John Inman, who played the engaging and overtly gay character of Mr Humphreys in the 1970’s British sitcom Are You Being Served (at a time when it wasn’t that easy to do it), has died at the age of 71.
The Guardian marks the occasion with the sourest obit I can remember ever reading.
This is the sort of thing that failed to amuse the The Guardian’s obituarist:
I’ve spent a lot of the weekend hunting around the blogosphere looking for posts on the current situation in the Gaza Strip. I’ve seen death porn videos, rampaging looters, murders, shootings. The little Palestinian statelet has imploded, and no-one seems to know what to do or what will happen next.
It’s easy to reach judgements from afar, and even easier to make a fool of yourself prognosticating about a region you’ve never visited. But it seems to me that the nation-that-would-be-Palestine has effectively committed suicide.
Economically, Palestine is already non-viable. In March, the newly-appointed Finance Minister of the Hamas/Fatah government, Salam Fayyad (recently appointed PM by President Mahmoud Abbas, following the catastrophe in Gaza), told Newsweek:
How long can you survive if the sanctions continue?
On our own, we bring in $15 to 20 million per month—compared to a need of $160 million per month. Survival depends on how successful we are in bridging the gap. Clearly, you can’t go long with 10 percent of what you need. That’s all we have control over—just 10 percent of our need. I’m a realist, and one cannot look at that as a sustainable situation.
The territories can generate just 10% of of the revenue they need to sustain themselves. All the rest is provided by donors: the US, the EU and the Arab states.
This exposes the long-masked reality of the Oslo Accords: they were just a huge bribe, intended to get Arafat to say, at least in English, that the PA recognised the existence of Israel. (In Arabic, Arafat said things very different.) But it also established the territories as eternal dependants, reliant on outside aid for salaries, infrastructure, education and health. There is very little of a self-sustaining indigenous economy to provide jobs, livelihoods and sustenance for the millions in the territories. On these figures, they will be perpetual beggars at the tables of the world. Such will be the true legacy of Oslo.
But bad as the situation of the Palestinians is in economic terms, in moral terms it is far, far worse.
For a generation, and certainly since the first intifada, Palestinians have been weaned on a diet of hatred, violence, suicide-aspiration and genocide. A poignant witness to this is Daryl Jones, an Australian aid worker who went to Jenin in the hope and expectation of assisting the Palestinians in their struggle, only to find, when she opened her eyes, that they systematically brainwashed their children into becoming agents of indiscriminate death.
Her tears in this video speak volumes, as she recounts how dreadfully she allowed herself to be deceived.
It is impossible to build a state on this basis. If you indoctrinate a generation, starting at kindergarten, to aspire to murder, to feed them from the fountains of race hatred, and then, when they’re old enough to be of some use, you put guns in their hands and bombs in their pockets, you get — well, you get what happened in Gaza these past few days.
The brutality has been beyond belief. As liberal Israeli blogger Yaeli said, reluctantly posting one of the vilest of the death porn videos:
….if I hear one more word about Israeli brutality. Our soldiers have never, ever, ever done anything even remotely in the ballpark of something like this. Not in Gaza, not in the West Bank, not in Lebanon, nowhere. We do not kidnap people from their homes and then throw them alive off rooftops. We do not intentionally try to kill little children. We do not kick people to death in the streets and we do not kick them to death in private. We play in a whole different playground folks. And we sure as hell don’t treat our fellow citizens in this way. For those who want to claim that Israel is the most horrible, violent and oppressive regime in the history of the planet, this video invites you to get some perspective.
I know the Israelis are no angels, and have been guilty of acts of aggression and stupidity. But they never did anything like this.
These bloody hands had just dismembered two
IDF reservists (Ramallah, 2000).
Nor do they teach their children like this.
:
To valorise and emulate that deed.
If you grow children to be murderers, then that’s what they will be.
It may be wrong, or fanciful, to say this: but I think the Palestinians have just dealt themselves the greatest moral defeat they ever could have suffered — one more far-reaching, I suspect, than the military humiliation of the Six Day War. They have proved to the world and to themselves that they cannot do what the Israelis have done: they can’t create their own nation. Even with the Arab states behind them (sort of), most of the rest of the world on their side, the UN as their echo chamber, and an endless purse of money to spend which they never even had to earn, they still can’t do it.
The Palestinians cannot build a civil society while their collective moral compass pulls them inexorably toward hatred and violence. Whether there’s much prospect of that changing is hard to say, but all the portents look bad. Palestine as so far constructed is a criminal swamp and a rage for destruction — a rage whose weapon is their own children, whose minds have been warped into homicidal and genocidal delusion, and whose deaths in the service of death serve as a general template for the Palestinians’ own national suicide.
__________________________
Update: It may be my weakness for metaphysics, but this analysis by Fouad Ajami struck me as absolutely true right down to the bone.
(Hat tip: Meryl Yourish.)
Oh, and some heart-breaking irony.
Sorry to be sexist and all, but if you were a coward like me, who would you rather surrender to?
Hamas freedom fighters —
— or Israeli oppressors?
Yes, I know it’s been around for a while but just in case you haven’t seen it yet.
Excellent Fijian blogger
who went off the air a few weeks ago due to the kind of pressures bloggers find themselves under in various parts of the world, is back – and on WordPress.
Go visit.
A great voice from the South Pacific.
Salman Rushdie has been knighted.
Having a bit of a problem as I do with the imperial honours system, I don’t know if this is the best reward for being a great writer as well as one of militant Islam’s most courageous and indomitable adversaries.
But congrats, Sir S.
One thing I will always remember from his work is the concept of the
which is a
(from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, one of his best books).
A most convenient alibi for almost anything.
Update: Here’s an irony: in 1989, Mr Iqbal Sacranie, of the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs, said of Rushdie:
Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him .. his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness to Almighty Allah.
Iqbal Sacranie was knighted in 2005 for services to the Muslim community. The persecutor was rewarded before his victim.
And they’re all bad.
Check them out.
He’s —
Archaic
Tribal
Hierarchical.
But, worst of all, he’s —
The gall!
From Conflict Blotter.
At the fallen security compounds, Palestinians gathered around to curiously see Hamas’ new power. A 14 year old boy was banging down a Fatah flag hanging on an electrical pole.
Fatah is in hell. They’ve fled to Israel. Fatah are cowards,” he said. “I will tear up this flag. We hate them because they are collaborators with the Jews.”
Another looter told me that he had been at the Preventative Security headquarters earlier. “I saw dozens of the latest model cars and mercedes, while the people have nothing.”
There are death porn videos out there but I didn’t want to link them.
Excellent commentary also from the indispensable Good Neighbours.
Ramzi S., a West Bank Palestinian, writes:
It is very much Clan Related, Mafia! Hamas is a better choice for the clans in Gaza that’s why they got the support of all the little gangs here and there and that’s why Fatah lost quite fast!
Fatah in gaza means : a Possible end to all violences and a possible renewal of the peace process , which means an end to all kinds of clandestine illegal activities such as Lawlessness, Murder, Drugs, Arms…. having in mind that Hamas is totally isolated by 99% of the world, it needs the support of the clans , their first move yesterday was to set free all the prisioners in the Gaza prisons! All of them : the Killers, the rapers, the thiefs, the Corrupt, the violent, the criminals…. I wouldn’t like to take a walk in gaza’s streets! …This move was nothing but a service for the clans ! ” we supported you, now free our clan members or else… ”
The G8 summit at Heiligendamm has wrapped up with even more promises of even more aid to Africa to assuage the world’s conscience by turning the continent into even more of a charity sink.
THERE were more smiling African leaders in the final G8 “family photograph” than ever before.
The promise from the world’s eight richest countries to pump $71 billion into tackling HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other health emergencies was certainly eye-catching.
The G8 leaders also “recommitted” to doubling aid for Africa by 2010, the ambitious goals of the Gleneagles G8 in 2005.
It’s worth recalling that Kenyan economist James Shikwati had an uncomfortable message at the time of that Gleneagles summit:
________________________
SPIEGEL: Mr Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa…
Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.
SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.
Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.
SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?
Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.
SPIEGEL: Even in a country like Kenya, people are starving to death each year. Someone has got to help them.
Shikwati: But it has to be the Kenyans themselves who help these people. When there’s a drought in a region of Kenya, our corrupt politicians reflexively cry out for more help. This call then reaches the United Nations World Food Program — which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of, on the one hand, being dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other hand, being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated. It’s only natural that they willingly accept the plea for more help. And it’s not uncommon that they demand a little more money than the respective African government originally requested. They then forward that request to their headquarters, and before long, several thousands tons of corn are shipped to Africa …
SPIEGEL: … corn that predominantly comes from highly-subsidized European and American farmers …
Shikwati: … and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unscrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It’s a simple but fatal cycle.
I’m no economist, but this looks persuasive to me. 30 or so years ago, Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin and other (generally Marxist) economists proposed a new paradigm for understanding the economic relationship of the first and the third worlds. It was known as dependency theory – the argument that the provision of Western aid led not to the hoped-for ‘the take-off to self-sustained growth’ and consequent propserity, but merely bankrolled indigenous kleptocracies and cemented underlying inequities and supervening tyrannies.
Plus ca change.
June 6th marked the anniversary of the 1944 invasion of Normandy, which paved the way for the ultimate victory of the Allies over the Axis powers in World War II.
If we had had then the media we have now, how would they have reported it?
Like this.
And yet you can no more blame them than a dog for having fleas.
(Hat tip: BlackFive.)
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As well as cats, Rob loves classical music and is Australia's #1 fan of Wilhelm Furtwangler (1886-1954), the greatest conductor in the history of recorded music. Hence the gravatar.
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