Harry's Place

Jolly good. As a folllow-up, how about asking some of the HP mods about their deletion of comments which contain no personal attacks, are not off-topic, etc?

It seems pretty obvious who has the agenda, and it is not you. But then the Graun is run by people who “know the truth”, and therefore do not need any contradictory facts.

Excuse my following “right wing” analysis:

All ideologies are devices of the Left, that is not to say that all who are of the Left succumb to ideology, many are decent folk who wish to make the world a better place (as do I). Unfortunately, such folk are susceptible to impatience, to short-cuts proposed by demagogues, and hence to facile analyses of human behaviour – a highly complex subject way beyond any of us.

Ideologies are quasi religions. As such they involve revealed truth. Facts contrary to said “truth” must therefore be incorrect.

With a technical training, I cannot avoid the uncomfortable truth that it only takes one contrary fact to destroy a theory, be it scientific or of the humanities. For example, Marx is contrary to Darwin. Darwin has stood repeated tests against countless observations, therefore Marx is wrong and (until a contrary fact is found) Darwin is right.

Your facts make Begg a liar. The Graun sympathises with Begg and wants to use him as a stick to beat … well it’s difficult to say really, but probably the usual Left hate figures: America, Israel, Christianity, Capitalism, Toffs. So why do they hate these? Why do they feel the need to use such unpleasant people in this “struggle”?

May I suggest that anyone whose world view is collapsing feels defensive about it. Muslims are obviously such, their “prophet” was a bandit and fraud, their book a concoction, transparent to anyone who is not afraid to examine it objectively – unfortunately few, due to fear of deadly consequences. Guardianistas are still smarting from the collapse of their beloved icon of international socialism, the Soviet Union. Worse, they fear the entire concept of collectivism is about to follow it. How to fight this imagined “attack” from “the right”? Join forces with similarly threatened and deluded folk, shout “racist”, “Nazi”, “Zionist”, “homophobe”, “Islamophobe”, or any other brainless jibe that is likely to chime with their kind.

It won’t work.

A ‘racist’ is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal. – Peter Brimelow

I will be saving that comment on my hard drive Alcuin. Thankyou.

Hi Harry

I’ve known about your blog for years, occassionally read it.

I disagree with your politics and seldom agree with you, though I respect your opinions and you come across and very intelligent and good at basing your views on well researched fact.

I read this piece with sorrow and I am mildly depressed at your encounter with CIF. I hardly post there, though have had my fair share of banning before (years ago now).

I think the erosion of free speech on the internet is actually quite worrying. You should be allowed to post opinions using fact no matter what they are. Who is to judge and draw the line at what is allowed and what is not?

I may be a bit of a freedom of speech fundamentalist (I am a Libertarian after all) but really, it’s common sense surely?

I think you should follow through on your quest to right this wrong.

I wish you luck

regards

John Demetriou

Why the bloody hell did they let Begg out of Gitmo? Sounds like exactly the right place for him, and for all other Islamists.

The Groan, whatever former glories it may or may not have had, is today a very dodgy rag with strong anti Liberal – in the classical sense, and pro fascist – sympathies. It beats me, really it does, why one would expect anything else from an engagement with them?

I really shouldn’t worry about it!

Everyone who fights for Freedom of Speech and the Right to Protest eventually gets banned from Cif.

I believe the phrase would be – “They don’t like it up ‘em”

Most of us who have ever posted there without being fascistic-ally Labour supporting, tend to get banned.

See it as a badge of honour. :o)

The Groan, whatever former glories it may or may not have had, is today a very dodgy rag with strong anti Liberal – in the classical sense, and pro fascist – sympathies. It beats me, really it does, why one would expect anything else from an engagement with them?

Because what happened to the Graun is what has happened to an entire generation. The Graun is the voice of a new sort of self-aggrandizing, self deluding, bigoted ignorance – and since the Left always assumed itself to be the opposite of that, the left has become ever harder to reach. It’s as if people have invented “the big lie” on their own as a self-defense mechanism and are unreachable.

Sorry, to add, I just noticed this was a guest post! So it’s from “DaveM” not Harry – I’ll adjust my original post to read: I’m sorry to hear about your experiences, DaveM!

regards, apologies for the confusion it is late and I’m tired.

John

Well, we can but hope that a few more self identifying Lefties, at least the few Kosher liberals amongst them, have their Cohen/ Hitchens/ Aaronovitch moment.

The fact is that Leftism and classical liberalism are completely independent attributes. Indeed, if there is a correlation between these attributes it’s inclined inversely.

Why there is any kind of received wisdom that liberalism and Leftism are correlated – and there is – has always been an enigma to me.

Social liberalism is correlated with centerist politics and extreme Right Libertarian types.

I can only repeat what I said on another thread about the delightful Moazzam Begg – the apple of every luvvie’s eye, and pin-up boy for the Quakers: Moazzam Begg’s a nice guy who went to do charitable work in Afghanistan, which means he obviously has a big heart and puts himself in danger for others. He oviously easily makes friends with everybody; if some of them are dodgy characters – well that’s not his fault – he’s a non-judgmental type (unlike a lot of commenters here – you know who you are), and likes people for what they are. His goodness, patent honesty and bonhomie shine out in all his interviews: he’s as incapable of cruel deeds or bad thoughts about infidels as is any other pious Muslim whose Islam hasn’t been hijacked by fundamentalists. He speaks the truth to powerful -in English, Arabic and Urdu – and fights for the rights of the weak. Knock it off, bigots.

We don’t live in a free speech society.

We learn today that the McCanns are launching a tactical strike in Portugal (allegedly a libel action against the very upright Goncalo Amaral) in order to secure an injunction on Amaral’s book in the UK. They dare not launch a proper libel action in the UK, it would appear but may use this to justify an injunction on Mr. Amaral’s book.

We should wage the battle for free speech on all fronts.

Alcuin – It seems pretty obvious who has the agenda, and it is not you. But then the Graun is run by people who “know the truth”, and therefore do not need any contradictory facts.

That’s very concisely put.

Appropriately re-arranged, can I quote you on CI(F)? It may cost me my moniker but I will be changing my ISP soon so will have another email address to register there.

“Because what happened to the Graun is what has happened to an entire generation. The Graun is the voice of a new sort of self-aggrandizing, self deluding, bigoted ignorance”

Absolutely. See the videos on the Finally a protest thread.

The Guardian is also almost entirely now an antisemitic sewer, that publishes plays by anti-semites pretending to criticise only Isreal.

It is axiomatic that they will always seek to obscure and cover up even the slightest suggestion of any antisemitism by Muslims, particularly when it reveals a systemic cultural and religious bias (as in ‘Allah damn the Jew’).

People with this mindset smirk when they write Israeli knowing they mean Jew.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a counter-site called “Facts are Sacred”.

DaveM, the comment above, “They don’t like it up ‘em” sums up Cesspit is Free. From my following it since I myself was banned (I heard later in a roundabout way that I had argued too well) I would add another which has to be true of Georgina Henry – “We’ve made up our minds so don’t confuse us with facts” (and this is certainly true of the drivel by its authors, with a few exceptions).

If anyone here posts regularly on CiF may I make a suggestion?

Henry / CiF makes money from hits to blogs.

Since many of the neanderthal haters who contribute aren’t going to be convinced by reasoned argument however simply put, why bother?

Why not BOYCOTT CiF?

“Comments are not sacred but facts are sometimes free” should be the slogan of Guardian as far as Israel and the Middle East is concerned.

I second the proposal of MITNAGED.

ClapHammer

Be my guest, though you could just link to this thread. Use TinyURL and they may not notice. I have been twice banned from CiF, which is (or was) populated by many who, if the right were as intolerant as the Left, would have been banned years ago. HP is more decent, more open, more civil and more erudite.

I know that the anti-Israel stuff is personal for Georgina Henry. I wrote to her about one blog article a couple of years ago which was, in my opinion, tantamount to glorifying support for Islamist terrorism in the UK, and said that she had to all intents and purposes put a loaded gun in the hand of every would-be Islamist terrorist in the UK who might happen across it, by giving their actions the Guardian seal of approval. I took care to be polite.

I got back a stream of personalised invective which, among other things said that my email to her had proven that CiF was entirely on the right path.

I was “deaded” shortly afterwards, from my IP address which was, of course, on my email to her. Shortly after that she was “moved upstairs” and poor Matt Seaton now has to try to contain the damage from the can of worms she opened.

I am sorry that I didn’t keep the exchange of correspondence.

Karl Pfeifer, thanks. The only way we are going to stop this sort of hatred is to

BOYCOTT CiF!

Interesting, I thought, that Cif’s editor, Matt Seaton, was able to step in below the line to defend Begg in nine separate posts, then went missing when Dave (and others) asked a few direct questions about factual matters. The thread was then closed to further comment yesterday.

That bit about them thinking you had an “agenda” sounds particularly sinister. If they expand on their reasons for deleting your posts I’d like to hear more.

Tom Foster, the accusation that DaveM had an “agenda” is blatant projection.

It’s not difficult to figure out who really has an agenda, given CiF’s performance on Israel, past and present.

And, yes, please let us know DaveM

“Why not BOYCOTT CiF?”

I have done so for a long time now.

I think the problem is that the Guardian can’t bamboozle DaveM, as he speaks and reads Arabic, as well as having an excellent command of English.

Combined with the fact that they hate being wrong and are too insecure to admit their own errors.

Alcuin @ 16 May 2009, 9:48 pm

“Marx is contrary to Darwin. Darwin has stood repeated tests against countless observations, therefore Marx is wrong and (until a contrary fact is found) Darwin is right.”

That’s a very broad statement for 2 writers of some decades ago, who both wrote a great deal. What issues between them are you driving at?

I can remember reading The guardian back in highschool in the 70s.

It would arrive days late, but was nonethless coveted by those interested in current events.

You cannot imagine the prestige it once enjoyed in foreign countries.

Is there any thread that the obsessive tit ‘field’ can’t try to use in his vendetta against the McGanns?

Alan Ji

If you want a testimonial on Marx and Darwin, listen to John Maynard Smith, an evolutionary biologist and Marxist (in his youth). He found Marx incompatible with biology, and so being a scientist, and so inexorably rational, had to abandon Marxism. Interview (Marx discussion is from ~ 37.20 minutes). Transcript (search for Marx, read on).

“…you have an agenda…”

How unsinister. Or rather, who doesn’t?

Anyone who is emotionally engaged with an issue can be said to have an agenda, as is anybody who is dispassionate but has a material interest in the outcome. That leaves the uninterested disinterested apathetics – hardly the constituency for engaging in spirited debate.

It is very cunning of the CiF moderators to claim a (concocted) opposition to anyone bearing an “agenda”, especially as the Guardian is a vehicle for the pursuit of agendas if ever there was one.

DaveM should not be apologizing for his agenda, i.e. exposing why antipathy to Islamism and Islamists is correct.

I notice that the comments following Dennis McShane’s piece on MP’s expenses is almost universally hostile, and some link to external data to show up the deficiencies in the author’s argument.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/17/michaelmartin-mps-expenses

Yet, the CiF mods didn’t step in for Mr McShane. So why did they feel they needed to mollycoddle Mr Begg? Racism perhaps? The cheuvanistic belief that brown people can’t speak for themselves?

Have never read CiF thanks to Harry’s Place, don’t intend to now and feel much better for it.

Someone said:
“I have done so for a long time now.”
The only reason for reading CiF is if you want to vomit but can’t be arsed with messing about with all that ‘fingers down the throat’ business.

CiF is just one of the political sites I now boycott because of the shreiking prescence of Galloway and Hamas worshippers and thinly veiled antisemites.

Brett, you make an interesting point about the motives of the Guardian, vis a vis their belief that brown people cannot speak for themselves.

I have held this belief for quite some time, that al-Guardian’s attitude towards Palestinians and other Muslims is a sort of inverse racism which, far from empowering them, keeps them in a child-like dependent state.

Which, of course, is what their leaders do.

MITNAGED

‘Henry / CiF makes money from hits to blogs.’

Really so we can actually quantify the amount of money that Georgina Henry makes from racist filth and anti-semitic hysteria?

Who, or what, the fuck is a Georgina Henry?

I am serious is it a name a title or an ideological position with a direction of travel?

Clearly it is enormously self regarding and incapable of grasping the immense evil it is fostering and re-introducing into polite society, while all the time receiving a directly enumerable payment for doing so.

It is vile but presumably quantifiably so.

CIF can be measured both by the content and number of pro-islamist anti-israeli and anti-jewish articles (yes we have Carol Churchill to thank for the fact that we can count the useage of the J word again) and’

by the obvious anti-semitism of so many of the comments.

Having a moderation policy, especially one that can be shown to be so biased, is actually a smoking gun for the presence of a systemic anti-semitic, pro-islamist, Israel annhialationist bias at CIF.

When you moderate and remove posts you become accountable for those you leave behind, call it an agenda.

“Comment is free” as long as they approve of what you say, particularly relating to Islam. Otherwise, it isn’t just not free, its forbidden. As far as I am concerned, the Guardian might as well let the Saudi “religious police” review all comments. Maybe they do.

I have been banned from CIF for years. My crime? Saying unkind but very true things about Islam. Note that I always took care to link any statement about Islam to online texts of the Quran and hadith or to Muslim websites and other Internet sources.

http://www.kactuzkid.com/censored.html

Truth and freedom of expression mean nothing to the Guardian. It and so many other institutions (academia, government, the press, COE, etc.) have chosen to turn their back on the values of Western Civilization and to support and protect an ideology that teaches hate and violence. These foolish people are only adding to the sorrows that will certaining come when their creature starts to devour its keepers.

Absolutely one of the certain criteria used for censoring at CIF is any citation of Muslim texts, even those deemed authoritative by Muslims themselves.

- Further as some have realised citing Muslim websites (even say, Qaradawi’s Islam online) gets one censored.

- Citing Arabic language sources gets one censored.

- using the word Islamist gets one censored. I long ago stopped commenting at CIF. I naively thought that people really did need to know about Islamism as a political ideology as distinct from Islam. All of these posts were censored.

The ‘direction’ of CIF is clear and part of it represents a systematic campaign of disinformation and censorship, deliberately intended to prevent a wider understanding of the theo-political nature of Islamism, and an informed debate.

Obviously they are very psychologically flawed people who having made a decision to support Islamism in general and excuse Hamas and Hizb’Allah as the new cool anti-Imperial resistance movement, have no intention of seeing or letting anyone else see the dark nature of the Theocratic fascists they have climbed into bed with.

Its very funny that Islamists like makbool Javaid and Selma Yaqoob are now objecting to the very term Islamism (I very first heard the term from the lips of a Khommeneite revolutionary) as if it means ‘Islamic fascism’.

Well it does you creeps and if you get rid of Islamism you will find the ridiculous portmanteau (oh joy) ‘Islamophobia’ binned too.

What the Guardian and CIF have done is far more egregious. They have subverted any clear decent meaningful use of the term anti-fascism and anti-racism.

As the response to Caryl Churchills play has shown, there is a large majority of peopl who would consider themselves by their views and past actions to be anti-racist activists, who are incapabble of seeing the most blatant racism in that shit of a play that the simplest of substitutions reveals.

These anti-racists have shown themselves as only selectively anti-racist, simply holding a different and inverted racial hierachy of contempt from those they endlessely accuse of racism.

I will not be taking any notice of anything the say about the BNP, they are incapable of seeing that it is their contempt for the vast majority of British people who don’t think that having to live in a society that has produced Jihadis out of neighbours and school mates and many more sympathisers is cool anti-imperialism at all.

I hate the BNP. They are racists they are weird and nasty and stupid and incompetent.

They might make some electoral gains but even so will be excluded from the institutions of power and patronage that make up the silent state.

Even with their disgusting presence in parliamentary politics they will be a long way from the influence that has enabled Islamists to establish what increasingly looks like an Islamist shadow state.

A racist intolerant anti-democratic communalist force has been established, aided and abetted by a racist (as we now can see clearly) liberal elite.

This liberal ‘progressive’ elite has always been there. They are not the decendents of the classical liberalism of JS Milne.

They do not decend directly from the Labour movement, but come from the authoritarian poor law reformers and workhouse builders, the eugenicists and mandatory sterilisers of the insane,idle and infirm.

They are the Temperance campaigners so convinced in their moral mission and puritanical zeal that they have every right to decide the direction that others must follow.

They are the Social Hygienist femminists obsessed with the promiscuous behaviour of urban poor women that they went out under lamplight to find the places of iniquity to turn the women over to the authorities for enforced testing and treatment for Syphilis and often for sterilisation.

They are the Georgina Henry’s of the world. They are the dark side of the progressive tradition, that unchallenged wreak incredible damage upon society through their unflagging sense of self righteousness dependent on a monstrous ego.

I wonder how much she has earned from all the accumulated toxic anti-semitic posts festering in the swill at CIF?

They do say that what goes around comes around and may I be there to witness it when it does for Georgina Henry and CiF.

I have been wondering of late how it can possibly be that educated, progressive people actually think there is nothing wrong with supporting murderous, barbaric, mysognist thugs and then I realised. The wonderful thing about Islamacists is that they are not members of the white working class. The dilitanttes of the Guardian etc actually hate organised labour more than they do Islamacists. Their own working class is insufficiently deferential, yet the ‘Oriental’ or ‘exotic foreigner’ appears sufficiently respectful and polite, easy to patronise and fawning. Hell, these people are so grateful for the attention and it proves that the Westerner is morally and politically superior to other Westerners who can’t see beyond their own racism. If organised Labour should actually effect a transformation in society, these people know that there privilidged lives would not continue as they are, but if the ‘exotics’ take over they would be able to win all sorts of concessions by aiding them at this time.

As SilentHunter said, treat it as a badge of honour.