Victoria Brittain Is a Disgrace
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?
Comments
| 3 December 2008, 4:13 pm |
Making use of new techniques in magnetic resonance imaging, the programme set out to discover if its subjects were telling the truth.
[...]
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.
Yes, but was it Islamic science?
P.
| 3 December 2008, 4:14 pm |
I wonder sometimes what has happened to the Guardian — something seems to have gone terribly wrong at this newspaper.
| 3 December 2008, 4:18 pm |
My cousin, who was at the LSE in the 1960s, says that it was always like this.
All the way through the 80s, we were told that - for example - the “Peace Movement” had been thoroughly penetrated by agents of the USSR.
“Disgraceful, fascist slur tactics” I used to think.
But then it turned out that I was wrong, and they were right.
| 3 December 2008, 4:22 pm |
She describes Qatada as a ‘vulnerable refugee, but the only vulnerability on display would appear to be her intellect.
| 3 December 2008, 4:28 pm |
All the way through the 80s, we were told that - for example - the “Peace Movement” had been thoroughly penetrated by agents of the USSR.
“Disgraceful, fascist slur tactics” I used to think.
That’s why The Gipper — no idiot he –preferred Reader’s Digest to The New York Review of Books.
| 3 December 2008, 4:34 pm |
Such people are, in a real sense, traitors.
When an event Mumbai occurs in London or Manchester, as it surely will when thousands of UK born jihadists return from Iraq and Afghanistan, people such as Brittain will no doubt defend their “right” to avenge themselves by committing mass murder of our population.
| 3 December 2008, 4:34 pm |
Also, the Gipper knew well that, although the Peace Movement was shot thru with commies, the commies were shot thru with FBI informants.
| 3 December 2008, 4:38 pm |
I’m not so sure about that, Suffolk Boy.
MUMBAI - Ajmal Amir Kasab, the sole surviving member of the 10-man team of Pakistani gunmen that left hundreds dead or wounded after a bloody three day rampage in Mumbai, today blamed the mayhem on an “email mixup” that left him and his colleagues unaware that Barack Obama had won election as President of the United States.
“What? Oh bloody hell, now you tell me,” said Kasab, as he was led away in handcuffs by Indian security forces.
| 3 December 2008, 4:47 pm |
Victoria Brittan does perform a useful function
She can pole dance?
Sorry! But I bet you had a small laugh!
| 3 December 2008, 5:04 pm |
I have recently had the misfortune to come across a fair number of articles from Race & Class. They were poorly argued, devoted to ideology over rationality and rather shit. Now things make sense. Thank you David T.
| 3 December 2008, 5:05 pm |
Peter wrote, “I wonder sometimes what has happened to the Guardian — something seems to have gone terribly wrong at this newspaper.”
I woud go further: The Guardian is chock-full of people like Brittain; publishes anti-Israeli diatribe after diatribe on CiF; publishes terrorists; tries to blow up a margin note on a Foreign Office draft into Jewish ownership of government; and attack the Jewish National Fund and Hasidim.
The pattern at the Guardian - confirmed by Burchill from the inside and documented in reports to Parliament - renders the Guardian as an institution a moral leper, the leading propagator of anti-Semitism in mainstream UK and a cheerleader for a second Holocaust in the Mideast.
The institution should be shut down under race hate laws and completely boycotted by all who reject anti-Semitism.
| 3 December 2008, 5:17 pm |
The problem being drawn attention to in Brittain’s piece is the contrast between the secrecy surrounding Abu Qatada’s legal proceedings and those of Green.
Now the ideological intent is clearly the usual one of trying to pretend that Muslims are treated like second class citizens, something that was the propaganda point behind Moazzam Begg’s book Enemy Combatant.
Yet there seems more to this.
It might be that the British state wants secrecy not because Qatada is being treated unjustly as part of its complicity in the USA’s process of ‘extraordinary rendition’, but because he knows too much about how the British secret services have colluded with AQ operatives in the past.
Qatada has been allowed free passage into Britain and the USA for years as part of some cat and mouse game between him and the security services. They could have just not allowed him in. They did not do that.
Naturally for RESPECT ideologues who always support the sacred cause of terrorists more than the right of people to be protected such issues don’t really matter.
The important thing is to keep pressing the idea that Muslims are being demonised so that when the next bomb goes off they can claim that its only British Imperialism that ‘made’ them do it.
Even so, it’s quite consistent to maintain that even if craven RESPECT members like Brittain are hypocritical, in using the shortcomings of the British justice system here to defend the right of those who preach death and destruction, then the British state and the shoddy realpolitik behind the ‘war on terror’ is undermining liberty in Britain to.
The fact is that Qatada,from what I know, is an asset whose worked as a double agent. The last thing the British state would want is for the events of 7/7 to be interpreted as a consequence of bungling incompetence and massive security failures.
Nor the fact that the security services have comprimised domestic public security as part of the attempt to use the ‘war on terror’ to advance New Labour’s support for US global hegemony in the Middle East and Central Asia.
| 3 December 2008, 5:18 pm |
“The pattern at the Guardian - confirmed by Burchill from the inside”, and who could dispute the veracity of that?
Qatada is a thoroughly evil bastard though. He was the guy who issued Fatwas to the crazies in Algeria allowing them to kill civilians. I always though Abu Hamza was a pussycat by comparison.
| 3 December 2008, 5:22 pm |
He was certainly a man who was ‘cultivated’ to some extent.
Not evidently very succesfully.
I really do think that Alan Johnston was kidnapped so that Qatada could prove his ‘use’ as an asset.
This is the game plan of the jihadists and their supporters. They are desperate to present themselves as “the guys you can do business with”.
Every attempt to do that, has resulted in utter disaster.
| 3 December 2008, 5:24 pm |
Every attempt to do that, has resulted in utter disaster.
The question is: why do the authorities go along with it?
| 3 December 2008, 5:28 pm |
Naylor, “US global hegemony”.
Thank for for so brilliantly discrediting yourself in just 3 words.
Mike - You ignored my mention of several documented submissions to Parliament concerning anti-Semitism at the Guardian. So, while Burchill alone does not constitute sacrosanct proof, she certainly qualifies as yet anoither point confirming the pattern.
Down with the Guardian, the most influential anti-Semitic bastards this side of the Channel.
| 3 December 2008, 5:37 pm |
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?
No they wouldn’t David. Some people at the Guardian don’t want to see what is in front of their face. Unravel these threads and they are exposed themselves.
| 3 December 2008, 5:42 pm |
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?
Yes, if it also included their attitude towards Jews and how there may be some credence to it.
| 3 December 2008, 5:45 pm |
The thing is, Victoria Brittain is thought of - no doubt - by the likes of Milne as “our staunch comrade against the forces of international capitalism and imperialsim”.
But there will be colleagues of hers, perfectly nice and fair minded people, who will think
“Gaw, daft old Victoria - on her hobby horse again! She does sometimes overegg the pudding but, y’know, her heart is in the right place, and she sometimes makes important points”
This is exactly what happened during the 1950s and 60s and 70s and 80s, with people who were either sympathisers with, or actually in the pay of, murderous nightmarish Stalinist regimes, which tortured and imprisoned their citizens.
| 3 December 2008, 5:45 pm |
“Qatada is a thoroughly evil bastard though. He was the guy who issued Fatwas to the crazies in Algeria allowing them to kill civilians. I always though Abu Hamza was a pussycat by comparison.
”
Very true - should be deported straight away.
| 3 December 2008, 5:52 pm |
Race & Class!!!! Hahahaha!
This is the journal that published a glowing review of a pro Pol Pot book! Yes, the review actually states the following:
Far from slaughtering three million people, as has been alleged, the Khmer Rouge saved three million.
And that was not the only one in that journal - How about Malcolm Caldwell <a href = “http://rac.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/18/4/425″ who said in Race & Class in 1977:
The evacuation of Phnom Penh was not, therefore, an unpremeditated act of savagery (as portrayed in the western press), but a well-thought-out operation to feed its starving people.
Seriously, being the editorial board of that journal virtually disqualifies someone from being taken seriously.
| 3 December 2008, 6:04 pm |
And that explains why I no longer waste my money on purchasing the Grauniad, or even bothering to waste my typing on the internet version.
GW
| 3 December 2008, 6:15 pm |
“… when thousands of UK born jihadists return from Iraq and Afghanistan”. – Suffolk Booy.
Unlikely, I would have thought from the (under reported) casualties the jihadists are suffering. Crawley, Birmingham etc., must be largely empty of young Pakistani males by now. Few if any will return, though some may run away.
I have heard nor read any really convincing explaination for the eagerness with which every radical-fascist grouping (providing it is anti-democractic, anti-Jew or simply opposed to modernism) is embraced by the Guardianistas and their semi-educated followers in staff common rooms up and down the land. This has damaged the social democratic left tremendously. I simply fail to understand how it can be possible to hold in one’s head at one and the same time that contemporary social democratic advances in the rights of individuals, for minorities, or disadvantaged groups, are just and must be defended and yet also, must be extended in their entirety to those who would abolish those same rights if they could.
There has been no great surreal exhibition in recent years than the grotesque spectacle of trades unionists and gay and lesbian activitists marching arm and arm with elements whose first action if they had the powers, would be to remove their present legal protections, silence or kill them. And this is the Left!
| 3 December 2008, 6:22 pm |
Simon Jenkins is beyond parody in the Guardian today. He actually equates the invasion of Afghanistan as a ‘jihad’. He also states that
“More Pakistani soldiers have died as a result of the [Nato] occupation of Afghanistan than any other state”
Er what?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/us-iraq-india-pakistan-lebanon
| 3 December 2008, 7:17 pm |
“Mike - You ignored my mention of several documented submissions to Parliament concerning anti-Semitism at the Guardian.” My apologies. Was speed reading. Can you cite any?
“So, while Burchill alone does not constitute sacrosanct proof, she certainly qualifies as yet anoither point confirming the pattern.” Or were the Times just offering more cash? Who knows.
| 3 December 2008, 8:01 pm |
Philosemite: “..The institution should be shut down under race hate laws and completely boycotted by all who reject anti-Semitism…”
I have boycotted it for years, but I had a really hilarious experience about a month ago, when I got an email inviting me to participate in a survey by the Guardian “as a Guardian reader” (eh??). I had nothing better to do, so I took part.
And I had a wonderful time. It felt like they should have been told, “Be careful what you ask for; you may get it” and boy, did they.
I told them that I wouldn’t have the Guardian in the house unless I needed to cover the floors after having cleaned them or to put in the bottom of the kitchen bin. I also said that it made excellent food for the wormery when it was shredded.
I said that I believed the Guardian to have been more instrumental in exacerbating the troubles in the Middle East than any other media entity, that Comment is Free should be pulled immediately because it deliberately incites Jew-hatred and supports Islamist terror, and that Georgina Henry should be sacked (well, they asked for it. They were daft enough to ask me how the Guardian could be improved).
I politely accepted their offer to contact me again for further surveys about the Guardian, but somehow I doubt that they will.
It felt better than eating the best Belgian chocolate.
| 3 December 2008, 8:13 pm |
The institution should be shut down under race hate laws and completely boycotted by all who reject anti-Semitism.
Steady on, old boy. I mean, I’ve not bought it for 6 or 7 years and I’m a bit disappointed about the number of friends I have that still do - they’re young; they’ll learn, I tell myself, without really believing it - but shut down under race hate laws is a bit much. For one thing, wouldn’t there have to be a crime and a prosecution first?
| 3 December 2008, 8:36 pm |
Part of your grievance with Brittain is that she co-wrote a book with Moazzem Begg and the latter is a jihadist. Where on earth is your evidence and whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
| 3 December 2008, 10:53 pm |
Is Victoria related to her almost namesake, Vera Brittain - the one who’s only grievance with the Holocaust was that it would be used to retroactively justify Allied bombing of Germany during WWII?
If so, I would suggest that her recent antics show that the apple hasn’t fallen far from this particular tree.
| 3 December 2008, 11:27 pm |
Let’s face it, she’s a complete muppet.
Here she is a few weeks ago, whingeing about David Milliband going to the Congo instead of Gaza. (Never mind that the former is the site of the deadliest conflict since the Second World War, and also that, weeks later, Milliband went to Israel/Palestine anyway).
| 3 December 2008, 11:42 pm |
I remember Victoria Brittain as a guest on LBC radio in the 80s. She said that the western democracies were “undemocratic”. What was a good example of democracy in her opinion? The MPLA one-party state in Angola.
| 3 December 2008, 11:58 pm |
“How about Malcolm Caldwell :
The evacuation of Phnom Penh was not, therefore, an unpremeditated act of savagery (as portrayed in the western press), but a well-thought-out operation to feed its starving people”
Caldwell found out what the Khmer Rouge were really like when he visited Cambodia. He was murdered for being a British agent. Perhaps we should have a whip-round to send Ms. Brittain and assorted other jihad-fans to training camps…
| 4 December 2008, 12:16 am |
Roger - !Caldwell found out what the Khmer Rouge were really like when he visited Cambodia. He was murdered for being a British agent. Perhaps we should have a whip-round to send Ms. Brittain and assorted other jihad-fans to training camps…”
Actually he was murdered, according to the Khmer Rouge government, by a crack team of Vietnamese assassins who had inflitrated Phnom Penh and for some reason decided to murder the fatuous Westerner rather than, say, Big Brother Number One.
It was done in a hotel containing the rest of his group of Useful Idiots so that other Westerners saw the assassin being held by the Khmer Rouge guards. He was Khmer.
I think the most likely reason was that Ben Kiernan asked Caldwall about his wife’s relatives. Many of whom had not been in touch lately. Caldwell certainly asked Pol Pot about them and other Khmer people in his interview on that day. What Pol Pot said I don’t know but I suspect that Caldwell did not take it well so Pol Pot had him killed.
| 4 December 2008, 12:37 am |
Is Victoria related to her almost namesake, Vera Brittain?
I don’t think so, Vera had two children, Shirley Williams (Lib Dems) and John Brittain-Catlin. I think your characterization of Vera is a bit perverse, she was more complicated than that and came to her pacifism as a result of her experience in WWI. Testament of Youth is an interesting read, if a bit draggy in places.
| 4 December 2008, 2:21 am |
David T
Do you think Moazzam Begg is a terrorist?
What do you think of his detention at Gitmo?
What do you think of Gitmo generally?
| 4 December 2008, 8:20 am |
“Do you think Moazzam Begg is a terrorist?” - so what is he, a Freedom Fighter or just a naught person?
“What do you think of his detention at Gitmo?” - We told you, if you are late two days out of a week….
“What do you think of Gitmo generally?” - One Star, food needs livening-up, cracks in the swimming pool, washrooms not cleaned too often, semen/faeces/hair bombs in guards faces not very pleasant. See entry in TripAdvisor
(Sorry, I was bored)
| 4 December 2008, 8:35 am |
“I told them that I wouldn’t have the Guardian in the house unless I needed to cover the floors after having cleaned them or to put in the bottom of the kitchen bin. I also said that it made excellent food for the wormery when it was shredded.”
Steve Bell used to do a sketch in his strip in the mid-nineties where his alter-ego refused to wipe his dog’s arse with a Daily Mail. Well, if push came to shove, I might have difficulty wiping Bungle’s arse with a copy of the Guardian.
| 4 December 2008, 9:55 am |
>Peter wrote, “I wonder sometimes what has happened to the Guardian — something seems to have gone terribly wrong at this newspaper.”
I went there once - it was like a Harrow Old Boy’s reunion.
Stuffed to the gills with White, wealthy, privately educated, guilty Libearls.
The whole thing is filled with the guilty rich.
I went to an xmass party, talk about multiculturalism, the only Black was the chap on security. The rest were children of the rich and well placed.
I think there was one person there who hadn’t been to Public school or Grammar School, that’s multiculturalism for you!
| 4 December 2008, 10:24 am |
It is worth recalling that the extremely well-spoken Brittain (I have heard her at meetings) says that during the Algerian Civil War she backed the ‘Eradicateurs’. Even Coatesy who is not known for his tenderness towards Islamicists baulked at that (well, okay except when he’d had ten pints of Abbot).
I notice that another one of the same crew as Brittain, *Tariq Ali*, has become something of a hate object amongst South Asian leftists for expressing similar opinons to this blot on humanity. Having started a thread on this on the world-class *Tendance Coatesy* Blog, I found myself inundated by in-coming links slagging off the Patrician Pillock Ali.
| 4 December 2008, 11:02 am |
Benjamin, Begg wasn’t a terrorist, but he had certainly (on his own admission) been training to be a terrorist and so his arrest and incarceration were justified. That is not a justification for Guantanamo, however.
What do you think about Begg, by the way?
| 4 December 2008, 11:49 am |
…It had transpired that £327,000 had been paid into Ms Brittain’s bank accounts on Ms Tsikata’s behalf, most of it from Libyan sources, before being transferred by Ms Brittain to the solicitors, Bindman & Partners. The money was intended to fund an action brought by Mr Tsikata against the Independent.…
…Or will Mr Kojo AmooGottfried, the former Ghanaian ambassador to Beijing who transferred £49,989 from a Swiss bank account into Ms Brittain’s account on Mr Tsikata’s behalf…
| 4 December 2008, 11:50 am |
A tip of the hat to Andrew.
Assigned reading in my class at UC, Santa Cruz (a thoroughly upper class school full of the children of California hippies boy, did I have some er, ahem, trips there in the 80’s bit, i digress, heh ;-) in Wallersteinian world systems analysis, was a text by Caldwell, published by Zed Press. Rubbish, as even I recognized at the time. Elizabeth Becker, a Washington Post reporter who knew Caldwell, has a bit on him in her book on the Khmer Rouge, which I need to read. Subscribers to Monthly Review (btw, on their website they are still featured a daft piece by some UK Maoist disputing the carnage under Maoism http://www.monthlyreview.org/, I “recommend” reading their spin-off blog MRZine for apologetics defending the Iranian regime) who have access to their archive going back to 1949 can find Caldwell a plenty there. MR Press published his book, “Cambodia in the S.E Asian War, ” from ‘73, preface by Chomsky. A cheap copy ,$1.99 can be found on alibris.
More anti-imperialist lunacy from Cynthia McKinney, the U.S. Green Party candidate for POTUS, who alleged thousands were killed by the National Guard during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and dumped in Louisiana swamp, listen to this interview on Pacifica Radio on the Rwandan genocide and the Congo,
http://www.sfbayview.com/2008/kpfk-breaks-the-silence-on-congo/
Finally, another recommendation, Al Qaeda in Europe, ” by Lorenzo Vidino from a few yrs. ago. U.S. publisher Prometheus Books which mostly publishes “secular humanist” agitprop. Vidino has testified in front of a Congressional committee on that European group that raised moola for the “Iraqi resistance.” IIRC the http://www.antiimperialista.org/ loons.
| 4 December 2008, 1:03 pm |
Benjamin, Begg wasn’t a terrorist, but he had certainly (on his own admission) been training to be a terrorist and so his arrest and incarceration were justified.
So you believe in ‘preventative detention’, but just not at Gitmo?
| 4 December 2008, 1:08 pm |
MY DERE SWEAT VICORIA BRETIN
I WRITE TO YOU IN THE LOVE OF CHRIST JEASUS
PLESE ALOW ME TO INTRADUCE MYSLEF I AM CAPTAN GENRAL LORD KOJO TSIKATA OF GHANEA!!!!! I AM FORMAR HET OF THE GHANEAN SECRITY SARVICE AND I HAVE BEEN GREVOUSLY LIABLED BY THE INDAPENANT NEWSPAPAR WICH IS AN EVIL COLONALIST IMPARILIST!!!!!!
I U ALOW ME TO DEPOSET IN YOAR BANK ACOUNT 327,000 £327,000ukponds THAT I EXCPET TO GET FROM LIBEYA U WIL HELP ME SOW THESE TERIBLE MALAFICATORS!!!!!!!
U WILL GET NOTHING IN RETURN BUT U WIL BE HELPING PORE VICETEMS OF RASCISM GET SOME JUSTISE AT LAST!!!!!!!!!!!!
| 4 December 2008, 1:35 pm |
Ah yes, Victoria Brittain’s “good friend” Kojo Tsikata!
Sharon W. Scranage was a young American CIA secretary serving in Accra, the capital of Ghana. The Ghanaian government used Michael Agbotui Soussoudis, a young male intelligence officer to target her, romance her, and solicit US intelligence from her. Scranage disclosed to Soussoudis the identities of undercover CIA agents working in Ghana as well as plans for a coup against the Ghanaian government by dissidents. Soussoudis then passed the information to Ghanaian intelligence chief and Marxist Kojo Tsikata, who then passed it to Cuba, Libya, and East Germany.
| 4 December 2008, 1:53 pm |
‘I think your characterization of Vera is a bit perverse, she was more complicated than that and came to her pacifism as a result of her experience in WWI. Testament of Youth is an interesting read, if a bit draggy in places.’
Yeah, and some of Erza Pound’s poetry is interesting as well.
| 4 December 2008, 1:54 pm |
‘Ezra’, dammit.
Can we have the preview function back, please?
| 4 December 2008, 6:04 pm |
All the way through the 80s, we were told that - for example - the “Peace Movement” had been thoroughly penetrated by agents of the USSR.
I was in the peace movement in the 80s and though Trots were attempting to take over the local CND branch, I didn’t think the movement had been penetrated by agents of the USSR. There was certainly misapprehension of what kind of place the USSR was from many people, and a lot of general pacifist idiocy but the leadership (I’m thinking of E P Thompson) made every attempt not to be co-opted by the official Soviet “Peace” movement and to reach out to Soviet dissidents when he could. The Daily Mail etc would say we were paid by Moscow and we would groan after unprofitable fund raising and wish we were so lucky.
If you have a link for further information on this point I’d be grateful.
| 4 December 2008, 6:51 pm |
“Well, if push came to shove, I might have difficulty wiping Bungle’s arse with a copy of the Guardian…”
I would imagine you might, Bungle-arse. You’d have to catch him first and he’s a very slippery customer.
I doubt you’d need to do it, though. He’s got the crew on CiF (Henry, Berchmans et al) to lick it clean for him.
Yech!!!
| 5 December 2008, 9:26 am |
‘If you have a link for further information on this point I’d be grateful.’
With my complements.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1999/09/99/britain_betrayed/451366.stm
| 5 December 2008, 8:06 pm |
Thanks Sackcloth - one red swallow does not make a soviet summer. CND was a broad church, much like the Stop the War movement a few years ago, and there were all sorts in it. I don’t think that amounts to proof that CND policy was directed by Moscow or that Greenham women were KGB agents.
| 7 December 2008, 4:09 pm |
Benjamin: “What do you think of his detention at Gitmo?
What do you think of Gitmo generally?”
I think you should go on a fact finding visit Benjamin and come back and tell us all about it.
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