JEWS AND BLACK SOLDIERS TARGETED

It is hard to imagine Nicolas Sarkozy saying to Arab families in France, ‘how close we feel to you,’ in response to an attack on their relatives. That is what he said, however, to the relatives of a Rabbi and Jewish children were shot at close range by a lone gunman only weeks before the April Presidential election.

As soon as the evidence emerged that these killings were connected to attacks on black soldiers, the presumed political motivation of the assassin began to be traduced as lunacy: the killer was merely a rogue nutcase.

The context for the killing was the race rhetoric infusing the Presidential election campaign. Sarkozy had already been protesting about the spread of halal meat, complaining that France had become like a ‘sieve’ for migration, that there were too many ‘foreigners’ and threatening to halve immigration.

Unpopular Sarkozy had been playing the race card. He was pre-empting the suave, bitter tongue of the far right, Marine Le Pen and her National Front, and her bizarre claims about diet and a ‘dictatorship of minorities’.

France has half a million Jews, and 5 million Muslims.  Anti-seminitism has haunted the country since the scalding Dreyfus affair in 1894, when the only Jew in the military high command was hounded for alleged spying – untrue – and then the Vichy regime’s complicity in the holocaust.

Racism has veiled the history of the Free French soldiers who joined the Allied forces in liberating the country from Nazi occupation.  So many of them were black. After France had capitulated, it was Africans from the French colonies who filled the ranks of the First French Army. It was Africans who liberated Marseille and Toulon and marched all the way north to Alsace. It was these so-called ‘indigenes’ who were ready and waiting to take the French capital – until the Allied High Command, including our own Winston Churchill,  insisted that the liberation of Paris by black soldiers was unthinkable: white men had to take the city.

This is a story that France has only begun to tell itself – encouraged by the 2006 award-winning movie Indigenes, and the scandal of black soldiers receiving lower pensions than their white comrades. 

These histories were buried again in the election rhetoric of the last month, when Marine le Pen’s language was usurped by President of France fighting for his political life.

Then a gunman dressed in black, got off his motorbike and shot down a rabbi and three children at their Jewish school in Toulouse after shooting at a black army officer from Guadaloupe and three paratroopers from Magreb.

This is a ghastly comeuppance for France and its unresolved struggle to reconcile ‘difference’ with the idea of ‘the people’ and the lore of citizenship and secular state bequeathed by the revolution. It has prized its post-colonial state without ever resolving the implications of colonization. These shootings pose France another challenge: when is commitment to la liberte and la France perceived as an inclusive embrace or white supremacy?

We need a soul revival to spread the word of Aretha Franklin’s great 1967 hit – one of the first to cross over from black Rhythm and Blues to white pop. Or we need Anna Calvi or Lady Gaga or even Rihanna to do a new cover version of this great anthem. We need it more than ever before because too many girls think they don’t deserve it.

That is the only way to interpret the sad statistic that half of teenage boys think it is ok to hit a girl or force her to have sex. And more than a third of boys actually expect to hit a girlfriend or force a girl to have sex.

On March 5 the government announced that it is extending domestic violence offences to under18s.

This is a positive response to campaigners against men’s violence toward women, and to the evidence gathered both by the NSPCC and feminist activists over the years.

What it tells us is that teenagers’ relationships are no less at risk of violence than adults.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise. But still, it does.  Those statistics provokes a gasp, a spasm of great sadness, and a sudden loss of confidence that the present is surely better than the past, that the future will be more humane and peaceful and that boys will be better and girls will be braver.

Behind those figures there is an expectation of violence; there is the rustle of pessimism among teenagers about the very idea of respect.

For a start, there seems to be a prevailing notion that girls will provoke boys beyond reason, that they will cheat, or cheek and that they will, therefore, deserve those slaps and pushes and kicks.

This is a somewhat different – and more disheartening – worldview from the notion that men and boys are somehow hapless, out of control, or that they are – as it says on the T-shirt – trouble.

It is a view of boys that they are somehow entitled to power in a relationship, and the referee is their pride: injured pride attracts the right to retribution; it is his duty to society and himself to sort her out!

This is not a million miles off the historic defense in cases of homicide -  ‘crime of passion’: he was provoked, his reputation was affronted, and he was therefore, entitled to kill her. Two women are killed every week in Britain by the partners or ex-partners.

Worst of all, the evidence tells us something so dispiriting about our shared ‘common sense’ – the thoughts we have when we are not thinking. It is that we expect boys to be violent and girls to be vulnerable, to be victims.

This won’t do! What young men need is an unyielding zero tolerance of violence, an optimism that masculinity can become non-violent; that intimate relationships will be peaceful. We want to make a break with that historic correlation between masculinity, violence and mastery over women and the earth and everything; and between femininity and victimization.

Let’s go to it sistas, R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Now we know the security services were there.

The only people who knew that three men were signing on at the Royal Ulster Constabulary post in Lurgan Northern Ireland in 1990 were the three men themselves, their solicitor the police and security services.

It was always a dangerous visit – Sam Marshall, Tony McCaughey and Colin Duffy were Republicans, they were traveling through hostile Loyalist territory to the police station. These visits were part of their bail conditions.

Duffy noticed a familiar red Maestro circling them – these men’s lives depended on noticing everything, and he’d noticed it before.

Minutes later the three were ambushed in a torrent of bullets. Sam Marshall died, the other two escaped.

The smell of collusion has swirled around that ambush for 20 years. It was, of course denied.  Who was in that red Maestro?  And who was traveling in the maroon Rover that accompanied it? The first evidence to vindicate charges of collusion emerged during an extradition case in the US, when the police admitted that the Maestro men were security services personnel. And the weapons that fired the 49 bullets had been used in other assassinations.

Twenty-two years later we have been told by the Northern Ireland Historical Enquiries Team:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-17251032

that there were eight officers around the scene, and six cars. Two soldiers had followed the men from the police station and ‘partially witnessed’  shooting, only yards away. They did not intervene. The assassins escaped. The guns were not found.

The HET comes to no conclusion about security forces’ collusion in the killing – but does not rule it out.

The men’s families believe that the guns used were part of a cache of weapons smuggled from South Africa by the security services, through their agent Brian Nelson, and distributed among the main loyalist paramilitary organizations.

See a fuller account of this in my book Agreement! The State, Conflict and Change in Northern Ireland, Lawrence and Wishart 2008.

The British re-invigorated a campaign of assassination against republicans – just at the moment when both sides in the Northern Ireland armed conflict were contemplating peace.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-it-is-the-haves-going-on-strike-not-the-havenots-6269308.html

Lawson’s argument was reiterated by Tory minister David Willetts on Radio 4’s The World at One. It shows a remarkable sway of denial. It is the wrong inference from an irrelevant comparison.

The public sector is not to blame for rubbish private sector pensions, it is not to blame for private employers’ abandonment of employers’ contribution to private sector pensions; nor is it to blame for the relentless march of inequality over the last 30 years – synchronising exactly with the rise and rise of neo-liberalism in the global economy.

The Britain bequeathed by the neo-liberal thrall is one of the most unequal societies in Europe – since 1980 workers’ share of the national income has declined from 45 per cent to 157 per cent.

There is an unspoken, inchoate resentment shadowing the resentment of the public sector and indeed the values of public service: it is called misogyny. Sixty-five per cent of public sector workers are women.

They aren’t to blame for the 25 per cent that was wiped off private pensions by the credit crunch, according to Ros Altman, director of Saga:  http://www.rosaltmann.com/independent_metlife_may09.htm

Nor are they to blame for the five years worth of contributions estimated by PriceWaterhouse Coopers to have been wiped off during the 2011 summer stock market crash.

There is a semantic ‘surge’ being mobilised by the deniers: a vocabulary borrowed from the language of class and privilege in Britain is being mobilised against public service. Tories now cite the private sector, hailed for three decades as the paragon of economic virtue, as a victim.

But pensions expert Ros Altman reminds who is the private sector pensions banker – it isn’t the public:

‘The idea that equity markets might not deliver over the long term was never seriously entertained by policymakers. Nobody explained to workers that they were effectively gambling their future security on the stock market without any form of insurance to protect themselves against the risks of poor equity returns and rising life expectancy.’

Society wrought in the image of the private sector, equity markets and neo-liberalism has produced Britain as one of the most unequal societies in Europe.

Since 1980 the workers/taxpayers share of national income: from 45 per cent 1980 to 157 per cent 2007.

Private sector employers have largely abandoned contributions to private pensions. The desperation felt about the declining value of private pensions has to be located alongside the declining value of the basic state pension: it is one of the lowest in Europe.

‘The entire UK pension system has been based on a bet that equities would always do well enough over the long term to deliver good pensions,’ says Altman. ‘Generous final salary schemes – as well as forecasts for good personal pensions – all relied on the equity gamble paying off. The expected strong equity returns also enabled successive governments to cut UK state pensions over time.’

Britain has the largest funded private pension system in Europe – and lowest level of pensions as a percentage of earnings in Europe.

Women employed in the public sector are not responsible for any of this. They probably didn’t vote for it, they certainly didn’t cause it.

To Be or Not to Be On Strike…

The strategic implications of the government’s plan for pensions take us to the re-structuring of the state itself, and to the ethics of industrial action in the public sector. They are connected.

The industrial action is vulnerable to the charge that it is about individual interests v public interest, and that charge that the victims are not big power but people dependent on public servants.

Listening to strikers it is apparent that they are very afraid of the coalition government’s surgical attack on the public sector and the culture of public service: November 30 it is about money, jobs, services and the people who need and use those services.

It is about everything.

But after all the years of purgatory into which trade unions were thrown by Thatcherism, no new idiom of ‘industrial action’ has been invented to address the historic anomaly of strikes in public service: the target isn’t profit or corporate power, it is a person; it is persons whose needs make them powerless.

Without doubt the day of action has concentrated the collective mind on the detail of the coalition’s re-distributive consequences, but it has not resolved the anxious hesitations of people who support the theory behind the strike but not its practise. If trade unions are recovering their nerve and purpose, they also need to improvise action that can inspire and engage those who need them most: the people like them – the people.

The Conservative Euro revolt: 10 points to note

Oh happy days. Just when we think we’re getting a bit tired of doing this rebellions lark, along comes something like Monday’s Euro rebellion.  We knew it would be big, but we were surprised it was quite that big.  Today’s Sun has a Rebelometer, which points to: Utter Disaster.  That’s going a bit far, but not much.

But what is this?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/deccaaitkenhead

Exposing Louise Mensch for having a facelift.

What was brave, illuminating or newsworthy about sharing with Guardian readers little telltale signs of cosmetic surgery? I thought it was – as Omar might say –  unseemly. As it happens, Mensch gave as good as she got. But the game the Guardian interviewer played with Mensch, trying and failing to extract a denial, revealed more about faux journalistic heroism than Mensch’s body politics.

Are we to be enlightened by revelations of dandruff on politicians’ suits, nail biting habits, hair in ears and noses? No of course not, because that’s about blokes and who cares.

a delegate "dances" for protesters at the pornographers conference

Feminists organised a cute  protest on  23/9/11 outside XBIZ EU, an international pornography trade summit, at the Edwardian Radisson Hotel in Bloomsbury Street – dressed as butchers and businessmen trading in women’s body parts. Delegates – some of them already, obviously, having begun their happy hour early – came out to see the kerfuffle. Perma-tans and exotic coiffure were de rigueur.  The gentleman above was very enthusiastic, as you can see.

Swiftly, however, the police and later Radisson staff, escorted the gentlemen back into the hotel so that the women could carry on, unharrassed, with their peaceful protest.

Speakers at XBIZ EU included porn baron Berth Milton, Chairman and CEO of Private Media Group, and Michael Klein, president of Hustler, founded in 1974 by Larry Flint, is now a major producer of pornographic DVDs and online content. In 1978 the Hustler magazine featured an infamous front cover image of a woman’s body being mutilated by a meat grinder.

The global pornography industry is estimated to be worth $97 (US) billion.

OBJECT has launched the STOP.PRESS.PORN campaign to call on the Government to end the sexual objectification of women in newspapers and to end the Page 3 phenomena – already been supported by the Lib Dem Party Conference.

Kat Banyard, Director of UK Feminista, said:

“The pornography industry butchers women. Brutal, body punishing acts are now routine in mainstream porn and women are presented merely as a collection of body parts, deserving and desiring of pain. The pimps and porn moguls gathered at this are part of a global industry ruthlessly seeking new and profitable ways to carve up sexuality and trade away women’s equality. The Radisson Edwardian hotel is hosting a brutal meat market, not a lavish corporate conference.

“For decades the pornography industry has enjoyed unchecked expansion. It’s time to wrestle power back from the pornographers. With a review into the culture and ethics of the press underway, the Government must ensure that pornographic imagery – like ‘Page 3’ – is a key part of this review.”

Anna van Heeswijk, Campaigns Coordinator at OBJECT, said:

“This is not the porn of yesteryear. Pornography today is increasingly violent, body punishing, degrading and woman hating. Hardcore porn is the norm and it is being accessed by boys as young as 11 on the internet and on mobile phones. The messages and images from porn are infiltrating every aspect of our popular culture and women and girls are bearing the brunt of increased levels of violence, sexual abuse and harassment that accompany pornification.

Our message is clear: ‘women are human, stop treating us like objects’.”

Julia Long from the London Feminist Network said:

“This summit is being presented as a lavish, respectable corporate event, when in fact it is a brazen opportunity for the porn industry to plan new ways of profiting from the exploitation of women. No matter how slick and sophisticated the presentation, it is the still the same old meat market just below the surface. This protest is sending an important message that Xbiz is not welcome in London.”

Sabinra Qureshi from Million Women Rise said:

“The public deserve to know the truth and reality behind the so called sex industry and the harm that underpins it, not the glamorised version the media and events like this tend to promote.”

 

 

 

Protesters meet and greet Porn Industry

 

 

 

 

 

This is not to join the tendency to deride ‘compensation culture’: redress and reparation are important contributions to individuals whose wellbeing has been vitally injured, to their recovery, and to social recognition.

The cruel irony for the Dowlers is that these millions compromise their own wellbeing: this money is about someone who can never profit from it, Millie. The Dowlers will now have to manage Murdoch’s largesse. Nothing can ever be enough, and yet this is already too much.

They will also have to manage the meaning of Murdoch’s offer. There is no restorative justice here. Murdoch himself needed to meet the Dowlers, he needed  his face-to-face humbling because he and his empire needed forgiveness. He needed to perform virtue and to have it rewarded and recognised by his victims.

So, this offer denotes neither contrition nor conscience nor compensation – because those words imply change.

What is Murdoch giving the Dowlers? The money is peanuts for an empire that is almost the most powerful media organisation in the world. It is pennies for the man himsef, reckoned to be the 13th most powerful  person in the world.

What he is not giving the Dowlers nor the other hacking victims, nor British culture, which has been so degraded by his presence, is the promise of dignified and deep reform of his media practices.

The context of the offer is a salutory: in the very same week the Metropolitan police tried to mobilise the Official Secrets Act to scare the Guardian, the scourge of News International.

It was the Guardian’s revelations about the NoW hacking and interference in the Dowler investigation that detonated the hacking scandal – it morphed from a scandal about celebrity privacy to a scandal about the the breaching of any code, public or private; and it exposed a most dangerous triangulation: the intimate circuit connecting the News International, the Met and Conservative Party HQ. The promiscuous spread of NoW personnel into the police and the highest echelons of a political party secures for the Tories illicit access to information. Knowledge is power.

The Dowlers they didn’t put themselves into that scandal – but they are in it, nevertherless.

The Met’s audacity in trying to terrify the press with the Official Secrets Act shows that it is still trying to lock the gates of the Temple rather than  cleanse it. The Met is still trying to protect itself rather than the public and the public interest. The Met’s managers don’t seem to know what world they are living in after Dowlergate – until the outraged reaction forced withdrawal.

Not to have anticipated the calumny caused by the Dowler case ad then by the Official Secrets Act caper, exposes its media department – a quarter of its staff former NoW hacks – as equally unworldly.

This week Conservative Party HQ isn’t in the narrative, but if the Met is News International’s security arm – see Jonathan Freedland: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/20/new-met-chief-u-turn-misjudgment

- then the Tories are also hardwired into this circuit. This is very sinister.

Unwittingly the Dowlers found themselves positioned in this narrative and the campaign to crack hacking -

http://hackinginquiry.org/news/hacked-off-manifesto/

- it is to be hoped that the money won’t take them out of it.