Considering the amount of time and effort that the BBC are currently putting into whinging about bloggers over the whole Prescott/Anschutz business, you might think they’d be just a tad more careful about waving a red rag in the blogosphere’s face…

…but no, this morning finds Newsnight’s Paul Mason continuing in much the same vein as his BBC colleague Nick Robinson did yesterday…

Not since 7/7 has the UK blogosphere looked like functioning in the same way as its US counterpart - until now. Slipping and sliding around the libel laws, and the custom and practice of us media types refraining from telling the world who is sleeping with whom at Westminster, the British bloggers are at it, right now, on an almost hourly basis, pushing the Prescott story forward almost faster than the Mainstream Media (MSM).

And later on, Paul goes on to voice the now obligatory whine about how us bloggers don’t play fair by running scared of Britain’s notoriously pernicious and inequitable libel laws the way they do…

Now call me old fashioned, but either the libel laws apply to these blogs the same as they do to Newsnight, or they don’t. (Mr Justice Cocklecarrot: "What is a blog?" - Brief: "My lord I believe it is a website upon which an individual or individuals may express unsubstantiated allegations in cyberspace") As Guido points out, there have been no writs issued against him.

And, of course, there’s the now standard reminder that many bloggers have an agenda…

The Prescott issue is an ideal topic for a blog feeding frenzy because it is in the objective interest of the Tory bloggers and the anti-Blair Labour bloggers for Prescott to go. It was when this happened in the USA that blogging started to have a real impact on events.

To which one can only say:

a) Bloggers do what they do entirely at their own risk. If someone did issue a libel writ against a blogger in this country, then that blogger is on their own, would have to sort out their own defence - paid for out of their own pocket - and if they lost the case, would have to pick up the cost/damages tab all by themselves. For the most part our sole effective defence against such actions is that most of us are too poor to be worth suing.

b) If broadcast journalists and the hacks working for the dead tree press - who’ve run through these same arguments long before the Beeb got around to taking a swipe - had anything about them at all, they’d be campaigning long and hard for libel proceedings to put on more equitable footing and not one that, as is presently the case, is fundamentally biased in favour of the plaintiff; which is precisely why Britain has become the jurisdiction of choice for the aspiring US corporate litigants in recent years,

c) So what if bloggers have specific political views, ideas and agendas - none of us put up the pretence of impartiality anyway, not do we make any attempt to hide our views and opinions. That’s the whole point of blogging, its entirely open and transparent in terms of the kind of political opinions that bloggers hold. Blogger’s like Guido and Iain Dale are an entirely known quantities. What we haven’t seen in the UK, as yet, is any real sense that bloggers are being fed material by the political elite to further their ends, as has been alleged to have been the case in the US, nor would I suspect that is likely to happen, not least because any UK blogger who was found working as a puppet for the politicos in that way would see their credibility disappear down the pan quickly than you could say ‘Andrew Gilligan’, and

d) In the case of the vast majority of bloggers there is an immediate and largely unfettered right of reply on offer, via comments, to anyone who considers themselves to have been harshly treated — a feature that is quite often absent from blogs run by professional journalists… although in some cases (Melanie Phillips, for example) one can well understand why. Personally I see that as a far more open and honest way of going about matters than any amount of skulking round the Westminter lobbyists for a hack who’s amenable to droping a puff-piece  and a smear or two in tomorrow’s first edition.

The last thing to be said on the bias/agenda issue is that if Paul, and those of his ilk, can manage to find the time to look a little more closely at many of the bloggers who are running with this story then what they’ll find is that there’s rather more to the issue of bloggers’ agendas than anything quite so crude as being ‘Tory’ or ‘Anti-Blair Labour’. One of the more interesting facets of the British blog scene is just how quickly, on certain issues, a cross-party consensus forms amongst bloggers from very different political backgrounds, one in which certain values such as democracy, personal liberty, human rights, due process in law, and plain old fairness, honesty and integrity, can be clearly seen to override party alliegences.

Many of us are long past the point at which outdated left-right labels can be easily applied to our stance on many issues - you really want to update your thinking here and take a look at stuff like Political Compass to get a better picture of what many bloggers are really all about.

Interestingly, having a good old whinge about bloggers doesn’t seem to prevent Paul linking to several of the notables who’re covering the Prescott story…

Guido Fawkes, Ian Dale’s blog, Labour Councillor Bob Piper’s blog, The Void blog, Devil’s Kitchen…

Although, as he makes an explicit reference to the conflict of interest question that I raised last night, it seems I don’t get a mention even through my post is heavily referenced and linked by DK.

Now I wonder what that’s all about - did I, perhaps, upset someone in the Newsnight posse with my criticism of last night’s report, where I questioned why it was that the Beeb failed to make anything of the glaringly obvious conflict of interest that exists in the government’s dealing with AEG over the former Millennium Dome and AEG’s bid for the single super casino licence currently on offer?

Or does Paul perhaps think that DK’s typicaly robust style of commentary is more in keeping with the Beeb’s current sniffyness about bloggers and that his take on this story is, therefore, much more in keeping with his view of us:

If you want to dip into this world of ranching and raunching…click on any of these links and you will soon get as far as we poor professional journalists have got: to a bunch of infidelity allegations that have not been substantiated but are, as of Today’s 8.10 interview with Prezza, the subject of a non-denial; and to the documents at the centre of an argument over whether his decision to go and study the intricacies of farming courtesy of Phil Anschutz amount to a conflict of interest…

Or perhaps he was too lazy to click the link to my article over DK - who knows,?

And even more interestingly, nowhere at all does Paul make any reference whatsoever to the central issue that I was exploring, and which DK featured heavily in his post, which is the little matter of the pecuniary interest that the government has in AEG’s bid for a casino licence, which arises out of the terms of the deal under which AEG leased the former Millennium Dome…

…which I find completely remarkable as that aspect of this story does not rely in any material way on either speculation about Prescott’s extra-marital activities, or even necessarily on Prescott’s string of tete-a-tetes with Phillip Anshutz.

The government’s potential pecuniary interest in the awarding a casino licence to AEG exists irrespective of any other part of this story and its existence can easily be verified by reference to documents already in the public domain.

Whether the government has taken any undue actions on this interest is another matter entirely and one that, in the circumstances, merits both consideration and further investigation - it is, after all, an interest that could be successfully managed out this situation , if the applications for this one super casino licence can be shown to have been considered in an entirely open, independent and transparent fashion and without undue influence from government ministers and, particularly, from within the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, where this interest is most directly vested.

Newsnight clearly had, as of last night, all the information necessary to report this aspect of the story without fear of litigation and yet it remains the elephant in the corner of the room whose existence the BBC somehow cannot, or will not, acknowledge…

Why?

Personally, the lack of a hat tip to this blog is no big deal - I’m not exactly short of visitors today from various links around the blogosphere and the general consensus on this is that if I’ve not hit the nail exactly on the head then I’m at least in the right ballpark when to comes to trying to understand the back story to Prescott’s dealings with Phillip Anschutz.

So why, exactly, is the BBC still not explicitly covering this aspect of the story?

On the bright side, at least one of my questions from last night’s post has been noted and answered by the Beeb’s Open Secrets FOIA blog, from which it seems that the documents cited in Newsnight’s report were already out in the public domain on the DCMS website.

But, of course, one can also point out that:

a) We might well not have discovered this had I not asked the question anyway - so we can score one for bloggers, there, and one for the Beeb for responding so quickly to the question…

b) From a post at the Yorkshire Ranter, it would appear that the Evening Standard were on to at least some of the basics of this story more than a month ago, even if, like Newsnight, they look to have missed the key point - although Alex came damn close on this in lacking only the point about the financial arrangements in AEG deal for the Dome, and

c) It has still come down to bloggers to smoke out large segments of this story and push the issue to the top of the media agenda.

That being said I’m not so churlish as to decline to thank Martin Rosenbaum for responding so quickly, nor am I unwilling or unhappy to accept that my speculations on this particular subject were wide of the mark, not least because this has no bearing either on the validity of the arguments put forward in relation to pecuniary interests in the casino deal or my contention that Newsnight dropped the ball by failing to explore that aspect of the story.

As a final thought, I wonder if anyone at the Beeb has yet come to realise that when it comes to all the whining about bloggers and libel, the presumed superiority of journalistic ’standards’, bias, alleged agendas, etc.they are actually saying nothing new at all. We’ve long since both seen, debated and worked through all these issues and more with the dead tree press to little or no effect on bloggers - in fact the dead trees have moved on so far from these arguments that they’ve now got on to complaining about some of us being a bit less than gentle in our responses to some of the profession’s more obviously sanctimonious op-ed writers.

I wonder, therefore, if all this current moaning is just a phase that all media organisations eventually have to through in coming to terms with the new frontier that is the ‘blogosphere’ - in which case this will all blow over in a few weeks and we’ll get back to business as usual.

I am deeply endebted to Leo McKinistry, as author of the Thunderer column in today’s Times, for providing the following example of complete and utter illiberal crap, which I present today for your general edification - with annotatations, naturally

MR JUSTICE SULLIVAN is lucky he is not facing a prosecution for perverting the course of justice after his extraordinary decision to give a bunch of Afghan hijackers the right to settle in Britain. The High Court judge’s ludicrous ruling makes a mockery of the law, treats the public with contempt and sends out the message that our country is a haven for gun-toting hostage-takers.

Actually it does nothing of the sort; Mr Justice Sullivan’s ruling concerns the correct application of UK immigration law in line with Britain’s duties in International, European and UK law in respect of refugees/asylum seekers, but we’ll let that pass for the moment and see what else Leo has to say…

Any normal, morally self-confident system would hold that a gangster who smuggles guns and explosives on to a plane and then threatens to kill all the passengers had abnegated any claim to have his human rights treated seriously. But our bewigged, complacent judges seem to inhabit an alternative moral universe, a place of legalistic quibbling and abstract theorising, where all common sense has been abandoned and the rights of foreign criminals are given priority over the interests and security of the public.

Leo has clearly forgotten the circumstances in which this hijacking took place. The nine Afghan nationals to which this ruling relates, hijacked an internal flight in February 2000, which was eventually flown to the UK, via Moscow, landing at Stansted Airport where, after four days of negotiations all passengers and crew on the plane were released unharmed.

The actual hijackers were arrested, tried and, subsequently, convicted for the hijacking, receiving sentences of between 5 years and 27 months, which may seem rather lenient, however in handing down sentence Judge Sir Edwin Jowatt had this to say about the case:

The judge conceded the initial hijacking "was brought about by fear of death at the hand of a tyrannical, unreasoning and merciless regime".

He said: "This was a case which was different to other hijacking cases.

"I accept you were fleeing Afghanistan in fear for your own lives."

He added: "But for that the sentences for all of you would be much longer."

BBC News Online - 18 Jan 2002

Any morally self-confident society would consider the circumstances leading up to the hijack to provide considerable mitigation for their actions - it does not excuse but it does explain and in terms with which any reasonable person could, and should empathise - it should be noted that of the 150 Afghan passengers taken hostage during the hijack, 60 claimed asylum on release.

The nine hijackers susbsequently appealed against their convictions, which were quashed in July 2004, when the Appeal Court ruled that the original trial judge had misdirected the jury in the application of the principle of ‘duress’ - a technicality, yes, but an important one. However due to time it took to hear the appeal, all but two of nine had served out their sentences without - as far as I can ascertain - without incident and equally I can find no suggestion anywhere that any of these men have been involved in any further criminal conduct since the hijacking itself.

These men are not gangsters, and while one cannot condone their actions in hijacking the plane, one can legitimate ask the question of what you would have done had you have been in their situation - would you hijack a plane if you were in fear for your life and it was the only way you could see to escape from a brutal and murderous regime like the Taleban.

This is, as the judges who have dealt with this case throughout have stressed, an exceptional case dealing with exceptional events - and not a matter of simple criminality.

Indeed, it is sometimes hard to know whose side the civic authorities are on. Citizens are constantly bullied and threatened with imprisonment for driving too fast, failing to pay a TV licence, falling behind with the council tax, dropping a crisp packet or holding unfashionable views about cultural diversity and homosexuality.

What a wonderful euphemism we have at the end of this sentence - ‘holding unfasionable views about cultural diversity and homosexuality’ - or to put it more simply - ‘being a racist, homophobic twat’.

Yet a gang of Afghan Muslims, without any connection to Britain, can hijack a plane and threaten mass murder, only to find themselves rewarded not only with the right to live here, but also with a string of welfare benefits. It is estimated that the British taxpayer has been forking out at least £150,000 a year to feed and house the hijackers while their legal cases were processed. In total, more than £10 million, including the usual exorbitant legal fees, has been spent on this wretched gang.

There are several points to pick up from this paragraph.

First, having a prior connection to a particular country is not a pre-requisite for seeking asylum in that country and never has been - or perhaps Leo believes we should only accept asylum-seekers from Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

To be granted asylum is not a ‘reward’ for their having carried out a hijacking - the two are entirely separate matters. Nor is their entitlement to welfare benefits a reward either - they have had no choice but to claim benefits due to the government’s decision to hold them on what amounts to an indeterminate residency status, which denies them the right to work - this is a classic ‘you can’t have it both ways’ situation, if you are going to deny asylum-seekers the right to work and earn a living for themselves then you can’t complain about them receiving benefits. The same argument applies in respect of the legal costs incurred in this case - if you deny people the right to work then you really have no ground for complaint when they claim legal aid, unless you believe that foreigners should not be accorded the basic right to adequate legal representation and are happy to undermine one of the core principles of the British justice system.

This grim saga encapsulates so much that has gone wrong with the governance of Britain: pathetically short sentences for criminals; lawyers earning a fortune by parading their synthetic compassion; epic welfare profligacy; and thugs laughing at our craven surrender to their brutality.

Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

Tony Blair is now ranting against the judiciary, but his Government is largely to blame for making such a fetish of human rights, symbolised by the Human Rights Act 1998 that acted as the catalyst for this judicial revolution. Only a fortnight ago, Mr Blair promised to “hassle, harry and hound” foreign criminals out of the country. How laughably hollow those words now look.

And, as usual the Human Rights Act gets the blame - except that all HRA 1998 actually does in encapsulate in the UK law, the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is binding on the UK anyway.

The net effect of the Human Right Act, which Leo clearly fails to, or refuses to, understand is merely to speed up access to justice and reduce the costs incurred in human rights cases by enabling the vast majority of them to heard within the UK system, rather than have them go to the European Court of Human Right, where proceeding take considerable longer and costs are substantially greater.

In this case the Government is to blame, not for making a fetish of human right but for failing to deal with these nine men fairly, equitably and within the law. Instead they chose to concoct an ad-hoc system which appears to have been pretty much pulled out of the collective arses of the Home Office, in irder to deal with these men - a system which has rightly been ruled unlawful.

Ultimately, this is not a matter of human rights but a simple matter of justice - these men were arrested, tried, convicted and served time in prison for having hijacked a plane to get to the UK - in all but two case, the time spent on remand and in prison following their initial conviction more than adequately covered the sentences they were given, long before those convictions were overturned on appeal.

These men have already been punished, in accordance with the law, for their part in the hijacking in 2000, so how is justice to be served by punishing them a second time by repatriating them to a country who President has authority only in so far as the boundaries of its capital city, where corruption is rife, where the rule of law has but a tenuous hold and where the very people that these men were fleeing from, the Taleban, continue to murder and maim seemingly at will across large sections of the country.

If one is to blame the government for anything, it is for being too ready and too inclined to give credence to the illiberal, venomous and xenophobic media rantings of reactionary twats, like Leo McKinisitry, rather than stand up for civilised values and plain, old fashioned justice.

Time and again in recent times, the judiciary have weathered the storm of such rantings and done what is right, proper and in the best interests of British justice, while the real hijackers of British justice - the Home Office, The Mail, Sun and Express - go largely unpunished.

*Actually the article is 391 words in length, but 400 sounds better as a title.

The Mohammed Cartoons get yet more attention today in Times, with Andrew Sullivan adding his ‘considered’ opinion on the matter, all of which amounts to:

…much of the “offenceâ€? is contrived, that it has been manipulated by Islamists and the Syrian and Egyptian governments to advance their own agendas

Well yes, quite obviously.

…Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published them, deserves high praise for facing down Islamist bullies.

No, for reasons I’ll come on to in a moment, and

…in this new war of freedom versus fundamentalism I always anticipated appeasement. I just didn’t expect the press to be among the first to wave the white flag.

Maybe, but maybe not. Let’s just say at the moment that the press hasn’t done what it should have done, but that’s not necessarily what Sullivan thinks it should have done.

In fact the most accurate thing in Sullivan’s article is its headline ‘Islamo-bullies[sic] get a free ride from the West’, which as a general statement of the situation, I would agree with.

Yes, the bullying hard-liners in the Islamic world certainly have ‘got a free ride’ from the West on this issue but not because of press appeasement in the UK. The ‘free ride’ they’ve been given lies in reaction of westerners who’ve leapt unintelligently to the defence of free expression in Europe - which was never really under threat anyway - at the expense of doing little more than reinforcing the spurious claims of those extremists in the Islamic world who have been hawking the cartoons around to deliberately stir up trouble.

At the heart of this issue lies a good old fashioned propaganda war, and in terms of reaction in the Islamic world - we’ve lost. The ‘dick-swinging’ attitude of bandwagon jumpers in the European press and parts of the blogosphere, however well-intentioned some of that may have been, has succeeded in doing little more than playing right into the hands of Danish Imams, and now others, who were trying to stir up trouble in the first place.

If what we want to achieve here is to support more progressive, moderate and - dare I say it - enlightened elements in the Islamic world, then we’re having entirely the wrong debate here. This should not be about free speech in the West but about the use of propaganda in the Islamic world - our line on this should be:

1. We’ve, perhaps, inadvertantly caused offence.

2. This has arisen out of cultural differences and is all rather a misunderstanding.

3. Yes, we’re prepared to listen and understand your point of view, but…

4. Have you noticed how its your own hard-liners who’re deliberately winding this whole situation up to deliberately provoke conflict where we could all sit down and deal with this rationally?

Would this have stopped some of the protests? Certainly not.

Would this have made those protests substantially more difficult to justify in the Islamic world? Probably not, although they might have been less intense in some quarters.

Would it have called into question the action of those who have been hawking these cartoons around the Islamic world trying to stir up trouble? Absolutely, especially had we heavily pushed the line of ‘hang on there, there seem to be three extra images tacked on to the original cartoons and one of them’s a piss-poor photocopy of a weird guy at a pig-squealing competition and nothing to do with Mohammed at all’.

And instead of lecturing the Islamic world on ‘enlightenment values’ from the outside, should we not be working through rational dialogue to support the development of similar values within Islam and to encourage and support progressive elements within Islam.

It’s time for us to remember that once, a few hundred years ago, our own societies attitudes and values were not so very different from those to be found amongst those conservative elements in the Islamic world who seem, to us at least, to dominate Islamic culture and politics.

Yes, we come a long way from the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the divine right of Kings, the burning of witches and heretics and the concept of ‘Christendom’ but it’s not been easy and not without a terrible price in wars, revolutions and repression.

We take so many thing for granted in the West and treat them as if they have always been part of our culture, forgetting all too easily that, for example, homosexuality has only been legal in the UK for a matter of forty years and that it’s perhaps only in the last 10-15 years that widespread acceptance of the gay community has come to fruitition - and even then we still have our fair share of bigots to contend with.

One can take the same view in terms of the the equality of women. It’s less than a hundred years since women were granted the franchise anywhere in the world, let alone the UK and only just over 30 years since we put in place the Sex Discrimintion and Equal Pay Acts, putting equality on a legal footing.

The ideas that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment may be of the order of 200-300 years old, but its only in the last half-century at most that many of those ideas have come to be realised.

It’s a long hard road we’ve travelled to get to where we are today - so what makes us think that we can demand that Islam walks that road overnight?

Polly Pot on the Lib-Dem leadership contest:

Huhne is the most knowledgeable of the three - an economist, ex-Guardian economics editor, founder of his own economic consultancy

Yes, ok Polly. He’s a fucking economist.

Is it me or is anyone else thinking that Polly’s finally snapped under Tim’s near legendary ragging of her own economic illiteracy?

Well that don’t that put the icing on the fucking cake. Yes, our fearless Danish defen-duhs of free speech are back with their latest wizard wheeze.

Remember this is newspaper that set itself up as a shining beacon of free expression by commissioning the ‘Mohammed Cartoons’ only to show up as complete bunch of fucking hypocrites when word got around that a couple of years earlier it had passed on publishing a few piss-takes of Jesus.

In April 2003, Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler submitted a series of unsolicited cartoons dealing with the resurrection of Christ to Jyllands-Posten.

Zieler received an email back from the paper’s Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser, which said: “I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them.”

But never fear, our intrepid band of free-dumb loving Danes are fighting back in style - and what could possibly be more stylish than a bit of egregious Jew-baiting:

Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, said today he was trying to get in touch with the Iranian paper, Hamshari, which plans to run an international competition seeking cartoons about the Holocaust.

“My newspaper is trying to establish a contact with the Iranian newspaper, and we would run the cartoons the same day as they publish them,” Mr Rose told CNN.

The Danish editor was also defiantly unapologetic about the original publication of 12 cartoons - one of which featured the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb - in his paper five months ago.

Mr Rose said he did not regret publishing the pictures.

“I think it is like asking a rape victim if she regrets wearing a short skirt at a discotheque [on] Friday night,” he said.

“If you’re wearing a short skirt that does not necessarily mean you invite everybody to have sex with you. If you make a cartoon, make fun of religion, make fun of religious figures, that does not imply that you humiliate or denigrate or marginalise a religion.”

I do like the rape analogy by the way - nice one guys. All we’re short of now is a good old bout of queer-bashing and a couple spastic jokes and we’ve got the full set.

Just so we’re in no doubt here, the cartoons that Flemming Rose is so keen to publish are going to be ’satirising’ things like this…

And this…

And, of course, let’s not forget this one either…

Hell, Flemming, why stop at whatever shitbox cartoons the Iranians manage to turn out?

Why not make that day’s edition a holocaust special? Just think of all the fun things you could to show just exactly what kind of defen-duh of free speech you are?

You could start a new five-part serialisation of the Protocols of the Elder’s of Zion?

Or how about a DVD giveaway? They’re always popular with the punters and I’m sure your readers would just lurve a copy of ‘Nuremburg - The Rally Years’.

There’s plenty of great jokes you could be publishing t6o go with it - what about the classic ‘What were Hitler’s last words? Fucking hell Eva, have you seen the size of this gas bill?’

All you’re missing now is a few of those ever popular word games. How about ’see how many words you can make from the letters of the word ZYKLON B?’ or a super sudoko with a letter grid made up of A, U, S, C, H, W, I, T and - you guessed it - Z.

Oh, and musn’t forget the big name interview - I understand David Irving’s not up to much at the moment.

I guess you’re thinking that maybe I don’t think that the half-arsed results of the Iranian cartoon competition should be published in Europe at all…

…and you’d be completely wrong.

Of course, I want the Jyllands-Posten to publish the fucking things, just to see whether the massed ranks of the 101st Fighting Keyboards are going to be in quite such a rush to leap to the defence of free speech when its the holocaust that’s having the piss taken out of it and not Islam.

Or maybe this is going to the be the point when some of those who’ve jumping on the bandwagon get around to remembering that racist caricatures are nothing new here in Europe, thia is something where we have just a bit of history… a history that looks like this:

And this…

And I think you’ll all enjoy this one…

The caption on this last image reads ‘One eats the other and the Jew devours them all…’ and pushed the idea that Jews orchestrated World War II in order to destroy Nazi Germany.

I dare say that there will be one or two bloggers who will publish this next set of cartoons if they are published by Jyllands-Posten, but if they do I doubt very much they’ll accompanied by the kind of paeons to free expression we’ve seen this last couple of week. No, what we’ll see instead will be just the right kind of moral hand-wringing to go with the occasion - ‘well, yeah, of course I support free speech but I really don’t approve of the these cartoons and I’ve only posted one here to show you just how awful they are…’

Actually I was lying a while back. Much as I would take great pleasure in cataloguing the hypocrisies that would come flooding through the blogosphere were these ‘holocaust cartoons’ published, I really would not like to see them published at all.

You see, not only am I sick of all the macho posturing over this issue - on both sides - but as I’ve said all along while I may have the right to free speech and the right to use that offend, but on things like publishing cartoons of Mohammed when I know full well it causes unecessary and avoidable offence - not just to those who’ve been petrol-bombing embassies and carry placards demand the excution of those insult Islam but to many more ordinary, peaceful, law-abiding and basically decent Muslims across the world, not a few of which live in my own local community - and on things such as a holocaust, which is certainly not something to poke fun at, I can also make a moral and ethical choice not to cause offence and that’s the choice I’ve taken throughout.

As for Flemming Rose and his pretensions of being a defender of free speech all I can say that there are some people for which even the word ‘Cunt’ is not strong enough.

Hat-tip to Al-Hack at Pickled Politics, where I find that Jyllands-Posten’s Editor-in-Chief has now squashed any thought of the newspaper publishing the Iranian holocaust cartoons, which is the right decision, of course.

Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted. – Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, pp12

We move into another day and the furore over the ‘Muhammed cartoons’ continues unabated by anything that remotely resembles common sense to the point where one begins to wonder whether this might all, in some bizarre and unexpected way, herald the end of Western civilisation as we know it. It’s a thought I find both amusing and ironic; the idea that all the many predictions made over the centuries about the nature of the ‘end of days’ may be completely and utter wrong; no fire, no great conflagration, no many headed beasts or whores of Babylon, no second coming, no blinding flash, no mushroom clouds, no melting ice caps or rising seas, not even the nuclear winter that the Cold War promised. No, what better, what more appropriate and ignominious end could there be than that on offer at present; the end that comes with a civilisation that slowly drowns in its own bullshit and hypocrisy.

Freedom of speech means the freedom to speak the unspeakable and to cause offence is the rallying cry of those who are openly supporting the actions of the Danish newspaper that triggered all this off, and of those newspapers who recent reprinted the cartoons - and, of course, in principle, they’re correct - but the mere fact that one can do something does not necessarily mean that one should, or that one should take the view that such things can be done without regard to the consequences of your actions or without fear of disapproval, censure or even sanctions.

I’ve certainly seen the cartoons in question and have taken the decision not to either publish them myself, or even to link to them – which it seems if one takes the criticism levelled at the mainstream media on board, marks me out as a coward who’s afraid of publishing for fear of the reaction they might provoke in the Islamic world.

Yet, my reasons for taking this decision are both entirely clear in my own mind and have nothing to do with either self-censorship or cowardice. I won’t publish them here because, first and foremost, I don’t find them funny or even particularly satirical. Beyond that I seem them as unnecessarily demonising Islam, and by extension, Muslims in general – as tarring the entire Islamic world with the label of being intolerant and violent and as being terrorists. They don’t, as I see them, mock religion so much as rely for their alleged humour on the egregious stereotyping of its followers and, for want of a better word, I consider that to be ‘racist’.

I ought to qualify that last statement by explaining both what I personally mean by ‘racist’ as well as I why I dislike that particular term and consider it both imprecise and unhelpful.

First of all, I do not believe in the concept of ‘race’ as it is commonly presented as meaning differences between human beings arising out of their physiological characteristics. The idea that someone belongs to a special ‘racial’ group because of their skin colour, the colour and texture of their hair, the shape of their nose, their lips or minor variations in the shape of their skull is, I think, a load of unscientific nonsense – if the genetic differences between me and a member of Masai tribe living on the African savannah were that significant we would be classified as belonging to different species, or at least to different sub-species of dear old Homo Sapiens.

‘Race’ is something I see as social construct, a collective social and cultural identity to which individuals identify themselves as belonging and something that is not necessarily predicated on shared physiological characteristics. In law and in the common view we accept the idea of Jews as comprising a distinct ‘racial’ group, yet if one looks at the Jewish population in Israel one finds as much physiological variation amongst that population. The physiological differences between the Ashkenazi, descendents of the Northern and Central European Jewish populations, the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews of the Iberian peninsula and North Africa and the Beta Israel Jews of Ethiopia are no less marked than those that exist between myself, Mr Ahmed who lives a few door down and the Somali couple who’s names I don’t know but who live just over the road having moved in only a couple of weeks ago, yet we consider Jews to be a single, homogeneous, race for the purposes, certainly, of our Race Relations laws where no one would take the same view of myself and my near neighbours.

You’re free to disagree with particular view if you wish, but it is the way I personally see things and because I see things that way on a moral and ethical level I make no particular distinction between my dislike of the ‘racial’ stereotyping of Jews as mean, grasping and untrustworthy agent-provocateurs and my dislike of seeing Muslims stereotyped as bloodthirsty, barbaric medievalists. Each in its own way is ‘racist’ and I want nothing to do with either as I consider them both to be morally reprehensible.

In observing not just the development of the ‘debate’ – if one can consider it that – that’s sprung up around the Muhammed cartoons and, in general, around Islam since the attack on the World Trade Centre, I keep coming back to one particular passage in Orwell’s essay ‘Anti-Semitism in Britain’, which I consider particularly relevant at present:

And naturally the antisemite thinks of himself as a reasonable being. Whenever I have touched on this [anti-Semitism] in a newspaper article, I have always had a considerable ‘comeback’, and invariably some of the letters are from well-balanced, middling people – doctors for example – with no apparent economic grievance*. These people always say (as Hitler says in Mein Kampf) that they started out with no anti-Jewish prejudice but were driven into their present position by mere observation of the facts. Yet on of the marks of antisemitism is the ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.

[Orwell is writing here, for the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. Earlier in this essay, Orwell notes that Jews working in the retail trade in London, selling commodities which were scarce due to rationing – food, clothes, furniture, tobacco, etc. – were being targeted for abuse on the basis that it was assumed that they were engaged in profiteering, black-market trading and favouritism. Undoubtedly some of this did happen at the time, and some Jewish shopkeepers would have been involved in such activities, but then so would many other non-Jewish shopkeepers as well. Orwell notes this alongside other examples of what he sees as people rationalising their anti-Semitic views, views that Orwell himself considered to be entirely irrational]

Orwell, who was ever the superb observer of human nature and character would, I have no doubt, make a similar observation about the growing tide of irrational prejudice against Muslims that we see today.

And that really is my position on this whole issue.

There are one or two cartoons amongst those commissioned by the Danish newspaper that just about qualify as satirical, albeit that the jokes are pretty piss poor, but others, and I am thinking particularly of the turban-bomb ‘gag’ which deliberately draws the parallel between Islam and terrorism are what I would consider ‘racist’ within the definition of the term I’ve give above. Moreover, very few of the ‘jokes’ rely in any way on the central character of the cartoon actually being Mohammed – the turban-bomb joke, which is one that has caused particular offence and for good reason, would work just as well, in fact better, were it a cartoon of Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri. So on that basis I may well defend the principle of free expression but I’m damn well not going to defend the content of the particular cartoons.

And that, for me, is one of the more disturbing aspects of this whole issue; that in and amongst all the grandstanding about free expression, it seems that some have forgotten to consider the content of the cartoons themselves and take a view as to whether its right that Muslims should consider them offensive, not simply because they deliberately break an important religious taboo but simply because some of them are ‘racist’ and do make use of stereotypes to present a demeaning and oppressive view of Muslims.

Much of what’s been written about this issue of late, certainly in the blogosphere, carries with it the distinct stench of hypocrisy precisely because some, if not many of those expressing a stridently ‘libertarian’ line on this issue, have failed to give any consideration to the question of whether Muslims have, after all, a genuine grievance here.

That is not to suggest that one should condone the extreme reaction that these cartoons have generated in parts of the Islamic world, rather it should cast our own reaction to the sight of Muslims carrying placards demanding the execution of those who insult Islam rather more into the mode of understanding that two wrongs don’t make a right. As much as we may, in the West, be either offended or alarmed by the violent reaction these cartoons have provoked, we should remember that such a reaction was, and is, entirely predictable given past reaction in the Islamic world to other perceived ‘insults’ to their religion – one thinks immediately of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, although that situation was made considerably more complex by his own Muslim origins, which led him to seen not only as insulting Islam but as an apostate as well. Rather, should not give some consideration to our own role in these events and ask the question as to whether the newspaper that commissioned and published these cartoons was justified in its action, knowing full well the reaction they would engender?

It’s in this question that one finds the deepest hypocrisies exposed.

As with near enough all our dealings with the Islamic world of late, the idea that we, in the West, may bear some measure of responsibility for our actions when, as in this case, they trigger a violent response from disaffected Muslims is too much for our supposedly civilised and enlightened sensibilities to bear. Immediately we retreat into abstractions and cosset ourselves with the sure and certain knowledge that whatever the consequences of our own conduct, that conduct is itself of unimpeachable character, being driven by the highest of principles; the defence of free expression and the promotion of liberal democratic values. So it is that we are right to defend the principle of free speech and, more than that, to demonstrate unequivocally our collective will to defend that right by publishing and re-publishing these cartoons with impunity. And, naturally, because we are right, those Muslims who complain that we have insulted them and their religion and culture are wrong; better yet they go on to prove conclusively that they are wrong by reacting violently to our actions; by protesting, by boycotting Western goods and, ultimately, by burning down the embassy’s of those who’ve offended them.

And are we in any way responsible, let alone culpable, for that reaction?

Of course not – and out come the abstractions, the ideals and the principles yet again. Muslims have a choice, they possess moral agency and so can choose not to protest, not to boycott, not to respond to perceived insults – although curiously enough this same concept of moral agency, of choice, rarely seems to be applied to our own actions and our own choices and, moreover, any hint of a suggestion that it should is met immediately with a further abstraction, the dread charge of ‘moral relativism’.

Of course such hypocrisy is nothing new as the South African activist, Steve Biko, pointed noted:

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

As much as I find the ‘racist’ stereotyping of some of these cartoons unpalatable, I find the hypocrisy of some of those now defending their publication on the grounds of free speech to be reprehensible – in some ways the position of the Nick Griffin and BNP is preferable to that taken up by some of the self-styled defenders of liberty and free-expression that have taken up their pseudo-intellectual cudgels on this issue. Griffin may well play the same kind of intellectual games as others have adopted on this issue, skirting around the parameters of the UK’s race relations laws by targeting his bile on the abstract notion of ‘Islam’ but at least you know deep down that he and others of his ilk are just the same old racist bigots that the far-right have always been, that when he says that he hates Islam, what he means deep down is that he hates “Pakis, Wogs and Niggers�, that his ‘I’m not racist, but…’ line is just a front designed deliberately to keep his arse out of prison.

But what does that say about those current using the same old ‘I’m not racists, but…’ line, but actually believe it of themselves?

Oops. Did I just write ‘Pakis, Wogs and Niggers’? Well it seems I did and who knows, maybe the mere fact that I have just written that will cause someone, somewhere to be offended – so does that make me as much of a hypocrite as anyone else as here I am, possibly exercising my right to offend?

Not as I see it – but not because I believe in the absolute and unfettered right to cause deliberate offence either.

It may well be there are those who read this piece who do find the mere use of those words offensive, irrespective of how they are used or the context in which they appear, people who almost literally choke at the thought of saying words like ‘Nigger’ and resort to coy euphemisms like ‘the N-word’. That’s their choice and they’re free to make it.

The thing is that for I’ve said above, I genuinely do believe strongly that people do have the right to cause offence, to speak the unspeakable – my only qualification on that right is that if one is cause offence then one should do so for a clear purpose and for good reason, and as such I consider that the deliberate use of terms such as ‘Pakis’, ‘Wogs’ and ‘Niggers’ can be and is entirely justified in the context of exposing the hypocrisy of the BNP’s pretence that it is not a racist political party, that somehow it is the fair-right leopard that has changed its spots. I think that’s bullshit and have no problem saying so, or using language that some would find acceptable to drive home that point.

Whether you agree with view or not, that’s the standard against which I judge ‘free expression’ at those times when something is said, drawn, written, broadcast or displayed which does cause offence. Does it serve a purpose? Is it clear who or what is being targeted and if so does that target merit what is being said, etc. about it?

There may be, and sometime is, something to be gained in causing offence but that alone does not justify a laissez-faire attitude which takes anything and everything that causes offence to be valid simply because it is ‘free speech’ – I wonder just how many of the ‘I’m not racist, but…’ crowd busily posting away in support of the ‘Mohammed cartoons’ would be quite so sanguine and relaxed in the face of, say, ‘Auschwitz: The Musical’ with its high-stepping chorus line of Jewish cheeky-chappies happily doing the conga into the ‘shower block’ to a soundtrack of Kylie’s version of ‘the Locomotion’. Or what about the hilarious new cartoon show ‘Eat my Neighbour’, the every-day story of an ordinary family of pygmy cannibals living quietly in small-town America, with it breakfast cereal tie-in – get a free nose bone and black-face make-up with every packet of Nestle Cheerios.

Offended yet? If you are, then good! In fact, if you’re one of those people whose out there now happily defending the rights of a right-wing Danish newspaper to publish racist cartoons that cause widespread offence across the Islamic world then perhaps you’d like to think about just how you’d react were either ‘Auschwitz: The Musical’ or ‘Eat My Neighbour’ anything but the bizarre products of a blogger’s imagination.

Even to the best satirists – and I make no pretence of being one of them – there are some subjects, some ideas, some images which are still considered to be out of bounds, to be things where the offence that targeting them would cause is so great that its just not worth trying make fun of them. That’s not self-censorship or cowardice, that’s using satire intelligently and making sure that point you’re trying to make is not lost along the way.

If there are no limits of taste and decency when it comes to satire then where’s the Auschwitz shower scene in ‘The Producers’? It isn’t there, of course. Why? Because some things really aren’t funny – are they? Take the piss out of goose-stepping Nazi goons by all means, but people being herding into fake shower blocks and gassed in their thousands – what’s funny about that? What is there to satirise there?

I keep reading here and there that Muslims shouldn’t be offended by these cartoons because Christians ‘tolerate’ satirists poking fun at Jesus – anyone who believes that is clearly ignorant of the furore that something as simply as John Lennon stating that the Beatles were ‘bigger than God’ sparked off in the 1960’s and they certainly weren’t around when ‘The Life of Brian’ was first released. Nor indeed, have they ever seen the Python’s discussing ‘Brian’ and making the point that they weren’t satirising Jesus at all, merely the edifice of the Church and religious orthodoxy – as Terry Jones noted, when they came to write ‘The Life Of Brian’, the first thing they realised was that it was impossible to satirise the figure of Jesus, himself, because everything that the four Gospels attributes to him, personally, his words and his values, amount to nothing more than sound moral philosophy of the kind that it is near impossible to poke fun at.

Who could argue that Mel Brooks and the Pythons do not belong amongst the great satirists of the modern era, and yet each of them clearly understood that they are limits and boundaries to what constitutes a legitimate target for satire – that some things are just not funny enough to justify the offence that satirising them might cause. They understand that because they understand the most important rule of satire, that satire is a human ‘thing’ and that which deserves to be satirised, which often demands to satirised, are our human failings; ego, arrogance, pomposity, vanity, stupidity and so many other things besides. Knowing that, is it any wonder that Muslims are so offended when a piss poor bunch of second-rate cartoonist turn their fire on a man they revere not just as a prophet but as THE prophet, a man in whom their deepest held beliefs and traditions hold that all those human qualities that are worth satirising are wholly absent.

Watching this debate unfold, one can’t help think that maybe Mark Twain was right and that “our civilization is… a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.

Well there’s no doubt what the story of the week has been - the Danish ‘Muhammed’ cartoons and the furore they’ve stirred up all over the place.

I’m not going to dwell overmuch on what’s been said, and is still being said, either in the dead tree press or across large sections of the blogosphere, nor am I going to be running a shed of links to other commentaries - if you need to catch up on things - in which case you’ve been asleep all week - then start with Tim’s linkdump over at Bloggerheads and work from there.

Why? Because I’m simply not stupid enough to suckered into this whole game.

Let’s take step back and look what’s really happened here.

This all started with a Danish newspaper that no one’s ever heard of outside Denmark commissioning a bunch of fairly crappy and unfunny cartoons using Muhammed as their central character.

Why? To stir up a bit of controversy, get a bit of free publicity and flog a few more newspapers.

What happens next is entirely predictable.

The Islamic world gets pissed off with a bunch of Westerners taking the piss out of their prophet (for profit) and deliberately breaking a major taboo in their religion - so they start complaining, protesting and calling for everything from boycotts of Danish goods (which as Dave Weeden wonderfully noted, is a fat lot of good when Denmark’s two main exports are lager and bacon) to the odd beheading or two…

…which is exactly what happens every time someone takes the piss out of their religion and something the newspaper in question knows perfectly well - which is precisely why they commissioned the bloody cartoons in the first place.

About the only thing the newspaper hasn’t got out of this gig is the piece d’resistance of pissing off the Islamic world, an honest-to-goodness fatwa - something that can’t be too long in coming as it only takes one suitably qualified foaming-at-the-mouth fundamentalist cleric to kick that particular game off.

Fair enough, file this one under ‘if you put your dick in a hornet’s nest, you’re bound to get stung’.

But it continues, still in full predicability mode, as the bandwagon jumping starts in earnest on the pretext that this is all a matter of the right to free expression - no it isn’t, its about flogging newspapers and cheap publicity. None of that matters, of course, because by now a few newspapers in other countries have decided that there’s plenty of room in the hornet’s nest to fit their dicks in as well, enough cheap ‘heat’* to go around and enough punters dumb enough to buy their rags just to see what all the fuss is about to make reprinting these cartoons worth their while.

* ‘Cheap Heat’ - a term used in professional wresting for a situation where the ‘heel’ (bad guy) deliberately insults the audience, the town/city in whcih they’re working or (commonly) a local sports team, to get the audience to boo him and take the side the ‘babyface’ (good guy) in the bout.

And of course, like Bagpuss, when the dead tree press wake up and start banging on about how reprinting these cartoons is really only defending the right to free speech, so a section of the blogosphere do the same thing because they too are defending freedom of expression - as well as those other great freedoms of capitalist liberal democracies, the freedom to funnel money into the pocket’s of newspaper proprietors and the freedom to be too stupid to understand what’s really going on here.

And so things continue to escalate until, inevitably, we end up with Syrians going out and setting light to the odd embassy or two and our very own bunch of rent-a-wingnut fundies wandering the streets of London carrying placards demanding the summary execution of all blaspheming infidel cartoonists.

Meanwhile…

Over in the politicosphere things are also happening…

Nick Griffin of the BNP, having just been acquitted of inciting racial hatred by spouting off about the evils of Islam is busy beavering away at his next ‘I told you so’ round of speeches and public engagements.

The Government’s tame Muslims in the Muslim Council of Britain and MPACUK suddenly come over all moderate and tolerant because it suits their interest to play the game and particularly to have anyone who might rock the boat and challenge their position as the self-appointed leaders of the Muslim community in the UK tarred as potential ‘extremists’, whether they’re extremists or not. Equating youth with extremism is a very effective means of keeping young progressive Muslims in ‘their place’ as some self-style ‘leaders’ know all too well.

And of course, dear old Jack Straw is pushed out front and centre to make just the right kind of placatory noises to suit the occasion, while, behind the scenes, the spin doctors are already working overtime to figure out just how much political capital they can make out of TV news footage of brown-faced people with placards demanding that those who mock Islam should be ‘butchered’ and chanting about ‘Bin Laden coming’ for the government’s next run at forcing through some more crappy, illiberal, authoritarian anti-terrorist legislation - let’s face it, you can bet your arse that all this is going to come up when the government have to try to get last year’s anti-terrorist legislation, with its appalling ‘control orders’ renewed.

But hey, who gives a shit about that when you’re sat there in your jim-jams and playing at being a fearless defen-duh of free speech and a fully paid up member of the 101st Fighting Keyboards (Dumbass Platoon).

Never mind that the Spectacle has you and you’re just too self-absorbed to see it…

Cue Keanu Reaves, looking cool and flying up into the stratosphere in full Superman mode…

Cue End Titles…

Cue Monster riff from Rage Against the Machine…

WAKE UP!!!!

UPDATE - Jamie K of Blood & Treasure absolutely nails it…

Principles are one thing, sympathies another. In principle I support the right of any newspaper to print cartoons of Mohammed and the right of anyone else to reproduce them. As far as sympathies go, can I just say that if you side with a group of effete right wing pseudo intellectuals in making sport of a decent, inoffensive and hardworking group of people like my Muslim neighbours, then you ought to be fucking well ashamed of yourself.

It’s called having moral and ethical standards and I fully support this view - no self censorship here.

German ad boss apologises to bloggers

The leader of a campaign to cheer up German citizens has been forced to apologise after dismissing weblogs as “the toilet walls of the internet”.

Jean-Remy von Matt, the head of the leading German advertising agency Jung von Matt, fired off a furious internal email to colleagues after his “du bist Deutschland” campaign was criticised by the media and in cyberspace by bloggers.

“What on earth gives every computer owner the right to exude his opinion, unasked for? … and most bloggers really just exude,” he wrote.

The blogging community responded furiously when Mr von Matt’s comments were leaked on the internet, calling him a “low-level moron” and accusing him of blaming his audience for the failure of his campaign.

I love that one bit - “what on earth gives every computer owner the right to exude his opinion, unasked for?”

Because we can.

Makes you wonder just what kind internal memos have been flying around the DCMS of late given the hoots of derision that met the ‘Icons of England’ project - I notice that foxhunting is still in top position in the nominations.

Coming up to a year of these (is it really that long) but always unmissable.

You know the drill by now, the usual round-up of bloggy goodness courtesy of the estimable Mr Worstall, go visit - you know it makes sense.

…it has to be done.