Racism
Departing Ceredigion exec calls for Starmer’s resignation over Gaza ‘disrepute’
Slavish following of US policy and inhumanity to Palestinians is intolerable, say elected Welsh officers
Keir Starmer has been told to go by the outgoing executive of the Ceredigion Labour party in Wales, for his appalling support for genocide and his refusal to call for a ceasefire in the one-sided slaughter.
A statement released on the constituency party Twitter page gives the officers’ reasons:
The statement has been applauded by supporters of human rights, but some have said he should be expelled from the party altogether for his shameful siding with the apartheid oppressor and his contempt for the lives of civilians, including thousands of women and children – not to mention for breaking every promise he made in order to con his way into the job in the first place.
Israel’s bombing of schools and hospitals continues, including the bombing overnight of yet another school run by the UN relief agency and the destruction of the oxygen tanks of the Al Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest, to force a desperate attempt to evacuate desperately ill patients that will surely cost further lives. Some reports have said that all the hospital’s intensive care patients have now died.
Starmer, friend of genocide and apartheid, go.
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Exclusive: Starmer hoping for Tory support to stop SNP ceasefire amendment
Backroom maneouvres underway to try to block SNP and Labour amendments to King’s Speech trying to protect Gazan civilians
Keir Starmer is hoping the Tories will support his attempt to prevent SNP and Labour backbench motions that call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israeli genocide in Gaza even getting to a vote in the Commons chamber, according to sources in Westminster.
According to parliamentary insiders:
Starmer’s motion will be heard first and if it passes the SNP amendment calling for a ceasefire will fall with no division [without MPs voting]. Only if Labour’s amendment falls will there be a vote on the SNP amendment.
The SNP thinks Starmer is trying to do a deal with the Tories to support Labour’s amendment order to deprive MPs of any opportunity to vote for a ceasefire – but there are also rumours that the Tories will vote against the Labour motion, which would mean the SNP amendment going to a vote, to put Starmer in trouble.
Keir Starmer is such a friend of apartheid and genocide that he is allegedly prepared to do a deal with the party that has killed hundreds of thousands of poor, sick and disabled people in this country in order to allow Israel to continue killing civilians in Gaza and to head off a revolt among Labour MPs disgusted at his willingness to enable war crimes and slaughter.
MPs have now gone to vote on Starmer’s amendment, so we’ll know soon.
Update: Starmer’s amendment fell heavily, despite his manoeuverings, by 183-290.
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Starmer’s disgusting Gaza amendment – no ceasefire, just longer pauses
Starmer’s victim-blaming amendment still ‘reaffirms’ Israel’s actions but asks genocidal apartheid regime to pause a bit more than four hours
The appalling wording of Keir Starmer’s proposed amendment to the King’s Speech avoids any mention of the word ‘ceasefire’, expresses only a feeble ‘wish’ for less violence and spends far more time ‘reaffirming’ Israel than talking about even the pathetic ‘longer pauses’ in the occupiers’ relentless bombing of civilians in schools, hospitals, refugee camps and homes:
Amendment
Keir Starmer
Angela Rayner
David Lammy
Yvette Cooper
Lisa Nandy
Sir Alan CampbellAt end add – “and submit to Your Majesty that this House wishes to see an end to the violence in Israel and Palestine; unequivocally condemns the horrific terrorist attack and murder of civilians by Hamas, calls for the immediate release of all hostages and reaffirms Israel’s right to defend its citizens from terrorism; believes all human life is equal and that there has been too much suffering, including far too many deaths of innocent civilians and children, over the past month in Gaza; reaffirms the UK’s commitment to the rules based international order, international humanitarian law and the jurisdiction of the ICC to address the conduct of all parties in Gaza and Hamas’s attacks in Israel; calls on Israel to protect hospitals and lift the siege conditions allowing food, water, electricity, medicine and fuel into Gaza; requests the Government continue to work with the international community to prevent a wider escalation of the conflict in the region, guarantee that people in Gaza who are forced to flee during this conflict can return to t heir homes and seek an end to the expansion of illegal settlements and settler violence in the West Bank; and, while acknowledging the daily humanitarian pauses to allow in aid and the movement of civilians, believe they must be longer to deliver humanitarian assistance on a scale that begins to meet the desperate needs of the people of Gaza, which is a necessary step to an enduring cessation of fighting as soon as possible and a credible, diplomatic and political process to deliver the lasting peace of a two-state solution.”
The ‘two-state solution’ is a farce and a fiction pushed by politicians who support Israeli apartheid – what little remains of Palestine is too fragmented and the right-wing extremists running Israel are open in saying they have no intention of allowing Palestinians to operate a functional state. Labour, long dead since Starmer became what passes for its leader, is a rotting corpse poisoning the political waters of this country.
Starmer reportedly avoided Monday night’s weekly meeting of Labour MPs and peers, allowing the woeful Lammy to take the flak at a ‘bin fire’ of a meeting. At least half a dozen, probably more, of Starmer’s front bench are said to be planning to vote instead for the SNP’s amendment demanding a ceasefire. And given the above and the toxic, murderous stench emanating from Starmer’s office, it is the least they should be doing.
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Anti-Sinoism in Australian media
The article titled “’Golden visas’ are known to attract dirty money around the world. Why does Australia still offer them?” by Linton Besser was published on ABC News (31/10/2023). Taken at face value, it appears as another piece of usual media reporting. However, read with an awareness of the scourge of recent mainstream media proclivity Continue reading »
Cartoon: Self-parodic sages
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Nothing is Pure. Everything is Complicated.
People have a strange vision of me. I’m going to set a few things straight real quick.
I was an anarchist pacifist two years ago, I was an anarchist pacifist two months ago, I’m an anarchist pacifist right now, and I probably will be one until I go to my grave. I didn’t get fired for what I believe or what I’ve done, because none of that ever really came up. I got fired because of the language I used when I was working with Anonymous in 2011-12, and because I believe in engaging with racists instead of shunning them. On a personal level, my friends can tell you, it’s not just racism. I’m not an easy friend. I confront a lot of difficult topics head on, and I can be in turns comforting and challenging. If I am worried you are going to far with drugs or alcohol, I will tell you. If I think your relationship is fucked up, you’ll understand why I think that. If I think the road you are going down leads to dark ruin, a wasted life, and only makes the people who ruined you more powerful, well, weev, you know that’s what I think.
I don’t give up on people. I have in the past. I told my dad he was a failure as a father in a mall in Northern California, and the next time I saw him, I was identifying his body. I told Aaron we needed to be apart, and when I could have warned people that he would try to kill himself I was 6000 miles away. I have lost so many people, and I will lose more, but it will never again be because I didn’t try. And that’s true of this whole damn world. We may lose it, but not because I didn’t try.
I am not a conservative. Conservatism in an age of calamities can only be about death, and I have had enough of death. I’m not a proper lefty. The left as I know it doesn’t afford enough agency to people who came up hard. To my mind, “everything is systemic, nothing is personal” is as bankrupt as “everything is personal, nothing is systemic.” Everything is both, all the damn time. You have to live with that, you have to live with no easy answers. I am much more persuaded by lefists who work their politics in the street, taking care of people in need, like trying to shut down prisons, instead of cheering when the bad guys get put in them. I am more persuaded by conservatives who practice hospitality and Christian charity towards all, including people who aren’t like them, because that’s what hospitality and Christian charity means.
The public made me into a boogyman, and then people cheered when the Times accidentally mugged my career. I didn’t apologize for that, and I’m not going to apologize for doing what I believe is right and effective. But none of that had anything to do with what I was hired for by the Times. All I was going to do there is explain to the world how the internet works, and how it works on humans. It’s not a complicated mission, but one the world needs, and one I can do. So I’m going to keep working on it. I’m also going to keep opposing racism, sexism, hatred, the wars declared and undeclared, all the dehumanizing bullshit I see from the entire political spectrum. I’m going to keep loving the people the gods put in my path. I’m going to keep loving humanity and our pearl of a planet until they lay me in its belly. I don’t think I’m ever going to be persuaded that the nation-state is very good for us, or at least, I think we can do better.
I believe in the humanity of all humans, which seems ridiculous to have to say, but all across the political spectrum, so many of you don’t. I’m sorry you didn’t find an easy world at the beginning of the 21st century, but you didn’t. Nothing is pure. Everything is complicated.
And I think that’s why people hate me: because I don’t fit, I am full of impurity and complication, and my story doesn’t let you ignore that in me, or the world. I am never going to be easy to label, and I’m always going to make people uncomfortable. And many people would rather bleed than be uncomfortable. I will love you, and I will not be cool about it. I will never, ever, ever settle for your unjust and hateful world.
If you do want to know what I think about racism, here’s a few pieces from the last nine years. There’s be more, but this isn’t what I’m payed to write about. I’m a technology writer, and it’s rare I get paid to write anything else. So most of this was written for love, not money.
https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/the-problem-with-white-shunning-56b67cc2d726
https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/black-men-please-play-pokemon-go-c99a61a05aa5
https://medium.com/message/looking-past-our-racist-assumptions-to-see-africa-f5bddab648ea
https://medium.com/message/how-white-people-got-made-6eeb076ade42
Ethnicised Religion and Sacralised Ethnicity in the Past and the Present
An expert panel discusses the phenomenon of ethnicisation of religious identifications focussing especially on the nexus of religious, ethnic and national identifications in colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial settings from Ireland to South Asia. The commonly invoked phrase 'Islam is not a race' forms a ubiquitous racist trope that represents Islamophobia as a legitimate political critique of religious ideology, rather than a form of ethnic and religious prejudice. Yet in spite of such rhetorical acrobatics, it is clear that we are observing an ‘ethnicisation’ of Islam in 'the West' – the hegemonic transformation of hugely diverse 'Muslim' populations into an allegedly singular community, defined in essentialising racist terms. Hidden behind the language of a binary between 'Muslim' and 'British'/'European'/'Western' 'culture' and 'values' – viewing these as fixed communal essences, rather than endlessly variable phenomena reproduced in the material practices of everyday life – this ethnoreligious essentialism-come-racism has gained ever-increasing acceptance in mainstream political discourse. Islam forms a particularly salient example today, but the ethnicisation of religious identifications is a phenomenon with a much broader transtemporal and global history. So at this round table on 'Ethnicised Religion and Sacralised Ethnicity in the Past and the Present', we will discuss this phenomenon, focusing especially on the nexus of religious, ethnic and national identifications in colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial settings from Ireland to South Asia.