I’m going to Manchester next week. On Saturday night I left my parents’ house with a load of my old LPs. One of them was Dandelions by King Of The Slums. King Of The Slums are Manchester and there are few better bands, anywhere. Their promotion was always useless. Can I find anything on YouTube? I cannot.
Favourites: Bear Wiv Me; Violate Nothing But the Best; Psycho Motorbike Ride; Leery Bleeder.
Update. For more on this see Martin In The Margins.
Further to my last post The Guardian is ridiculously wrong on Finkelstein. If I had better expectations of The Guardian, I’d be surprised.
Probably the most irresponsible aspect of the article is the assertion that Finkelstein has been banned for ‘criticising Israel’. Author Toni O’Loughlin is playing to the beat of Finkelstein’s tub here – one limb of his campaign is to make the world believe that Israel overreacts to plain decent criticism. But is an American national who commands considerable media attention calling for a violent invasion of Israel mere ‘criticism‘? And there’s no reason to suppose that Finkelstein was banned for ‘criticising Israel’ – and what’s his father’s Holocaust survival got to do with anything? (maybe the author believes that’s a pedigree which makes Jews more truthful…)
Finkelstein is pro-war and obsessively anti-Israel. He wants Israel gone and he supports Hesbollah and other violent resistance to this end. As an aside, he speaks on the conflict without compassion as if the world were a chessboard. He’s a discredit crank who lost his De Paul University job because he’s a crank. Israel contains and receives a small number of people with views somewhat in his direction – important to Finkelstein’s deportation would have been whether or not he has plans to whip up hate or violence.
But The Guardian wants us to think his deportation was part of the “increasingly bitter divide in academic circles, between those who support and those who criticise its treatment of Palestinians.” But if there is such a divide in Israeli academics, what has that to do with whether or not Finkelstein is banned by Shin Bet? (Nothing.)
The Guardian wants us to think that Ilan Pappe was deported too. Indeed, the false charge that Pappe was hounded out from Haifa on a spurious pretext was one of the defamatory premises of an old UCU boycott campaign – this was easily debunked and that particular boycott was abandoned (there’s another boycott motion in UCU this week). Pappe seems to have things very uncomfortable for himself with his aggressive and self-promoting politics (and note that there are plenty of anti-Zionists who make a go of it in Israeli academia and civic life) but he kept his tenure. Incidentally, he doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. He gave an interview to a neo-Nazi publication without a) checking first and b) noticing that the questions are strange. And he’s still not banned from Israel.
The nature of author Toni O’Loughlin’s errors suggest bias – again, this is in keeping with The Guardian coverage of Israel in general.
Normal Finkelstein is mainly responsible for the idea that Jews abuse Holocaust memory to screw the Germans out of cash and deflect criticism of the occupation. He wrote a famous piece titled Kill Arabs, Cry Anti-Semitism, which you can find in the home of so much that’s politically whiffy, CounterPunch. He was denied tenure at the US and had to leave. He is also an obsessive and uninsightful anti-Zionist in a way which suggests violence if enacted.
There’s coverage in Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post that he was arrested on entry to Israel (he was on his way to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to see a friend in Hesbollah). He hinted to the press – he was permitted to give a statement it seems – that he’d been tortured but although it would suit him marvellously to become a cause celebre, it’s almost certainly not the case. If he had been you can bet we’d have known unambiguously from the horse’s mouth.
As with so much else I’m new to this banning stuff. First I thought it would have been much better, much more liberal, to let him in, protest against him and make the case. I wondered what state Israeli society is in if it can’t let in Finkelstein, who is vastly influential but who is also easily recognised as a crank by people who understand the situation.
Then I gave myself a clip round the ear. What kind of sucker are you, Flesh? You have to learn to spot the difference between debate and pro-war campaigning. Finkelstein is right up there with the other inciters. He’s straining every fibre to end Israel and he thinks that Hesbollah should wage all-out war. He probably salutes the way it’s turned its guns on those, as he sees them, pusillanimous Lebanese, and these things provided the final grounds for his deportation. The Shin Bet said Finkelstein “is not permitted to enter Israel because of suspicions involving hostile elements in Lebanon,” and because he “did not give a full accounting to interrogators with regard to these suspicions.”
Hesbollah is at war with Israel and Lebanon. Finkelstein supports that war. Israel is trying to avoid a repeat of 2006. So I’d imagine there are plenty of grounds for banning Finkelstein in the national interest. Lots of states ban hatemongering foreign nationals from polluting their society. The UK banned Louis Farrakhan, since 1986 – here are some of the things he’s said. Don Treshman, because his interpretation of anti-abortion led to violence. Various preachers of terror.
Israel has a good track record of free speech, incidentally, as does the UK. Sometimes that’s trumped by the need to exclude people who preach violence. There are invariably appeals for these bannings. Finkelstein will certainly appeal.
I can list them. They’re the reason I’m not starving to death in Burma, being burned out of my home in Darfur, beaten to death in Zim, unemployed, homeless, impoverished or depressed.
It’s called Saf and it’s on Curtain Rd.
The menu looks good, interesting! Though I think they’re catering too much for the health-anxious… But then, you have to make your buck.
How much buck I don’t know – no prices.
Oprah is vegan now. I’m braced for a backlash from the Guardianistas.
Ok, we have a creative breakthrough on the vegan dessert lubrication front. All I have to think of are names…
This is particularly good on pineapple, mango or other fruit. Takes maybe 10 minutes prep.
Melt the coconut cream (smaller pieces are better – stops the outside getting too cooked. It will thicken the sauce when it cools.
Turn off the heat. Add the coconut milk and the lime juice.
Stir in the sugar to taste.
Add the dessicated coconut until you have a thick pouring texture.
Add the lime rind.
Put in a sealable container and refrigerate until needed. Will keep for days.
Add the proportions gradually, mixing well, until you have a satisfactory flavour, texture and appearance.
Any surplus coconut milk should go in pina coladas or curry sauce
Commissioned by BICOM. The links look pretty strong to me, confirming what was said in the Israel and the Great Powers conference at SOAS the other month. The trend is for things to normalise with Israel after a long period of rejection, and this normalisation is to the benefit of everybody. Except of course those who wish to precipitate a crisis.
Anyway, this report is a kind of benchmark which will allow us to gauge the success or failure of the boycotters’ neo-Gramscian attempt to inculcate a hegemony of anti-Israelism.
Table B1-5 details research and development collaborations. When I saw this sample laid out like that I got angry all over again at the pointless destructive impulse of campaign to boycott Israel.
Flesh is Grass 