Well, courtesy of Harry’s Place the mystery behind the closure of the excellent Shot By Both Sides has been solved.

What appears to have happened is John posted this comment:

Send the Board [of Deputies] to the gas chambers, that’s what I say (no, not for their ethnicity; for their fatuous whining. And obviously, the people who complain about Bob Geldof saying ‘fuck’ on the telly should be ahead of them in the queue….)

In relation to the wholly manufactured furore over Ken Livingstone’s ‘Concentration Camp Guard’ jibe, which has been referred to the Standards Board by the Jewish Board of Deputies; a comment which, if you visited SBBS with any frequency, you’d know this to be little more than John’s usual brand of humourous polemicism.

Only this time around some anonymous - of course - piece of shit took it on themselves to threaten his livelihood by complaining to his employer as well a threatening to make complaints to the firm’s clients and to the national press.

Aside from provoking widespread anger amongst many bloggers, this whole episode and some of the comments its provoked raises a number of interesting questions.

One has to wonder, in the first place, whether its the mere fact of jokingly calling for execution of the Jewish Board of Deputies which caused so much apparent offence or whether, as seems more likely from comments on other blogs, it was his specific reference to sending them to the ‘gas chamber’ and the presumed symbolism of this reference. On heavily suspects the latter and that none of this would have occured has he referred, instead to, say, having them put against the wall and shot.

The fact is, as his reference to people who whine about Saint Bob saying ‘fuck’ on TV shows, part of John’s humourous style was to call for the assassination of people who pissed him off with their own particular brand of banal absurdity.

In other words, it’s a joke in very much the same way that the story that Hitler’s last words to his mistress Eva Braun were ‘Fuck me! Have you seen the size of that last gas bill?’ is a joke - you might think it a bit sick and rather cruel but - guess what? - a lot of the best humour is frequently a bit sick and very often extremely cruel.

It’s no coincidence, for example, that very best British TV sit-coms, think Fawlty Towers, Steptoe & Son, The Office, Rising Damp and others are all predicated on the key premise that the central character is a complete and utter fucking loser, a social misfit/halfwit. Fact - we laugh at other people’s misfortunes, especially when they’re self-inflicted. Fact - we find humour in even the wosrt and most horrific of situations, it’s what psychologists refer as a ‘coping strategy’, a means of letting off steam and releasing a bit of psychological pressure - often we laugh because if we didn’t we’d cry instead.

As I’ve said, there have been a few comments to the effect that John was ‘out of order’ with that particular comment. Well if you read this and feel that way then let me ask you this question:

If comments like that are so offensive and you believe the holocaust so terrible it should be off-limits when it comes to humour then tell me - are you going to writing a letter of complaint to the BBC next time they show Mel Brooks’ classic comedy ‘The Producers’ - or does ‘Springtime for Hitler’ not count as offensive because Mel Brooks is Jewish?

Exactly. There’s nothing wrong with cracking gags about the holocaust if youre Jewish, is there? You wouldn’t complain about ‘The Producers’ anymore than you’d no more call for Chris Rock to drop his achingly funny ‘Niggaz vs Black People’ routine or lay into Richard Prior for observing how dumb it was of black rioters in LA to trash their own neighbourhood in the aftermath of the Rodney King case rather than head on over to Beverley Hills and trash the homes of the rich and shameless.

Which makes you a fucking hypocrite, doesn’t it.

Just the kind of hand-wringing, middle-class, liberal twat who used to lecture people about the supposed ‘fact’ that non-whites couldn’t be racist, only prejudiced - if you’ve never come across that particular gem, btw, yes it is true that that kind of bullshit was pretty much common currency in liberal anti-racist circles during the 1980’s and certainly a fair way into the 1990’s. Of course, the kind of people who used to spout that kind of bollocks were also the kind of people who’d never sat on the top deck of bus going through an inner city area and listened to group of black youths banging on about how much they hated ‘the pakis’.

No community is entirely free of racism and if you haven’t worked that out by now then, hey, take a seat, wipe the bullshit out of your eyes and welcome to the real fucking world.

Let me tell you something important here, something really important.

There is only one division in society which really matters and that’s the division between the powerful and the powerless - that’s it, that’s the only division that really matters, everything else is a distraction.

Sexism, racism, homophobia, prejudice, bigotry - you know what? In the grand scheme of things they’re all illusions, artifical constructs which serve a single purpose - divide and rule. That’s how the limited number of people in this world who exercise real power hang on to it, by keeping everyone else focussed on fighting amongst themselves - that way no one every really get round to figuring out exactly who it is whose really shitting on them from a great height because if they did…

… well you figure out for yourself just how many people exercise any real power in this world compared to the billions who don’t and then work out just exactly ehat would happen if all us powerless folks suddenly wised up at the same time and decided to go after the bastards with real power. Exactly.

That’s the saddest, dumbest part of this whole episode. Whoever it was who took umbrage at John’s comments and started kicking out complaints is probably sitting there congratulating themselves on a ‘job well done’, on striking a blow against the ‘oppressor’ without ever giving a second thought to the fact that, in reality, they’ve achieved precisely nothing. Nada. Fuck all. Jack Shit.

All they’ve done is pushed a guy who at least had the balls to speak his mind with a bit of humour and who understood that its often necessary to take things to the edge, to set out to deliberately provoke a reaction just to get a debate going at all, to shut down a weblog. Big fucking deal, hope you’re proud of yourself for proving that you’re just as dumb as pretty much everyone else on this fucking planet.

Or, as John Cooper-Clarke might say:

“People don’t have a good word for you, but I do.

TWAT!”

Thw utterly dumb suggestion that we drop Holocaust Memorial Day out of deference to Muslim sensibilities - apparently its ‘offensive to Muslims’, give the impression that “western lives have more value than non-western livesâ€? and “sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals” is almost too contemptible to deserve comment.

Yet, at the risk of being pedantic I am going to offer a few words and, frankly. make no apologies if any of them cause offence.

First of all, having looked over the HMD website there are certainly valid grounds for characterising the site and its resources and being rather too exclusive and, yes, rather too Jewish.

Yes, the best estimates of the number of Jewish casualties of the Holocaust run to around 5-6 million, a horrific figure in anyone’s book but some way short of the estimates 9-11 million who actually died in Nazi concentration and slave labour camps during WWII, despite the fact that the only olther casualties which seem to be explicitly acknowledged by the site are Jehovah’s Witnesses.

So, yes, there is certainly a strong case for the charity to put considerably more effort into remembering the full range of victims of the Nazi genocide in Europe, which include:

Between a quarter and half of the total Sinti and Roma population of Europe.

Poles, Russian POWs and a wide range of ethnic Slavs.

Homosexuals

The physically and mentally disabled.

Communist, Socialists, Trade Unionists and political dissidents.

In fact anything from another 3-6 million people who were not Jewish but still made their way onto the Nazi shit-list and ended up taking a short trip to a mass grave.

Now getting back to the other point, the idea of a generic ‘Genocide Day’ - as supported by Sir Iqbal Sacranie - which would recognise the mass murder of Muslims in Bosnia, Palestine and Chechnya.

To be honest I’m fine with that in principle as a new and separate event, although I might be rather more sympathetic to the idea had anyone bothered to mention the little matters of Rwanda or Darfur by name rather than lumping it in with ‘people of other faiths’ as a bit of an afterthought - oh, and why only ‘people of other faiths’, what have us atheists done to get ourselves excluded - but as we’re on the subject of remembering genocide and saying never again then I’m sure that, as a Muslim, Sir Iqbal won’t mind being the one to lay a wreath to the memory of one of two other historical genocides that he might otherwise be inclined to forget.

For starters we’re take the Armenian, Assyrian and Pontian Greek massacres carried out by the Ottoman Empire - exact figures for the number of deaths are disputed but the general estimates run to anything from 1-1.5 million Armenians, around 250-500,000 Assyrians and 300-600,000 Pontian Greeks - although it needs to be remembered here that the Turkish State does not officially recognise any of these events as genocide…

… and nor does our own government or the US and, ironically, Israel, for that matter.

Or maybe we’ll take it back a bit further in history to the Mahmud of Ghazni who slaughtered an estimated 6 million Hindu in the course of conquering the Punjab in mix of religious zeal and outright greed - Mahmud would routinely strip Hindu temples of their wealth before destroying them so never let is be said that converting the infidel is without its fringe benefits.

Perhaps we should let that one go seeing as it was just over 1,000 years ago - or, fuvk it, maybe not. After all if the Pope can offer an apology for the Crusades then why baulk at remembering events that are only a couple of hundred years further back - who knows, if moan about it enough then made the government of Norway will offer us an apology for the antics of the Vikings, either that or send us another fucking Christmas tree every year.

I know, how about something a little more recent, something more contemporary might be more to Sir Iqbal’s tastes - how about the 3 million Bangladeshi killed by Pakistani forces during the Bangladesh Liberation War - not bad going for a war (in 1971, btw) which lasted a mere 267 days. That’s an average of over 11,000 killed per day, which in purely statistical terms seems to me to make the Nazis (11 million in, say 6-10 years or so all told) look like a bunch of rank fucking amateurs - and Speer thought he was fucking efficient, huh?

Oh, almost forgot, the was the little matter of the estimate 200,000 women raped during that little altercation as well, now I come to think of it.

The moral of this piece? Only that people in glass houses… oh, fuck it, you know the rest.

If people think a genric day of remembrance for victims of genocide is a good idea then I’m cool with it… just so long as they remember that if we’re really going to be inclusive then no one gets to pick and choose which genocide they wish to remember and which ones they’d rather forget.