normblog

More on the bus workers

Further to my post on the bus workers strike in Tehran, see this appeal at LabourStart:

Beginning on Friday, 27 January, security forces in Iran began arresting hundreds of striking bus workers in Teheran, including the leadership of the union. Workers are also being intimidated into signing pledges to give up strike and protest actions or risk being fired. The management of the company and the company's Islamic Council worked hand in hand with the security forces to help identify the workers and assist in the arrests. Union officials said the brutality of the security forces was indescribable. The wives and children of some union executive members were also arrested, but later released. They were taken out of bed and beaten up during raids on Friday night. The beatings continued in detention. On Saturday, as the workers arrived at the picket lines, they were rounded up. Many were verbally abused, threatened and beaten up to force them to drive the buses. Those who refused were taken away. The majority of the detainees are now in the high security Evin Prison, which is notorious for the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners.

In arresting these workers, the Iranian government is in violation of ILO core conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and deserves to be condemned by the entire world. Please add your name to the thousands who are sending a loud and clear message to President Ahmadinejad - free the jailed workers now!

Reckless

Polly Toynbee on the religious hatred bill:

This free-speech guarantee seeks to protect "debate" and "ridiculing". However, unpick the language: a person can debate and ridicule "unless he intends to stir up religious hatred or is reckless as to whether religious hatred would be stirred up thereby", which immediately removes any extra safeguard. Lawyers say that instead it specifically draws "debate" and "ridicule" into the act's dragnet.

Reckless, she goes on to say, is what writers and artists are. And if it's about beliefs, then that is their moral right.

MPs should go into the chamber tonight to stop all this religious appeasement in its tracks.

The report here is relevant.

Asides

Sometimes in a relationship a person will not read the sign in her partner's behaviour that the relationship is in trouble and possibly doomed, where an outsider to the relationship can instantly see this from the same sign. The reason for her failure to understand its meaning is that to see it for what it is, she would need to make assumptions incompatible with her view of the person she still loves and trusts. The outsider, not bound by this constraint, has the chance of a clearer perception - can recognize, for instance, when an explanation on offer for some sudden alteration in behaviour is deeply implausible.

A major strategic mistake

Michael O'Hanlon in the Washington Post:

According to recent news reports, the Bush administration will not ask Congress for additional foreign aid for Iraq in its coming budget request. This would be a major strategic mistake. Iraq's infrastructure is still in mediocre shape, and most of its citizens are still seriously underemployed. Such an aid cutoff would be especially surprising coming from a president who has built his Iraq policy on an unflinching commitment to staying the course and completing the mission. Economics is a critical element of any success strategy for Iraq.

O'Hanlon goes on to argue why. Across at Winds of Change, Marc Danziger asks: 'how in the world does this connect to winning the war?' I don't know, is my answer. And to go on to Marc's next point, I also can't explain why it's 'just fine'. It undermines the regime change and democratizing objectives of the war.

In search of lost time

From Atlantic Online (subscription required):

Most of us will admit to wasting some time at work. But three new studies suggest that more time is lost now than ever before. According to a survey by the magazine Advertising Age, a leading culprit is Weblogs. The survey indicates that one in four U.S. workers reads blogs regularly while at work, losing, on average, some nine percent of the workweek. This amounts to 551,000 years of labor lost in 2005 alone.

The thought had occurred to me. There's also this:

If only the bloggers whose words seem so compelling were the ones sending us e-mail: 34 percent of workers surveyed by Information Mapping, Inc. reported wasting thirty to sixty minutes a day trying to interpret "ineffectively" written messages.

On that one I'm slightly sceptical, but if it's true, then such folk need guidance. The simple answer to spending up to 60 minutes a day doing that is: don't. (Thanks: IT / L.)

Hot joke?

Tony Blair is visiting a hospital in Ayrshire. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets the first patient with a handshake. The patient replies:

Fair fa your honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin race,
Aboon them a you take your place,
Painch, tripe or thairm,
As langs my airm.

Blair is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient and greets him. The patient responds:

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
So let the Lord be thankit.

Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, Blair moves on to the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:

We sleekit, cowerin, timrous beasty,
Thou needna start awa sae hastie,
Wi bickering brattle.

Now seriously troubled, Blair turns to the accompanying doctor and asks:

Is this a psychiatric ward?

"No", replies the doctor. "This is the serious Burns unit".

Writer's choice 35: Jacqueline Wilson

Jacqueline Wilson is the Children's Laureate. Her books for children – including The Suitcase Kid, Double Act, The Story of Tracy Beaker, The Illustrated Mum and Love Lessons – have sold millions of copies, been translated into more than 30 languages and won many prizes. Jacqueline is the most borrowed author from British public libraries. Below she remembers discovering Katherine Mansfield's 'The Doll's House'.

Jacqueline Wilson on 'The Doll's House' by Katherine Mansfield

Like most children in the 1950s, I read my way through Enid Blyton when I was in the Infants. I never had much time for Noddy, but I loved the Magic Faraway Tree books, and then went on those famous boiled egg and ginger beer picnics with the Famous Five and played tricks on the funny French teacher with the Twins at St Clare's. When I went up into Junior school I started to feel a bit restless and dissatisfied with these stories. I didn't have the words to express it but I wanted more depth and characterization in my books. I wanted to read about children as they really are, not the one-dimensional jolly decent Blyton boys and girls. I wanted gritty realism, but with a delicacy of language that would make every word chime in my head.

Then one day by chance I found what I was looking for. I was flicking through some big thick-paged school anthology and found a short story called 'The Doll's House'. I loved dolls' houses. I had one of my own, a red and white detached villa with green latticed windows - a much more desirable residence than our own cramped council flat. I played with my doll's house for hours. Sometimes I'd hunch up really small and shut my eyes tight and try to will myself inside the house, sitting on the green plastic armchair and licking the brightly painted plaster cakes.

I started reading 'The Doll's House' - and I felt as excited as the Burnell children when I read the description of the fully furnished miniature rooms. I knew why Kezia liked the little lamp so much. My doll's house didn't have anything as elegant as a little amber lamp. I read on, and my spine started prickling when I read about the Kelveys, the washerwoman's daughters, the oddly dressed little girls that no one talked to. There were 'Kelvey' girls at my own school, little girls who wore jumpers under their summer frocks in winter, who had let-down, drooping-hem coats and plimsolls with holes in the toes. These girls had mums who worked in factories, but their dads often didn't work at all. Sometimes they didn't have dads.

We were respectable. My Dad had a proper white-collar job. We might live in council flats, but my Mum insisted they were a 'better type of council flat'. My Mum dressed me in fancy coats from C&A and made me attend elocution lessons once a week. She didn't want all her hard work undone by me hob-nobbing with rag, tag and bobtail little girls.

I played with them secretly. I badly wanted to be proper friends, but didn't quite dare. I so felt for Kezia when she invites Lil and Our Else Kelvey in to see the doll's house. I cringed when Aunt Beryl found out and was furious. I found the bitter-sweet ending utterly perfect.

It was the best short story I'd ever read. I wanted to read more by this author Katherine Mansfield. By the time I was in my mid-teens I'd read every single story she wrote, her letters, her journals, and several biographies. I identified enormously with Katherine. I understood why she wanted to change her name from Kathleen to Katherine. I felt so sorry for her, trying to live on very little money on the fringes of London's literary society. I loved Virginia Woolf by this time too, but I hated the way Virginia looked down on Katherine and said she stank like a civet cat, when Katherine was so proud of her flowering gorse French perfume. I was furious with the footling little John Middleton Murray; I felt he was the most inadequate, lukewarm lover. I wept when I read about Katherine choking to death on her own blood and Middleton Murray not being brave enough to stay and hold her hand. But more than anything, I marvelled at the power of Katherine's writing.

I admired the full range of her writing. I loved the way she could convincingly take on the persona of a Lady's Maid or the sad little spinster Miss Brill. I laughed fondly at her depiction of the timid daughters of the Late Colonel. I winced at her depiction of arty modern society in 'Marriage à la Mode' and sympathized with tired wistful Rosabel, the hatshop girl. But most of all I loved Katherine Mansfield's stories about children, especially the beautiful and nostalgic stories about the Burnell family, 'Prelude' and 'At the Bay'. Kezia is the most convincing child in all literature, biting into her bread and dripping to make a little gate, scared of IT at the bottom of the stairs, cuddling up with her grandmother and making her promise she won't ever die, pretending to be a bee, all yellow furry with striped legs.

I was lucky enough to be given a first edition of The Garden Party recently, and on the dustwrapper it says:

Miss Manfield's stories are like life reflected in a round mirror. Everything is exquisitely bright, exquisitely distinct and just a little queer.

I think that sums things up perfectly.

[A list of the pieces that have appeared to date in this series, with the links to them, is here.]

Mixed race

Though we are afraid, we are running... We can have our faith and we can run.

Women running alongside men in the Lahore Marathon.

The rise of anti-Semitism in the UK

If you read just one thing online this week, please read the article by Shalom Lappin that I linked to on Saturday, from the inaugural issue of Engage's new journal. It's long, so you need to set aside some time; but it repays close reading. It is a powerful synthesis of some worrying, but unmistakeable, recent trends. An excerpt:

Regardless of what one thinks of Zionism and the creation of Israel in historical terms, Israel is a country that has existed for close to sixty years, and it now has a population of 6,869,500. Of these, 5,529,300 (80%) are Israeli Jews, who constitute a clearly recognizable national entity characterised by a language, shared culture, and common history. Using the rhetoric of anti-Zionism to criticise Israel’s repression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories is, in most cases, a device for rendering the call for Israel’s elimination palatable. By reducing an entire nation to an ideology, one gives the appearance of calling for a change of political regime when one is, in fact, advocating the destruction of one country and its replacement by another.

The radical uniqueness of this stance becomes apparent when one considers that no parallel movements exist for dismantling other countries, even when these were created by territorial partition in response to religio-ethnic strife, as in the case of Pakistan and India (established at the same time as Israel), or through colonial conquest and ethnic cleansing, like Australia, Canada, the United States, and most Latin American countries. The fact that, in general, the damage done to the indigenous populations of these countries remains unaddressed has not undermined their international legitimacy, which is never brought into serious question.

Anti-Zionism is also widely used in the current debate as a means of criticising the overwhelming majority of Jews who support Israel's existence, while avoiding direct reference to Jews as such. In this context "Zionist" has been emptied of its original historical and political content, and turned into a term of abuse that is used as a rough paraphrase of expressions like "racist" and "colonialist".

In a more sinister vein, it is employed to suggest a powerful, quasi criminal political and financial lobby working from within the Jewish Community, in league with the Unite[d] States, to promote Israeli and Jewish interests by controlling the press and pulling levers of international power. It is in this mode that current anti-Zionism blossoms into full blown anti-Semitism.

These distinct strands of anti-Zionism frequently blend into each other, and they often become closely intertwined in extreme anti-Israel discourse, despite their conceptual differences. The effect of this toxic mixture is that a line of discussion that may start out as reasonable, if forceful criticism of Israeli policy can quickly escalate into an assault on Israel as a country, and then graduate into transparently racist charges of Zionist control of the press and the political process.
.....
Mainstream journalists frequently invoke the activities of a powerful Zionist or pro-Israel lobby attempting to control the media's handling of news on Israel... Strikingly, advocacy of Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim interests is not generally treated as illegitimate lobbying, even when pursued in a systematic and professional manner by well funded political organizations or by Middle Eastern governments. Of course, there is no reason why it should be, given that it is part of normal public debate and political action. The obvious question is why activity on behalf of Israeli concerns, even when limited to protesting boycotts or objecting to imbalanced reporting in the press, is so often stigmatised in this way. The [e]ffect of this stigma is to deligitimise not only Israel but large sections of the Jewish Community and its institutions.
.....
Perhaps the greatest difficulty that the Jewish Community encounters in the current situation is its comparative isolation. It has no obvious allies in the political domain. Much of the left now serves as an impresario for the hostility that it faces. The centre and the moderate conservatives are largely indifferent, and the far right is a deadly threat. Islamist groups are shaping opinion within Muslim communities, while non-Muslim immigrants that share common concerns with Jews, like Indian Hindus and Sikhs are not in a position to offer substantive assistance, given their own vulnerable position in the cross fire between Islamism and anti-immigrant racism. Jews continue to be seen as privileged, excessively influential, and so in no need of assistance on one side, but irreparably foreign on the other. The unwillingness of major public figures to take up the issue of rising hostility to collective Jewish concerns leaves the Community quietly under siege.

Israeli matters

> There's been a conference at Bar-Ilan University on academic freedom and the politics of boycott. See the statement sent to the conference by Sari Nusseibeh:

[O]f all possible bridges to burn as a form of "well-intentioned" political pressure, the boycott of academic cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians should be excluded or avoided. Indeed... such cooperation should be fostered and expanded.

> The president of Georgetown University, John DeGioia, has rejected divestment from Israel:

DeGioia said that the "appropriate way" for Georgetown to address the situation in the Middle East is through "dialogue, research and intellectual discovery."

He then dismissed the comparison between Israel and South Africa that the PSM [Palestine Solidarity Movement], among others, has made.

> Here's an interesting item in Haaretz on opinion amongst Israeli Arabs:

44 percent of Israel's Arabs "are proud to be Israeli citizens"; 24 percent say they are "patriotic Israelis to a great extent"; and 35 percent say they are "patriotic Israelis to some extent."

> Some worries about the Hamas victory at the Women's Affairs Centre, 'a brave oasis of progressive feminism in fiercely conservative Gaza'. (Hat tip: the KP / HG.)