Now Ebola.

Why should anyone take Bono and Geldof seriously? This is the same pair who, in 2005, claimed that the G7 had wiped away the debts of Africa. As if the West would ever allow that continent to start over. In actuality the G7 had agreed to takeover the repayments of $55 billion (out of Africa's collective debt of $295 billion) to the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank. By the way Africa had already paid $550 billion in repayments from 1970 to 2002. Nearly a decade on and Africa is still weighed down with debt.

Europe's problem with Muslims.

Now Marine Le Pen has stated that there should be no 'special treatment' for Muslims (and by extension Jews) with school meals. Either they eat pork, or they starve. This isn't to be understood as in isolation. As some of you may have read the Danish have banned halal and kosher slaughter on the grounds of animal rights. Of course, this is just another event in a long procession of bans in Europe. The French government banned the veil in public places, the Swiss government banned minarets, then there was the Cologne ruling against circumcision in 2012, and the 2013 ban on halal and kosher slaughter in Poland. This is at the same time as we've seen calls for the Qur'an to be banned from Dutch politician Geert Wilders. He has found common cause with other self-described 'counter-jihadists' such as Le Pen. We've had a recurring debate about whether Islam is compatible with 'Western' culture. Britain routinely has a debate over whether or not to ban the veil, with similar debates on halal meat and circumcision taking place with less frequency.

We should ask ourselves some stark questions about all of this. No Muslim country has invaded or occupied a 'Western' or European state in recent decades. To the contrary, the UK and the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and occupied leaving more than a million people dead. The vast majority killed have been civilians and no doubt most of them have been Muslims. The French were totally on board with the NATO intervention in Libya which left thousands dead, just as they also wanted to bomb Syria as US allies Turkey and Israel had already done. This is at the same time that the governments of the US and Western Europe continue to support dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim world. So the idea that there is a 'clash of civilisations' is somewhat absurd, mainly because it's rightists who want such a war. As for European Muslims, here's an excerpt from Yehouda Shenhav:

I would like to go back for a minute to what was known in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century as the "Jewish problem," and to the debates of Jewish emancipation. The debates were originally stirred by a Prussian government effort to extend an identical status to all Jews under its rule; in 1841, it released a draft law concerned with the need for maintaining "the wondrous essence" of the Jews without "intervening with the Christian state." Bruno Bauer wrote that, in a state where Christianity was the official religion, Jews could not be truly emancipated. Religious freedom necessitates the privatization of religion and eschewing it away from the public sphere, but Judaism, being a religion of (public) law rather than of faith, cannot be reduced into a "private religion."

Just as Judaism is a public religion Islam can be understood in these terms as well and liberal societies cannot easily integrate such religious groups into atomised chambers of individual rights and freedoms. The pre-Enlightenment communitarian values of Judaeo-Islamic culture reach beyond the limits of individualism, as such an identity and tradition cannot easily be relegated to a private space. This is where multiculturalism entered as a liberal option of opening up a space for newly settled cultures within the liberal framework. But this has been a beleaguered idea since it first appeared. This is how we are to understand the calls to ban the veil, minarets, and so on. It's no coincidence that the anti-Muslim racism of today can easily overlap with anti-Semitism. This is what bans on circumcision and halal slaughter demonstrate so well. The European fascist parties now have a new means of reinstating old anti-Jewish measures as a programme for defending 'our culture' from imaginary Muslim hordes.

Over the last decade we've witnessed the legitimation of anti-Muslim hatred across Europe in various forms. The actions Breivik undertook can only be understood with this background. The Far-Right used to claim Communism was the Jewish plot to destroy European nationhood, now they claim the Left (and the Jews, no doubt!) are working to flood Europe with Muslims and impose Islamic law in order to destroy 'Western' civilisation. This was the essence of Breivik's ideology: multiculturalism, feminism, and 'political-correctness', are a "cultural Marxist" affront to European nations and their traditional culture. I've covered the growth of this theory among neo-fascists before. It should concern all of us, especially as anti-Muslim hatred is increasingly normalised by the very same liberal intelligentsia who are meant to be the custodians of liberal democratic values.

Bad-Looking Narcissists.

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are." - Gore Vidal

It was quite something to open The Evening Standard on the day that the Queen shook hands with Martin McGuinness and find columns penned by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Bob Geldof. Blair stands as a living monument to everything wrong with British politics, one of the few pimps to be his own prostitute complete with the moral fibre of an open sewer. And then there is Clinton, a wretched primate standing atop the post-politics of personality and nothing more. Both men are the end products of a process that has hollowed out the discourse in countries where there was barely anything of political substance to desecrate in this way. Thrown into this mix is the white Knight, a mediocre musician, who saved the deserving and left the undeserving to die for our redemption. These spurious progressives know the

Third Way

to rape the developing world. Naturally they write with worry of the Arab’s push towards democracy against the old dictatorships and temper this anxiety with feel-good stories about the steps forward the black African has made.

Don’t forget when Mr Blair praised Mubarak as a ‘force for good’ just before he fell; thoughthe Clintons had always regarded Hosni as family. At least there was never a famine in Egypt, so Sir Bob never had to pose as the redeemer of mankind and toss millions into the mouths of leathery generals swimming in the Nile. And yet Blair has plenty of words to pen, with the blood under his fingernails, when it comes to lecturing ‘barbarians’ on how to run a democracy. He has no time to go into the details of the soft coup that has been carried out to neuter the officials elected to high office. It was seen early on that the outcome of the elections would be a marriage between felools and fanatics. But Blair seems blissfully ignorant. Really the stage is set for democracy in the Middle East, Blair salivates at the possibility of it all falling apart. If it ends up as a military junta “We told you so!” If it ends up as a theocracy, even better!

Of course, Blair has to pat the Arabs on the head for dethroning his friend – a man who held ‘terror suspects’ kidnapped by the CIA in chambers where their children could be tortured – what else would we expect of him? He’s too proud to concede defeat, let alone failure or wrongdoing. The poodle is always in the right, even when he says he’s on the Left. He reminds us “People often say: learn the lesson of Iraq. Actually, I have.” He says so only to draw an analogy between the bombing of Baghdad and the uprising in Cairo. He knows no shame in his capacity for self-love. Now he warns of a religious obstacle in the pathways to new heights of progress for Arabs. Oh he’s aware that Washington is perfectly happy to foster a marriage of convenience between the corrupt military establishment and Islamic conservatives. The idea is to buy-off the Egyptian masses and secure the status quo, namely a tacit alliance with Israel. And Tony Blair is most definitely preoccupied with the affairs of the Jewish State.

Blair wants nothing more than to hold a ‘special place’ in history and make a lot of money in the process. He’s already working to finger Palestinians out of oil found off of the coast of Gaza. It’s clear that Blair was anointed to the Quartet in order to look out for Israeli interests in the Middle East. This was the conclusion drawn by Tory journalist Peter Oborne. As Blair insists that he has visited the region 86 times and has an office in Jerusalem (that he barely uses) he maintains that the only workable solution is “an Israel secure and recognised by the region, and a viable independent State of Palestine.” It’s not common knowledge that the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) accepted the right of Israel to exist within secure and recognised borders. This was part of a platform for a two-state settlement in 1976 with Palestine confined to the occupied territories. The US vetoed the UN resolution and it was wiped from history.

 

Bob Geldof exudes a sense of great achievements when he writes of the “unprecedented effect of connectivity as the largest mobile phone market in the world took off”. A pattern seems to emerge as Bill Clinton has words of praise for mobile phones too.Apparently all over “cell phones are being used for banking, helping refugees find lost relatives, and allowing small producers such as fishermen find the prevailing market prices commodities.” Neither of them mentions the possibility that African countries could well do with major infrastructural investment. The construction of a landline network of phones could potentially create a lot more jobs than what precious little good banking does for Africa. The more it would seem Bob and Bill are just spewing sentimental guff crafted to fill the reader’s head with a soothing warmth. We don’t have to worry about changing the world, just wait for the moment for a feel-good shout. Surely poverty is a gift from the heavens. After all it gives us something to make us feel better about living in a society of moral degenerates.

Never mind what Oscar Wilde said about the beggar you encounter, if you don’t want to be bothered by him then you need a system that can end homelessness. Look on the bright side of the Chinese running the gamut when it comes to ringing Africa dry of any profit that the white man might’ve forgotten to soak up. You can forget about Mugabe and the US bombing of Somalia! Listen to Bob’s statistical bragging and swallow it for the pablum it is. Who wants to know what the great white Knight means when he says that Africa is ‘open for business’? Did you know that out of ten of the fastest growing economies there are six African countries? The International Monetary Fund, that beloved friend of the black man, predicts the African continental economy will grow by 5% in 2012. Perhaps it’s time to drag Geldof down to Golgotha and nail him to the cross. Surely it would raise a package big enough to choke the reptiles who pick at the bones of the famished African.

All the while Geldof barks on about a ‘new Africa’ as he reassures us that we can all prosper from its newfound exuberance. He just barely resists the urge when he notes that the majority of Africa’s people are under 16. Someone should tell Nike where these young  and energetic workers can be found. Perhaps Gap and Primark have already had a go at them, Shell has probably hung a few of them. The truth is Geldof needs black Africa to remain an impoverished basket-case for his career. What else can a musician of his calibre do? Back to the pressing issue, the Chinese creators of ‘jobs’ and ‘wealth’ for Africa. It’s true that Chinese investment leaped from £30 million to £1 billion, with Chinese-African trade leaping from £5 billion in 1998 to £53 billion in 2008. Chinese investment in Zambia is just as suspect as the interest Tiny Rowland showed in the country’s mines decades ago. Overall the influence of China in Africa is a malign one, plenty of dough for the kleptocracy in Zimbabwe and genocide in Sudan. Soon that’ll be the tip of the iceberg.