Sick of our good-old traditional British culture being pillaged by evil Muslims, bent on a regime of violence and outdated conduct? Worried your wives, daughters, grannies, sisters and girlfriends will soon be forced into wearing Burkas under an enforced authoritarian Islamic rule?  If so, you’re either a gullible moron, or worse, an Islamophobic hate-filled wanker. Unfortunately, the latter really can’t seem to be convinced why they’re wrong (not that this should deter us from reminding them at every available opportunity), but if you’re one of the former, all hope is not lost, thanks to those at cracked.com!

Throughout modern history, and particularly over the last decade, hostility has been unjustly bred towards the Islamic faith and those who practice it. Some is outright vitriolic propaganda designed to spread hate and fear (see that good old: ‘all Muslims are terrorists’ diatribe), and some is, unfortunately, just the product of misinformation.

A quick sweep round some of my schoolmate’s opinions only proved testament to this, with them suggesting (with an air of walking on eggshells) ideas such that Islam ‘breeds terror’; ‘promotes violence to uphold its rule’; ‘is unwilling to embrace other cultures’; ‘is incompatible with the modern world’. The people I spoke to were relatively harmless, and have simply been brought up in a society which accepts these myths as fact. But this is a small comfort when such myths are also in broad circulation all over the country with a much more sinister intent; one which hopes to alienate and isolate the Muslim community.

Thankfully, the writers at Cracked have provided an excellent, handy and insightful article, which can be found here, addressing the five main myths widely believed about the Islamic faith, and then explains why they’re basically all complete bollocks. Have a read, and next time you hear some prick dithering on about how Islam is going to seize control of Britain, challenge them!

Notorious New Labour Knobhead Phil Woolas is facing explusion from Parliament after a court ruled today that he’d broken electoral law during his successful re-election campaign in May. This is after he lied throughout his election material, which falsely claimed that his rival Lib Dem candidate was being “wooed” by Islamist extremists.

Indeed, it didn’t stop there: Woolas decided to centre his whole campaign around the “tough” line he’d taken as immigration minister from 2008-2010. He managed to weave a whole fantasy around this: that “militant Muslims” were waging a war against him in alliance with a local Lib Dem candidate and his party’s crazy plans to circumvent local planning rules to build Mosques in every street, and give an amnesty to “hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants”. The special election court’s ruling today means that Woolas will be barred from parliament for three years, and a by-election will now be held in his seat.

Woolas claims to have come into politics as an anti-racist campaigner – he joined the Labour Party in college and ran a “campaign against Paki-bashing”. He was elected in 1997, in one of the most ethnically diverse seats in the country, Oldham East. Phil said in 2008: “It’s had a race riot, it’s had a huge BNP presence and it’s a marginal seat. It’s a complete crucible. But we’ve never had a BNP councillor – I hope I’ve had something to do with that by getting in and getting dirty.”

It’s now fairly evident what Woolas meant by “getting in and getting dirty”.  He didn’t mean confronting the BNP’s ideas, politically and in the streets. He didn’t mean proving the BNP’s politics to be based on lies and hysteria, division and hate. No, it’s now clear that he meant taking the votes of the BNP by seizing the ground of the BNP. And not by talking about real issues that the far-right do occasionally bring up, but by pandering to their obsession with “Islamic extremism”, immigration, and asylum seekers. The Labour Party were so impressed that, after years of scapegoating Muslim women and refugees, he was given the role of Immigration Minister in 2008. He proceeded with glee in his new role of kicking out desperate asylum seekers, attacking charities that offer vital help to them and appeasing the right wing press with his tough talk on “immigration caps” and jobs for the “indigenous population”.

Phil Woolas is a racist fuck, no mistaking that. He made a calculated decision that whipping up racial tension in his area – which as he helpfully reminds us, suffered serious race riots less than a decade ago –  would be a sure-fire vote winner. Much of the commentary surrounding Woolas’ outrageous election material has stated that his leaflets read more like something the BNP or UKIP would produce than a supposed social-democratic party. But Woolas didn’t face victimisation or even official condemnation in his party – in fact his outright Islamophobia was applauded, with “lefty saviour” Ed Miliband appointing him as a shadow Home Office minister, responsible for immigration, in his new opposition cabinet!

They weren’t the leaflets of the BNP or UKIP, they were just the leaflets of a Labour Party beset by racist, anti-immigrant populism. All Woolas did was take twelve years of racist Labour policies to their logical conclusion andstuck it on a leaflet. What he said wasn’t much worse than what the wider party was proclaiming during the election – and then when Labour lost, the leadership became stuck on blaming the fact that their discourse on the issue hadn’t been right-wing enough, that they’d “failed to connect”. With the exception of Diane Abbott (who finished last with 7% of the vote), every candidate in the recent Labour leadership election was united in holding this view. Andy Burnham said of immigration, in a comment surely worthy of the BNP: ”People aren’t racist, but they say it has increased tension, stopped them getting access to housing and lowered their wages”. Go figure.

Burnham is lying – the Labour Party are convinced that most working class people are racist. No one would dispute that racism is a large problem in our society – but the way to get around this is to challenge and confront racist ideas wherever they come from, not pander to it through racist immigration laws and anti-terror legislation that serves little purpose beyond being a useful tool to harass Muslims.

Phil Woolas may have gone through a technicality of electoral law , but the ideas he represents are still every bit ingrained within the Labour Party.

"I'm looking at you funny cos I am a bit funny"

Nadine Dorries is the Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire. She’s a corrupt liar. She’s one of the greatest threats to reproductive rights in the UK through her attempts to get parliament to reduce the term limit for abortion. And she also exploits the very real problem of stalking and abuse to try and avoid criticism – in fact she doesn’t like people looking into her activities as an elected representative one little bit.

Nadine has been in the news this week because of a public spat with blogger Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads. He and some others have been working to document the frequent lies she tells and her flagrant corruption. She has responded by accusing him of being a stalker, but also by admitting that what she writes on her own blog is “70% fiction.”

Nadine was criticised in a Commons report last week for using her blog to try and make it look as if she was living primarily in her constituency, and lying to her constituents about how much time she was spending locally. She had been under investigation for her expenses claims, because she was claiming for her home in Bedfordshire as a second home, meaning she got about £24 grand from the public purse for it. But she was cleared of wrongdoing because although she wasn’t staying mainly in London, she also wasn’t staying in Bedfordshire – she actually lives in the picturesque Cotswolds in Gloucestershire!

Defending her lies on her blog about where she was at any particular time, she said:

“My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.”

She has previously attacked the media for “bullying” MPs over the expenses scandal (God forbid that journalists would look into how they’re spending our money!), famously saying on her blog that MPs were all checking up on each other because “everyone was fearing a suicide” (a post she later deleted when she realised how bad it made her look.) She again developed this theme to account for her blog lying:

“In the light of the bullying onslaught of the Daily Telegraph I used my blog to its best effect in reassuring my constituents of my commitment to Mid Beds. My commitment is absolute and is always my first consideration regardless of where I sleep at night. However, I have always been aware that should my personal domestic arrangements become the knowledge of my political opponents, they would be able to exaggerate that to good effect. Hence the reason for my blog and my need to reassure my constituents.”

Reassure them by lying?

She also went on to claim that she had been lying about her whereabouts to conceal them from the aforementioned blogging “stalker” Tim Ireland. However, the lies on her blog date back to before Ireland had even taken any interest her, and yet again she is trying to make herself look like a victim when she has been uncovered doing wrong, in a desperate attempt to deflect attention.

The story of how she came to be targeting Ireland is a complicated one, that he explains in full on his blog. However, it dates back to some investigative journalism he did that exposed some of the extremely dodgy activities of a group of Tory MPs and their associates. In January last year, he uncovered that a man called Glen Jenvey, a professional associate of the Tory MP Patrick Mercer (who btw is chair of the Commons sub-Committee on Counter-Terrorism), was going round the internet pretending to be an Islamic extremist. His aim was to create tabloid headlines and whip up anti-Muslim racism, based on lies.

When Ireland exposed this, he made himself a target for the Tory lie machine, who got hold of his (ex-directory) home address and started publishing it around the internet claiming he was a convicted paedophile and in league with Islamic terrorists. They handed this information to people who they thought were hostile, including members of the BNP. When Ireland began contacting Tory MPs to demand this stopped, they began the story that he was an “electronic stalker” who was bombarding them with emails and phone calls. This is a real misrepresentation of what happened, and I know if I was in his shoes I would be going considerably more ape shit than he appears to have done. From this however emerged the allegation that he was stalking a number of MPs, including Nadine Dorries.

One of the main people responsible for the attacks, a man called Charlie Flowers, said he was acting on behalf of Nadine Dorries. When this was brought to her attention, she claimed she had taken action (another lie) and then claimed she had reported Ireland to the police for stalking.

Ireland has responded to the allegation by asking for any evidence of the abusive emails she claims he sent, or even any evidence she has spoken to the police, as he has had no contact from them. She can’t even produce a crime number for her supposed report because it’s bollocks. Since then the cabal of Tory liars of which she has part have also initiated false allegations against Ireland’s children that they were guilty of criminal damage.

When a constituent tried to challenge Nadine on her smearing of Tim Ireland, she went on to launch a venomous attack against her as well. The woman in question blogs and tweets as Humphrey Cushion, and also has arthritis meaning she has had to give up her job as a carer temporarily while she waits for a foot operation. She does not qualify for benefits for disability, however, Dorries and chums decided to go all out describing her as a “benefits cheat”.

“Do you know of anyone else who has Tweeted more than 35,000 times in less than six months? If so, email my office and let me know. Or, better still, if it’s someone you know is on benefits, contact the DWP . . .

Twitter all day, every day about claiming disability benefit in one tweet whist arranging a night out in the pub in the next. If you tweet about claiming six months rent from the social fund whilst tweeting how bad your hangover is . . . then don’t expect someone like me not to a) inform the authorities and b) tell you to get off your Twitter and get a job.”

The hand of hope - on Snopes and everything

All this bizarre behaviour shouldn’t surprise us given some of Nadine’s wackier political outbursts. She’s most well known for her attempts to lower the abortion term limit from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, based on totally made up science and yet more lies. In the last parliament she put a private member’s bill up, which was defeated. In the debate she lied that polls show that 75% of women back her position (the real figure is 15% and only when it’s fed to them as an option.)

She also repeated the ‘hand of hope’ hoax. This is a photo that was taken during surgery on a fetus that it was claimed showed it reaching out to hold the surgeon’s finger, proof, claim anti-abortionists, that fetuses are fully formed little people and killing them is murder. Except it’s bollocks, the surgeon says what happened is he accidentally pulled the hand out of the womb, after which he tucked it back in. It’s an anti-abortion urban legend – it’s on Snopes and everything. (She does back up her scientific credentials however by being one of the MPs that backs homeopathic hospitals becoming part of the NHS.)

She also campaigned against what she claimed was an attempt by unions to “ban high heels at work.” The origin of the story was that the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists had submitted a motion to the Trades Union Congress asking employers (many of whom force women to wear high heels as part of a dress code) to consider the serious ill health wearing them all day can cause to the feet, legs and back. No call to ban, but that didn’t stop Nadine from smearing this perfectly sensible appeal as political correctness gone mad.

It's political incorrectness (lying) gone MAAAD!

And then there’s Channel 4 documentary, Tower Block of Commons, in which MPs were invited to live for a couple of days with people on welfare. Nadine took part, and managed to alienate the women she was staying with so much they set up a Twitter page called ‘I hate MPs’. They claim that she’d hidden 50 quid in her bra to avoid the reality of living on their income, and that she offered them temazepam!

“South Acton hates Nadine ­Dorries. Get her off the estate . . . Nadine Dorries is a lying two-faced bitch. I know first-hand,” they wrote.

All in all, Nadine is a bit of a train wreck of an MP, and if she was under proper media scrutiny rather than individuals on the internet being left to expose her she would have been forced to resign. Apart from being comedic in how much she lies, it’s good to read up on her as a cautionary tale as what we are up against in the Tories. And when it comes to the investigation that sparked all the trouble for Tim Ireland, it’s yet another warning that if we want to counter the politics of the SDL/EDL and the BNP, we should understand that the lies they tell about Islam and Muslims don’t just originate with them, but as much with members of UKIP, Labour and the Tories as well. In this case, there was in fact direct collusion with the BNP to promote a shared agenda.

Bonus: Check out the dedicated blog, The Nadine Dorries project.

Blonde hair and blue eyes brings a smile to her chops

Over the weekend, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of the youth wing of her Christian Democrat Union (CDU, kind of like the German Tories) party that multiculturalism had “failed, utterly failed” in Germany.

What this amounts to of course is a massive attack on the communities of immigrant descent in Germany, from the top of government.

Read the rest of this entry »

It's a damned impertenince that you unwashed socialist chaps should put a fellow of my standing on your website!

Lord Pearson of Rannoch, a man who talks like he’s a character in Jeeves and Wooster stories, has stood down as leader of UKIP. The main reason he’s given for doing this is his own raging poshboy incompetence.

The aristocratic Pearson, a would-be even-more-crap Oswald Mosley, took over from fellow toff Nigel Farrage last year. Since then he’s made a name for himself as a blundering idiot who makes a fool of himself on telly and doesn’t even know what’s in his own manifesto. His performances displayed all the arrogance of a traditional British aristocrat furious at being challenged by upstart journalists of no good breeding stock.

The video below has been doing the rounds today after his announcement, in which his performance was dubbed “the worst campaign interview ever” by his natural friends in the right wing press, who were forced to admit one of their own was a bit of an embarrassment.

To be fair to the old fool, he fully acknowledges that he’s a throwback to an era where the ruling class stayed in power in Britain by birth alone, and didn’t have to try and make themselves look good on telly. His resignation statement makes clear that he knows he’s “not much good at party politics.”

He says he’s going to concentrate on his other interests. Predictably enough for someone as upper class as he is, one of the main ones is slaughtering animals for his own pleasure, as he’s the chair of the deerstalking committee of the Countryside Alliance.

Although we're glad to see him go, Pearson's resignation may turn out to be bad news for Muslims and deer

He’s also going to be able to devote more time to his racism, a great hobby of his. As UKIP leader, Pearson famously invited rightwing anti Muslim racist politician Geert Wilders to the UK, which may turn out to have been one of the early stages of the growing alliance between the (largely working class) street thugs of the EDL and their aristocratic would-be leadership among the racist toffs of UKIP.

But now he’s resigned he can focus on “the [non existent fantasy] threat from Islamism.” Apparently one of his interests includes “the relationship between good and evil,” so we can probably expect him to be seen leading the crusade to save Britain from an imaginary threat over the coming years.

Although it’s always good to see the post-fascists of UKIP in trouble, we shouldn’t get too excited about today’s announcement. As UKIP themselves are quick to point out, the last election did see them increase their vote, and although they remain a fringe party staffed by lunatics (hi Kris!), their potential as the seedbed of a growing extreme right mainstream movement in the UK is worrying. The continued antics of UKIP just point to the need for anti-fascists and anti-racists to widen their understanding of the threat we face from the far right, to include post-fascists and official racists, both in UKIP and the mainstream parties of government.

Pearson: resigning to spend more time fighting fantasy evil that doesn't really exist

Chris Morris, the comedy genius behind shows like Brass Eye and The Day Today, has turned to the cinema with the release of his first feature film, ‘Four Lions.’

But he’s moved on from attacking ridiculous “news” programmes or hypocritical celebrities. For the last four years Morris has been engaged in a huge programme of research to produce what’s probably the world’s first laugh out loud funny comedy about suicide bombers.

Chris Morris on The Day Today

The premise of the film is that a group of young Muslim guys from Northern England are plotting a terrorist attack against the UK. Their problem? They’re totally incompetent. There’s Waj, a none too bright spark who, not quite managing the Qu’ran focuses more on reading ‘The Camel Who Went to Mosque.’ Or Faisal, who plans to attach a bomb to a crow that he’s trained to fly into a building. There’s wannabe rapper Hassan, who, after exploding a fake bomb full of party poppers in a public meeting shouts “Oh what, just because I’m a Muslim you thought it was real.” But the two most interesting characters are the feuding would-be heads of the cell, Barry and Omar.

Barry is clearly a man with a lot of issues. A white convert to Islam, he constantly raves and rants about his desire to bring jihad to British streets. His greatest resentment though is that the others have not recognised him as the natural leader.

Omar on the other hand is a security guard at a shopping mall, where he sits day after day listening to his inane boss drone on about his fitness regime whilst staring at CCTV monitors. He is the heart of the film, and you can’t help but sympathise with him.

When Waj and Omar are eventually summoned to take part in a training camp in Pakistan, they make a total arse of things, culminating in firing a rocket propelled grenade the wrong way and accidentally killing their hosts. When they return to Britain they are unable to face Barry and others and tell them the truth, and so invent a mythical sheikh who has given them orders to attack.

We see their chaotic preparations of explosives, and their inept attempts to film martyrdom videos. The video scenes are some of the funniest, as they try to explain what has motivated them on to their present course. They denounce western consumerism, decrying Britain as a “McDonalds, Disneyland, TK Maxx” land of bullshit, to which Waj enthusiastically responds “Fuck Mini Babybels!”

Barry

In another pivotal scene, Omar tries to convince Waj of the justice of their cause by comparing earthly life to the queues at Alton Towers, and the martyr’s paradise as the rides. From that point on, when Waj is trying to explain what he’s fighting for, he constantly tells people “Rubber dinghy rapids!”

One of the strengths of the film is in fact that it makes little reference to Islam itself. Omar has a devout brother, who in fact tries to argue Omar out of what he’s doing, saying that it’s contrary to Islam. The underlying message seems to be that these terrorists’ motivation has little to do with their religion or some mythical goal of a global caliphate, and everything to do with alienation from the society they live in, particularly represented by Omar’s job. It’s a message that seems all the more credible after reporters discovered that the guy who recently attempted to bomb New York’s Times Square was probably motivated mainly by the impact of the credit crunch on his family, and is more comparable to that guy who flew his plane into a tax office than Osama Bin Laden.

Perhaps this could have been explored further by showing us a little bit more about how Barry came to be one of the group. He’s a self-important nutter who clearly has turned to Islam to give his ridiculous life some meaning, as seen in the scene with the meeting, where he’s on the platform spouting slogans and generally making a lot of noise. (Omar, btw, consistently derides him for this public activity, recognising his need for attention undermines their efforts.) But Barry’s full motivation and background are never explored fully, and he remains a bit of a comedy caricature.

But the exploration of the group’s motives is perhaps the film’s most important achievement. Morris has attended hundreds of trials and demonstrations, and interviewed all kinds of experts from the police to imams. What his film sets out to do is what we also tried to do here on Leftfield when deconstructing Islam4UK: debunk the myth of the massive Islamist conspiracy. The Scottish/English Defence Leagues are the street expression of a political idea perpetrated by a right wing media seeking to bolster the power of the state: that there is a well organised extreme Islamist movement poised to take over Britain and impose Sharia law. Something which is total nonsense.

The fact is that hardcore Islamist political ideas are held by about 4% of the Muslim population in the UK. The idea that they represent some kind of powerful movement is a dangerous lie, used to justify racism against completely innocent people, and to give the state ever growing powers to control our lives and snoop on us.

Morris has attempted to make this stance clear, writing for example to attack vile racist Martin Amis. He’s also talked about how footage of the September 11th planners dicking about on a farm and having a laugh convinced him he had to humanise terrorists, and make us understand they are real people rather than cartoon monsters.

The group prepare to implement their devastating plan

The only part where this falls flat for me is the introduction of Omar’s family. Omar’s wife is an intelligent, modern woman who nevertheless fully supports Omar in his plan, as does his boy. Something about the ease with which they talk about his plans to kill himself made me feel that the message about the realities of Muslim life was being undermined. Not because I think that intelligent people don’t ever think that it’s ok for their families to become suicide bombers -- it’s just the lack of seriousness about it, the fact that it’s something that can easily be chatted about over a cup of tea.

However, it should also be pointed out that the film, although it dwells on terrorists, does not leave out the incompetence and thuggery of the state as well. At several points you think the game is up for the gang, only to find out that racist cops have got the wrong folk. In the final sequence, when the film is at its funniest, the remaining members of the group have disguised themselves in silly costumes to cover their bombs as they infiltrate the London marathon. Omar is dressed as the Honey Monster. Police snipers receive an order to shoot a grizzly bear, and promptly take out someone dressed as Chewbacca, leading to an argument on police radio about whether the Honey Monster, or Chewbacca, are bears.

The film has also been compared to Dr Strangelove in that it doesn’t shy away from showing the realities of what’s being discussed. In a similar way to the Kubrick classic, Four Lions tries to make us ask real questions about what’s going on in our society through the medium of farce. There’s no doubt that the realities of imperialism, and terrorism, are horrific, but constant repetition of those horrors has been used to shut down debate and justify some pretty awful things. Just as he’s done with drugs or paedophilia in the past, Chris Morris has successfully used humour to once again break through those barriers, and to see that for every September 11th, there’s a whole lot more Glasgow airports, with terrorists so inept it only took the likes of John Smeaton kicking a burning man in the balls to stop them.