Dear Kitty. Some blog

This video from London is called George Galloway Stop The War [in Iraq] Protest March 15 2008 London.

From British daily The Independent:

Muslims feel like ‘Jews of Europe’

Minister’s shock warning on rise of anti-Islamic prejudice

By Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter

Friday, 4 July 2008

Mr Malik said that many British Muslims now felt like ‘aliens in their own country’

Britain’s first Muslim minister has attacked the growing culture of hostility against Muslims in the United Kingdom, saying that many feel targeted like “the Jews of Europe”.

Shahid Malik, who was appointed as a minister in the Department for International Development (Dfid) by Gordon Brown last summer, said it has become legitimate to target Muslims in the media and society at large in a way that would be unacceptable for any other minority.

Mr Malik made clear that he was not equating the situation with the Holocaust but warned that many British Muslims now felt like “aliens in their own country”. He said he himself had been the target of a string of racist incidents, including the firebombing of his family car and an attempt to run him down at a petrol station.

“I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe,” he said. “I don’t mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost – and still is in some parts – to target Jews, many Muslims would say that we feel the exact same way.

“Somehow there’s a message out there that it’s OK to target people as long as it’s Muslims. And you don’t have to worry about the facts, and people will turn a blind eye.”

The claims are made in an interview to be broadcast on Monday in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme to coincide with the third anniversary of the London bombings of 7 July.

A poll to accompany the documentary highlights the growing polarisation of opinion among Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims, who say they have suffered a marked increase in hostility since the London bombings.

Shahid Malik should consider the contributions, like the war in Iraq, by the leaders of his own party, like Blair and Brown, to the sorry situation which he describes correctly.

This video from Britain is called Boris Johnson refuses to answer a question 12 times.

From The Guardian in England:

Johnson deputy faces inquiry over alleged financial wrongdoing

· Fresh blow to London mayor’s administration
· Aide had been banned from working as priest

* Matthew Taylor and Dave Hill

* Friday July 4, 2008

Boris Johnson, London mayor, launched an independent inquiry last night into allegations of financial irregularities and inappropriate behaviour against his deputy mayor, Ray Lewis.

The move followed a Guardian investigation and a series of questions tabled by the newspaper on Wednesday.

It became the second blow to Johnson’s administration in the past 10 days after one of his senior advisers, James McGrath, quit for telling an interviewer that African-Caribbean migrants should go home if they did not like London.

See also here.

London Racist Police Brutality - For more videos, click here

This video from London, England, says about itself:

Black Postman is assaulted by cops for refusing to move his van. Policeman at back punches him in groin, big crowd, possible injury.

From British weekly The Observer:

Minister is dragged into police race row

· Forces accused over Muslim audit
· Home Secretary urged to intervene

* Mark Townsend, crime correspondent

* Sunday June 29, 2008

The home Secretary is at the centre of the worst race row to engulf the police service for almost a decade as chief constables stand accused of blocking an inquiry into discrimination against Muslim officers.

Jacqui Smith will be asked to intervene tomorrow after the damning revelation that at least 20 police forces refused to co-operate with the first audit into the treatment of Muslim and black officers. Information from those forces that did take part suggested there was routine racial discrimination against them.

Accusations that police forces refused to co-operate with the audit, which was conducted jointly by the National Association of Muslim Police and the think-tank Demos, is bound to cause consternation in government. Initially, only 11 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales replied to the questionnaire on the promotional prospects, rank and number of Muslim and black officers employed. As a result of this ‘poor rate of return’, the deadline was extended by another month. Even then barely half - only 23 - co-operated.

See also here.

British police face discrimination lawsuit from top Muslim officer: here.

USA: how Rightist suspect Hatfill was treated vs. how Muslim suspects are treated: here.

This is a video from Britain about Martyn Gilleard.

From British daily The Guardian:

Nazi supporter guilty of terror plans and possessing child porn

* Jo Adetunji

* Wednesday June 25, 2008

A Nazi sympathiser, described by police as extremely dangerous, has been found guilty of planning acts of terrorism and of possessing child pornography after investigators found homemade bombs and indecent images of children at his home.

Martyn Gilleard, 31, a forklift truck driver from Goole, east Yorkshire, pleaded guilty in two separate cases at Leeds crown court after police found “significant” volumes of extreme right-wing literature, weapons, ammunition and homemade expolsives in his flat last October.

About 39,000 indecent images of children were also seized.

Humberside police, searching only for the child pornography, found the racist material and called in the Leeds counter-terrorism unit. Gunpowder, fuses, camouflage clothing, balaclavas, a bombmaking manual, telescopic sights, knives, a machete and rifle, were discovered. Residents were evacuated as bomb disposal experts removed the explosive material.

A jacket bearing a swastika with lettering alluding to the far-right group Combat 18, was found at the timber yard where Gilleard worked. Police said that, when arrested, Gilleard was a paid-up member of the National Front, the British People’s party, and the White Nationalist party.

See also here.

There are also paedophile nazi leaders in other countries, like the Netherlands; see here.

An article at UK Indymedia mentions that police discovered Gilleard’s ‘plans to bomb mosques’.

British self styled “Decent Left”, in reality more often indecent racist, blog “Harry’s Place” (no, I am not linking to them), writing on this, uses the Rightist trick of blaming the (intended) victim; in this case, Muslims. It spuriously suggests that wannabe killer of Muslims Martyn Gilleard might want to convert to Islam, not basing this on anything. Harry’s Place already has the Islamophobia, and the pro Iraq war propaganda just like British neo-nazi chickenhawks, so it would be far less of a contorted form of imagination to imagine them converting to open neo-nazism.

The video White Nationalist Paedophile + Terrorist Martyn Gilleard, from Channel 4 news in Britain, is here.

This video from Britain is called Andi Ali interviews anti BNP [British nazi party] protestors.

From British daily The Independent:

Murder conviction for Iraq war hero ends 14-year mystery of Indian restaurant shooting

By Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter

Saturday, 21 June 2008

To his comrades in the Black Watch [part of the British Army in Iraq], Sgt Michael Ross was nothing other than a hero. …

Yesterday, a different and horrifying side to the 29-year-old decorated soldier was revealed in Glasgow’s High Court when a jury convicted him of murdering a Bangladeshi waiter by shooting him in the head in front of diners at a restaurant in the Orkneys, in 1994. Ross, who had hidden his face behind a balaclava or ski mask, was aged just 15.

Moments after the verdict was delivered, Ross tried to escape from the court, managing to run through a side door before he was wrestled to the ground by an official and handcuffed by police.

The conviction brings to an end the 14-year mystery of who killed Shamsuddin Mahmood, 26, at the Mumtaz restaurant in Kirkwall, the main town of the Orkney Islands with a population of 8,500. The murder was the first on the Orkneys for 25 years.

Evidence emerged during the six-week trial that Ross had been a gun-obsessed teenager who doodled Nazi imagery on a notebook and told a comrade in the Army cadets: “Blacks should be shot.”

The soldier – who was a sniper with the Black Watch, now part of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, when he was arrested in May last year – had denied the murder and claimed to have been in another part of Kirkwall when the killing took place on the evening of 2 June 1994.

Ross was convicted on a majority verdict and will be sentenced on 11 July.

Andrew Laing, the Procurator Fiscal for the Highlands and Islands, said: “This was a callous murder of an innocent young man who was well known and liked within the town.

“This cowardly act shocked not only the local community but people throughout Scotland.”

Also from The Independent, from the other side of Britain: Racism rears its ugly head in Cornwall.

This video is about a pro refugee demonstration at Harmondsworth Immigration Detention Centre in England.

From British daily News Line:

Saturday, 21 June 2008

LOCKED IN FLOODED CELLS! – Harmondsworth inquiry demand

On Monday, 23 June, the High Court will respond to a Liberty demand for an independent investigation into the treatment of detainees at Harmondsworth Immigration Detention Centre.

The court will determine whether an inquiry must be held after vulnerable detainees were locked in flooded cells without food or water while fires burned during a disturbance in the centre, near Heathrow.

The legal challenge is on behalf of three individual detainees who claim that during the November 2006 Harmondsworth disturbance they were denied food and water for up to 40 hours.

The detainees also allege they were locked in overcrowded, pitch-black rooms flooded with water for more than 24 hours; forced to urinate and defecate in front of each other; and were strip searched in front of several officers.

Permission to judicially review the actions of the Home Office and Kalyx Ltd (the private contractor running the centre) was granted by the High Court in March.

Liberty’s Legal Officer Alex Gask said: ‘This appalling mistreatment of immigration detainees will only be stopped if exposed through a root and branch independent inquiry.

‘It is shameful that these men were abandoned to pain, fear and hunger while in UK detention.’

One detainee told how he was taken to the centre’s medical clinic suffering from a bad back.

The man said: ‘They just abandoned me. There was no doctor and, when I asked where the doctor was, the detention officers laughed at me . . .

‘One of them stepped on the hem of my trousers to make me fall over. He then started laughing and called me a “fucking negro”.’

Britain: Gay and lesbian asylum-seekers can be safely deported to Iran as long as they live their lives “discreetly”, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has claimed: here.

Woman ‘assaulted’ by UK security guards during forced removal: here.

EU parliament agrees to strengthening of Fortress Europe: here.

Why is Australia still mistreating refugees? Here.

Inside Bush’s Billion-Dollar Immigration Gulag: here.

This Reuters’ video is called Marching for Roma rights in Rome.

From British daily The Guardian:

We won’t be Berlusconi’s scapegoats, say Gypsies

Tom Kington in Rome meets families evicted by the city’s new right-wing mayor at their isolated camp and hears them demand ‘a few rights’

European Roma Rights Center: here.

Political situation in Italy: here. And here. And here. And here.

This is a music video from the USA of Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode.

From British daily The Independent:

No, Johnny, No: Chuck Berry joins chorus of musicians snubbing McCain’s campaign

By Leonard Doyle in Washington

Wednesday, 11 June 2008

Songs by Chuck Berry, Abba and John Cougar Mellencamp have at various times been chosen for the McCain campaign but the artists have made it clear they do not support the Republican candidate

For a US presidential candidate, there is nothing better than a rocking anthem to pump up the crowds and project the sort of imagery that could help win the keys to the White House.

The Republican hopeful John McCain may be pushing 72, but his “town hall” events can be as noisy as the stadiums where Barack Obama appears on stage to the strains of U2’s “Beautiful Day.” But the McCain camp is having trouble settling on a suitable campaign anthem. After searching for months, it finally picked “Johnny B Goode” – Chuck Berry’s rock ‘n’ roll classic from 1958. The high-power guitar licks and “Go, Johnny, go” chorus put a spring in Mr McCain’s step. When asked why he chose it, he quipped: “It might be because it is the only one [the artist] hasn’t complained about us using.”

Berry, 81, may not have complained about his song being appropriated by Mr McCain, but he has made it clear he would prefer Barack Obama in the White House. “America has finally come to this point where you can pick a man of colour and that not be a drawback,” Berry said. “It’s no question, myself being a man of colour. I mean, you have to feel good about it.”

The anointment of Mr Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate was, he added, “definitely a proud and successful moment for all the people of this country – not just black people, but Americans in general”.

Berry, known as the “father of rock ‘n’ roll”, recounted: “In the Fifties there were certain places we couldn’t ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in White House.” “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last,” he added, quoting Martin Luther King.

There was a groan at McCain headquarters as it suffered yet another musical derailment. An attempt to use Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me” also bombed. “We played it a couple times and it’s my understanding [Abba] went berserk,” Mr McCain said.

Mr McCain is not the first political candidate to stumble into a musical minefield, only to discover their theme song is not what was originally imagined. Objections often come in the form of letters to “cease and desist” by offended songwriters or musicians. Sometimes the lyrics are discovered to be off message. The McCain team had earlier alighted on John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses”. The Mellencamp back-story as a hard-living rocker who had cleaned up his act seemed to perfectly project Mr McCain’s maverick image as a rule-breaking but deeply conservative sonofabitch.

That scenario went into meltdown when aides realised Mellencamp is a Democrat activist who supported the presidential contender John Edwards, even appearing with him on the campaign trail. Mellencamp asked Mr McCain to cease and desist. Not only that, but “Pink Houses” is a song about missed opportunities and wasted potential, so the lyrics are not exactly on-message for a presidential campaign.

Mr McCain then used the theme from Rocky after the head of MGM, a McCain backer, gave his approval. But MGM did not own the rights to the track.

Republicans seem to have a tin ear for music. For a while in 2004, George Bush’s re-election theme was the rock standard “Still The One”. However, it turned out that the songwriter John Hall was an environmental activist who had been campaigning against nuclear power since 1979.

David Cameron [of the British Conservative Party] will have some sympathy with Mr McCain. The Tory leader recently incurred the wrath of Paul Weller for expressing his liking for The Jam’s song “Eton Rifles”.

This video from the USA is called Stokely Carmichael: We Need a Black United Front. It says about itself:

Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Toure) speaks at the Free Huey Rally

(for Black Panther Huey Newton, then in jail)

From the Independent series about activists in the USA:

Stokely Carmichael

1968

Kwame Ture - known until the late 1970s as Stokely Carmichael - was arrested while pressing for the right of African-Americans to vote in the South. Elected chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, the FBI sought to silence and discredit him.

When I was an organiser in Greenwood, Mississippi, [SNCC organiser] Bob Moses informed me that I should report the beatings, the shootings, and the burnings to the FBI. But I didn’t want to waste my time. They never did anything with the reports. And we saw the FBI exactly for what it was. We saw its racism. We saw its defence of segregated policies. At first, we would present the facts to the FBI. But we learnt that it would endanger the local person who saw it. Whatever we told the FBI, its agents told the local police. But nothing the FBI did stopped us from organising. Later, when I had disputes with SNCC, the FBI manipulated them to wreak havoc on us. I can remember when it spread three rumours about me at the same time: I bought a $70,000 house; I ran away to Africa ; I was a CIA agent. It had informers in every city and every organisation. All the FBI had to do was send out one memorandum, and overnight a rumour was dropped everywhere, and it appeared to be the truth: “It is also suggested that we inform a certain percentage of reliable criminal and racial informants that ‘we heard from reliable sources that Carmichael is a CIA agent’. It is hoped that these informants would spread the rumour in various large Negro communities across the land.” You really can’t fight this. How can you go to every large city and say, “It’s not true. The FBI said it.” You can’t. Some people in SNCC actually believed all that about me. We were unified against local southern sheriffs and the Ku Klux Klan. But the FBI was able to split us on every conceivable issue with their channels to the press and their informants inside our organisation.

Racism in the USA today: here.

This video from the USA says about itself:

A firsthand story of “Bloody Sunday”, when hundreds of marchers were brutalized while trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an attempted voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

From the Independent series about United States activists:

Ruby Sales

1965

Those who defied segregation risked their lives, such as civil rights activist Jonathan Daniels, killed in broad daylight. Despite death threats, Ruby Sales testified at the trial; but the all-white jury found the killer, Tom Coleman, not guilty.

I was a 16-year-old student at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. After the terrible beating of the people in Selma on Bloody Sunday [in March 1965], we felt we wanted to make our own statement. About a thousand of us marched to Montgomery and had a sit-in. We were hemmed in for a day and a night, surrounded by dogs and by very menacing white vigilantes who called themselves policemen. For the first time, I saw people resisting police in a non-violent way. That was the turning point in my life: I became part of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC].

Young people from the town of Fort Deposit had begun to organise themselves around the exploitation of their parents as sharecroppers, and asked us to join their demonstration. When we got there, a mob of white men was waiting. Then the city came with a garbage truck. They put us in it along with the garbage and took us to prison. We were refused bail and kept in jail for seven days. Suddenly they ordered us to leave. We left with great trepidation and I walked to the corner grocery with Father Richard Morrisroe and Jonathan Daniels. A white man, Tom Coleman, was standing in the doorway with a shotgun. He hurled obscenities at us. He told me he would blow my brains out. Jonathan pulled me back in an attempt to protect me. In that instant, he got shot. Then there was another shot, and Father Morrisroe fell. They made him ride to the hospital in a hearse on top of Jonathan’s dead body.