Harry’s Place

In his excellent post ridiculing Sean Penn’s reverent account in The Nation of his recent meetings with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Raul Castro in Cuba, Marc Cooper wrote:

For an infinitely more incisive and — I might say– a more morally elevated discussion of Cuba from a thoughtful and quite courageous Cuban writer, I refer you to the dazzling Generation Y blog from Havana-based Yoani Sanchez. Please check it out and make sure you cast a vote for her blog which is currently up for a Bobs award (Yoani has already won the coveted Ortega y Gasset prize — which is probably what keeps her out of jail). [Note: Yoani won the Bobs award, which I hope will provide her with additional protection from imprisonment.]

Here’s an excerpt of one of her recent postings titled “I’d Love to Choose.”. It cuts neatly, simply and cleanly like a blue-steel machete through the sort of drivel produced by Penn:

For weeks, there are words like “ballot box,” “votes,” and “candidates” that persecute us everywhere. First there were the elections in the United States and now the issue has been revived with what happened on Sunday in Venezuela. It’s as if at the end of the year everything conspires to remind us of our condition as non-electors, our limited experience in deciding who leads us.

You become accustomed to not being able to choose what to put in your mouth, under which creed they will educate your children, or to whom to open the door, but that resignation shatters when you see someone else vote. Because of this it has risen up, these days, the desire to fold the ballot, to push it into the slot and to know that with it goes my stentorian shout that demands: “to choose.”

To understand a part of what it’s like to live in Cuba, consider that it’s possible to gaze longingly from there at elections in Venezuela.

Yoani writes about her life in Cuba in what I can only assume (based on the English translations) is beautiful Spanish, and relies on volunteer translators to render it into other languages. She makes no effort to hide her identity, and in fact displays her state identity card. (See above.) The message to the authorities is: “You know who I am. If you want me, come and get me.”

Although her feelings about the regime are clear, she just as clearly loves Cuba– the land and its people, the rhythms of life there. In fact she left the country in 2002, only to return two years later.

Like virtually all Cubans, Yoani has no access to the internet at home. A Wall Street Journal piece about her last year described her blogging technique:

On a recent morning, Yoani Sánchez took a deep breath and gathered her nerve for an undercover mission: posting an Internet chronicle about life in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

To get around Cuba’s restrictions on Web access, the waif-like 32-year-old posed as a tourist to slip into an Internet cafe in one of the city’s luxury hotels, which normally bar Cubans. Dressed in gray surf shorts, T-shirt and lime-green espadrilles, she strode toward a guard at the hotel’s threshold and flashed a wide smile. The guard, a towering man with a shaved head, stepped aside.

“I think I’m able to do this because I look so harmless,” says Ms. Sánchez, who says she is sometimes mistaken for a teenager. Once inside the cafe, she attached a flash memory drive to the hotel computer and, in quick, intense movements, uploaded her material. Time matters: The $3 she paid for a half-hour is nearly a week’s wage for many Cubans.
…..
The [blog’s] name refers to a fad for names starting with “Y” that began in the 1960s. Cuba’s boxing team, for instance, has members named Yoandry, Yuciel, Yampier and Yordenis. Roughly between 25 and 40 today, people in this generation are the offspring of the revolutionaries. Weaned on Soviet cartoons and Communist slogans about a “luminous future,” they came of age amid shortages of food, clothing and soap as the economy crumbled.

Some in the Cuban exile community don’t entirely trust her, and suspect she is being used by the regime. She replies: “It’s funny, but it seems that the only way some people will believe I am authentic is if I am thrown in jail”– as other Cuban dissidents have been, and where some remain. Of course it probably helps to keep her free that her blog is unavailable in her homeland to all but the few Cubans with internet access.

In her low-key, understated prose, Yoani posts devastating first-hand accounts of the wretched conditions of daily life in Cuba, quietly puncturing the propaganda believed by many on the western Left.

Here she is on visiting a part of the country devastated by Hurricanes Gustav and Ike:

The two backpacks of medicine and clothes we’d gathered among friends turn out to be very limited for all the needs facing us. Food is scarce, especially, and ironically, that which comes from the furrows. Even the children, who normally pick out the pieces of cucumber from their plates, miss the peculiar flavor of this vegetable. The land delays its healing. The small independent farmer has seen increased pressure to sell his crop to the State rather than in the free markets, where he could reap greater profits. This generates disinterest in production, and empty stalls at the points of sale. Again, as in those years of adversity in the nineties, it’s necessary to leave the city to buy yucca, onions or a piece of pork.

Between Havana and Pinar del Río there are two police checkpoints choosing cars at random to verify no one is trafficking in milk, cheese or food. Like the sophisticated medical devices that look inside the human body, people have baptized these checkpoints “CAT scans.” In the stretches of highway without patrols, illegal vendors show their merchandise and hide themselves whenever a vehicle with official plates passes.

Although for the media the news of disaster is fading from view, in the lives of the victims it’s the lead story of every day. We have to avoid letting our tendency to forget cover up the situation, letting the triumphalism make us believe that everything’s already over, letting the avalanche of positive reports deceive us about the depths of the catastrophe. I remind everyone that we have to go to the affected areas, deliver aid directly, and record the testimonies there. The hurricane-force winds are still blowing in the lives of these people and will not diminish because we cover our ears.

Here she ruminates on a a billboard near her house:

On the left, below this billboard, you could see a woman who sells coffee at the corner of my house, who gets up at five to brew it and plays hide-and-seek with the police. The young man who left his studies and sews shoes at the workshop of his cousin, though the Sector Head considers him an habitual vagrant, a derelict, who refuses a job commensurate with his qualifications because he’s not politically correct. Many could be the tiny ant who carries no leaves in his hands… because the others are not only the workers, but also the authorities, the group of those who never get out of line.

And here she describes a visit to a hospital to see a friend’s mother. (It is obviously not one of the model hospitals to which foreigners and Cuban big shots are admitted.)

A bucket in one hand, a pillow under my arm, and a fan balanced on my hip. I enter the door of the oncology hospital and the backpack over my shoulder blocks the custodian from seeing my face. It’s of little importance because the man is used to the fact that the patients’ families must bring everything, so my Baroque structure of fans, bucket and pillowcase doesn’t surprise him. He doesn’t know it yet but, in a bag hanging off me somewhere, I’ve brought him an omelet sandwich so he’ll let me stay after visiting hours.

I come into the room and Mónica is holding the hand of her mother, whose face is increasingly haggard. She has cancer of the esophagus and there is little that can be done, although the woman still doesn’t know it. I’ve never understood doctors’ refusals to inform one, directly, how little time is left before the end; but I respect the decision of the family, although I don’t join in the lie that she will soon be well.

The room has a thin light and the air smells of pain. I begin to unpack what I’ve brought. I take out the little sack of detergent and the aromatic with which I’ll clean the bath; its aroma floods everything. With the bucket we can bathe the lady, using the cup to pour, because the water faucet doesn’t work. For the great scrubbing I brought a pair of yellow gloves, afraid of the germs that spread in a hospital. Mónica tells me to continue unpacking and I extract the package of food and a puree especially for the sick. The pillow has been a wonder and the set of clean sheets manages to cover the mattress, stained with successive effluvia.

The most welcome is the fan, which I connect to two peeled wires hanging from the wall. I continue to unpack and come to the little bag of medical supplies. I have obtained some needles appropriate for the IV, because the one in her arm is very thick and causes pain. I also bought some gauze and cotton on the black market. The most difficult thing—which cost me days and incredible swaps—is the suture thread for the surgery they are going to do tomorrow. I also brought a box of disposable syringes since she yells to high heaven when she sees the nurse with a glass one.

To distract her, I’ve come loaded with a radio, and a nearby patient has brought a television. My friend and her mom can watch the soap opera, while I look for the doctor and give him a gift sent by the sick woman’s husband. When bedtime comes a cockroach crosses the wall near the bed and I remember that I also brought some insect spray. In the backpack I still have some medicines and a little gift for the girl in the lab. I have money in my pocket, because ambulances are for the most critical cases and when they send her home, evicted, we will need to take a Panataxi.

In front of our bed there’s an old woman who eats the watery soup she’s been given by the hospital staff. Around her bed there’s no bag brought by her family and she doesn’t have a pillow for her head. I position the fan so that she will also get the cool air and talk about the arrival of another hurricane. Without her realizing it I touch the wood of the door frame, whether to expel the fear of disease or in horror at the conditions in the hospital, I don’t really know. A woman passes by shouting that she has bread and ham for sale for the visitors and I lock myself in the bathroom which smells like jasmine after my cleaning.

In his essay on Charles Dickens, George Orwell described him as someone “who fights in the open and is not frightened.” I think it’s a tribute he would have gladly paid to Yoani Sanchez.

Here is a piece of scripture that has played a central role in the systematic persecution of Jews within Europe.

Matthew 27:24-25 (King James Version) 

24  When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.

25  Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

In the Middle Ages, it came to be believed that, as a result of speaking these words, all male Jews were cursed by a sort of menstruation-like affliction. The only cure was drinking the blood of a Christian.

A monk called Thomas of Cantimpré put it this way:

“A very learned Jew, who in our day has been converted to the (Christian) faith, informs us that one enjoying the reputation of a prophet among them, toward the close of his life, made the following prediction: ‘Be assured that relief from this secret ailment, to which you are exposed, can only be obtained through Christian blood (”solo sanguine Christiano“).’ This suggestion was followed by the ever-blind and impious Jews, who instituted the custom of annually shedding Christian blood in every province, in order that they might recover from their malady.”

Cantimpré was at pains to point out that he got the information from “a very learned Jew”. The Jew who “kosherised” this theory was probably Nicholas Donin who, having become a Franciscan Friar, devoted the rest of his life to encouraging the persecution and murder of Jews.

Since the Second Vatican Council, and in particular, the Declaration of Nostra Aetate, things haven’t been that bad, theologically speaking.

Now, have a look at this.

The Political Cartoon Gallery, in Bloomsbury, London, is hosting an exhibition of antisemitic cartoons that have been published in the Arab and Western media.
 
The exhibition, curated by Dr. Simon Cohen and CST, will coincide with the publication of Cartoons and Extremism: Israel and the Jews in Arab and Western Media, by the Belgian academic Dr Joel Kotek.
 
The exhibition and the book show how historic depictions of Jews as sadistic and bloodthirsty monsters, solely interested in money, power and blood, have been revived in modern anti-Israel propaganda.
 
Through the internet, this return to ancient stereotypes of Jew hatred is reaching ever-wider audiences. As Jim Murphy MP, former Minister for Europe, noted in a lecture: ‘Europe, which traditionally exported antisemitism, is now a net importer of it.’
 
The intention of the exhibition and the book is to expose the essential antisemitic core of much anti-Israel media imagery, which echoes historic antisemitism from medieval times to the Nazi period and beyond.
 
The exhibition will be at The Political Cartoon Gallery, 32 Store Street, London, WC1E 7BS.

Finally, here is Deborah Fink, singing carols “asajew” in a Church, at an event that has been sponsored and defended by the Church of England vicar, in whose building the event took place.

The words of the carols have been changed, to draw a parallel with the plight of the baby Jesus at the time of the first Biblical Christmas, and the contemporary position of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank.

Plus ca change.

Victoria Brittain has never met a terrorist, jihadist, or enemy of a liberal and multicultural society that she doesn’t admire. A former associate foreign editor of the Guardian, Brittain is a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, sits on the editorial board of Race and Class, and is on the national executive council of Respect Renewal. 

She also has a nice side line in advocating for jihadists.

Most famously, she ghost wrote the biography of Moazzam Begg, whose involvement in jihadism stretches back to 1994. The thesis of the Brittain/Begg book can be summed up in one sentence, which should have been its title:

It Was All A Series Of Co-Incidences and Terrible Misunderstandings.

Well, she’s at it again. Here is the opening sentence of her latest offering on Comment Is Free, where she boohoos about Abu Qatada’s return to prison:

What a study in contrasts of legal rights and concerns in Britain today: a Tory MP, and a Palestinian scholar and refugee.

Yeah.

Read through the rest of the article, and you’ll notice that - amazingly - she has forgotten to mention that this “Palestinian scholar and refugee” is an outspoken and active jihadist: the spiritual leader of Al Qaeda in Europe. In fact, the point that is usually made about the need to ‘treat him nice’ is that he might be a useful conduit to the Al Qaeda.

You’ll remember that the jihadist Jaish al-Islam group - that kidnapped Alan Johnston - did so to demand Abu Qatada’s release. Qatada swiftly offered to ‘intermediate’. I serious wonder whether the whole reason for Johnston’s capture, was to remind the British Government that Qatada was the guy they could ‘do business’ with.

None of this, of course gets mentioned by Brittan.

Then there’s this beautiful paragraph:

The use of the media to create a climate of fear around Muslims in Britain is nothing new. Remember the tabloid frenzy over “the Tipton Taliban”? These were three young men from Tipton who crossed from Pakistan to Afghanistan during the refugee crisis of late 2001, had nothing to do with the Taliban, but who suffered shocking torture during more than two years in Guantanamo. They were completely exonerated and released in 2004.

Oh yeah. The Tipton Three.

Buried away in the schedules with almost no advance publicity was Lie Lab. Making use of new techniques in magnetic resonance imaging, the programme set out to discover if its subjects were telling the truth. Last week those subjects were Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul, better known as two-thirds of the Tipton Three.

That was the name given to the three young men who were picked up in Afghanistan in late 2001 by American forces and transported to Guantanamo Bay, where they were held without charges or trial for two years before being released back to Britain.

Campaigners for the men have always maintained they were innocent tourists-cum-aid workers, caught up in the invasion of Afghanistan. This was also the line of Michael Winterbottom ’s film, The Road to Guantanamo. And given the tone and approach of Lie Lab, it also seemed to be a belief shared by the programme makers.

But at the end of what was actually a rather dry and laborious piece of science TV, when confronted with results that suggested he was less than forthcoming with the truth, Ahmed confessed (Rasul had refused to go through with the test) not only to visiting an Islamist training camp but also handling weapons and learning how to use an AK47.  

What an idiot!

Victoria Brittan does perform a useful function, however. You can be certain that, whatever she thinks, the exact opposite is likely to be true.

UPDATE

A reader directs our attention to last year’s court judgement on Abu Qatada, the mild mannered “Palestinian scholar and refugee”:

28. The Appellant, over his years here, has constructed a support base within the United Kingdom for terrorism-related activities abroad and in the UK. Prior to the UK’s involvement in military action in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, the UK was largely used by the Islamist terrorist networks as a base from which to support terrorist networks or groups engaged in terrorist actions in countries other than the UK. For a while, the Appellant appears to have viewed the UK as a comparatively benign environment in which the motivation for carrying out attacks may have been outweighed by the opportunities for carrying out fundraising, recruitment and procurement, although, even in December 1996, the Appellant was already proclaiming that it was acceptable to fight Jews within the UK.

29. The Security Service interviewed the Appellant on three occasions in 1996-7, when he agreed to use his influence to minimise the risk of a violent response to the possible extradition of Ramda, the UK leader of the GIA. But he provided no information enabling attacks to be prevented, warned his congregation to be wary of MI5’s approaches and provided them with physical descriptions and names of MI5 officers approaching Muslims.

30. In September 1998, the Appellant expressed the view that it was legitimate for GIA followers to break Western laws, to steal and cheat “kaffirs” (unbelievers or infidels), and to take their women for sex or sale, but as they were living in a predominantly “kaffir” society, they had to be careful to conceal their activities to avoid a backlash, and should wait one month from the seizure of women before having sex with them.

31. In October 1999, the Appellant made a speech at the Four Feathers mosque in which he effectively issued a fatwa authorising the killing of Jews, including Jewish children. He told the congregation that Americans should be attacked wherever they were, that in his view they were no better than Jews and that there was no difference between English, Jews and Americans.

32. In a sermon given by the Appellant, apparently in the UK in 2002, he stated that if a Muslim killed a non-believer for the sake of Islam, it was not a sin and Allah looked well upon it. In response to a question about suicide bombings, the Appellant said that they were legitimate if undertaken for the benefit of Islam, causing damage to an enemy.

There’s more. Read the judgement.

If somebody had written a puff piece for a White Supremacist who had acted this way, do you think they’d  get a column in the Guardian?

This is a guest post by Ben Cohen of Z-Word

An almighty row has broken out in Norway following a monologue by comedian Otto Jespersen - and broadcast on national TV - which resulted in a man who lost nine relatives during the Holocaust phoning the police.

Here’s the joke:

”I would also like to take the opportunity to remember all the billions of fleas and lice that lost their lives in German gas chambers, without having done anything wrong other than settling on persons of Jewish background.”

That’s about as sophisticated as the interminable joke popular among American white supremacists about black people (”if we’d known they were gonna be this much trouble, we’d have picked the goddam cotton ourselves.”)

Jespersen isn’t the first European comedian to deploy antisemitism in his act - in France, there’s the notorious Dieudonne. And just as Dieudonne ran into trouble with the law, so has Jespersen.

Aftonbladet, a leading Norwegian newspaper, reports that Kurt Valner, the man who lost nine relatives to the Nazi murderers, reported Jespersen to the police on what appear to be incitement grounds. Jespersen himself has remained silent, but other comedians have jumped to his defense, along with his boss, Alf Hildtrum, who said, “The claims that Jespersen has anti-Semitic sympathies is completely false. I don’t believe it. Otto Jespersen is trying to make a point in these monologues, and the text should be judged in context. It shouldn’t be taken in isolation.”

I’m not quite sure of either the point or the context. But I am mindful of another context: the claim, documented by the scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld and others, that antisemitism, frequently blended with anti-Zionist tropes, is alarmingly prominent in Norway and the other Nordic countries.

Ha’aretz reported that a former Norwegian Prime Minister, Kåre Willoch, responded that these claims amounted to “a traditional deflection tactic aimed at diverting attention from the real problem, which is Israel’s well-documented and incontestable abuse of Palestinians” - a Norwegian version of what David Hirsh calls “The Livingstone Formulation.”

Willoch did not respond to the specific examples raised by Gerstenfeld which, interestingly, included a number of newspaper cartoons designed to raise the same dismissive, morally superior sniggering as Jespersen’s mangled joke. One cartoon showed an ultra-Orthodox Jew engraving “thou shall murder” into an alternative Decalogue. Another cartoon showed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert dressed up as a guard at a death camp, smiling and holding a rifle.

All of this is illustrative of a wider point. These days, racist jokes about blacks and other minorities are largely - and correctly - regarded as an embarrassment, the preserve of failed comedians performing to inebriated audiences in seedy clubs. But transfer these same themes to Jews and all of a sudden, they acquire a delicious sense of toying with the forbidden. What is reactionary becomes radical, what is stupid and insulting becomes pathbreaking. Thus does the gutter enter the lofty heights of the salon.

Great story in The Times today about Croydon council’s education chief, Maria Gatlan, who had to resign yesterday after she was outted by a member of the Communist Party of Britain, Peter Latham, for being a former member of the Provisional IRA.

Gatlan did one year with the Provos and on one occasion accompanied the terror group’s chief of staff, Dave O’Connell, on a botched mission to buy weapons in continental Europe. The trip ended in disaster for the IRA when the Czechoslovak-made bazookas, rocket launchers, grenades and rifles were seized by police.

Gatlan then escaped to England with the help of an Observer journalist and wrote a book, ‘To Take Arms: A Year with the Provisional IRA‘, whilst becoming a suburban Tory.

Latham says he outted her as part of his campaign against the Conservative-led council’s proposals for community schools. “The only reason I did it was to help our campaign. I was told she had been in the Provisional IRA and I assumed that her Tory grouping were aware of that,” Dr Latham said.

It’s all becoming clear. German troops in Afghanistan won’t fly at night, won’t send troops to help Nato in the volatile south, and are apparently “too fat to fight”. According to The Times today official reports say that the 3,500 troops in northern Afghanistan drink too much and are too fat.

A German parliamentary report has revealed that in 2007 German forces in Afghanistan consumed about 1.7 million pints of beer (485 pints per man) and 90,000 bottles of wine (25 per man). Blimey they’re a bunch of alcoholics. Sounds like life in Kabul for German troops is one big slap my thigh and pour me another.

In comparison British and US bases in the country enforce a strict ban on alcohol. The report also found that 40 per cent of German soldiers aged 18-29 were overweight - more than the civilian population (35 per cent) .

When Barack Obama comes begging to Nato for more troops for Afghanistan to support the troop surge he better bring a diet plan and fitness regime for the Germans. Obama has said as many as 20,000 more US troops could go, but he wants a commitment from allies for more support. Good luck with that.

On that note, and more seriously, chief of the defence staff in the UK, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, has said no more British troops should be sent to Afghanistan unless other countries make greater efforts to promote the economic and political development as fears grow over the lack of ability of Hamid Karzai’s government to impose its will outside the capital.

The Guardian says frustration among British military commanders is coming out into the open, which was reflected in a forthright speech by Sir Jock about any increase to the 8,000 British troops in Afghanistan.

“I’m not saying that we couldn’t or shouldn’t do more in Afghanistan if we judge that to be necessary.”

It has been hinted that Britain could transfer some of its 4,000 troops in Iraq to Afghanistan but is resisting the idea of a one for one swap.

The Daily Telegraph quotes senior defence sources as saying that the defence chief’s comments reflect a belief that the Nato mission to contain the Taliban and stabilise Afghanistan is not making enough progress because of the lack of troops on the ground.

“We do not have enough military force on the ground — it’s as simple as that,” said one source. “We need more than we’ve got now.”

If only you could win this war in the beer halls. It has been pointed out by Nick in the comments that the French are also pretty shoddy as was mentioned in the Summer.

For those with better things to do than plough through the hundreds of pages of secondhand opinion marinaded for months in an unappealing stew of verbosity that constitutes the published work of a certain self important blogger here’s an Amazon UK review of Richard Seymour’s book The Liberal Defence of Murder:

 ”God have mercy on my soul for I have never seen such an assault on the English language as the one presented here. I defy any rational human being to read more than ten pages of this extraordinary travesty without feeling the urge to end it all quickly and quietly. My wife found me weeping and loading the pistol, but luckily had bought a puppy that day and presented it to me as I raised the firearm to my temple. Looking into its innocent eyes I realised life could go on, and that just because some lunatic had tortured and murdered a once proud language with such relish, I didn’t have to leave a comely girl widowed and a dog without a master.”

Amazon asks: Was this review helpful for you?

Bang on target I’d say.

Tom Gross in the Wall Street Journal on the Bombay terror attacks and the power of words, weasel or otherwise.

This is a guest post by Fiyaz Mughal. It was given tonight at the Kinloss Learning Centre / Synagogue in North London

My friends. It’s wonderful to be here today and I am honoured to be invited. I bring a message of hope today, but first of all I want to impress upon you how important it is to keep hoping. So before I tell you how I have been seeking to promote a healthier discourse between Jews and Muslims, let me remind you what is at stake.

We’re all familiar with the historic faultlines in the relationship between Jews and Muslims, and it may take an effort for us to tear ourselves away from those quarrels and look at what’s happening around us – but we must do it. The fact is this: the Far Right is slowly gaining electoral ground in Britain, as it is across Europe. Intolerance and bigotry is creeping in under other names, like patriotism and a narrow concern with one’s own people to the exclusion of all else. The irony is that both Jews and Muslims are in a unique position to know how damaging such attitudes can be – we see the consequences played out in Gaza and the West Bank every day. Now in Britain we are facing a similar set of attitudes, except this time we’re all targets.

British Muslims, British Jews and tolerant British liberals of any faith and none must have a clear answer to this Far Right threat. We must be able to show up bigotry and intolerance for what they are – and we can’t do that if we are prey to them ourselves. We must be able to offer our young people a course of action they can take if they are concerned about bigotry and intolerance directed against them. Otherwise they may take courses of action offered to them by extremists. In short, our answer to prejudice and bigotry can only be clear if we are ourselves engaged in a peaceable, co-operative and productive discourse, one which works to secure not only peace and productivity between Jews and Muslims, but in our society as a whole.

So what are the obstacles to our progress? I believe they could be summed up in one word – fear. The politics of fear shapes the discourse between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East and over the last few years it has also threatened to shape our discourse here in Britain. We have seen the growth of negative stereotyping and a the birth of a climate of suspicion. If the measure of a civilised society is how it treats its minorities, we in Britain are at risk of going backwards. I don’t believe we should agonise and blame ourselves for this – the politics of fear is partly about the responses of individuals but it’s also about expediency for governments. The politics of fear is useful to politicians – it is not the domain of one side or one community. All sides in the Middle East and our own government in the UK has at some time, in some way, thrived on the politics of fear. Politicians and their PR men look to fear to gain the party advantage, and the press look for the negative angle to sell more papers. And so the truth – the hopeful truth – suffers.

That truth is that things can change. The best decisions are made free from fear. We must emancipate ourselves from fear in order to make good decisions. I believe there’s a paradox at the heart of the conflict between Jews and Muslims and that is that everything is couched as if the problems are fixed, eternal, as if people can never change their minds. And yet we know things do change. All of us know that Middle Eastern politics are not static – they are constantly changing and fast moving. Once you accept what you know in your heart, that people and even states can change, then you must accept that things can change for the better.

So how can we pursue hopeful change? I’m not going to talk to you about politicians today. I want to talk about what you and I and people like us can do and contribute to. The most obvious way is simple dialogue itself. For the last three years I have been the director of Interfaith, a not-for-profit initiative which seeks to build understanding between Jews and Muslims at home and abroad. In this role I have run programmes, workshops and visits designed to foster debate, promote community volunteering, reduce extremism and bring people back from the brink of violence, back into society. I have seen people change with my own eyes, even people whose views seemed trenchant and fixed.

A lot of what I do (ladies and gentlemen) is informed by events like Limmud’s annual winter conference. We Muslims, I have to say, have some way to go in replicating the success of Limmud’s activities. But we also have a lot to learn from the experiences of you as a community, a community which is integrated and which has become part of the fabric of this country, yet which still has strong cultural and religious values. Values that transcend time and which give a uniqueness to the community. Yet this model of community development and engagement has come at a cost and it has come at the cost of the persecution and pogroms committed against Jews here within the UK and throughout Russia, the Baltic States and who can forget, Europe itself. We all have to recognize that within and beyond faith communities.

But creating a new discourse between Jews and Muslims is about more than cultural events and ideological discussion, as valuable as those things are. It is also about the nuts and bolts of life in our shared communities. Persistent warfare and unrest has led to the total economic dislocation of the West Bank and a collapsing economic situation in Gaza. This benefits no-one and all our efforts, Jew and Muslim alike, can be directed towards projects designed to address this. Right now, civic regeneration programmes are underway in the Palestinian territories. Some of these are truly inspiring, both in the hope they offer to the citizens who live there and in the example they set of Judaico-Muslim cooperation. Just off the coast of the Palestinian territories, there are gas reserves which cannot be tapped by Palestinian expertise as it currently stands. However, a project is underway to upskill Palestinian engineers to make the most of this natural resource. This project is funded by a Jewish philanthropist. So even in the heart of the crucible, there is hope. Not only is it important to develop areas that have no economic future, it is also the best way to ensure that both countries, Israel and Palestine, see the future through shared mutual financial and logistical co-operation. It might sound prosaic, but I have never been so sure as I am now, that peace will not come through the barrel of a gun, but through strengthened economies and mutual trading co-operation. Workaday economic solutions to what we are accustomed to thinking of as intractable ideological problems.

We can support our relatives and co-religionists in the Middle East on projects like these, but we can also replicate them here. Judaism and Islam share a tremendous sense of civic pride, social justice and responsibility and these can be tapped into. Often our young people are crying out for opportunities for productive, fun and economically useful opportunities. The voluntary sector, which I work in, provides these to some extent. But I believe we could be tapping this resource more effectively. Our religions already provide the desire to do good, we just need outlets. Cooperation isn’t always easy. Some of you may know about the synagogue and mosque which stand side-by-side in Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel. Many Imams and Rabbis over the years have nurtured excellent relations between the two places of worship and have even sought to provide guided tours of both buildings to the public as part of the same experience. The only snag with this excellent plan has been the great difficulty in finding a regular day which isn’t either a holy day or a fast day or a feast day in either religious calendar and when both mosque and synagogue can be open. But the hope is all, this is the kind of project I would like to see in every community.

These are not just nice-sounding ideas. A culturally and economically robust community is good for everyone. It means more prosperity, less risk of extremism, an end to entrenched disadvantage. We British Jews and Muslims are in a unique position to provide this robustness to our communities. We both have a past as immigrant peoples. We both bring a new perspective and new ideas. If we can harness our sense of religious identity for positive ends and defy the politics of fear, I believe that we will not only achieve great things in our communities in this country, but we will set an inspiring example to our friends, families and peoples in troubled and divided societies around the world. They need our help in reminding them to keep hoping. The new discourse must be economic and prosaic as much as cultural and ideological – because if we give ourselves common goals, we give ourselves the hope of overcoming our differences.

We’ve had a few comments recently asking why Harry’s Place isn’t posting more about the current financial crisis/meltdown/calamity/Armageddon/whatever-it-is. And aside from the fact that such comments are off-topic, and it’s our blog and we can post whatever we damn well want, they have a point.

On my account, it’s because– unlike some instant experts– I don’t pretend to understand the totality of what’s going on, or even a small portion of that totality. But occasionally, from the morass of information and opinion, I find something that on its face makes sense to me. Such were the comments of Elizabeth Warren, the head of a Congressional panel that oversees the US government’s $700 billion bailout program.

Warren… said in an interview Monday that the government… seemed to be lurching from one tactic to the next without clarifying how each step fits into an overall plan.

“You can’t just say, ‘Credit isn’t moving through the system,’ ” she said in her first public comments since being named to the panel. “You have to ask why.”

If the answer is that banks do not have money to lend, it would make sense to push capital into their hands, as the Treasury has been doing over the last two months, she continued. But if the answer is that their potential borrowers are getting less creditworthy with each passing day, “pouring money into banks isn’t going to fix that problem,” she said.
…..
In her view, the government should be trying to create more reliable customers for those banks by shoring up the fragile finances of the millions of American families that could not save, borrow or spend even if their banks were flush with capital.

“Any effective policy has to start with the households,” she said. “Years of flat wages, low savings and high debt have left America’s households extremely vulnerable.”

Barack Obama seems to grasp this, which is why he is proposing to create jobs by funding programs to repair and build roads, bridges, schools and other public infrastructure, and to cut taxes for the middle class. More disturbing to some (but not me), he also advocates an increase in the minimum wage and making it less difficult for workers to organize unions.

So is the government– by pumping more than a hundred billion dollars (with no strings attached) into banks that are holding it instead of lending it– getting things backwards?