It’s that time again: Eurovision!
Every year it disappoints me, yet every year I return. And once more, the Eurovision Song Contest is upon us. For the uninitiated (though I can’t imagine there are that many people unaware of exactly what this affair entails), I have selected some of my favourite Eurovision winners from ABBA to Loreen, both of whom are Swedish, by coincidence I presume. My selection indicate two things: first, that Eurovision had a kind of musical peak between 1974 and 1982; and second, I started watching Eurovision after 1997, and in spite of the overall decline in quality, I keep doing so.
ABBA, “Waterloo” (Sweden, 1974)
Marie Myriam, “L’oiseau and l’enfant” (France, 1977)
Izhar Cohen and the Alphabeta, “A-Ba-Ni-Bi” (Israel, 1978)
Johnny Logan, “What’s Another Year”(Ireland, 1980)
Nicole, “Ein Bisschen Frieden” (Germany, 1982)
Britain’s Thatcher
I’ve just spent the past hour or maybe two reading through today’s copy of The Times, which while extremely thorough and well-reported but on the balance of things was decidedly glowing. Thus, thoughts inevitably turned to how to make the left critique of Thatcher’s Britain, or indeed Britain’s Thatcher. In The Independent, Owen Jones demonstrated perhaps how not to do it:
Thatcherism was a national catastrophe, and we remain trapped by its consequences. …We are in the midst of the third great economic collapse since the Second World War: all three have taken place since Thatcherism launched its great crusade. This current crisis has roots in the Thatcherite free market experiment, which wiped out much of the country’s industrial base in favour of a deregulated financial sector.
Jones’ critique comes very much from the socialist left, the perspective of the working class, and when he goes onto highlight the loss of skilled industrial jobs, a paucity of decent social housing, and growing income inequality, he isn’t incorrect. These are the consequences of Thatcherism, and those on the right who deem her to be something of a mix of Boudicca and Jesus of Nazareth might do well to recognise that while Thatcherism had its winners, it had its losers too.
Jones’ problem is that his critique of Thatcherism almost exists in a vacuum. He fails to recognise that deindustrialisation in the north of England was somewhat inevitable. He does not which to discuss the negative impact of the power undemocratic, unaccountable trade unions. And, he seems unable to acknowledge that her policies of deregulation, modernisation, and privatisation were a perfectly reasonable response to ten or more years of economic stagnation that had made the United Kingdom a sick man within Europe.
The sorry truth is that the virus of anti-Semitism has infected the British Muslim community
by Mehdi Hasan, New Statesman, March 21, 2013
It pains me to have to admit this but anti-Semitism isn’t just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it’s routine and commonplace. Any Muslims reading this article – if they are honest with themselves – will know instantly what I am referring to. It’s our dirty little secret. You could call it the banality of Muslim anti-Semitism.
I can’t keep count of the number of Muslims I have come across – from close friends and relatives to perfect strangers – for whom weird and wacky anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are the default explanation for a range of national and international events. Who killed Diana and Dodi? The Mossad, say many Muslims. They didn’t want the British heir to the throne having an Arab stepfather. What about 9/11? Definitely those damn Yehudis. I mean, why else were 4,000 Jews in New York told to stay home from work on the morning of 11 September 2001? How about the financial crisis? Er, Jewish bankers. Obviously. Oh, and the Holocaust? Don’t be silly. Never happened.
Growing up, I always assumed that this obsession with “the Jews” was a hallmark of the “first-generation” immigrants from the subcontinent. In recent years, I’ve been depressed to discover that there are plenty of “second-generation” Muslim youths, born and bred in multiracial Britain, who have drunk the anti-Semitic Kool-Aid. I’m often attacked by them for working in the “Jewish owned media”.
The truth is that the virus of anti-Semitism has infected members of the British Muslim community, both young and old. No, the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict hasn’t helped matters. But this goes beyond the Middle East. How else to explain why British Pakistanis are so often the most ardent advocates of anti-Semitic conspiracies, even though there are so few Jews living in Pakistan?
CST publishes report on UK anti-Semitism in 2012
- 640 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in the UK in 2012, a 5 percent increase on the year before.
- While reported anti-Semitic incidents were up 55 percent in London, they decreased by 34 percent in Greater Manchester.
- A spike in recorded incidents occurred in November, at the time of Operation Pillar of Cloud in Gaza, and also in March after the terrorist shooting at the Jewish day school in Toulouse.
- There were two reported incidents were constituted GBH or a threat on someone’s life. First, in Northern Ireland, a schoolboy was beaten and left unconscious after a lesson on the Holocaust. Second, in Glasgow, a Jewish couple were punched in the street, and a non-Jewish male identified by the assailant as Jewish was knifed.
- Over half of recorded incidents took the form of abuse behaviour, meaning verbal or written anti-Semitic abuse, delivered face-to-face, via telephone, email, in the post, etc.
- Around half of reported incidents were perpetrated against random individuals in public places, followed by synagogues and those attending them.
- Of the incidents that were ideologically-motivated, a majority were driven by far-right or neo-Nazi thought, over anti-Israel or Islamist sentiment.
Read the CST’s full findings here.
Falklands Redux: Is President Kirchner South America's Biggest Troll?
The Argentine economy is struggling. The government is locked in a dispute with the IMF over the accuracy of its inflation and growth figures, the latter of which is reported to be as high as 25 percent. Protectionism and populism in the form of tariffs, import restrictions, nationalization of industry, and price controls are discouraging foreign investment and capital. Argentinian bonds are currently rated by Fitch as being just slightly above junk status, while the peso has plummeted in value against the dollar.
With growth slowing, inflation soaring, and crime on the rise, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is bearing the brunt of the people’s ire. Re-elected in a landslide in October 2011 without the need for a runoff, Kirchner saw her approval rating bottom out at a meager 30 percent last November. In October, 200,000 people marched through Buenos Aires protesting economic failings and systemic corruption, while in November the trades union — traditional allies of her faction, the Peronist Front for Victory — organized a 24-hour general strike and instituted road blocks across the city.
It is hardly surprising, then, that against this backdrop of economic and social tumult and strife that Kirchner would seek to bring up the Falkland Islands. Having once fought with Britain over that rocky archipelago of fishermen and sheep farmers in 1982, Argentina’s issues of sovereignty and self-determination have come to the fore again in a series of public confrontations with London.
Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/falklands-redux-is-president-kirchner-south-americas-biggest-troll/267067/
Whatever the Sickly Media Coverage, the Monarchy Remains Important (For Now, Anyway)
News such as a royal pregnancy (or better yet, a wedding!) gives the British an opportunity, as Christopher Hitchens once phrased it, to “bid adieu to every vestige of proportion, modesty, humour, and restraint”. Indeed, as I was pursuing the newsstands one day last week, I could not help but notice and be a little disappointed by the sight of the forced smile of Duke of Cambridge inked onto the front pages of every rag, highbrow and low, accompanied by a feast of flattering headlines.
Full-on royal hysteria – commemorative tea-towels and camping outside Westminster Abbey in the rain – is alien to me and somewhat disappointing to boot. The nine months of inane coverage which will almost certainly follow the Duchess’ joyous announcement – What will they name it? Diana?! Good heavens! – will cheapen the national discourse and will in turn only serve to obscure the important and understated role the monarchy plays in the United Kingdom’s political system.
The UK’s constitution has one great advantage and one obvious flaw: that it is not contained in a single document. Its main defect is that whereas the rights of the individual in the United States are carefully codified in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the subsequent Amendments, in Britain they must be sought in a hodgepodge of parliamentary statutes, legal precedents, and international treaties that have come into effect over the course of nearly a thousand years.
Greek and Latin, Yes. Hebrew, No.
Ancient Greek and Latin, yes. Hebrew, no.
That’s the headline from a new British government proposal that excludes Hebrew from plans to encourage primary school children to learn a second language. The plan, which remains under discussion and would come into effect in September 2014 if implemented, would mandate that pupils aged 7 to 11 learn one of either French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, Latin or ancient Greek, as to “make foreign languages a key part of every child’s education, and to stop the slide in standards and take-up.”
In response to further enquires, a spokesperson for the Department for Education (DfE) told the Forward: “We want to give young people the skills they need to compete in a global jobs market. This is why we introduced the Foreign Languages Plan, which will ensure that every primary school child has a good grasp of a language by age 11.
“Whilst French, German and Spanish were the modern languages identified by respondents to the consultation as the most popular choices, we have been clear that primary schools will be free to teach any other language.”
Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/167839/greek-and-latin-yes-hebrew-no/#ixzz2FMMZFaFL
Useful Euro Summit?
“European Union summit breaks up without agreement” are dead words at this point. In a contest to name the most redundant headline, it would have to be given serious consideration for the top prize.
This latest summit—held last Thursday into Friday, in order to negotiate the budget (or the Multi-Annual Financial Framework, MFF, in Euro-speak) for the next seven years—was shambolic. The president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, and the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, met with each national leader to discuss demands and proposals in what were supposed to be 15-minute intervals that soon became 35. Dinner—over which the most important negotiations between member states are traditionally conducted—was pushed back to midnight, by which point attendees were merely served cold cuts and coffee. The following day, and after little movement, Van Rompuy abruptly concluded meetings at lunchtime, stating that the leaders of Europe would come back and try again “early next year,” most likely in February.
This is not to say, in spite of the assertion from one member of the United Kingdom delegation that Van Rompuy “f—ked up” the whole thing, that the gathering was a worthless one. While the conference did indeed end in rancor, division, and finger-pointing, it helped to clarify the nature of the schism at the heart of Europe—and to reveal the divisions that exist between the various member states.
The broadest division rests between two parties. The first is the cluster of nations that make a net contribution to the EU and favor a level of spending lower than the €973 billion ($1.26 trillion) proposed by Van Rompuy. (That’s down already from €1.025 trillion floated by the Commission, but still above the €886 billion put forward by the U.K. as a marker prior to the summit). The second group consists of the net recipient states who are seeking to protect the budget from cuts.
Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/useful-euro-summit.html
What Ted Kennedy Didn’t Get About Northern Ireland (And What the United States Still Doesn’t Get Today)
“What answer from the North?
One Law, One Land, One Throne!
If England drives us forth
We shall not fall alone.”
— “Ulster 1912”, Rudyard Kipling
Being convinced that Irish self-rule would have been “disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster”, 500,000 men and women signed a covenant and declaration on September 28, 1912, pledging “to stand by one another in defending our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom” – “using all means which may be found necessary”. One hundred years later, 30,000 unionists marched through Belfast this weekend past largely without incident, save complaints that one drummer relieved himself on a Catholic Church in the east of the city, an action already condemned by the parade’s organisers. Additional accusations that loyalists ignored proscriptions on the signing of unionist hymns including “The Sash” near St Patrick’s Church are currently being investigated.
That the march passed off as peacefully as it could have is attributable in no small part to the work the United States undertook during the peace process of the 1990s. Lawmakers including President Clinton and Sen. Ted Kennedy were instrumental in aiding Tony Blair and others in forging the Good Friday agreement. This compromise between Ulster unionists and Irish republicans allowed for the formation of the democratically-elected Northern Ireland Assembly and autonomy over a number of policy areas including education, healthcare, and most recently policing and justice. It is no mean feat that the executive branch is headed by a grand coalition led by First Minister Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionists, and his deputy Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin.
Yet it was not always that case that U.S. lawmakers held such equitable and peaceful views on the conflict in Northern Ireland. After all, it was Sen. Kennedy who proclaimed in 1971 that the presence of British military forces in Ulster was akin to the American occupation of Indochina. Not only that, but Protestants and unionists in Northern Ireland should, Kennedy believed, be given “a decent opportunity to go back to Britain”, as if fifty percent of Ulster’s inhabitants were but squatters in republican, Catholic territory.
You can tell this was written by Mitt Romney, or possibly a ghostwriter with a fantastic knack for mimicry. The awkward stiltedness of the astonishing boring and banal line, England is just a small island — its roads are and houses are small, bears an uncanny resemble to the queer, benign observations Romney would later make on the stump in Michigan:
I was born and raised here. I love being in Michigan. Everything seems right here. You know, I come back to Michigan; the trees are the right height. The grass is the right color for this time of year, kind of a brownish-greenish sort of thing. It just feels right. I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes. There’s something very special here. The Great Lakes, but also all the little inland lakes that dot the parts of Michigan.
I can only apologise to Gov. Romney on behalf of the whole nation that our roads and houses are too small for his taste. Unfortunately, not all of us are in a good enough financial position to be able possess four large piles dotted across the United States, including one in La Jolla, Calif., currently being remodeled in order to accommodate a $55,000 car elevator.
You can also tell the words came from Romney’s ivory-embossed pen because his thoughts (or, to put it more accurately, brain farts on the page) are ignorant, vapid, and all above exceptionally uninteresting. It is true that the United Kingdom has moved from a secondary to a tertiary economy in large part, but industry and manufacturing of items people too in fact wish to buy still constitutes 21.4pc of the country’s economic output. Even a cursory glance at the CIA World Factbook, produced by his own government, would have informed him of that.
And on the small matter of the War, Romney should know better than the raise that subject whilst questioning the United Kingdom’s record. After all, the United States did not care enough to enter that sanguinary conflict in any serious way until 1944, leaving it to the Soviet Union and Great Britain as the only two combatant states standing between the ambition of the Nazi regime to conquer Europe entire. His thoughts on this matter — that victory in the Battle of Britain and later on D-Day was purely down to luck and location — rather undermines his professed love of Winston Churchill, whose single greatest achievement was leading his nation during its both its shining and darkest hours.
This oddity on Romney’s part can be extrapolated as to fashion a larger question. These remarks come from Romney’s 2010 book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, in which he pushes back a President who Republicans believe has spent a good deal of his first term travelling the world apologising for the United States. One the essential tenets of a Romney foreign policy is the need to stand by friends and allies. And, we know from prior remarks that he believes President Obama has disrespected the United Kingdom and diminished the value of the Special Relationship. In contrast, as one of his advisers so illiterately put it, Romney “feels that the special relationship is special”.
If we believe this to be the case, then why would Romney think it wise to make these crude and ill-educated remarks, in a book written under the explicit knowledge that he was running for the presidency of the United States? Did he not think people would read it? Or does he really believe that his country’s most “special” ally is but a “small island [which] doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy”?
The emergence of this extract from No Apology helps to complete the picture of a contender for the presidency absent of tack and guile, deaf to history, and with little to no knowledge of foreign affairs or the art of diplomacy. After the insult that was Sarah Palin, the Republican Party is thumbing its nose at its electorate and its friends once more. Better, then, to do business with President Obama — who whilst cool on Europe maintains cordial relations with David Cameron and Her Majesty — than Gov. Romney who can talk a good game to our face, all the while stabbing us repeatedly in the back at home.
(Source: blog.foreignpolicy.com)
