UPDATE
Minutes after I posted this article, the ludicrous Jess Phillips published an article in the Guardian which could not have been better designed to prove my thesis. A number of people have posted comments on the Guardian article pointing this out, and they have all been immediately deleted by the Guardian. I just tried it myself and was also deleted. I should be grateful if readers could now also try posting comments there, in order to make a point about censorship on the Guardian.
Catching up on a fortnight’s news, I have spent five hours searching in vain for criticism of Simon Danczuk from prominent or even just declared feminists. The Guardian was the obvious place to start, but while they had two articles by feminist writers condemning Chris Gayle’s clumsy attempt to chat up a presenter, their legion of feminist columnists were entirely silent on Danczuk. The only opinion piece was strongly defending him.
This is very peculiar. The allegation against Danczuk which is under police investigation – of initiating sex with a sleeping woman – is identical to the worst interpretation of the worst accusation against Julian Assange. The Assange allegation brought literally hundreds, probably thousands of condemnatory articles from feminist writers across the entire range of the mainstream media. I have dug up 57 in the Guardian alone with a simple and far from exhaustive search. In the case of Danczuk I can find nothing, zilch, nada. Not a single feminist peep.
The Assange case is not isolated. Tommy Sheridan has been pursuing a lone legal battle against the Murdoch empire for a decade, some of it in prison when the judicial system decided his “perjury” was imprisonable but Andy Coulson’s admitted perjury on the Murdoch side in the same case was not. I personally witnessed in court in Edinburgh last month Tommy Sheridan, with no lawyer (he has no money) arguing against a seven man Murdoch legal team including three QCs, that a letter from the husband of Jackie Bird of BBC Scotland should be admitted in evidence. Bird was working for Murdoch and suggested in his letter that a witness should be “got out of the country” to avoid giving evidence. The bias exhibited by the leading judge I found astonishing beyond belief. I was the only media in the court.
Yet even though the Murdoch allegations against Sheridan were of consensual sexual conduct, Sheridan’s fight against Murdoch has been undermined from the start by the massive and concerted attack he has faced from the forces of feminism. Just as the vital messages WikiLeaks and Assange have put out about war crimes, corruption and the relentless state attack on civil liberties have been undermined by the concerted feminist campaign promoting the self-evidently ludicrous claims of sexual offence against Assange.
As soon as the radical left pose the slightest threat to the neo-con establishment, an army of feminists can be relied upon to run a concerted campaign to undermine any progress the left wing might make. The attack on Jeremy Corbyn over the makeup of his shadow cabinet was a classic example. It is the first ever gender equal shadow cabinet, but the entire media for a 96 hour period last September ran headline news that the lack of women in the “top” posts was anti-feminist. Every feminist commentator in the UK piled in.
Among the obvious dishonesties of this campaign was the fact that Defence, Chancellor, Foreign Affairs and Home Secretary have always been considered the “great offices of State” and the argument only could be made by simply ignoring Defence. The other great irony was the “feminist” attack was led by Blairites like Harman and Cooper, and failed to address the fact that Blair had NO women in any of these posts for a full ten years as Prime Minister.
But facts did not matter in deploying the organised feminist lobby against Corbyn.
Which is why it is an important test to see what the feminists, both inside and outside the Labour Party, would do when the leading anti-Corbyn rent-a-gob, Simon Danczuk, was alleged to have some attitudes to women that seem very dubious indeed, including forcing an ex-wife into non-consensual s&m and that rape allegation.
And the answer is …nothing. Feminists who criticised Assange, Sheridan and Corbyn in droves were utterly silent on the subject of Danczuk. Because the purpose of established and paid feminism is to undermine the left in the service of the neo-cons, not to attack neo-cons like Danczuk.
Identity politics has been used to shatter any attempt to campaign for broader social justice for everybody. Instead it becomes about the rights of particular groups, and that is soon morphed into the neo-con language of opportunity. What is needed, modern feminism argues, is not a reduction of the vast gap between rich and poor, but a chance for some women to become Michelle Mone or Ann Gloag. It is not about good conditions for all, but the removal of glass ceilings for high paid feminist journalists or political hacks.
Feminism has become the main attack tool in the neo-con ideological arsenal. I am sceptical the concept can be redeemed from this.
Fred
I know it wasn’t you using Paul’s name, because about 2 minutes in you’d have been ‘f**k off and die, retard c**ting him. yes it’s hot in the kitchen.
John:
” most affairs, especially casual affairs, just happen ”
that’s why Islam segregates the sexes, so they won’t just happen. Christians complain that Muslims are going too far, but in reality the avoidance of STD, unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted extradition prove that we are justified in sticking to our divine traditions.
Ba’al
Ashraf Fayadh
Saudi Arabia is categorically incorrect in Islamic terms for persecuting voices of opposition. Even if they were the Amir ul Mu’mineen, which the Saudi family are far from being, the Amir represents the truth of Islam and they can be challenged if they appear to be deviating. The Sauds seem to think that their vast wealth means that they have absolute power. Do they not remind themselves after every prayer that Allah’s power overrules everyone’s. I do. it reminds me that the tyrants among the imams of the religion will be punished severely by Allah for their oppression.
Glyane,
You make a valid point about misunderstandings that can arise over sexual matters between people of different cultures. Are you aware of the scandal going on at the moment in Sweden? There has been a deliberate cover-up by the Bonnier-owned Dagens Nyheter newspaper (and now all Swedish MSM are tipping in, wagon circle-style) over non-reporting of mass sexual assaults at the We Are Stockholm festival, attended mostly by 12-18 year old teenagers (and large groups of ‘unaccompanied migrants’ – Afghan migrants/asylum-seeker youths). Apparently, both police and media were worried that reporting of these mass sex assaults, which happened two years in a row at the festival – and specifically the ethnicity of the perpetrators – would increase votes for the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party. So they suppressed the story completely and only tried to tackle it after similar attacks were reported in Cologne.
http://nyheteridag.se/exposing-major-pc-cover-up-in-sweden-leading-daily-dagens-nyheter-refused-to-write-about-cologne-like-sex-crimes-in-central-stockholm/
So, that’s one side of it. On the other hand, this case gives a good illustration of how Sweden’s justice system thinks of and deals with ‘sexual molestation’:
‘Your Place or Mine’ – Group Sex and Swedish Judicial Procedure
http://rixstep.com/1/20160214,00.shtml
Saudi Arabia is categorically incorrect in Islamic terms…
Of course it is. But as its rulers are the (self- and British- ) appointed guardians of the holy places, they are making up the rules as they go along. I think it was a mistake destabilising the Ottomans (we might have realised that at the time of the Crimean War) and replacing an old, sophisticated, if institutionally corrupt, bureaucracy with a bunch of desert robbers. But what do I know?
I’ll see your Salmond and raise you a Cameron, Fred. IMO Crace is a damn sight better at it than the Murdoch man…
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/12/david-cameron-sees-red-as-the-liaison-committee-bares-its-teeth
The prime minister had breezed into the committee room as if he was expecting his usual easy ride. Tyrie was quick to disabuse him. “We are going to get three sessions in this year, aren’t we?” asked Tyrie. Dave didn’t quite get that this was an order not a question. “I think so,” said Dave, checking through his 2013 edition of the Slacker’s Diary. “How about another session before the summer and another one after?”
“I was actually thinking of another two sessions before the summer,” said Tyrie.
“I hadn’t banked on that.”
“You managed to miss the one before Christmas,” Tyrie pointed out.
Dave scratched his head. Ah yes! It had clashed with the Murdoch party. A chap has to have his priorities … which reminded him, he must congratulate Rupert and Jerry on their engagement. Such a happiness.
It was all downhill from there, as Julian Lewis tried to pin the prime minister down on who exactly the 70,000 moderate fighters in Syria were whom our airstrikes were meant to be supporting.
“I’m not going to tell you,” Dave replied tartly.
“Why not?”
“Because then Assad and Isil would know who they were and could target them,” Dave said confidently, missing the obvious point that both Assad and Isil already know who they are fighting.
“So we don’t know if they are moderates or extremists,” said Lewis. Or if they exist at all.
“Would you agree that our actions in Libya have removed Isil’s strongest adversary?’ added Tyrie.
It was at this point that Dave’s fingers began to hammer on the desk. He hadn’t come to the committee to be asked questions that required a degree of thought or understanding.
ROFL
John:
” most affairs, especially casual affairs, just happen ”
that’s why Islam segregates the sexes, so they won’t just happen.
———————————————-
Giyane I have to part company with you on this one. I know Islam segregates the sexes but that is unhealthy in my opinion. Cycling through Turkey in 2000 I was made welcome by the men in the cafes but never saw any women outside of Istanbul, except in the brothels. So while it is incumbent among young women to remain virgins until they married there were many brothels in the cafes catering for the needs of the sex-starved males. The prostitutes were from nearby ‘Christian’ Georgia.
Later when I did my masters about Midland eighteenth century novelist Robert Bage (d. 1801) it occurred to me that this has been going on for centuries. In ‘The Fair Syrian’ (1787) Honoria Warren is captured and sold into slavery as a sex slave virgin. She is able to protect her honour which even the author found a bit far-fetched. Saif Ebn Abu, who cannot get her to become one of his wives vows to take her forcibly, but he is called away to war. Then she is sold into the Harim of a rich Syrian at the slave fair in Basra. She has been befriended by a Georgian, Amina, who argues that her father would pay much more for her were she to remain a virgin. He decides to sell both women after he has taken his will with Honoria but dies from an overdose of provocatives.
Honoria would prefer death a thousand times to sex outside of marriage to someone of her choice. In contrast Amina would prefer a thousand times to death.
Yes, he was a good novelist, Bage. And got most of his facts right.
in the cafes = in the hotels
Now Alan Rickman has also, like David Bowie, died at the age of 69 from cancer. Odd coincidence.
Cycling through Turkey in 2000 I was made welcome by the men in the cafes but never saw any women outside of Istanbul, except in the brothels.
That’s in the East, I’m guessing. Liberal attitudes weren’t confined to İstanbul at that time: northern and western tourist areas were pretty relaxed about women in public, though a headscarf was pretty well mandatory. The religiosity kicked in around Kaiseri, going East. Nowadays, I’d guess it’s stricter all round.
The Ottoman dynasty had already been replaced, as the real rulers of the Ottoman Empire, by the genocidally minded Young Turks.
Lysias
14/01/2016 2:59pm
That’s much more of a grief to me than Bowie’s death.
Anyone ever see Closetland? What an amazing film. Well worth watching if you have not.
My mum fancied him like mad.
Black armband. RIP Alan Rickman.
Kind regards,
John
The Ottoman dynasty had already been replaced, as the real rulers of the Ottoman Empire, by the genocidally minded Young Turks.
Well done you. I intentionally said ‘destabilised’. This began well before WW1 and the Sykes-Picot fuckup, and was principally financially driven. The Young Turks in fact intended to continue, but modernise, the Ottoman structure. Had we been a little cannier regarding German involvement in Turkey pre-war, that could have been maintained. But removing the Ottoman government (or whatever the YT’s would have replaced it with) fitted very nicely with beating Germany. Even in its politically and financially weakened state, Turkey put up a damn good fight. The Ottoman territory outside Anatolia was divided along arbitrary borders among our (not-terribly-useful, despite the Lawrence of Arabia hype) Arab allies. Who had previously made a living very largely by robbing their neighbours. Not a good decision, as it continues to turn out.
The caliphate wasn’t abolished until 1924.
Sod it – Let’s have a smoke
http://www.itv.com/news/granada/update/2016-01-13/photo-of-smoking-magpie-seen-more-than-2-000-times/
Kind regards,
John
Does not alter the fact that, from 1913 to 1918, the real power in the Ottoman state belonged to the genocidally criminal leaders of the Young Turks: in particular, Talât Paşa and Enver Paşa. (The third of the so-called “Three Pashas”, Cemal Paşa, seems to have avoided participating in the worst of the genocide.)
Ba’al
“The religiosity kicked in around Kaiseri”
You mean when you entered the Kurdish region. USUKIS plan for 2016 is to let Erdogan drive 10 million Turkish citizens , ethnically Kurds, out of their homeland that predates the Turkish presence by thousands of years, because Erdogan and the Turks are racist against Kurds. NATO reckons it can genocide them to the daesh region of Syria and put them under the unelected dictator massoud barzani, former president of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Only swivel-eyed neocons, salivating at the prospect of more red injuns, dressed as Kurdish Muslims, in wigwams, to be hounded out of good prospectus land, could invent, let alone start to enforce this genocidal misery. Trump is the Good, Barzani is the Bad, and Erdogan’s got the sherriff’s star, he’s the Ugly.
Cameron and Blair are two bit-part prostitutes from whose drapery curtains Putin and Lavrov can shoot the felons down.
Does not alter the fact that…
Which has zilch to do with the point I was making that breaking up the Ottoman Empire and replacing the caliphate with a bunch of camel-raiders was not a particularly intelligent thing to do. Another hidden point is that anyone can Google anything.
You’re Armenian?
The Caliphate has never been abolished, which is why USUKIS thought they’d get Erdogan to fire it up again. Imagine the world’s Muslims devoutly obeying ( as deobands now do) the commands of NATO’s man ).
re 3.17pm Ba’al
So you’ve never heard of the League of Nations Mandates? The British/French intention was to expand their empires, only it didn’t work in the post-war context.
I’m not certain I understand what you mean by this. The YT were principally Turkish nationalists – that was what made them different from the multi-ethnic Ottoman empire. The empire would have collapsed anyway, even if they hadn’t gone into the war, as the YT were Turko-centric.
Ah yes, the standard British establishment explanation. It’s in all the documents, I’ve read a good number. What the documents don’t say, because they don’t know, is that five years before the war, the Hijazi Arabs had had their livelihood taken away by the construction of the Hijaz railway to Madina. They were already in revolt against the Ottomans, even before Lawrence came along.
Odd someone would think that only a person of Armenian descent would believe that it was right to seek to overturn the rule of the criminally genocidal Young Turk leaders. (As it happens, and as I have said on this forum a number of times, and as a certain commenter who is now absent from this forum has repeated ad nauseam, I am Irish-American.)
PS
During Ottoman rule the population was organized in two overlapping ways. First, there was no “Syria” in the sense of a nation-state, but rather provinces (Turkish: pashaliqs) that were centered on the ancient cities. The most important of these were Damascus, which may be the oldest permanently settled city in the world today, and Aleppo. The concept of a state, much less a nation-state, did not enter into political thought until the end of the 19th century. Inhabitants of the various parts of what became Syria could move without feeling or being considered alien from one province of the Ottoman Empire to the next. Thus, if the grandfathers or great grandfathers of people alive today were asked about what entity they belonged to, they would probably have named the city or village where they paid their taxes…
…Whether in enclaves or in neighborhoods, each non-Muslim community dressed according to its custom, spoke its own languages, and lived according to its unique cultural pattern; it appointed or elected its own officials, who divided the taxes it owed to the empire, ran its schools, and provided such health facilities and social welfare as it thought proper or could afford. Since this system was spelled out in the Quran and the Traditions (Hadiths) of the Prophet, respecting it was legally obligatory for Muslims (attn, Giyane! – BZ). Consequently, when the Syrian state took shape, it inherited a rich, diverse, and tolerant social tradition….
After WW1, it became French, as the spoils of war were divided. Eventually:
…When French policies did not work and nationalism began to offer an alternate vision of political life, the French colonial administration fell back on violence. Indeed throughout the French period—in contrast to the relatively laissez-faire rule of the Ottoman Empire—violence was never far below the outward face of French rule. The French bombarded Damascus, which they had regime-changed in 1920, in 1925, 1926, and 1945, and they pacified the city with martial law during most of the “peaceful” intervals. Constitutions were proclaimed periodically, only to be revoked, and independence was promised time after time until it was finally gained—not by the Syrians nor given by the French but bestowed on Syria by the British army.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/understanding-syria-from-pre-civil-war-to-post-assad/281989/
Since then, compare and contrast with the Ottoman period.
Ba’al
Nobody thinks the House of Saud are a caliphate. Nobody thinks Erdogan is a Sultan. You can do a lot with glued moustaches and costume but they are still wholly owned and controlled by Disney Corporation Inc.
Ba’al:
Since this system was spelled out in the Quran and the Traditions (Hadiths) of the Prophet, respecting it was legally obligatory for Muslims (attn, Giyane!
I know the Saudi muppets think that their oil wealth entitles them to ascribe to themselves the honour of the Amir ul Mu’mineen. But they have tied up and gagged the scholars of Islam who might disagree with them. Muppets have hands inside them making their big gobs open and close and move around.
That Ottoman period had effectively ended with the Young Turk coup in 1908 and especially with the consolidation of power by the most radical Young Turks in 1913. They may not have had time to end all the multiethnic and cosmopolitan powers of the old Ottoman regime before they entered World War One in 1914 and lost power themselves in 1918, but their actions show that they eventually would have, and probably in pretty short order. Their policies towards Arabs in Syria during the war may not have been as genocidal as the way they treated Armenians and Assyrians, but they were certainly draconian.
The Young Turks paid as much attention to the moral dictates of Islam as ISIS currently does.
I meant “multiethnic and cosmopolitan policies”, not “powers”.
arbitrary borders
Arbitrary, as in geographically rather than culturally defined. Not so much of an issue for the USA, whose States follow parallels for the most part, but crucial to the ME.
The YT were principally Turkish nationalists – that was what made them different from the multi-ethnic Ottoman empire. The empire would have collapsed anyway, even if they hadn’t gone into the war, as the YT were Turko-centric.
I see your point. My reading is that their nationalism embraced the Ottoman empire as it then was, at least to some extent. I’d argue that they’d have found it impossible to relinquish a lot of it, particularly Mecca and Medina. And the weakness of the Sultanate created the conditions for their power-grab.
Hijazi Arabs had had their livelihood taken away by the construction of the Hijaz railway to Madina. They were already in revolt against the Ottomans, even before Lawrence came along.
Their livelihood being? Transport contracting? Oh yes, thieving rival tribes’ camels.
Lawrence represented them, since they were happy to take our money, as noble savages. They weren’t. Or at least, no nobler than they needed to be. Read contemporary – and later – accounts of visitors to the Hijaz, Yemen, etc. Thesiger is particularly good.
Actually, the British establishment view (until the 1980’s) is not to be despised. We actually had Arabists who knew their subject in the FO then. I think Craig might confirm that. Subsequently we struck a patch where no-one in the UK (or the US) establishment had a fucking clue what was going on, and our intelligence had to recruit people who could even speak Arabic.
Giyane – I was alluding to the much more liberal interpretation of Islam current under the Ottomans, and effectively making your point.
Lysias – let’s deal with what is/was, rather than what might have been. There are around 7 million displaced persons in Syria right now. Would the YT’s have done any worse?
Here is what the Wikipedia article on Cemal Paşa has to say about his treatment of the Arabs as governor of Syria during World War One:
They certainly could have. Their conduct shows that they could be genocidal.