City University

As reported by the BBC :

Some Muslim students at City University in London are praying in the street in a row over prayer room facilities. The university closed a prayer room after Muslim students were attacked in November. A new multi-faith room was opened the following month. A group of Muslim students now refuse to use the facility as they say they cannot pray in a multi-faith room. The university says it goes against its philosophy to provide a room for just Islamic students.

As reported by Gauche :

For some time now, the leaders of City ISoc have relentlessly pushed a separatist and intolerant version of Islam, repeatedly promoting apologists for terrorist violence and the most reactionary social attitudes. They have consistently and insidiously played the role of victimised innocents in order to gain sympathy, without any solid evidence, to further their cause.

This time last year, the main treat advertised for the ISoc’s annual fundraising dinner was a video link-up with none other than Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-Yemeni preacher who was spiritual mentor to three of the 9/11 suicide-murderers (and a contact of the December 2009 pants bomber to boot).

The university authorities objected and al-Awlaki’s virtual appearance never happened. But was the ISoc deterred? No way. Next up was an ISoc meeting in autumn 2009 addressed by two other reactionary Islamist preachers, Abu Usamah, who is on record stating that gays should be killed, and Murthadah Khan, who is on record describing Jews and Christians as "filthy". The university Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Society and the campaigner Peter Tatchell objected, saying that the ISoc was whipping up hatred, but the meeting went ahead. At the end of last year, after it was reported that al-Awlaki had been killed by a Yemeni air attack on a meeting of al-Qaida leaders, the ISoc website praised him and the "staunch al-Qaida fighters" targeted by the raid...

In the meantime, the ISoc complained that the university’s Muslim prayer room was not safe. In November last year there was a street fight outside it, in the course of which some Muslim students were badly hurt by local youths, though it remains unclear what the fracas was about. (The building where the prayer room was is on to a dimly lit back street and is rarely used by other students in the evening.)

The university’s acting vice-chancellor, Julius Weinberg, responded, entirely reasonably, by setting up new multi-faith prayer and reflection rooms in the main university block where there is 24-hour security and no exit that can be identified as being used only by Muslims.

Some weeks later, after another controversy over an ISoc speaker meeting at which another gay-hating preacher was billed as the star attraction, Weinberg told the ISoc that its speaker meetings – as opposed to prayer meetings – could not continue to be segregated between men and women and would have to be open debates if they were to take place on university premises.

The ISoc’s next step was to assume the role of aggrieved victim. How could anyone have the temerity to suggest that Muslims should share a space (even if use of it were carefully timetabled) with others? Such arrangements are, of course, the norm in most further and higher education institutions – but the ISoc declared that the new set-up was an outrage against the tenets of Islam and started holding Friday prayers outside the university’s main entrance as a protest, to which it invited supporters from every Islamist group in London to boost numbers.

There is no evidence that the Islamic Society at City has been recruiting for terrorist organisations, or that former members have gone on to commit terrorist acts (although the same cannot be said of other student Islamic societies in the UK of a similar ideological bent). But its insistent pleading for special treatment, its consistent policy of inviting the most inflammatory separatist preachers, its repeated smearing of critics and its refusal to discuss its views in an open and civilised fashion are all intolerable in a university.

UPDATE - la lotta continua - Islamic Society statement :

".. the ISoc will no longer remain silent and take a back seat whilst innocent students and readers are manipulated into blindly following what some may say are Islamophobic secularists. No, it is time the ISoc stands up, defends itself and fights back against the likes of Ms Waterhouse and Mr Anderson; two confused secularists that promote significantly preposterous views. So where do we go from here? Well, a new vice-chancellor is due to take over in August, indeed it will be a brave vice-chancellor who confronts this issue."

It will indeed. I see a new Vice-Chancellor, geographer Paul Curran, takes over in the autumn. I can't for the life of me imagine what was wrong with previous Vice-Chancellor, Julius Weinberg. Most odd.

Grand Festival of Cognitive Dissonance

Rasputin - "Church in Ireland has lost all credibility"

(sponsored by Greenhouse and Stone-Throwing Monthly)


Mandelson "suffered from low self-esteem"

Love Bade Me Welcome

It was a beautiful Easter Day Mass today - standing room only, sunshine, lots of happy children and adults. Afterwards I walked the dog and gave thanks and praise for this still most beautiful country.

George Herbert and Vaughan Williams.

Google Maps and Genocide (and Trainspotting)

Google Maps (the satellite view) is both a great boon to the armchair traveller and a tremendous time waster - I remember using it when it first came out to trace the long-vanished railway lines from the Clydach Gorge to Abergavenny, and then followed the line at small scale all the way through Hereford to Colwall !

My record time-waste occurred after blogging the Skeleton Coast diamond excavations in Namibia, which can be seen on Google Maps. Bleak and inaccessible places have always appealed to my imagination, and that night I sat up for hours tracing the Skeleton Coast all the way from Oranjemund to Walvis Bay, with frequent stops to zoom in on some remote diamond working. And that's still only half way up the Namibian coast !

Why genocide ? Well, I was reading the wiki for Walvis Bay, as one does.

Fishing

In Walvis Bay there are different fishing companies like Hangana Seafood,Caroline Fishing, Benguella Fishing Company, Genocide of Namibia, Etale Fishing Company... WHAT ?

Genocide of Namibia ? I bet their produce just flies off the shelves ! A quick Google gave me this, on the events of 1904 when Namibia was a German colony :

On 2 October, Trotha issued an appeal to the rebellious Herero tribe:

I, the great general of the German troops, send this letter to the Herero people... All Hereros must leave this land... Any Herero found within the German borders with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall no longer receive any women or children; I will drive them back to their people or have them fired upon. This is my decision for the Herero people.

Unable to achieve a conclusive victory through battle, Trotha ordered that captured Herero males were to be executed, while women and children were to be driven into the desert. Leutwein complained to Bülow about Trotha's actions, seeing the general's orders as ruining any chance of a settlement and intruding upon the civilian colonial jurisdiction. Having no authority over the military, the chancellor could only advise the Kaiser that Trotha's actions were "contrary to Christian and humanitarian principle, economically devastating and damaging to Germany's international reputation." After a political battle in Berlin between the civilian government and the military, Wilhelm II countermanded Trotha's decree of 2 October on 8 December, but the massacres had already begun. When the order was lifted at the end of 1904, prisoners were herded into concentration camps and given as slave labourers to German businesses. Many prisoners died of overwork and malnutrition.

The whole story is not a nice one, to put it mildly. Which brings to mind something Norman Geras wrote a while back (in a review of the remarkable story of the life and death of far-left academic Malcolm Caldwell - a story worth a post all on its own) :

That Nazi ideology was pregnant with the danger of terrible consequences is true, as virulent racism always is; but it is debatable - and indeed has been intensively debated in the historiography of Nazi Germany - whether the genocide against the Jews was a matter of fixed ideological intention from the moment Hitler took power or rather something that emerged only after the war in the East (Operation Barbarossa) had begun and out of the policy-making interactions of different parts of the Nazi regime. Given Hitler's own obsessive hatred of the Jews, Nazi ideology was bound to have disastrous consequences for European Jewry after 1933; but whether Auschwitz and the Holocaust were an inevitable product of that ideology is more open to question.

I think Norm's point is that Nazism may have been a necessary but not alone a sufficient trigger of the Shoah. I tend to wonder if there's not just a Nazi dimension, but also a German one. Wee Adolf was but a sprog when Lothar von Trotha issued his orders. Obviously not everyone in Germany felt that way - von Bulow for starters - but it was only four years since Kaiser Wilhelm had addressed German troops on their way to put down the Boxer Rebellion in these stirring words:

"Just as the Huns a thousand years ago, under the leadership of Attila, gained a reputation by virtue of which they still live in historical tradition, so may the name Germany become known in such a manner in China, that no Chinese will ever again dare to look askance at a German."

Not exactly a call to moderation, I think you'll agree - in fact almost an invitation to the kind of stuff the Japanese were doing nearly forty years later.

(I would never suggest the Germans had a monopoly on attempted genocide - if not one of the human universals, it must alas come reasonably close. Think in recent years of Indonesians and Chinese, Hutu and Tutsi, Gabra and Borana, Kalejin and Kikuyu. The big difference was that a major 'civilised' state, efficient and mechanised, was doing the killing. I'm sure if the organisation and capability of 20th century Germany had existed in 11th century England, the tolls of St Brices Day and the Harrying of the North would have been higher still.)

I digress greatly from the original theme - Google Maps and armchair travelling.

Mick Hartley has taken a break from attacking the Catholic Church to point out the photographs taken by Jan Smith of the many abandoned vessels around the peninsula of Nouadhibou, at the very top end of Mauretania (NW Africa). The place is a massive ships graveyard, though I'm not sure why. This site says it's cheaper to dump than scrap :

For years, Mauritanian harbour officers were so corrupt, that they let ships be discarded in the harbour in exchange of some cash. Discarding a ship is quite expensive for a company, so during the decades, lots of unwanted ships ended up in the Harbour of Nouadibou. A few years ago, the situation was so out of control, that even Mauritanians started to worry. Nowadays there’s a project from the European Union to refloat all these junk and take them away, or destroy in situ (with explosions) the remaining wrecks.

While Jan Smith says its something to do with insurance - "they are most vestiges of the rampant insurance fraud (where boats are simply abandoned) that takes place in those waters" - how dumping a ship in plain sight makes fraud possible I don't know - wouldn't it be better to sink it ?


Either way, one can waste much time in scanning Google Maps for boats. But what's this on Wikipedia ?

"...the largest industry is processing iron ore transported by train from the interior mining towns of Zouérat and Fdérik. These freight trains can be as much as 3 km long, reputedly the longest in the world. The railway also carries passengers and calls at Choum. "

Another line to follow ! The railway company has a neat zoomable map of the line here. It's easy to find the iron ore terminal on Google maps, and there are railway maintenance sheds just to the north, but tracing the line across the desert is tricky. It can be done, however, and the line eventually ends up in the scarred, nightmare umber open mines at Zouerat and (especially) Fderik. You can spot a few trains en route, but none 3km long - more like 1.5. In Arizona a couple of years back we stopped to film a container train which took 15 minutes to pass.




(For more armchair travelling, samples from John Marsh's The Skeleton Coast, and a little further south and a lot colder(their discoverer, Marion du Fresne, christened them "Iles des Froides"), the full text of No Pathway Here, the story of South Africa's annexation of the remote Prince Edward and Marion Islands, lying in the Southern Ocean halfway between South Africa and the Antarctic. Lots of stories of shipwreck and (sometimes) survival.

Those South Africans call a spade a spade. "Human waste flows into the sea at Shit Creek")

Immigration: the need for controls

I don't think I can disagree with a single word of this WalesHome piece by Michael Jones, a former open borders advocate. Here's a paragraph or two, but read the whole thing :

Some people say soothingly that one should relax about this. The whole history of Britain’s population, they assure us, is one of ebb and flow of different peoples and tribal groups. All of these facts are correct, but the way they are presented is thoroughly questionable. Past migrations, of Jews and Jutes, of Celts and Romans, of Angles and Saxons, have never been on anything like the current scale. Around 95% of Britain’s pre-war population had been born here, and the other 5% was mostly made up of English and Scots whose parents had happened to be serving the Empire.

Historically, we have been a country of emigration, not immigration. Ashkenazis entered Western Europe by the tens of thousands, not by the millions. The Normans, although they seized land and power, were a tiny elite. The Dutch who arrived in the 16th Century were, in proportion to the whole population, a much tinier group. Even the 50,000 Huguenots from France only ever amounted to a hundredth of Britain’s total population, and they arrived over a period of 50 years.

Today, immigration adds 1% to Britain’s population every two years, or more than 5% every decade. Inevitably, this has led to changes in the queuing system for council housing, which once kept established working class communities together, but has now been adapted to meet the needs of new arrivals, who have tended to occupy housing units in higher densities and have settled in enclaves, cut off from their neighbours by great walls of ignorance, by impossible language barriers and by a growing, cold dislike. In the south east of England and around the Pennine towns in the north, there are places where people from different racial origins never meet, never talk, never go into each others’ homes. The result is the worst of both worlds: stoking up resentment against foreigners: and stoking up resentment against the authorities. The question that pro-free movement advocates should ask is: will the descendants of today’s huddled masses join the middle class or form a new underclass?

Of course, we have no crystal balls, but leaders with sound judgment on core policies don’t play dice with the fabric of organisational life. We’re lucky to live in a country cautiously built up by our ancestors through institutions like Parliament, the monarchy, Magna Carta, the system of justice and, at a more modest level, the pubs, chapels, local choirs, co-operatives, county regiments, trade unions, local rugby teams, and thousands of other local voluntary clubs and societies. Without a stable population there cannot be the values, habits, understandings and loyalties that enable us to live as we do and perhaps sometimes to act for the benefit of others in less fortunate places.

I chipped in with a comment about the secondary impact of immigration on Wales - the westward shift of the English which is damaging so many Welsh-speaking communities - and which I have blogged here, here , here and here.

Lackey and Sweeney

Hippies, VW camper van, autoharp, guitar, denim skirts, 1973 - what's not to like ? Pull up a floor cushion and have another piece of barm-brack with that Earl Grey !

Billy Lackey and Kathleen Sweeney from "Junk Store Songs For Sale", a 1973 Village Thing LP recorded somewhere in Gloucestershire.

I know nothing about them except that Kathleen was pretty obviously at that period of her life a Type 2 girl, and that an LA guitarist called Steve Waddington has one of their hand-made Appalachian Dulcimers. Whether that be this Steve Waddington I dinna ken.

What Day Is It Today ?

According to Google, it's Hans Christian Andersen's 205th birthday.

I'm sure the writer of The Loveliest Rose In The World would have preferred that another, slightly more important event be marked.

Old Hans was quite a modernist :

"It was another Easter morning, bright as that morning when Valdemar Daae thought he had found the gold. Among those tumbledown walls beneath the stork's nest I could hear a faint voice chanting a psalm. It was Anna Dorothea's last hymn.

"There was no window with glass, only a hole in the wall; but the sun set itself there like a lump of gold, and as she gazed on its glory her heart broke and her eyes grew fixed. The stork had given her shelter to the day of her death. I sang at her funeral," said the Wind, "as I had sung at her father's; I know where his grave is, and her grave, but no one else knows.

"Now there are new times, changed times. The old highway is lost in the fields, old cemeteries have been made into new roads, and soon the railway will come, with its train of carriages, and rush over graves where lie those whose very names are forgoten. All passed away, passed away!"