No Compassion For Refugees Please, We’re British

“Charity begins at home” at least this is what Britain’s “no refugees here” types have been saying on comments threads on The Guardian and Independent websites. Ironically (or perhaps not), these are the very same people who would not only claim that “people are receiving to much in social security payments”, they would also tell you that the existence of foodbanks proves there is a “food shortage” in this country. Logic? It was never there in the first place.

Many people like to think of The Guardian and The Independent as liberal newspapers with socially liberal readerships. In the case of The Indy, this notion was blown out of the water by the paper’s support for the Tories at the last election and in the case of The Graun, there has been a steady rightward drift in its editorial orientation for years. Sadly, however, the change in direction for these papers has also attracted legions of right-wing racists and keyboard warriors, all of whom have been drawn to the stories of what is now being called the “Refugee Crisis” (formerly the “Migrant Crisis”), a crisis that was entirely created by the actions of the so-called West.

Yet the idea that there is a cause behind the Refugee Crisis is barely mentioned by the tabloid hacks and their pals in Parliament. Instead, in the mind of the knuckledragger, these people are coming here variously for “economic reasons” or the “presence of McDonalds and KFC”, or some such nonsense, and not because they are fleeing the conflicts and tyrannies that the West has created and sustained for decades. Causality, as far as these people are concerned, is a hospital drama on BBC1.

Readers, I have been disgusted by the lack of compassion shown by these keyboard warriors and slackwits but I have been even more disgusted by The Indy’s and The Graun’s tolerance of the vile hatred that’s being openly expressed on its comments threads. If I want to read that kind of shite, I can always go to St*rmfr*nt. Dig?

I always remember reading about this country’s hostile reaction towards the thousands of Jewish refugees who were fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s. This article by Anne Karpf from 2002 – in The Guardian – recalls that those years.

The parallels between past and present are striking. Just as the majority of Jewish refugees were admitted less for compassionate reasons than to meet the shortage of domestic servants, so today’s refugees tend to do the low-paid catering and cleaning jobs spurned by the native British. And just as in spring 1940, when German Jews were interned on the Isle of Man, British newspapers blurred the distinctions between refugee, alien and enemy, so today, according to Alasdair Mackenzie, coordinator of Asylum Aid, “There’s general confusion in many newspapers between an asylum seeker and someone from abroad – everyone gets tarred with the same brush.”

Hostility towards the refugees was stirred up by the virulently anti-immigration rag The Daily (Hate) Mail. Many people internalised its xenophobic and anti-Semitic messages and demanded the government refuse to land any refugees. Déjà Vu? Malheureusement, oui.

The comment below appeared on this Guardian article by the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas. Her name, alone, is enough the get hordes of slavering knuckledraggers thumping their chests and declaring themselves the defenders of “common sense”.

melonice

2d ago

307308

Britons would probably be far more receptive to the idea of allowing many more refugees into Britain had the country not experience almost two decades of mass immigration in which over five million people had entered Britain.

Here, we have a comment in which the views expressed are little different to those expressed by UKIP’ Nigel Farage (or that Nuttall wanker) on a weekly basis. Although it avoids offensive language and isn’t obvious in its racism, its premise is based on the notion that there has been an “invasion”. Yet, this commenter offers no proof for the numbers they’re using; they are seemingly axiomatic.

On the other hand, this commenter doesn’t disguise his hatred. This is what passes for wit.

DWP_Mercenary

1d ago

2930

So it turns out now that the guy who recklessly ended up drowning his wife and children had turned down asylum.

Oh.

Sickening.

The government’s response to the crisis has been characteristically Tory: blame “people smugglers” and keep repeating the word “criminals”. It’s as if the refugees themselves have become secondary to the need to punish “those responsible for the trafficking”. In April, in response to refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, Michael ‘Polly’ Portillo, the son of a Spanish republican refugee who fled Franco’s dictatorship, said they should be “sent back where they came from” – and should be “dumped on a Libyan beach”. And you thought he’d been rehabilitated? No way, he’s the same as he ever was.

This nation has been governed by bullies for centuries and people have internalised the bullying to such an extent that they, themselves, have become bullies. This is evident from the lack of compassion shown to refugees. The idea that “charity begins at home” is noble one but one which is now being used dishonestly to bolster the fash’s absurd claim that this country is “full up”.

A few days ago, Cameron appeared on television to give an account of his sluggish response to the crisis. He told the reporter with a straight face that the solution is to “bring peace in Middle East”. But that’s after he’s bombed it back to the Stone Age first.

Saturday’s anti-war demo

In the days leading to the anti-war demonstration on Saturday and immediately after the Commons vote, which saw the government defeated, we have been treated to a deluge of macho language from politicians and right-wing hacks alike. As most readers will know that at times like this, I am fond of quoting Gil Scott-Heron’s powerful poem, B-Movie:

Clichés like, “itchy trigger finger” and “tall in the saddle” and “riding off or on into the sunset.” Clichés like, “Get off of my planet by sundown!” More so than clichés like, “he died with his boots on.” Marine tough the man is. Bogart tough the man is. Cagney tough the man is. Hollywood tough the man is. Cheap steak tough. And Bonzo’s substantial. The ultimate in synthetic selling: A Madison Avenue masterpiece – a miracle – a cotton-candy politician …Presto! Macho!

As you many of you already know, B-Movie was written about Ronald Reagan, the macho president of the United States, who borrowed themes from his filmography to impress the gullible public of the need to do this or that thing. Again, we have politicians and their friends in the media using the most extraordinary macho language. I kept hearing words like “diminished on the world stage”, which almost suggests a form of emasculation. Then there is the phrase “standing tall”, which conjures up an image of a Wild West gunslinger. But if the dominant ideologues are that worried about their big tough image, then perhaps they need to spend some time on a psychoanalyst’s couch rather than pursuing unnecessary wars that have the fig leaf of legitimacy that is conferred upon them by the laughable phrase, ‘International Law’. “But look” they’ll say, “there’s a ban on the use of chemical weapons”. This generally overlooks the US and Israel’s recent use of white phosphorus and the American’s use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Where’s the irony?

And so, on Saturday, I went to the anti-war demonstration organized by CND and the Stop the War Coalition. I wasn’t expecting much. In fact, I wasn’t expecting a massive turnout for this hastily convened march and rally.

I arrived in time to join the head of the march on Victoria Embankment. The march snakes its way towards Westminster Bridge, where I can see dozens of gawping tourists,with their cameras at the ready to take snaps of us as we march by. I pass, what I believe to be a small group of German tourists, one of whom remarks “I think they are marching against all wars”. His tone is half-mocking. Only morons are in favour of wars, mein freund.

We’re on Whitehall and we pause briefly outside the gates of Downing Street… on the opposite side of the road. We’re not allowed anywhere near Dippy Dave’s London residence and besides, he’s apparently holding a barbecue for his MPs at Chequers, which is designed to do two things: admonish those who voted against the government and reward those who voted the correct way.

As I said, this is a small march of perhaps around 1,000 or so people. Still, it isn’t that bad a turn-out for a quickly arranged demo. I can see bourgeois SWP splitters and café owners, Counterfire, posing in their designer clothes and mingling with the less bourgeois marchers.

It’s unlikely that this march will attract any attention from the BBC, which has been quick to march in lockstep with the government, the intelligence services and the Military-Industrial complex. In the media, anti-war voices are rare, while pro-war macho voices are ten a penny.

We arrive at Trafalgar Square and I can see a small number of Guy Fawkes masks… they’re so passé. The compères for the afternoon are Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn and Kate Hudson of CND and Left Unity. The first speaker is Counterfire’s  Lindsey German, whom Corbyn introduces as a “brilliant advocate for peace”. Her speech is an uninspiring tickbox list.  She says “UKIP are not welcome on this march” but to be honest, I don’t think I’ve seen any UKIP members. I have seen a couple of conspiracy theory types, both of whom were carrying placards with the words “9/11 was an inside job”. Given their love of conspiracy theories, perhaps they’re Kippers?

Andrew Murray is up next. He is animated and his speech is passionate. He’s certainly more interesting than Lindsey German and the best speaker of the afternoon. But as I look around the square, I am struck by the absence of anything cultural. Where is the street theatre? The sound systems? The scratch bands? I’ve heard no dubstep since I’ve been here. It’s weird.

Natalie Bennett follows Murray and while she makes some good points, she is a terrible orator. Someone with a great deal of experience of this kind of thing is Tariq Ali, who seems to be a professional protester. These days, he hasn’t got much to say that I haven’t already heard. Someone from the back heckles him with a loud hailer. I turn around and I recognise the heckler. I used to work with this guy!  He’s immediately surrounded by more serious types who like their speeches formulaic and unchallenged. “Listen to what they’re doing to your mind”, he protests. I’m not sure what he means. Perhaps he’s suggesting that these people mould one’s thoughts. If so, then he’s mistaken. I can think for myself, thanks.

Tony Benn comes on and he looks and sounds frail. I have trouble hearing what he’s saying. He was a pretty bad cough too. Usually, you can rely on Benn to put in a rousing performance but I think those days are behind him now.

A poet arrives on the platform. Wow. Culture. But it’s brief. We need more of this kind of thing. I decide to leave when the President of ULU rocks up. he’s pretty dull, probably not used to public speaking or has taken his oratory cues from Britain’s current crop of politicians.

When I get home, there’s no mention of the demo on the BBC News Channel (I didn’t expect it to be honest), Sky News or ITN News. The only mainstream media report of this demo can be found on the Evening Standard’s website.

PS. I’d actually taken a quite a few photos on my BlackBerry but it has deleted all of them without asking me. The photo at the top of this blog was sent to Facebook before my phone had a chance to delete anything. The phone will go back to the shop for the third time this year. I really should have taken a proper camera instead.

Selling War

Is your economy in the khazi? Are you poll ratings low? Have no policies? Well, why not start a war? It worked for others, now it can work for you.

Just look at some of our testimonials!

“War makes me go all gooey inside” – Tony Blair.

“Think of the money” – George W Bush.

“I live for the deaths of others” – Henry Kissinger

“Thanks to my Falklands campaign, I won a landslide election. I highly recommend it to others” – Margaret Thatcher

Remember, all you have to do is tell the public that so-and-so is “killing his own people” with weapons of mass destruction and Bob’s your uncle.

Worried about what the UN might say? Well, there’s no need. Who pays much attention to them anyway? Go ahead and make war. Remember that JP Morgan, Raytheon, Blackwater and Bechtel are there to support you.

If the public don’t believe you or pick holes in your argument, you can always call them “appeasers” and use the example of Hitler as your defence.

War: helping greedy psychopaths to make lots of money for centuries.

Tony Blair, Paul Kagame and Iraq: arrest this man

Tony Blair. What can you say about a man who led the Labour party to a landslide victory in 1997 and who presided over the longest period of economic growth for decades? Well, it was a great victory for sure and as for economic growth… what’s there to say? GDP is no great indicator of a nation’s wealth. And economic growth, like any kind of growth, cannot be sustained forever. Blair and his government continued the neoliberal consensus: the free market is great, the free market is good. All hail the free market.

The other day someone on Twitter, calling themselves “@blairsupporter”,  placed me on a list of “Blair haters”. Charming, I thought. And the reason for this? It’s because I referred to Blair as a “warmonger”, which indeed he is… unless the word itself has been redefined overnight, Blair still qualifies – in my mind, at least – as a war criminal.  He’s most certainly unrepentant. Take his appearance on Newsnight a couple of weeks ago, in which he said that Iraq had not turned out “as he hoped”. Instead of admitting his actions were wrong, he blames the continuing violence on insurgents and external forces.  Yet without his and Bush’s intervention, there would be no sectarian violence.

It’s easy to claim that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant who “killed his own people” when you know nothing of the history of Iraq or Britain’s 40 year on-off occupation of the country.  It’s a handy default position: after all, Saddam Hussein had a big moustache. Surely that’s good enough to have considered him as another Stalin or a Hitler? Remember Gamal Abdul Nasser?

Most people knew nothing about Iraq before 1991 and took their information from the usual news sources. That’s always a big mistake. Britain was in, what was once called Mesopotamia from 1917 till 1958, with a wee break before WWII when it marched back in and kicked out the Nazi-sympathizing Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani (who had seized power in a coup in 1941) and connived to reinstall their man Nuri es Said, who dominated Iraqi politics with much repression and violence for the next 17 years.

Britain’s time in what became Iraq is hardly mentioned and is often skipped over to promote the narrative of a uniquely blood-thirsty Saddam Hussein. Nuri was really bad but then so was General Bakr Sidqi (a Kurd), who was largely responsible for the Simele Massacre in 1933, which matches Halabja for the sheer scale of its brutality.

During the pre-independence period… and when I say “independence” I use this word in its loosest possible sense… Britain used Iraqi Arabs and Kurds as target practice. The great racist, Winston Churchill once opined that the use of poison gas against “recalcitrant Arabs” would “spread a lively terror”, which would thus force them to submit to British imperial rule. The military commander in Iraq, General Aylmer Haldane was enthusiastic about the use of gas and other armaments when dealing with Arabs and Kurds. His passion for wanton death and destruction was shared by others.

Other officers seemed to enjoy the work. One who did was Arthur Harris, who would later achieve fame directing the bomber offensive against Germany in the second world war. Known to his friends as Bomber and to his enemies as Butcher, he first practised his trade against Kurdish villages in Iraq. “Where the Arab and Kurd had begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise, they could stand bombing, and still argue,” he reported after one raid in 1924, “they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.” The British employed “police bombing” elsewhere in the empire – in Transjordan; against the Pathan tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India; in the Aden Protectorate (now the southern part of Yemen); and against the Nuer people of the southern Sudan.

Wherever you find brown people, you’ll find Britain and the United States bombing the crap out of them.

But what about the company Blair keeps? Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, has been accused of human rights violations. Blair is his “special adviser”. One wonders what kind of advice you give to a man with no respect for the lives of others? “Carry on, Paul, my old son”!

In 2009, The Office of Tony Blair website (question: how many former Prime Ministers have created their own office? The answer is none. Not even Thatcher did it) said,

Tony Blair hailed President Kagame’s visionary leadership as he saw for himself the remarkable pace of Rwandan progress during a two-day visit to the East African country.

The founder of the Africa Governance Initiative met with the President and senior officials to discuss ways in which Mr Blair and his team could help Rwanda build the capacity to deliver on the priorities of the Rwandan people, before witnessing examples of Rwandan progress in education, clean energy and business.

More often than not, former PMs sit on the backbenches after they’ve lost a general election. Not Blair (Thatcher was packed off to the Lords within a couple of years). He was off gallivanting around the globe. He picked up a nice cushy number as an adviser with JP Morgan and was hand-picked by George W Bush to become the Middle East special envoy. Blair also has his eye on the job of European president. Except no one wants him. But then, no one – except Bush, his neo-con buddies and the swivel-eyed Rapturists wanted Blair to be Middle East’s special envoy either.

According to the Telegraph, Blair has set up an investment unit at his Mayfair  offices... this must be the location of The Office of Tony Blair. Let’s face it, he wasn’t going to base his operations in Greenford or New Cross.

His investment unit, headed by a former senior banker at Barclays, reflects the former prime minister’s growing business empire, worth tens of millions of pounds.

Five members of his staff are registered with the Financial Services Authority and trading screens have been installed at Mr Blair’s offices, in Grosvenor Square in central London.

Mr Blair has established a complex web of companies, designed, according to accountants, to hide just how much money he makes and from where his money comes.

He has denied being “super rich”, but having built up a property portfolio of several homes and two multimillion-pound businesses, it is expected that he will enter the rich-lists for the first time this year with a fortune of somewhere between £35 million and £60 million.

Details of his trading desk have been pieced together by The Sunday Telegraph, which has conducted a series of investigations into Mr Blair’s finances since he left office in 2007.

Greed, thy name is Tony Blair.

So what about Kagame? Well, here’s what Blair said to The Guardian’s Chris McGreal three years ago,

“I’m a believer in and a supporter of Paul Kagame. I don’t ignore all those criticisms, having said that. But I do think you’ve got to recognise that Rwanda is an immensely special case because of the genocide. Secondly, you can’t argue with the fact that Rwanda has gone on a remarkable path of development. Every time I visit Kigali and the surrounding areas you can just see the changes being made in the country.”

McGreal adds,

But a sound economic policy hardly justifies the years of abuses in Congo.

Quite right. Yet Blair is unable to see anything other than the colour of money and his place in history.

Death, thy name is Tony Blair.

Have you ever wondered why British politicians are so keen to put Israel’s position across in a positive light? Have you ever wondered why Foreign Secretary William Hague went on television and seemed rather biased towards Israel? Well wonder no more. This blog from Occupied Palestine tells how The Conservative Friends of Israel has spent £30,000 since 2010 on taking Tory backbenchers on tours to the Occupied Territories. The Conservatives are not the only British political party to have a “Friends of Israel” group, the Labour Party has one. Luke Akehurst, former member of the NEC, is one of the most vociferous supporters of Israel. The Lib Dems also have their own chapter, so to speak. Now you know why the Palestinians are portrayed as “terrorists”. Now you know why nothing ever changes. Israel has bought political influence in this country. I suspect that these “Friends of Israel” see themselves as helping to hasten the Second Coming of Christ (yes, they genuinely believe that Book of Revelations gobbledegook). Of course, the bonehead Zionists can’t see that.

What’s even more worrying is that 80% of Tories are members of CFOI. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Liam Fox is a prominent member.

Here is an article from The Guardian (16/11/09). Here’s a snippet,

William Hague allegedly accepted personal donations from CFI board members totalling tens of thousands of pounds after being appointed shadow foreign secretary. More than £30,000 from CFI supporters went to the campaign funds of members of Cameron’s team who were first elected in 2005, the film claims, using publicly available information.

Hague’s position as Foreign Secretary is compromised. He shouldn’t be in charge of the Foreign Office. He has blood on his hands.

Labour Friends of Israel, another key group, is described as being “less unquestioning in its support of the Israeli government than CFI”. But it has taken more MPs on free trips to Israel than any other group – more than 60 since 2001.

So if you vote for the three main parties, you’re voting to perpetuate the cycle of violence. You’re also voting for genocide.

Occupied Palestine | فلسطين

Pro-Israeli lobbyists inside the UK have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds since the last general election taking lawmakers on propaganda tours to the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories.

PRESSTV | Nov 23, 2012

British parliamentarians, who have toured the Israeli occupied territories on paid visits, have then gone on to make supportive speeches and statements in Parliament and the media backing the regime’s atrocities against the oppressed Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West bank.

A report has found that Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), a pro-Israeli parliamentary group inside the Commons, spent over £30,000 since 2010 taking more than two dozen Tory backbenchers to Israel and the West Bank on five separate trips.

As many as a few days ago, when the Zionist military launched an all-out invasion against the blockaded Gaza Strip, the CFI immediately released a public letter signed by 17 Tory MPs, 10…

View original post 3,908 more words

How Does Israel Attack Gaza?

Great little animation!

Gaza under attack and the lies continue

I don’t know how the IDF chooses  names for its operations but there is certainly no subtlety applied to them. Operation Cast Lead could have easily been called “Operation Spray Bullets”. The latest operation is called Operation Pillar of Cloud, which presumably refers to the cloud of smoke that billows skyward after an air strike. It’s as subtle as a brick in the face.

The issue of proportionality is one that is alien to the Israeli state. A few homemade rockets land on its soil and kill no one and it responds by assassinating Hamas’s military commander Ahmad al-Jaabari.  If the situation was reversed and the Qassam Brigades killed the racist Avigdor Lieberman, you can imagine Israel’s response: they would roll into Gaza with heavy armour and as many chemical and biological weapons that they could muster… but even without such provocation, they would do that anyway.

Let’s be clear about something: western news outlets have taken their information from IDF press briefings and as we know, those briefings only put forward the lie that Israel is the damaged party and that its response was purely defensive. Nothing could be further from the truth.  The first wave began on 5 November when the IDF shot and killed Ahmed Nuwabi, a man with learning difficulties,  who apparently had “approached the border fence”. 3 days later, the IDF tanks and bulldozers rolled into Southern Gaza and killed a 13 year old.

Today, the Foreign Secretary, William Hague said that Gaza “had to bear principal responsibility”. How about that for balance? As I type this I have BBC News Channel on in the background. Matthew Amroliwala is interviewing someone from Hamas. Amroliwala repeats Hague’s line and that of the IDF. This is the BBC. “Nation shall speak peace unto nation”and all that crap. With that kind of coverage it’s little wonder many people in this country are completely ignorant of the facts and see Israel as the “good guy” in this binary narrative.

Ben Brown is now reporting from Kiryat Malachi about a Hamas rocket strike. He’s interviewing a policeman with a suspiciously antipodean-sounding accent. The BBC reporter in Gaza reports that he “has seen rockets being fired from Gaza”. This is the first thing he says. He only mentions the IDF attacks towards the end of his report and even then, the overall narrative is one of Israel good/Palestine bad.

Brown returns, he talks bout how Israelis “live in fear from rocket attacks”. And the Gazans don’t live in fear of Israeli attacks? Get real.

Live blog from Occupied Palestine here.

UPDATE 16/11/12 @ 1119

I’ve noticed that the Israelis have now changed the name from “Operation Pillar of Cloud” to “Operation Pillar of Defence”. A subtle change but the word “defence” in the hands of the Israelis and the Americans means exactly the opposite. I also noticed that I had 2 visitors from Israel to this blog. I wonder if they… nah, surely not?

Remembering Sabra and Chatila

Thirty years ago this month, the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Chatila happened under the watchful eye of Ariel Sharon and the IDF. Yet, this slaughter of innocent men, women and children goes unmentioned by most Western news providers. While the media concentrated on the 1972 murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, those who perished in Sabra and Chatila go unremembered and ignorance among Westerners prevails.

Between 16th and 18th September 1982, members of the Lebanese militia, who belonged to the semi-fascist Kataeb or Phalange Party, entered the refugee camps at Sabra and Chatila with the approval of the IDF. The Israelis facilitated the slaughter by providing flares to light up the night sky so that the militias could kill 3,500 men, women and children.

To date, the only inquiry to be held into the massacre was conducted by the Israeli government, which found Ariel Sharon “personally responsible” for the massacre. In any case, Sharon refused to resign as Defence Minister and the Prime Minister, Menachem Begin refused to sack him from his position. After the death of Israeli peace activist, Emil Grunzweig, a compromise was agreed and he remained in the cabinet as a minister without portfolio. Grunzweig was a member of Peace Now and was killed during a demonstration when a live grenade was thrown into the crowd by Yona Avrushmi, who has been described as a petty criminal with mental health issues.  Seven others were injured by the grenade.  Avrushmi was released from prison last year.

Robert Fisk has written an excellent article that details the massacre.

Here’s an interesting video

Ariel Sharon is rather conveniently in a persistent vegetative state after suffering a massive stroke several years ago. The chances of him and others facing justice at the International War Crimes Tribunal are as remote as ever. Yet, more than anyone else, it was Sharon who instigated the first Lebanese War as this article from Ha’aretz tells us,

Thirty years ago, Ariel Sharon started the first Lebanon war in order to create a new order in the Middle East that matched his world view. In other words, he tried to instigate a revolution.

Looking back three decades, if any new order was created, it was to the detriment of Israel in general and, in particular, to the ideological right wing led by Sharon.

The first Lebanon war had three consequences with long-term strategic outcomes. Lebanon, which was supposed to be our great ally, the one that would lead the reconciliation between the State of Israel and the Arab world, gave rise to Hezbollah.

But it speaks volumes that  the Likud Party, through Sharon, would give support to the semi- fascist Kataeb Party and its thugs in the South Lebanese Army. Indeed, it is worth remembering that the father of the Likud party, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, was an open admirer of Mussolini. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

RIP those who were butchered in the camps.

It can’t happen here?

Or can it? The events in North Africa and the Middle East have sparked off protests and rebellions around the globe. Last night,  Saif al-Islam Ghaddafi was on Libyan state television speaking darkly about “foreigners, Islamists, drunks and drug users” being responsible for the revolts in Benghazi and now Tripoli. But Ghaddafi is a desperate man and like all dictators (elected and unelected) he’s blaming the events on everything and everyone but his father’s regime.

The protests and revolts aren’t confined to North Africa and the Middle East. There have been protests in China, Gabon and Wisconsin in the United States are the latest countries to witness mass protests against corrupt regimes and neoliberal economic policies. In Wisconsin,

Some 70,000 people, including union members from neighbouring states, flooded the state capital Madison on Saturday, protesting against benefit cuts proposed for government workers and an attack on union bargaining rules by the right-wing Governor.

In China, the Irish Times reports,

FEARFUL THE wave of change sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East could undermine the position of the Communist Party, Chinese security forces took to the streets of 13 major cities yesterday to squash any displays of dissent after a mysterious online call for a “Jasmine Revolution”, inspired by pro-democracy demonstrations elsewhere.

Crowds gathered outside McDonald’s in the Wangfujing shopping precinct, not far from Tiananmen Square, and some protesters were taken away.

One man was detained when he tried to place a jasmine flower in front of the restaurant.

In Djibouti, the Financial Times says,

Opposition parties said more than 30,000 people protested on Friday against the dynastic rule of President Ismail Guelleh, who last year scrapped a two-term constitutional limit to allow him to stand for re-election at polls due in April. Government officials say less than a thousand people took part.

One person has been killed.

In Yemen, MPs have joined the anti-government protests. AFP says,

Opposition MPs, who vowed to take to the streets in a statement issued on Sunday, joined students who have been protesting for the past nine days.

Security forces surrounded the protesters as they gathered in a nearby square carrying banners declaring: “People want change,” “People want to overthrow the regime” and “Leave”.

The Common Forum, an alliance of parliamentary opposition groups has urged all of its parties on Sunday to “join the protesting youths… in their demonstrations against oppression, tyranny and corruption,” in a statement received by AFP.

In Morocco,

Thousands staged rallies in Moroccan cities on Sunday demanding political reform and limits on the powers of King Mohammed VI, the latest protests demanding change that have rocked the region.

Between 3,000 and 4,000 people took to the streets of the capital Rabat, shouting: “The people want change, denouncing corruption and calling for a democratic constitution to be adopted.

In Casablanca, the North African nation’s biggest city, more than 4,000 people came out demanding: “Freedom, dignity, justice,” an AFP reporter said.

Already in Britain, the cost of living has sky-rocketed and the current Tory-led government continues to attack the poor, the low-waged and the working class. It has already put forward a range of cuts designed to kill any future young people may have longed for by raising university tuition fees and scrapping the EMA. The NHS is to be further marketized under their proposals. These are presented as ‘reforms’ but as anyone who has lived through the 1960’s will tell you, the word “reform” means something else.

As the cuts begin to bite, there will be more protests. The government will tell us that any change/protest should be made at the ballot box.  I’m not sure any of us can sit around for the next 4 years while we watch the country being destroyed by bankers and the mega-riche.

For pure comedy value, here’s Glenn Beck with some uneducated nonsense about the “New World Order”.

He blames the protests  on “The Muslim Brotherhood, Commies and the United Nations”. Standard fare for endtimes hick conspiracy theorists.

In 1848, revolutions swept away the old orders in Europe. In Britain, the Chartist petition was presented to Parliament, who pushed it aside.

These protests are only the beginning.

UPDATE: 2348

Added link to Gabon