
On Ken Livingstone – well his love affair is really with China, and I’d like to stand up loud and proud that I don’t consider him a spokesperson for my beliefs or for the kind of liberal left politics I subscribe to. Look, I’ve even slagged him off.
As for Galloway, most of the anti-war left sees him as a self-serving liability who voices horrific outpourings of idiocy like “the fall of the USSR was the worst thing that ever happened in my life”. By shaking Saddam’s hand – for example – this man did the anti-war left more harm than all the fuckwit “no blood for oil” oversimplification placards in the universe times a million. And oh look, i’ve had a go at him too.
As for leftwing protestors yelling stupid things. Well, yes, that happens. Does it mean all of the anti-war left is an Israel-hating blood-demanding fuckwit unable to see the irony in their stupid banners? No, obviously.
But it’s the guilt-by-association implication – and the whole “the world is neatly divided into these camps” oversimplification – that gets up people’s noses and prompts Flying Rodent to use phrases like “sub Harry’ Place guff”.
Frankly.

Oh fuck off HTML fail.

Right, in order:

http://flyingrodent.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-bullshit-works-32309-zombies.html

http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/7532

http://badconscience.com/2010/01/30/1669/

http://badconscience.com/2010/02/08/is-my-mp-as-bad-as-nick-griffin/

@Naadir: It was very disheartening to be on the Gaza rally with chunks of the far left shouting frankly, anti-Semitic chants.

I bet it was. For the thousandth time and a thousand times again, fuck these guys. I’ll take your word for it on the commie micro-groups, and provisionally dish out the Condemnations! to them too.

And yet, still. What I found really distressing about the Gaza campaign was all the cutting edge high explosives being hurled into highly-populated urban areas while our country’s political leadership – the people with actual power – whistled and looked at its shoes. What I find alarming about our numerous wars are the fact that we’re killing thousands of people with no strategy for victory or endgame.

These incidents are never added to the pro-war column. Police stations, schools, weddings, all can be obliterated with predator missiles, yet nobody is compelled to Condemn! any of it, far less held responsible.

Meanwhile, anguish over George Galloway – a man best known for appearing on a shit gameshow, who holds the popular support of next to nobody – and the left’s failure to engage with Meretz. I’m calling bullshit on this stuff.

It gives right-wingers carte blanché to label all opposition to say the Israeli occupation of Palestine as anti-Semitic.

Uh, yes. Do I need to respond to this sentence?

[29] “no blood for oil” oversimplification” – if there is a better explanation, I’d love to hear it.

Why then did the U.S. invade Iraq? Why is occupying Iraq so “vital” to those “national security interests” of ours? None of this makes sense if you don’t have the patience to drill a little beneath the surface – and into the past; if you don’t take into account that, as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once put it, Iraq “floats on a sea of oil”; and if you don’t consider the decades-long U.S. campaign to control, in some fashion, Middle East energy reservoirs. If not, then you can’t understand the incredible tenaciousness with which George W. Bush and his top officials have pursued their Iraqi dreams or why — now that those dreams are clearly so many nightmares — even the Democrats can’t give up the ghost.
http://aljazeera.com/news/newsfull.php?newid=52841

As John Gray said, “Those who control oil and water will control the world”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/30/fossilfuels.water

My only issue with the whole “It’s all about oil” thing is that for fucking YEARS people kept saying it to you in a meaningful way, as if they were revealing the world’s cleverest secret. Which obviously has little to do with politics. Yes, it’s a simplification, but it’s not really an over-simplification; saying “basically, we’re over there for the purposes of sating our greed, securing our fuel supply and, maybe, setting political and military precedents that could work in our favour going forward” pretty much tells people what they need to know.

Oh, PS: Paul, liked the look of your blog, and enjoyed your article about why you hate the Tories. Funnily enough, I ended up in a similar situation from what might be called the other side of the fence. Also, that has to be the only political blog in the world (except this one after I hit submit) where someone mentions Dark Eldar in the comments

@Chaiseguevara, A&E,

It’s not often at all i will quote Tony Blair in a way intended to denote approval and a belief that he is telling the truth. But nonetheless, as he put it the other week: “Iraq wasn’t about oil. If it was about oil we’d have just cut a deal with Saddam”.

And the reason we know this is probably true is that the UK and US do indeed frequently cut deals with horrific regimes in, especially, the middle east specifically to secure oil.

But you know what the worst thing is? If it WAS all about oil, the whole clusterfuck catastrophe would at least be intelligible. As it is, nobody really knows why that war actually happened – if you look back on it now it just makes so very little sense. And that, i find, is a lot scarier than some simple platitude about oil….

[33] “we’re over there for the purposes of sating our greed” – that’s a bit unfair considering western levels of individual consumption outstrips the rest of the world.
http://www.economicswebinstitute.org/glossary/cons.htm

Most of the electorate would become unhappy, and very quickly if OUR level of consumption was brought into line with poorer parts of the world – if we don’t have the means how on earth can we continue to fund this lot?
1. Food
2. Clothing and foot wear
3. Housing
4. Heating and energy
5. Health
6. Transport
7. House furniture and appliances
8. Communication
9. Culture and schooling
10. Entertainment

Paul (29)

Do you qualify all of those article re Begg? Did you read my own? [http://raincoatoptimism.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/moazzam-begg-is-no-friend-of-the-left/]

A lot of people struggle to understand the Bush administration because they assume that there was a neocon strategy. There was no strategy they were literally making it up as they went along. The whole ethos of the administration was to react to events and then create a narrative after acting. They did not have a clue why they were in Iraq. Removing Saddam sounded a good idea but what happens next did not enter their thinking. This prescient article from 2003 gets right to the heart of the administration and neocon thinking.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0309.marshall.html

This quote sums them up perfectly.

‘ The alternative to facts on the ground is to act, regardless of the facts on the ground. When you act you make new facts. You clear new ground. ‘
http://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2007/07/jay-rosen-retre.html

“The world has turned upside down, at least that was what we thought. Tony Blair and George Bush were liberal heroes in the Middle East while some on the left back home were doing their best to excuse Islamic fanaticism as a response to imperialism.”

Why would anyone hold views like that?

@Paul

“It’s not often at all i will quote Tony Blair in a way intended to denote approval and a belief that he is telling the truth. But nonetheless, as he put it the other week: “Iraq wasn’t about oil. If it was about oil we’d have just cut a deal with Saddam”.

And the reason we know this is probably true is that the UK and US do indeed frequently cut deals with horrific regimes in, especially, the middle east specifically to secure oil.”

True, but there’s also the issue of fuel security. For example, we can cut as many deals as we like with Russia, but they can turn the gas off whenever they feel like. OK, they might not actually want to do that, but they know they can, and we know they can… you see where I’m going.

“But you know what the worst thing is? If it WAS all about oil, the whole clusterfuck catastrophe would at least be intelligible. As it is, nobody really knows why that war actually happened – if you look back on it now it just makes so very little sense. And that, i find, is a lot scarier than some simple platitude about oil….”

Believe it or not, I think it was about 9/11. I’m fucking certain that’s why America went into Afghanistan, at least. Basically, Bush needs to win votes, and at the time the votes were going to go to the guy with the biggest balls who was prepared to make himself tough at the expense of the Evil Ones*.

There’s a side theory here – and it comes from Noam Chomsky, so you should feel utterly free to call it paranoid bullshit – that 9/11 came just at the wrong time. Just when America really felt it had the world in its fist, it got hit in a huge way, with its own infrastructure used as weapons against it. Chomsky talks about ‘preventive war’. Essentially, it’s the concept of a pre-emptive strike employed on a whole new scale and at the other end of morality. The way he sees it, America wanted to demonstrate that it had the right not only to fight aggressors, but to fight people who looked like aggressors or might look like aggressors at some unspecified point in the future.

In other words, defending American sovereignty gave it the excuse to attack anyone it pleased, and it needed to flex its muscles because of the effect 9/11 had on the home front. Hence Iraq. Chomsky, true to form, treats this whole concept as some kind of neocon conspiracy dating back to the Cuban Missle Crisis. For my money, if the theory’s worth anything at all, it has more to do with subliminal attitudes among the American high command. Still, food for thought, perhaps.

*Read ‘Arabs’.

Shit, the above post was long. Apologies.

“Most of the electorate would become unhappy, and very quickly if OUR level of consumption was brought into line with poorer parts of the world – if we don’t have the means how on earth can we continue to fund this lot?”

We can fund ‘em. The question is how cheaply can we fund them – because cheap resources and luxuries means higher quality of life, which means votes, and generally accelerates the economic process, which eventually means power.

To be honest, I think some world leaders, Blair included, tend to treat foreign policy as if it were a game of Risk: it’s not enough to secure your country’s needs, you need to maximize power even if it’s for it’s own sake.

@ Chris

“Why would anyone hold views like that?”

I don’t think both views would be held by the same people. First one’s rightwing: Bush ‘n’ Blair were liberal heroes in the eyes of some news outlets, and presumably the ears of some people who believed said outlets.

Second one’s leftwing. The whole cultural relativism (or whatever you like to call it) is real enough. There’s certainly an instinct among liberals in powerful countries to blame their own history for problems in the world theatre today (which may or may not be accurate, but it’s hardly a productive way to think). And even when we’re definitely not to blame, there’s a tendency to say that we should keep our nose out of foreign atrocities because otherwise we’re just as bad as the Roman Empire. Sounds like bullshit to me, but there you go.

It’s not three commies and a dog, it’s amnesty International making a poster boy of Moazzam Begg at the expense of feminist Gita Sahgal

Oh gimme a break. That who episode was hyped into some mass hysteria of bullshit proportions (as Flying Rodent would say).

We’re talking about the same Gita Sahgal who later pretty much accused Amnesty of doing what Chinese and Russian govts do?

Fr at #23 has it spot on. I fear you spend far too much time hanging out with Michael Ezra Carl. Tell the people at HP next time you meet them to try and get lawyers to check the stuff they publish (heh).

As FlyingRodent says @23 – this is a strawman argument. Either that, or it’s attacking a group of people who are extremely small.

What Carl appears to have done in this article (unless he’s actually only attacking George Galloway and Hugo Chavez) is to construct a strawman pro-Islamist liberal left out of various conveniently attackable characters, proceed to demolish it, and then gloat triumphantly over his pile of straw.

The thing is that most anti-war liberals/leftists are not pro-Islamist in the first place – they just don’t believe Islam is The Terrifying Threat To Our Nation’s Survival it’s made out to be by many. They also aren’t fanatically interested in either Galloway or Castro, don’t care if they disagree with each other, and certainly don’t rely on them for justification for not believing whatever Carl thinks they should believe (although I’m not entirely clear what that is from the article – but it seems to involve provoking some sort of confrontation with Saudi Arabia).

In defense of the article it does note that “this isn’t gamechanging stuff”.

Duh… in #44 I meant “extremely small group of people” (as in George Galloway’s immediate followers), not “group of people who are extremely small”.

Sunny (43)

it was hyped up, and you don’t have to be a fan of Sahgal’s hyperbole to see the affair as important.

But also, it’s an important example when a great orgainsation like AI has used someone who fundamentally cannot distinguish between Islamic scholars and fascists who utilise Islam erroneously (Anwar al-Awlaki is one case in point, who the Cageprisoners give uncritical platforms to – which is beyond the pale for a human rights organisation).

It is no small concern that such relativism has not saturated Western liberalism itself.

I’ve only met Michael Ezra once, he’s a nice guy, spends a lot of time showing the odious and revisionist nature of the socialist workers’ party.

“Why would anyone hold views like that?”

Because, like Packman, they get turned on by bombing ‘backward’ people like Muslims in the name of progress.

Duh… in #44 I meant “extremely small group of people” (as in George Galloway’s immediate followers), not “group of people who are extremely small”.

I don’t know – an inferiority complex due to their hight might explain quite why Galloway’s merry band take themselves so seriously?

I am struggling to see how much of the criticism levelled at Carl is valid (loath as I am to stir in the pot of left-wing discord and all that) since he is not denying there is only a small number of people in this silly leftish-Islamic nexus, but they are quite high profile (maybe because like that idiot in Gainsville, Florida, they make good press), and so far no-one has clearly drawn a distinction between their nonsense and ‘acceptable’ recognition of differences, such as underlie multiculturalism. Carl seems to want a line, when his critics seem more concerned with suggesting the problem does not exist.

…his critics seem more concerned with suggesting the problem does not exist.

I think it’s rather that, if you wanted evidence that the world has turned upside down and people are betraying their humanitarian principles and so on…

Well, you don’t have to go parsing blog posts by some Commie micro-sect. You could look at the language of humanitarianism being used to justify torture, extrajudicial detention, elective warmaking, state propaganda and forced confession, not to mention the absolutely massive piles of corpses stacking up as a result of our unwinnable wars.

Compare this with some Galloway figure talking dubious crap and being nice to Islamist headbangers. The idea that the latter exists in a vaguely similar category to the former is deranged, crack-smoking lunacy; this is before we even get to examining the individual cases cited by Carl above, which range from Caught-Red-Handed to Feeble, Inkblot Horseshit.