Silenced in America

Silenced, acrylic on canvas by Yehan Wang (yehanart.com)

Henry Porter writes for The Observer today about challenges to free speech regarding Israel and Palestine in the US.

Though Porter paints the situation with not too fine a brush, the firing of professor Douglas Giles from Roosevelt University, Chicago for allowing discussion of Zionism in a world religions class appears to be quite outrageous - particularly when you read Giles' own version of events. According to this, his department chair (Susan Weininger) had expressed concern that he had allowed a Muslim student to speak in a class on Judaism, and had called Palestinians 'animals' and 'not civilised'.

Porter also refers to the essay The Israel Lobby, which I posted on in April.

"It's the victim wot did it"

Fu Xiancai in the People's Hospital in Yichang, Hubei on 16 June (BBC News)

Police in Zigui county, in China's Hubei province, have concluded their investigation into the beating of Three Gorges activist Fu Xiancai on 8 June that left him paralysed.

This attack had followed a string of other incidents of harassment and assault, in which the same county police appear to have been complicit.

Perhaps it is this last fact that makes the result of their investigation less stupefying.

Human Rights in China reported yesterday that the Zigui county police have found that Fu Xiancai beat himself up.

Oh China.

As read on BBC News today.

Because it's there

What George Leigh Mallory told a New York Times reporter when asked why he wanted to climb Sagarmatha/Everest?

Well yes, but also the answer given by the chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) when asked why magic mushrooms were in the same category as heroin and crack - Class A - in the system defined by UK drug laws, according to The Guardian yesterday.

The ACMD says drugs currently classified too high up the scale shouldn't be moved down because this would encourage their use, and those classified too low down shouldn't be moved up either... because this would encourage their use.

So the answer is to keep everything exactly as it is, because it all works so well.

(The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 categorises controlled substances by class - A, B and C - according to how dangerous they are perceived to be, and by schedule - 1 to 5 - which sets out how you can legally use them. A drug's class defines the maximum penalties for its illegal use).

A tyrant's rationale

Tony Blair is endeavouring to engage in debate with critics of his invasion of our liberties in The Observer today, exposing himself even further as an intellectually and morally defunct despot.

Among readers' responses to the interchange, Gavin Bullock says:

There are two things which concern me about Tony Blair's views on civil liberties. First, his thinking seems to be getting increasingly extreme - even hysterical. His reaction to opposition is not to reconsider his position and ask if the other voices could be right. It seems to reinforce the certainty in his own infallability to the point of abnormality. This worries me a lot.

"Secondly, he lacks rigour in his thinking. He is the past-master of the false dichotomy. It is crack down on crime and protect the victims. Who would disagree with that? But that position appears to lead to a view that suspected criminals should lose their protections (right to silence, juries, revelation of past criminal convictions at trials, abolition of double jeopardy). Now wrongly convicted and imprisoned people are to have their compensation capped. He seems to think people are guilty until proved innocent. If proved innocent after a bit of porridge, tough. So he will do all for victims but disadvantage anyone who has been collared by the police even if their arrest was erroneous.

"My own view is that the intelligent thing to do is to protect society from crime and also make absolutely sure the justice system is fair. British justice (the best in the world, my dad would tell me) has a pretty bad record in locking up innocents and then deducts board and lodgings from the compensation.

"The governments view on civil liberties is shown clearly in the new bill that was drafted to 'tidy up' unnecessary business regulation but could be used to pass virtually any law by decree of the executive. The minister responsible could not even understand what the fuss is all about, yet, as it stood (it has been amended) is virtually did away with the need for parliament. This reveals a deeply malign government. Just ask yourself why they did it.

"Blair seems disinclined, or is perhaps unable, to debate in a rational way. He 'argues' solely by assertion. He never demolishes arguments point by point. It is just, 'I passionately believe what I say. Let history be my judge.' His intellectual bankcrupcy is strange in a former barrister but it is, combined with his messianic certainty, one of the greatest threats to our democracy since the WW2."

The sooner Blair is a part of our history, the better.

Jack Straw "approved torture"

On EU Observer yesterday:

A British former envoy to Uzbekistan has revealed that western secret services obtained intelligence secured under torture from foreign detainees...

"'There is a plenty of evidence about torture carried out in Uzbekistan and I know that foreign minister Jack Straw officially approved using the information obtained through torture,' Mr Murray said, citing a secret report from a meeting held on 3 March 2003.

"The German secret service was also cooperating very closely with its Uzbek counterpart, he added, while Britain and the US had taken a policy decision to obtain intelligence under torture in other countries as well."

Japanese imperialist atrocities, Chinese Communist lies

This morning, AP reports that a district court in Japan has rejected compensation claims by 45 Chinese men who were used as wartime slaves.

They were demanding US$9 million (US$8.5 million according to the BBC) from the government and two companies - Mitsubishi and Matsui Mining Co. - involved in taking them from their homes in China and into forced labour in Fukuoka between 1943 and the end of WWII.

One of the plaintiffs' lawyers says the case was ruled against despite recognising the wrongdoing due to a 20-year deadline for filing suits and because the current government shouldn't be held responsible for wartime leaders' actions.

A March 20 article by a Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University faculty member says Mitsubishi's defence had denied facts of forced labour accepted by courts hearing earlier cases, going so far as to question whether Japan had "invaded" China at all.

There have been many claims for compensation relating to Japan's war crimes against Chinese people (including forced labour, sex slavery, use of biological and chemical weapons and the Nanjing Massacre) progressing through its courts in recent years.

The great majority have been rejected for similar reasons, most notably that the government of China renounced all potential claims in exchange for aid in 1972's joint statement reestablishing relations between the two countries, though campaigners say this does not cover claims made by private citizens.

Shocking though the wartime atrocities committed by Japan are, I found the way they are perceived in China to be extremely warped by the lens of Communist misinformation, particularly among younger people.

Taught history has to conform to the Communist Party's narrative, portraying it as the saviour of the Chinese people and legitimating its authority over them.

As far as I could tell this results in a focus on the overlapping civil war and Japanese invasion, in which the Party's role in securing their own victory is exagerrated, and a brushing over of the millions who were killed and many more who suffered from Communist policies during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

Whilst many of my older Chinese colleagues could contextualise Japan's crimes within history, those in their 20s, though educated, were either largely unaware of or disinterested in significant events between 1945 and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms.

It is no coincidence that this is a generation so easily provoked into anti-Japanese demonstrations and violence over a textbook used in a small minority of Japanese schools with no reference to the books used universally in Chinese schools that whitewash Communist mass murder and lethal negligence under Mao Zedong.

Beijing Loafer talks about the reluctance of Chinese people to criticise a government that casts itself in a parental role, pandering to the misguided Confucian obsession with filial piety - contrasting sharply with the Communists' hackneyed demands for the Japanese government to "take history as a mirror and look forward to the future."

There does appear to be a huge amount of denial in Japan about its wartime actions, but repeatedly coming face to face with this hypocrisy in Beijing left me with little sympathy for those seeking compensation.

Instead, I (unfairly) began to see them simply as pawns used by the Party to help score points in wider strategies against its neighbour, keeping a check on its role in the UN and competing for natural resources.

Once again, the Chinese people are victims of their biggest real enemy: the Chinese government.