Glenn Beck is someone we’ve written about here before. For those that haven’t been lucky enough to check him out on youtube, he is one of the most prominent figures of the American right media, with 3 hours of radio and 1 hour of telly EVERY DAY to push his extreme agenda on to the public in the US. Some of his views make the Daily Mail look like a left wing propaganda sheet.
He’s also a relentlessly self promoting narcissist, who has raked in millions of dollars from his shows and books. He frequently fakes crying on air to try and give some fake sincerity to his constant verbal diarrhea of incoherent threats and garbage. He’s a convert to Mormonism (dum dum dum dum dum), mainly, by his own admission, so he could have sex with the woman who is now his wife (who btw he constantly insults, mocks and belittles in his show.)
Beck’s latest money making scheme is another book, ‘The Plan’, which apparently will detail his “100 year plan to restore our great country,” along with the upcoming paperback edition of his previous hit ‘Arguing with Idiots’ (takes one to know one.)
To promote these books, he’d planned a massive launch in Washington DC. That was, until he came up with an even better idea -- get a charity to pay for it so it doesn’t cost him anything! Although the event this weekend was originally billed straight up as what it was, a book launch designed to generate more cash for the Beck empire, it’s now being described as the “Restoring Honour” rally. Quite what the message of this event will be is pretty hard to work out, apart from a vague focus on the American military being great.
The event is supposed to be raising money for the charity Special Operations Warrior Foundation. This group provides counselling and support to the families of those killed on US military Special Ops missions around the world, including college education scholarships for their children. Let’s leave aside for a minute that a lot of these dead soldiers weren’t “heroes” but in fact scumbags sent to other people’s countries to kill, kidnap and terrorise in the name of American imperialism; that’s not the fault of their families and so some support for them is probably OK.
But all the money raised for the charity will first have to go for paying for the rally, featuring keynote speakers Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. So, these two self-promoting far right lunatics are getting a gigantic national platform provided to them FOR FREE. The estimated $1 million cost of organising the event will be met entirely by SOWF, allowing Beck to get in all the news and sell a whole lot more books.
Because it’s organised by a charity, the event can’t be “political” according to tax rules. But what that specifically means is that the speakers can’t endorse a particular political party or candidate; apart from that, they can rant away about their far out views as much as they like. The fact that the rally is also being sponsored by groups like the National Rifle Association and FreedomWorks, a right wing organisation behind many of the Tea Party protests, shows how much of a joke the idea of the rally as “non political” is.
However, the promotional stuff that Beck has put out for the event is a bit toned down, which in fact makes it even harder to watch. At least when this guy is ranting like a crazy person he can be entertaining to watch, like a car crash. But I challenge you to watch either of these two ads and not feel your last meal start inexorably rising towards your mouth.
“You see, I learned something today.”
But it gets worse! It turns out the date that Beck has picked for a gigantic celebration of himself is in fact the 47th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington at which Dr Martin Luther King Jnr made his ‘I have a dream’ speech.
Given that the event is inextricably linked with the racist Tea Party movement, dedicated to a far right politics of attacking the working class and motivated by a hatred of the first black president, understandably the surviving members of the 60s civil rights movement are a bit pissed off about this. Glenn Beck’s reaction? To claim that he and his supporters are “the inheritors of the civil rights movement”!! You couldn’t make this shit up. Check out what he says in the clips below on the subject, along with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was a close collaborator of King’s in the civil rights movement, slamming comeback.
Beck’s insulting claim to have any right to the legacy of the civil rights movement is based on pissing on the legacy of what he actually stood for. Beck claims that the left has lied about what King. He tries to claim that King was in fact an individualist or even a conservative. In hijacking the memory of the 1963 march on Washington he wants us to forget it was actually called the March for Jobs and Freedom, and was organised by Socialist and trade unionist A Phillip Randolph to demand federal investment in new jobs.
Martin Luther King might not have gone as far left in his politics as we in SSY do, but at root he was a left wing figure. Around him in the civil rights movement were a host of socialists and communists who saw the fight for racial equality and desegregation as inextricably linked from the fight against capitalism. King himself recognised that the battle against racism was in fact a battle against the socio-economic foundations of American society, saying:
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
As the 60s went on, King became more and more radicalised by events. Whereas before he had seen the way forward as appealing to the Democratic Party and the “moral conscience” of white liberals, after riots in Watts and seeing the horrors of the war in Vietnam, he increasingly saw the importance of appealing to the working class. In the last weeks before he was assassinated, he was in Memphis showing solidarity with striking black bin workers, some of the lowest paid in the US.
He also developed an uncompromising opposition to the war in Vietnam and US imperialism, denouncing the war as clearly linked with poverty and oppression at home. This drew the condemnation of many of his former liberal supporters, who found that messing with US geopolitical interests was a step too far.
Dr Martin Luther King wasn’t a full on socialist as we would understand it, but he was a social democrat who wanted to see an end to racism and imperialism, massive redistribution of wealth and huge government investment programme to provide decent, well paid jobs for the poor. He’d recognised the need to organise outside of the two-party system, and was preparing for the possibility of an independent run for President on a ticket of Peace and Justice.
For Glenn Beck to try and deny the legacy of King’s left wing ideas, and to claim that his racist mob of pro-capitalist crazies has any continuity with the civil rights movement would be hilarious if it wasn’t so insulting. His far right movement wants to undo everything achieved for the oppressed in the US during the revolutionary moment of the 60s, and he must be fought every step of the way.
“The dispossessed of this country — the poor, the white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. they must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.” Martin Luther King.
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
Johnny Rotten is an arsehole. He betrayed his punk roots long ago and is now nothing more than a sad old man flogging things and selling his soul for kudos from capitalism. He recently said:
I showed what I can do with butter, right? Eighty-five percent increase in sales. I’m very proud of them Country Life ads. They were funny and clever and classy like the Toblerone ads I grew up with. But no one’s come in for me with anything else. Like … Red Stripe lager! I drink lakes of this stuff. Why haven’t I been signed up for something like that? Or Marlboro fags? It amazes me that people don’t get the opportunity of me. I sell.
But he’s also revealed that he’s not just a capitalist fuckpig, he’s thick as a plank and racist at that.
Rotten was asked by Palestinian campaigngroups not to perform in Israel, as part of a cultural boycott – the campaigners say cultural collaboration boosts Israel’s image on the international stage, and that refusing to participate in cultural exchange, artists and cultural institutions globally can send a clear message to Israel that their occupation and discrimination against Palestinians is unacceptable.
Surely such a politicised and aware person as Johnny Rotten would, even if he disagreed with the boycott, respond to the requests on a political level?
Nah. He has “absolutely one rule, right? Until I see an Arab country, a Muslim country, with a democracy, I won’t understand how anyone can have a problem with how they’re treated.”
Woah woah woah woah woah…! So, Johnny is acknowledging that the Palestinian people are treated like shit, and he just doesn’t care? And since when did ordinary Palestinians become responsible for the actions of everyone in the world who shares their religion? This is like saying that everyone of German descent deserves to be put into concentration camps just because of the actions of the Third Reich.
And, when he says that Muslims aren’t capable of democracy, he’s implying that Israel is a democracy, yeah? Despite removing Arab members of parliament for being too representative of the views of their constituents?
What a dick.
When faced with people slightly more reasonable than Rotten, the Palestinian campaigners’ requests to musicians have had some degree of success in the past, with artists such as Gil Scott-Heron, the Pixies, Massive Attack and Elvis Costello pulling out of scheduled gigs in Israel in order to show their support for the Palestinian struggle.
Interestingly, if internet hilarity merchants hadn’t hijacked Justin Beiber and voted for him to send his world tour to North Korea, Israel would have won the wee boy singer for their own. Is Israel suffering an epidemic of Bieber Fever? Or was Israel’s campaign orchestrated by zionists in the same way North Korea’s was orchestrated by online pranksters? One thing’s clear – the cultural boycott is definitely shaking things up and getting people to take notice of Israel’s appalling human rights record.
I hear from my super sleekit pals in the meedjuh that Ruth Black, the Glasgow councillor and manager of the Glasgow LGBT centre who I just finished writing about, has been expelled from the Labour Party! Deary me. I guess there might be some truth in some of those accusations after all…? Perhaps a website update is in order, Castro webmaster.
ETA: Well, the party have suspended her and Gordon Matheson has withdrawn the Labour whip from her; in the world of murky Labour politics that’s as good as a straight expulsion. In other news, a stunning victory as SSY scoop The Herald on their own exclusive. Yaaaaas!
Unfortunately, as expected, Glasgow is about to lose its LGBT centre for the second time in less than two years due to the immediate withdrawal of the centre’s £50,000 grant. As much as Labour will want to put this down to one bad apple (and let’s be clear that this loss of another LGBT centre must be laid squarely at Ruth Black’s feet) this never would have happened without good old cronyism. And what exactly have they allowed to happen? Well, pretty much all the awful shit we detailed yesterday, but since this wee internal investigation is over we can stop being so coy and break out the juicier details.
- The centre’s management (ie Ruth Black) are under investigation by HMRC because despite deducting it from employee pay they have paid no tax or NI over for seven months. Naughty naughty! And also totally tragically hillarious from someone who has spent a lot of time over the past few years trying to convince everyone of what a good socialist she is. If the employees’ NI credits aren’t made up then they can lose pension and benefit entitlements. Fantastic. Well done Ruth!
- Part of the £50,000 grant for the council was used to buy a private car for someone.
- Huge phone bills have been run up and charged to the centre and stupid amounts of money have been paid to a Perth games machine company without any profits being declared.
- Ruth Black employed her partner’s son which is totally contrary to council grant rules. OOPS!
- The Centre has had its building insurance withdrawn because of non payment of premiums. OOOOOOOPS!
- Ruth Black has been operating the centre with no public or employee liability insurance. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPS!
Ruth comes up with another brilliant money saving idea
However, good old Ruth has promised that the centre will continue to trade without the council grant. Do I really have to spell out why that is a totally stupid idea that is never, ever going to happen? Ruth has managed to get the centre into £45,000 of debt, but has only received £20,000 of the council grant and wont be getting any more. That’s called being insolvent Ruth, and we aren’t even taking into account your eventual bill from HMRC and the fact that you’re trading illegally without proper liability insurance. Apart from that, does anyone in the Glasgow LGBT community want this woman in charge after the uncovering of this mess? My guess is no. You have to wonder what the hell Ruth’s actually been doing at the centre apart from skimming money off the top and making a shitload of phonecalls. I suppose the answer to that is nothing. Perhaps someone should have explained to her that saving money for yourself and saving money for the centre are two different things, and that things like insurance and paying for your beer are really not expenses that you can neglect.
No matter what Ruth Black says, the Castro centre is finished. Well fucking done Ruth for ruining Glasgow’s second LGBT centre after the first one closed in other mysterious circumstances, and congratulations for beating the last one by having your spectacular flaming failure before the centre’s even been open for a year! Ruth Black should never be in any kind of position of authority in the Glasgow LGBT community again, and here’s hoping that this debacle helps encourage folk to take charge and demand the LGBT centre that they want, instead of the centre that the council want.
Maybe Ruth will want to follow her good pal Steven’s example and make a rapid exit for a holiday in the sun where she can get away from nasty rumour mongering bastards like us. Might I suggest the Cayman Islands? I think it’d be right up Ruth’s street.
Before you jet off though Ruth, fancy explaining what the hell you’ve been doing with the centre, and where the stolen tax and national insurance is?
This week Obama sacked his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. What the affair proves is that, for US commanders, it doesn’t matter how many innocent civilians you kill, or deaths you cover up; what really matters is slagging off colleagues.
McChrystal had given exclusive access to a reporter from Rolling Stone, who went on to report some of the stuff he said about other top US officials in Afghanistan. Basically, he and his team don’t think very highly of them.
McChrystal and his aides said of Obama that he was “unprepared” and “intimidated”, and of US Vice-President Joe Biden, “Who’s that? Joe Bite Me?” They called a meeting with a French minister about war policy “fucking gay.” They say the President’s national security adviser is “a joke”. They call the President’s special adviser to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, “a wounded animal”, and react to him contacting them with “Not another fucking email from Holbrooke!”
The comments are so extraordinary they have made some people ask if McChrystal was actually trying to get fired to avoid taking the blame for failure in Afghanistan. Obama has made a promise to start pulling out troops next July, but this is of course dependent on the situation being stabilised to the US’ liking, something which looks just as unlikely as it has done for the last few years. Certainly there seems to be a recognition by pretty much everyone interviewed in the article that the US is not going to succeed in getting what it wants from Afghanistan. In a long piece, the words “win” or “victory” are not uttered by the general or his team. One commander who does say win says:
“It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win. This is going to end in an argument.”
But a perhaps more convincing explanation is that McChrystal is a product of a society that now accepts permanent war as a part of reality, and glorifies the soldier above the political “wimps” and “pen pushers” back home. The US is an incredibly militarised society, a process which has accelerated dramatically over the past decade. The idea of unending war for global dominance has become acceptable in a way that it wouldn’t have been not that long ago. McChrystal spoke out as part of a culture that loves “mavericks” who ignore what those above them think, causing maximum destruction in the process.
Movies and popular culture help create the context in which McChrystal felt he could publicly speak his mind so dramatically. His backstory reads a perfect action movie character. As a student he defied authorities and was a hard drinker, before going into the special forces to command black ops on behalf of the US government. This is the kind of character who is constantly glorified to the American public. His team of special advisers, who surely must share some of the blame for his gaffes, was composed of special forces veterans, and called themselves ‘Team America.’
The reporter for Rolling Stone himself was suckered into this atmosphere, gleefully describing how, after the “fucking gay” dinner, Team America found the “least Gucci” (unfancy) Paris bar to get “shit faced”, dance, sing incoherent songs about Afghanistan and declare how they would die for each other.
America's top people in Afghanistan
What the tales of macho heroism ignore however is the truth of what a special forces based, counter insurgency strategy actually means. Sacking McChrystal, Obama declared he was making “a change of personnel not of policy.” That is, the plan that McChrystal fought for in Afghanistan remains in place.
The plan is basically to flood Afghanistan with US troops, who will carry out special forces missions to assassinate the networks of opposition, gaining intelligence on how people organise against the US presence and eliminating them. In Iraq, McChrystal headed death squads that systematically hunted US opponents. The article refers to this operation as a “killing machine”, and McChrystal as “a terrorist hunter.”
The only problem with this plan is that it’s been shown again and again not to work. Leave aside all your preconceptions of Jack Bauer lone warrior types from movies, and examine the places were these kinds of tactics have been used before. Algeria, where the French were defeated by the national resistance and independence achieved in 1962. Or Vietnam, where year upon year of American actions failed to remove the political support for the National Liberation Front among the people.
The new US commander, veteran of death squads in Iraq General David Petraeus, wrote a manual on counter insurgency that praises Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. This programme used capture, torture, assassinations, terrorism and infiltration to disrupt the civilian population of Vietnam who supported the Communist resistance to the US. It targeted civilian members of the Communist Party, and led to untold deaths and misery. At least 26,000 people were killed. One former US serviceman called it “a sterile depersonalised murder programme.”
Insurgencies, or guerilla wars, fundamentally depend on the support of the people. Mao famously once wrote that “the guerilla must swim in the people as the fish swim in the sea.” Therefore, counter insurgency programmes inevitably end up killing a lot of civilians.
A good example of what the policy means for people in Afghanistan is a night time raid in Khataba earlier this year. US special forces attacked a home, killing a teenage girl, two pregnant women, alongside an Afghan police officer and government prosecutor who were on their fucking side.
On discovering they had made a mistake, the soldiers then carved their bullets out of the bodies with knives, and carved more out of the walls of their home. They washed blood from the scene with alcohol, and went on to tie up the corpses, claiming that was how they had found the scene. McChrystal, as overall commander, supported this cover up. It was only exposed because of journalists who were willing to dig a little deeper. However, McChrystal has suffered no reprimand as a result. If it had turned out that the men in the house had been “enemy combatants,” you can bet they wouldn’t even have bothered with the cover up.
Death covered up: Pat Tillman
McChrystal’s only other major previous brush with trouble was the affair of Pat Tillman. Tillman was a celebrity recruit for the military, a former NFL American Football player, who very publicly joined the special forces after 9/11, in what was a propaganda coup for the military and government. He was later accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan, something which McChrystal helped cover up by signing off on a falsified report aiming to make it look like he had been killed by hostile fire. But even when this was exposed he got away with it, even though this time it was an American celebrity dead rather than a (to the US public) anonymous Afghan girl.
So the conclusion to take away from all this is clear: the US government doesn’t care about civilian deaths, or even that much about the deaths of their own grunts. Deaths are what they send commanders abroad to cause. But when you start fucking with your fellow officials and commanders, well then your job really is on the line.
Souter en route to count his millions in a Scrooge McDuck-style tower full of YOUR CASH
Brian Souter, one of the richest arseholes in Scotland, has just won a court battle to get more taxpayers money for his Stagecoach travel empire.
Shares in Stagecoach have surged in value after it was announced the UK Department for Transport will be forced to pay him subsidies this year rather than next for operating trains into London.
Not many people realise that the although the rail industry is privatised, this doesn´t mean the taxpayer doesn´t pay for it. The rail network was publicly owned for decades and run as a public service, and many routes have to be run this way because they won´t ever make a profit.
So, rail companies throughout the UK receive huge amounts of public cash in order to keep them afloat. Souter is one of the richest men in Scotland, and his empire is set to see £100 million of public cash as a result of this judgement. He also successfully argued that the cash that Stagecoach makes from charging people to use their station car parks shouldn´t be included in the calculation of their revenue.
Souter branded the Department “deceitful” during the dispute, and correctly predicted that “we will end up with a very large cheque.”
He´s a man we´ve written about on here before, as one of Scotland´s premier knobheads. He´s used to getting his own way, such as when he gave the SNP half a million quid just before the last election. The SNP did have a policy of reregulating the buses, which would have meant that Souter´s gangster style business practices of driving rivals out of business so that he can charge extortionate fares on the routes he controls, would have been brought to an end. However, shortly after he gave the SNP a big fat cheque, this policy mysteriously disappeared. Hmmm.
One thing that Souter didn´t get all his own way on was his attempt to impose his raging homophobic born again Christian bigoted views on Scotland. He bankrolled the Keep the Clause campaign, which tried to get people in Scotland to vote in a private referendum to keep a bizarre law outlawing the “promotion of homosexuality” in Scottish schools. The public ignored him and the clause was repealed, showing Scotland is not as bigotted as the millionaire transport baron.
Souter is so hungry for profit he´s trying to replace ferry services at Yoker with amphibious buses. This is actually true!
This latest judgement has to make us wonder why the fuck anyone would support the ridiculous system we have since the privatisation of the railways and the deregulation of the buses. The SSP has long campaigned for the whole transport industry to be brought back into public ownership, and for all fares to be abolished. Free public transport for all is not only possible, but necessary as a major measure against poverty and climate change. It´s been tried and succeeded in the Belgian city of Hasselt, and in various parts of the USA.
The good news is that support for this idea is spreading. The PCS union, which represents civil servants, recently backed their idea at their conference, and are in the process of setting up a UK wide campaign demanding free public transport, which the SSP and SSY will obviously thow our weight behind as much as we can. Hopefully, PCS members who work for the Department for Transport will have their determination boosted after being branded decitful and dysfuntional by someone who´s making a killing out of the current (dysfunctional) system.
In South Africa there’s a popular comedian called Matthias Rath. Here’s one of his jokes:
“Patient: Doctor Doctor, I’m worried about transmitting HIV to my unborn baby.
Doctor: Don’t worry, just have some potatoes. Whatever you do, don’t take any poisonous anti-viral medicine which will actually cause AIDS.”
It’s a screamer eh? Ok, I lied. Matthias Rath is actually a doctor from Germany, not a comedian, and some might also say he’s a serial killer. Not a serial killer in the Harold Shipman way, but his practices have almost certainly led to the deaths of thousands of South Africans.
South Africa is a nation with a massive HIV/AIDS crisis. It is currently estimated that 11% of South Africans are HIV-positive. This means that if you walk down a busy street in South Africa, chances are 1 in every 10 people you see has HIV. This changes by province; in KwaZulu-Natal the rate goes up to 26%. With a disease this widespread, anyone able to market a treatment might end up very rich very quickly and it appears that Matthias Rath also knew this.
Having studied medicine in his native Germany, Rath went into research in California. It was here that he started making claims about the use of high dose vitamins in treatment of cardiovascular disease. He began suggesting that conventional cancer treatments should not be used as they kill patients and that they should instead take Rath’s vitamin supplements. His books developed an impressive readership throughout Europe and he sold lots of interestingly priced vitamins. Despite being criticised and fined throughout Europe for claiming his pills could cure cancer, he developed an impressive following and an impressive bank balance, allowing him to try and break South Africa. Well he broke it alright.
With all guns blazing he filled newspaper pages with his claims. “Antivirals are a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry to poison you. Vitamins are the true solution to AIDS. Stop taking your antivirals right now…RIGHT NOW. STOP IT. STOP TAKING THEM. SPIT IT OUT. Now don’t let me catch you doing it again.” Ok, so those weren’t his exact words, but they might as well have been. Soon he was conducting trials, recruiting poor black township residents with promises of money or food. The patients were told to stop taking their antivirals and were instead given high doses of vitamins. Guess what happened. Guess. Everyone was actually fine and they all lived happily ever after. Sorry, typo, what I meant to say was that a considerable number of the study participants quickly deteriorated and died. The South African High Court eventually found that Rath’s trial was illegal. This could have ended up being an unfortunate isolated incident in which a doctor with crazy ideas performed an unethical trial. Thousands of lives may have been saved if one of Rath’s supporters didn’t just happen to be the President of the Republic of South Africa.
And so it came to pass that thanks to Matthias Rath, a country with one of the highest HIV rates in the world was telling people to take African potatoes and garlic instead of antivirals. The country refused to roll out antiviral treatment programmes; they turned down grant money intended for the purchase of HIV medication and even turned down donations of drugs. Presidential advisors recommended banning HIV tests and denied any knowledge of an AIDS epidemic in Africa. President Thabo Mbeki himself repeatedly denied that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS and his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang repeatedly praised Rath’s work and publicly decried antiviral therapy as being dangerous and counterproductive. Overall it’s estimated that around 330,000 people died unnecessarily in the space of 5 years thanks to the government’s policy on antivirals.
Naturally these policies encountered opposition; the Western Cape province ignored governmental advice and continued to supply antiretrovirals. Groups such as Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) did their utmost to get HIV medication to those in need. This resulted in Anthony Brink, a colleague of Rath, taking TAC to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, accusing them of genocide. In his indictment Brink set out what he believed to be an appropriate punishment for Zachie Achmat, the founder of TAC:
“APPROPRIATE CRIMINAL SANCTION
In view of the scale and gravity of Achmat’s crime and his direct personal criminal culpability for ‘the deaths of thousands of people’, to quote his own words, it is respectfully submitted that the International Criminal Court ought to impose on him the highest sentence provided by Article 77.1(b) of the Rome Statute, namely to permanent confinement in a small white steel and concrete cage, bright fluorescent light on all the time to keep an eye on him, his warders putting him out only to work every day in the prison garden to cultivate nutrient-rich vegetables, including when it’s raining. In order for him to repay his debt to society, with the ARVs he claims to take administered daily under close medical watch at the full prescribed dose, morning noon and night, without interruption, to prevent him faking that he’s being treatment compliant, pushed if necessary down his forced-open gullet with a finger, or, if he bites, kicks and screams too much, dripped into his arm after he’s been restrained on a gurney with cable ties around his ankles, wrists and neck, until he gives up the ghost on them, so as to eradicate this foulest, most loathsome, unscrupulous and malevolent blight on the human race, who has plagued and poisoned the people of South Africa, mostly black, mostly poor, for nearly a decade now, since the day he and his TAC first hit the scene.
Signed at Cape Town, South Africa, on 1 January 2007
Anthony Brink”
Fortunately Rath’s heyday is over in South Africa. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was replaced as health minister and Mbeki was replaced as president by Kgalema Motlanthe, who stated that “the era of AIDS denialism in South Africa is over.” Despite this, a massive amount of damage was done by Rath and the other AIDS dissidents in South Africa. The lack of HIV medication is estimated to have caused 35,000 babies to have been unnecessarily born with HIV and 171,000 preventable HIV infections. Antiviral medication is difficult enough for the poorest to afford at the best of times thanks to prohibitive pricing by the pharmaceutical industry and so extra restrictions are likely to have a devastating effect. Purely for the sake of money and advancing his own career, Rath destroyed thousands of lives and thousands of families across South Africa. In a similar fashion to our own MMR scare, irresponsible claims made with a lack of evidence proved dangerous and the importance of examining evidence is once again demonstrated.
Here at Leftfield, we try very hard to see the funny side of many things. We had a good chortle at the fact that noted racist shit bag Eugene Terreblanche had gone to the big Bantustan in the sky, for example. We also made light of the fact that Nigel Farage, the leader of the barely concealed far right party UKIP, had been in a comedy plane crash (and survived!)
So we’re no strangers to sailing close to the comedy wind. Something even we think is outside of the realm of potentially funny things is last week’s brutal assault on a ship full of charity workers by Israeli naval commandos that left at least 9 dead. To try and justify the unjustifiable, the Israeli propaganda machine has tried to create all kinds of lies about these humanitarians, who aimed to bring aid to the people of Gaza suffering in the world’s biggest prison camp, under Israeli siege.
The Deputy Managing Editor of the Jerusalem Post doesn’t agree, apparently. Caroline Glick has created something which is up there as a contender for most offensive thing on youtube (and we all know that’s a stiff competition.) Her video, ‘We Con the World,’ mocks the dead murdered by Israeli forces.
In the past, Glick has claimed in articles that there is a “totalitarian jihadist ideology which is ascendant throughout the Islamic world.” She’s advocated the unilateral bombing of Iran by Israel. Among the lyrics of the song in this video are “Itbach el Yahud!” (slaughter the Jews!) It also claims that children in Gaza lack “cheese and missiles.” This at a time when 65% of babies in Gaza suffer from anemia, according to the UN, as a result of the Israeli blockade.
The video is supported and endorsed by the Center for Security Policy and Christians United for Israel. Glick is a former Assistant foreign Policy adviser to far right Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Maybe that’s why the PM’s press office “inadvertently” circulated the video to journalists on Friday night. On her blog she says:
“We think this is an important Israeli contribution to the discussion of recent events and we hope you distribute it far and wide.”
Well yes Caroline, we intend to do just that, in order to expose you as an unfunny, unpleasant, propaganda mongering racist knobhead. Here’s the offending video:
At times like this though, it’s really important to remember that not all Israelis are bastards. Many of them are extremely unhappy about the actions of their far right government, and have come out on to the streets to say so. On Saturday night over 6000 Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv to protest the raid on the aid ship. Among their banners were slogans like “The government is drowning us all,” “We must stride for peace,” and “A right wing government = clear and immediate danger to state security.” Although right wingers did try to attack the demo, hurling abuse and a smoke grenade, they were greatly outnumbered by the left wing protesters.
Below is footage shot by the Latin American TV network TeleSur, (which was established with the help of the revolutionary government of Venezuela to bring news that wasn’t just western propaganda to the Spanish speaking world.)
Having trouble with a break up? Most people just do the decent thing and degenerate into alcoholism, but cockney hardman and wank Danny Dyer thinks you should go one step further and slash your ex’s face, so no one else will fancy her.
When you’ve stopped being a nice pair of tits for Zoo readers, all that’s left is to cut you. Danny also congratulates Cheryl Cole for winning sexiest women of the year award, but says he might only shag her out of sympathy.
Sources close to Cheryl have told SSY that she is inconsolable at not being able to get a proper shag out a sexist arsehole and Z list celeb Danny, best known to SSY readers as Kent Paul out of GTA: Vice City.
Dyer’s comments about slashing women are gonna be picked up by thousands of young men across the UK who read Zoo, and will think it’s acceptable to abuse a woman if she decides she’s not your property anymore.To complain about Dyer, send a message to the Press Complaints Commission here. SSY is gutted to see Danny Dyer drop his standards so low, we’re hoping Danny will return to some of the quality entertainment he has provided us all before, as outlined below:
Johnny Rotten
Woah woah woah woah woah…! So, Johnny is acknowledging that the Palestinian people are treated like shit, and he just doesn’t care? And since when did ordinary Palestinians become responsible for the actions of everyone in the world who shares their religion? This is like saying that everyone of German descent deserves to be put into concentration camps just because of the actions of the Third Reich.
Here at Leftfield, we try very hard to see the funny side of many things. We had a good chortle at the fact that 
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