If you listen carefully, you can hear the Conservatives scraping the bottom of the barrel. Through all of the corruption, scandals, and resignations over the years, Rishi Sunak’s government is facing a serious dilemma: they’ve got no one normal left to serve in key positions.
That’s why Lee Anderson MP was just made deputy chair of the Conservative party. Not because he was the best candidate but because there are simply no decent people left who are willing to go down with this sinking Tory ship.
Anyone who’s familiar with “30p Lee” will not be surprised to see him immediately cause a scandal. After all, this is the man who condemned food bank users for being “bad at budgeting”, refused to watch England play because they took the knee to stand against racism, and expressed delight at being named the “worst man in Britain”
A core part of Anderson’s new role is promoting the government in the media and generally garnering public support. It’s not an enviable position for anyone to be in, but they genuinely seem to have found the worst possible person for the job.
Anderson is, of course, off to a roaring start as deputy chair. He very publicly called for the return of the death penalty just before his appointment, forcing Rishi Sunak to awkwardly clarify that that was not the government’s official position. He also advocated for a “naval standoff” in the channel over small boats and got himself into a petty row with a BBC reporter who brought up his past. That’s just in his first week.
The real story here is not just that Lee Anderson is the worst kind of politician and person (though that’s hard to deny). It’s that Rishi Sunak is too weak to fight off the extreme and incompetent wing of his own party. He’d rather bring them into the fold than take any kind of principled stand.
Rishi’s lame-duck government is an opportunity for far-right ideologues like Lee Anderson. Since Johnson, they’ve made a comfortable home in the Conservative party and advanced an anti-democratic, xenophobic, economically illiterate agenda that has had real repercussions for the public. Sunak, despite his promises for change, is only letting them dig their heels in even further.
The most frustrating part of all this is that, despite what he may say, Lee Anderson and his ilk are nowhere near being representative of ordinary British people. Yes, there are some people who share Andreson’s extreme, pigheaded views, but they are a tiny minority and should never be allowed to dominate the political debate, let alone occupy positions of power and influence over our lives.
Nigel Farage plays that game too. He claims to be an ordinary bloke, someone you might have a pint with in your local pub, but he isn’t. He’s a multimillionaire TV show host with a global network of rich and influential friends. Remember that the next time you hear him dishing out questionable advice about the direction we should be taking our country in.
All this shows why our mission to fight for proper democracy is so important and why we MUST succeed. If we don’t, our broken democracy will continue to allow people like Lee Anderson to exercise power and influence over our lives. What a terrible thought that is.
I haven’t donated to Open Britain, but I’m putting this message up because it is an accurate statement of the dire state of politics under Sunak and the Tories.
GB News and the Heil carried reports a few days ago attacking Glasgow council for a report compiled by a highly respected Scottish historian about the city’s historic involvement in the slave trade and its statues commemorating figures connected with it. The council felt that, unlike Liverpool and Bristol, and the city had not faced up to its history as one of the other major British centres of the slave trade. It compiled a list of seven statues that were particularly questionable because of their subjects’ links to the trade. These included the missionary and abolitionist, David Livingstone, Robert Peel and William Ewart Gladstone. The reports concentrated on the criticism of Livingstone, as the man was a fervent abolitionist and it demonstrates how ridiculousness the iconoclasm by the anti-slavery activists is. According to reports by GB News, the Heil and the Glasgow Herald, it’s partly because Livingstone started work at age 10 in factory weaving and processing slave-produced cotton from the West Indies. They make the point that as a child worker, Livingstone had absolutely no control over what the factory did. I doubt very much that he had much control, as someone who could be called a ‘factory slave’, over his choice of employment either. Later videos from GB News and further down in the articles from the Herald and the Heil is the statement that he also defend the cotton masters, believing that they were paternalistic. He may well have done so, but this hardly discredits him because of his life’s work in Africa.
Livingstone had a genuine, deep hatred, as many British Christians had at the time, of slavery. He travelled to Africa to spread Christianity and to combat slavery as its sources. He was also a doctor, and had worked hard after work to educate himself. One of the guests on the GB News debate about it was a right-wing historian of Africa. He pointed out that Livingstone is still very much loved in Africa, and there are plaques to him in Malawi, Zambia, Tanganyika and three other African countries. I have no doubt this is absolutely true. A few years ago I took out of Bristol’s central library a history of Malawi. The book was even-handed and objective. It did not play down massacres by the British army committed when we annexed the area during fighting with the slaving tribes. It described how, under imperialism, White Malawians tended to look down on the indigenous peoples and the dissatisfaction with imperial rule that resulted from the use of forced labour. But neither did it omit or play down the enslavement of indigenous Africans by the other native peoples. These included the Yao, Marganja, Swahili and Arabs, who preyed on the other tribes for the Arab slave trade, sending their captives to Zanziba, Kilwa and across the Indian ocean. To gain their victims’ trust, they’d settle down with them for a year, working alongside them as friends before finally turning on them. They also set up a series of forts to defend the slave routes. One of these, set up by Zarafi, one of the most infamous slavers, had a palisade on which were impaled 100 severed heads. As for the akapolo slaves used in the local economy, they were made very much aware of their status. They had to work with broken tools, and eat their meals off the floor. The chiefs, meanwhile, seemed to have spent much of their time relaxing and having their hair done.
Livingstone, whatever his faults, hated all this and his settlement became a refuge for runaway slaves. As did many of the other settlements he or his followers founded for this purpose. These settlements have since expanded to form some of Malawi’s towns.
William Ewart Gladstone was the leader of Britain’s Liberal party, serving as prime minister, in the latter half of the 19th century. The scandal here is that Gladstone’s family got its money from slave estates in the West Indies. I know Conservatives who genuine hate slavery, who despise Gladstone because of this. So it isn’t just ‘leftists’ that have issues with the Grand Old Man, as Gladstone’s supporters dubbed him. But Gladstone is immensely important because of the social legislation he enacted. He was an Anglican, who, in the words of one historian, ‘became the voice of the Nonconformist conscience’. He wanted the disestablishment of the Anglican church at a time when Christian Nonconformists were still required to pay it tithes and other duties that left them disadvantaged. He also wanted to give Ireland home rule. Of course this faced immense opposition, and I think it was one reason why he failed to win elections as the century wore on. But it seems to me that if he had been able to enact this policy, then perhaps Ireland’s subsequent history may not have been quite so bloody. One of the surprising facts about Irish history is that there was in the 18th century an alliance between Roman Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists. This was before Roman Catholic emancipation, which legalised it and granted Roman Catholics civil rights. At the same time Protestant Nonconformists were tolerated, but still suffered deep political disabilities. As a result, one of Ulster’s historic Roman Catholic churches was build with donations and subscriptions from Ulster nonconformist Protestants. This surprising fact was included in a BBC Radio 4 series, Mapping the Town, which traced the history of British and UK towns through their maps.
I don’t know much about Robert Peel, except that he introduced free trade as a policy for the Conservatives, or a section of the Conservatives. But what he is primarily known for is founding the metropolitan police force. I’ve got a feeling he might also have been responsible for reducing the 100-odd crimes that carried the death penalty to three. These included murder and treason. It might be because of Peel that we’re no longer hanging people for stealing a loaf of bread or impersonating a Chelsea pensioner. But long before Glasgow council decided he was problematic, there was also a demonstration by masked protesters in London demanding that his statue should be removed. And last year the right were also getting in a tizzy because one of Liverpool’s universities was removing him as the name of one of their halls. The student union replaced him with a Black woman, who was a Communist and teacher. She is, no doubt, perfectly worthy of commemoration, but hardly in Gladstone’s league.
Part of the problem is that iconoclasts want to judge everything by a very strict, modern morality. Slavery and the slave trade was an abomination and was rightly abolished. Good people have been continuing the struggle against global slavery since then. But not everybody, who was connected to the trade, is such a monster that they should be blotted out of history in the same way Stalin’s historians removed all mention of his opponents.
One of the things you are taught, or at least were taught, in history at university level is not to play ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ with historical figures. There is no set outcome to the historical process. If events had been different in the past, then modern society would also be different. If, horribly, Wilberforce and the abolitionists had lost, then slavery would still be unchallenged today. At the same time, you need to use the historical imagination to understand why people in the past behaved as they did, and why good people by the standard of their times were capable of attitudes that are deeply morally repugnant to us.
The great British philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin, was an admirer of the 17th-18th century Italian historian Vico. Vico believed, as Berlin later did, that there were no objective moral values. He noted how they changed over time, and that to properly understand a past epoch, you needed to understand also its art and culture. I don’t think he was a cultural relativist, however. Berlin certainly wasn’t – he believed that while there were no objective moral values, there were certainly those which acted as if they were. He was fiercely anti-Communist, partly because his family were Lithuanian Jews, who had seen their logging business seized by the Bolsheviks and had fled the Russian Revolution. He was a major figure during the Cold War in establishing western contacts with Soviet dissidents like Nadezhda Mandelstam, who wrote moving accounts of her experience of the gulags under Stalin.
I don’t share Berlin’s Conservatism and strongly believe in the existence of objective moral values. But I strongly recommend Berlin’s books. He wrote a series of potted intellectual biographies, including on the early Russian revolutionaries like the 19th century anarchist, Bakunin. Even though he hated what they stood for, his books are notable for his attempts to see things from his subjects’ point of view. So much so that some people, according to Berlin, though he was pro-Communist. They’re fascinating and highly readable, even if you don’t agree that someone like the French utopian socialist Saint-Simon was ‘an enemy of freedom’.
There are statues of slavers and the people connected with the trade that deserve to be torn down. There had been calls for Colston’s statue to be removed since the 1980s. It was highly controversial all those decades ago, though many Bristolians would have defended it because he gave away most of his money to charity. But other historical figures deserve to be still commemorated despite their connections to the ‘abominable trade’ because of their immense work that has benefited both Britain and nations like Malawi. And I believe that some of those, who find figures like Gladstone objectionable, could also benefit from reading Vico and Berlin. In the meantime, it should be noted that Glasgow council has no plans to tear any statues down.
Slavery is a great moral evil. But historic slavery should not considered so grave and unforgivable, that it is used to blot out the memory of figures like Livingstone, Gladstone and Peel, whose work has so helped shape modern Britain for the better.
This is another piece from the anti-Islamic YouTuber, the Apostate Prophet. I said yesterday when I posted another piece up by his that I don’t share his atheism nor his wholesale dismissal of all of Islam, although it very definitely isn’t my religion. Not all Muslims are the same, and I got the impression that there is a wide variety of belief and practice within global Islam. It’s therefore wrong and dangerous to give the impression that all Muslims are somehow militant hardliners wishing to impose the sharia and subjugate the unbelievers.
But there certainly are some very unpleasant individuals in the western Islamic community, who would like to impose an extremely strict, repressive version of Islam and who have a bitter hatred of gays, non-Muslims and apostates from Islam. These people, like White Fascists, deserve to be exposed and condemned for their vile views. One of these is Daniel Haqiqatjou. Haqiqatjou is an American Muslim apologist of Iranian extraction. In this post from June last year, 2020, the Apostate Prophet discusses Haqiqatjou’s squalid views and his connections to the Yaqeen Institute, a hard-line Islamic organisation whose leader, Omar Suleiman, attended some kind of public gathering with Joe Biden.
Haqiqatjou would like the death penalty for homosexuality. On LGBTQ Remembrance Day last year, he joked about remembering them through Muslim base jumping. It’s a tasteless joke about the method used by some Muslim countries of executing gays by throwing them off tall buildings. When AP called him a vile piece of sh*t, Haqiqatjou made it clear that people like him wouldn’t be forgotten either. Which is a reference to the traditional Muslim penalty for apostasy, death. The video contains a clip of Haqiqatjou explaining this to one of his callers. He also wrote a piece for the website of Muslim Jurists of America hailing the Sultan of Brunei’s introduction of Islamic law against homosexuals and fornicators, and urged western Muslims to come to Brunei to watch a public caning to see Islamic law in action. Thanks, but I’d rather stay in Britain and watch Gardener’s World. He also whined about how the West looks down on child marriage, but western children are sexually active at 13, 14, 15. The Apostate Prophet points out that this is 14 year old kids having sex with other 14 year olds. It is not a case of thirty year old men marrying 13 year old girls.
Haqiqatjou did, however, have some criticism for his posts from the American Muslim community. This was from an American convert, Justin Parrott, who objected to them, not because he found them to be wrong or offensive, but because he and other Muslim authorities didn’t want him to make Islam look bad. Haqiqatjou dismissed this by saying it is exactly what Jews and Christians have done to their religion, and they won’t look well on Islam unless Muslims convert to their religions. And so he blithely carries on spreading his backward views.
The Apostate Prophet also makes point in this video that there is something wrong in western society. If a westerner expresses hatred of homosexuality, like the baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay couple, or if they express concerns about Islamic grooming gangs and immigration, then they are met with immediate howls of disapproval and cancellation. But the worst thing that happened to Haqiqatjou when he posted his obnoxious views online was that the post was taken down, something he found to be terribly tyrannical. Which is especially rich coming from him, as if left to him he’d end freedom of speech. All in the name of Islam, of course.
And in July last year, Apostate Prophet put up this video in which he questions Haqiqatjou on his attitude to slavery. Guess what! Haqiqatjou doesn’t condemn it. Indeed, he tries to defend it by saying that where it exists, the slaves may be better treated than free workers. He accuses AP of comparing slavery to an idealised form of freedom that has never existed, and may not make people happy. It seems to me to be very clear from this that Haqiqatjou would like to bring back slavery.
Now Haqiqatjou is correct when he says that in countries where slavery still persists, the slaves may be well treated. I can remember one book on modern slavery stating that the lot of slaves in those cultures that still practise traditional slavery is much better than modern from of enslavement, disguised as long-term work contracts, for example. I also suspect that Haqiqatjou has a very romanticised view of Islamic slavery. It could be different from western chattel slavery, in that slaves could serve as soldiers, scribes and arrange their masters’ business affairs. The Mamlukes, the Muslim warriors who ruled Egypt prior to Napoleon’s invasion, were originally such a corps of slave soldiers. Their name actually means ‘White slaves’. And ostensibly free labour, as we’ve seen, can be highly exploitative. The abolitionists’ opponents in the 19th century argued that it was hypocritical of William Wilberforce and the others to demand freedom for enslaved Blacks, when their White ‘factory slaves’ endured such grinding poverty and poor conditions. I suspect Haqiqatjou looks back on Islamic slavery as a time, that actually didn’t exist, when loyal slaves worked for caring, paternalistic masters. One of the British ambassadors to Zanzibar and Pemba in the later 19th century argued that the British government should not bother about demanding the abolition of slavery there because it was so benign and gradually dying out. But it didn’t, and the resentments of the enslaved Africans grew until there was a rebellion in the 1920s in which the ruling Arab class was massacred.
As for Haqiqatjou’s bizarre statement that ‘owning a person is better than renting a person’, this shows his ignorance about the issue. In free labour, the employer rents the worker’s labour. He does not rent the worker. It’s a fine, but important point.
Now I believe that genuine freedom comes with true democratic rights – the right to elect one’s rulers, serve on juries and negotiate with employers over wages and conditions. Which means the right to form trade unions and other professional associations, which Conservatives and Libertarians hate, because their interpretation of freedom is just freedom for the bosses, not the workers. But freedom begins with personal freedom – the freedom to do exactly as one wishes away from work, regardless of the views of one’s master, and not to be tied to one employer. Haqiqatjou, it seems, would like to end that, just as he would like to end secular law and government.
Now I think Haqiqatjou is almost certainly an extreme case. I doubt many western Muslims would want to see the return of slavery. Even the Saudis officially ended it in 1964 or so, although it still goes on in private and foreign workers are treated as slaves under the sponsorship system. I read somewhere that the Mullahs in Iran briefly considered bringing it back after the Islamic Revolution, but they decided against it. And there are certainly Muslims in the West who very strongly oppose views like his.
Unfortunately, liberal, modern Muslims are given no support in their struggles against the hardliners, and there certainly does seem to be a double standard amongst western liberals towards intolerant, repressive Islam. At the moment the west is going through paroxysms of guilt about its historic involvement in the slave trade. I realise that there are a few extremists out there, who would like to have it brought back. They are tiny minority who are rightly marginalised and attacked for their views. But it seems that their Muslim counterparts with deeply unpleasant views, like Haqiqatjou, are free to express similar views and no-one says anything against them.
This has to change.Fighting Islamic intolerance does not equal Islamophobia or fighting Islam. It is defending democracy and freedom, not all of whose enemies are White or somehow virtuous because they’re people of colour.
The Apostate Prophet is an ex-Muslim atheist YouTuber, who posts videos criticising and attacking Islam, as well as religion in general and occasionally other faiths such as Christianity and Hinduism. His main concern is the human rights abuses committed in the name of Islam in places such as Pakistan, where blasphemy carries the death penalty, for which people have been arrested and murdered. I am very definitely not an atheist, and I don’t support his farewell at the end of each video, ‘Stay away from Islam’. Islam isn’t my religion, but it’s by no means monolithic and not all Muslims by far are fanatical supporters of Islamic theocracy. I don’t want Muslim readers of this blog to feel unwelcome, or to spread even more baseless fear of perfectly innocent people because of their religion. But he has today posted a video explaining why the Taliban have had such success retaking power in Afghanistan.
He argues that the western occupation has failed because the majority of Afghans favour Islamic law, citing Pew research and polling by the Asia Foundation Survey. A Pew poll in 2017 found that 99 per cent of Afghans questioned supported sharia law. In similar research four years earlier in 2013, the pollster found that only 30 per cent of Afghans believed that women should decide for themselves if they wanted to wear the veil. In other words, 70 per cent felt that it should be compulsory. The polls also found that 96 per cent felt that it was obligatory to spread Islam to others, 79 per cent wanted apostates from Islam to be punished with death, and 85 per cent wanted stoning as the punishment for adultery. The Asia Foundation Survey of 2020 found that 65 per cent of those polled were willing to accept a peace deal with the Taliban in which they formed the majority government.
He therefore argues that it has been a useless waste of time and money trying to impose a western way of life on a country and its people, who simply don’t want it. He states very clearly that he believes that America should keep out of Islamic countries that don’t want western values and government. He states that in the case of Afghanistan, he’d change his mind if the majority, or even less than half of the population, actually wanted western style freedom and democracy. But they don’t. As a result, the Taliban has been successful because the Afghan people have largely been very close to them in their religious views and support for strict sharia law.
As horrific as the Taliban are, I think that he is correct. Afghanistan has been an Islamic state for centuries, and secular government is only very recent and fundamentally opposed by many of the country’s own people. As a result, the democratic government set up by the west was always dependent on the west’s military support, which explains its collapse the moment the American troops left.
We should not be invading other nations to impose our values and style of government on peoples that don’t want them. Especially, as I believe, when the construction of such democracy is merely a pretext for the looting of these nations simply for the profit of western multinationals.
Yesterday, Mike put up a piece reporting that Boris Johnson, the raging, incompetent blond beast now in charge of the government, has appointed Priti Patel as his home secretary. And she supports the reintroduction of the death penalty.
I’m not surprised. Johnson is a man of the Tory hard right, and there’s a section of the British public that has been demanding the return of the death penalty for years. I think support for capital punishment is probably spread between both parties, but I’m reasonably sure it’s much stronger in the Conservatives. This is the party that, after all, tries to project itself as the party of law and order and keeps demanding tougher sentencing for criminals. And that includes the death penalty for murder. It’s clear that Bozza is now very much appealing to that constituency with his appointment of Patel, although he himself won’t say whether he favours it himself.
I very well understand why some people want it back. There are unrepentant criminals responsible for the most sickening crimes, who do make you feel that they should pay the ultimate penalty. Like the Nazis at Nuremberg, who planned and presided over the horrific murder and torture of millions of individuals and the proposed extermination of entire races. Before Eichmann was executed he said something about regret and remorse being for the weak and inferior. Himmler in a notorious speech to the SS at the death camps actually boasted about the horrors they were committing, claiming that it was deeply moral and that though it was hard unpleasant, they would come through it with the moral character intact, still pure. With such twisted morality, such deep evil, you feel that death really is too good for them. And the same with serial killers and child murderers, like the Moors Murderers.
But as Mike showed in his piece, there are very, very strong arguments against capital punishment. Not least is the fact that innocent people have been convicted of murder in gross miscarriages of justice. This was Ian Hislop’s argument in a clip from Question Time he put up in his article, in which the editor of Private Eye mopped the floor with Patel. Hislop said that over the years his magazine had uncovered many such cases, and that if we had had the death penalty, then the people wrongfully convicted would be dead. He also pointed out that if we had it, we would also have turned some very unpleasant people into martyrs. By that, he means the various terrorists that have shot and bombed their way across Britain since the return of Irish nationalist terrorism in the 1970s. And some of those convicted of Irish Republican terrorist offences were victims of the miscarriage of justice. Like the Birmingham Six, who were wrongfully jailed for the Birmingham pub bombings. If these men had been executed for the crime, not only would the British state have killed innocent people, but that fact would have been picked up and strenuously broadcast by the IRA as yet more evidence of British oppression. And the Islamist terrorists responsible for 7/7 and other outrages see themselves as shahids – martyrs for Islam. At one level, executing them would be giving them exactly what they want. And their deaths would be used by the other zealots for propaganda, as righteous Muslims going to their eternal reward for killing the kufar.
All Patel could do in the face of this argument was bluster about being absolutely sure of the accused’s guilt before sentencing. That’s right – judges were obliged to point out to juries in murder cases during capital punishment that if they had any doubt whatsoever, they should not convict. But as Hislop then went to argue, innocent people were still convicted even with the weight of the burden of proof. And then Patel fell back on the old canard that it acted as a deterrent. There’s no evidence of that. A friend of mine, who’d actually read Pierrepoint’s memoirs, told me that Britain’s last hangman had said that in his experience, it didn’t act as a deterrent at all. According to Peter Hitchens, who is very much one of the law and order brigade – he’d like to see people jailed for drunkenness, for example – Pierrepoint changed his mind about this just before he died. But I think the evidence is that it doesn’t. In fact, it seems to encourage violence. I can remember reading in article in one of the papers back in the ’90s – the FT perhaps, or the Independent – that there’s actually a rise in violent incidents around the time of executions in the US. The article said that it was almost as though people felt that if the state could inflict violence, so could they.
I’d also argue that there are some murderers, who should be punished, but who also can be rehabilitated. When I was working as a volunteer at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, some of my co-workers were convicts at the end of their sentence. They were working towards being finally paroled and released back into the community. It was quite an experienced working with these people. Although they were murderers, they weren’t monsters. They were articulate, and often creative and highly educated. Some were so inoffensive, you wondered what circumstances led to them committing their crime. I realise that the people I knew may not be entirely representative. The Museum only took those who were genuinely willing to work there, rather than just exploit the system. And I am not suggesting for a single minute that murder should be treated leniently. I am merely arguing that there are some people responsible for this crime, who can be usefully rehabilitated after their punishment. And there may well be mitigating circumstances in individual cases that should rule out the death penalty.
And sometime, letting a murderer live and contemplate his guilt can be more terrible than simply killing them. One of the priests at my local church in south Bristol was a prison chaplain. He told us once how a murderer in one of the prisons in which he ministered told him one day, that he had no idea how difficult it was for the prisoner to live with the knowledge of what he’d done.
Way back in the 12th century, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the cleric who wrote the constitution for the Knights Templars, once saved a murderer from execution. He had him taken down from the scaffold. When the crowd objected, he told them he was going to take the man to do something far harder than simply being killed, and led him off to become a monk. This was during the great age of monastic reform, when life in some of the new orders being founded was very hard.
Many of the early Christians under the Roman Empire also had very strong views against the judicial system and its punishments. They objected to the death penalty, because Our Lord had been unjustly condemned to death by the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Christians had no choice but to adopt and become responsible for the trial and punishment of criminals. But some bishops and clergy remained firmly against it to the end. One clergyman stated that he could not see how any Christian could have a man tortured or sentenced to death, and then lie back in ease and luxury on cushions afterwards. The Christians, who object to the death penalty are heirs to this tradition.
The reintroduction of the death penalty cannot be justified, not least because of the very real danger of wrongful conviction. By appointing Patel, one of its supporters, Johnson has shown how amoral he is in pandering to such vindictive populism. He, Patel and the other horrors in his cabinet are an affront to British justice. Get them out!
Pat Mills is the creator of 2000 AD, the Galaxy’s greatest comic, and the co-creator of many of the favourite characters in modern British comics, like Judge Dredd and Slaine, as well as the creator of the anti-war comic strip, Charley’s War, in the British war comic, Battle. Crisis was an explicitly political strip Mills’ launched in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Its ‘Third World War’ strip tackled the politics of food and the exploitation of the Developing World. Mills was also not afraid to tackle other controversial subjects. He was contacted by Amnesty International to do a story about the oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis. He did, and inevitably the Board of Deputies of British Jews complained about anti-Semitism.
Mills is absolutely no kind of racist or anti-Semite, as you can tell by reading his strips. Many of them tackled racism and bigotry. The mutant heroes of Strontium Dog, for example, were forbidden by law to pursue any other job except bounty hunter, and were kept isolated from the non-mutated rest of humanity in ghettoes. And under the dictator Nelson Bunker Kreelman, there was an organised campaign by the British authorities to wipe them out. The Nemesis the Warlock strip was also a metaphorical treatment of racial and religious persecution. The villain of this strip, Torquemada, named after the head of the Spanish Inquisition, was the grand master of a feudal order thousands of years in Earth’s future, who were dedicated to exterminating all intelligent alien life. The treatment of the issues were metaphorical, but they had their basis in their bigotry and intolerance that has marred human history.
Mills describes the incident on page 155 of his book Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! 2000AD and Judge Dredd: The Secret History:
There were many more ordinary hero stories I would have loved to have produced. Eventually, Amnesty commissioned me to write an Amnesty issue of Crisis. And there were also plans for me [to] do something with Campaign Against Arms Trade. For Amnesty, I wrote about the death penalty in South Africa and Palestinian youth in the Gaza Strip. Both were illustrated by Sean Phillips. One Palestinian kid was so beaten up by the Israeli forces, Sean showed him lying there with his legs and arms a twisted angles.
When it appeared, the watchdog organisation, the Jewish Board of Deputies, complained to Robert Maxwell that this kid’s limbs were in the shape of a swastika. No concern about the kid himself. Or no interest in the story: a damning indictment of the brutality of the Israeli forces. It was like the Board were looking at faces in the fire and seeing what they wanted to see. But they couldn’t try their usual anti-Semitic allegations, which often successfully shuts us all up, because the three key organisers on the project were Jewish. Sara Selwood, Dan Green and Igor Goldkind. They couldn’t all be dismissed as self-haters. Surprisingly, Robert Maxwell, of all people, and hardly a self-hater either, told the Board to get lost. I can get behind his response.
This is the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which is now backing the fake anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn, and which, along with the Jewish Labour Movement, is now moaning about how he’s not really serious about tackling anti-Semitism. Because instead of meeting them, he went off to spend a Passover seder with Jewdas, a left-wing Jewish religious group instead. Which to me shows how pompous and arrogant they are, in claiming that they alone speak for the British Jewish community, when there are many other Jewish groups like Jewdas, who have put their full support behind the Labour leader.
Mills also goes on to describe how he also tackled other controversial topics in the strip, such as the British suppression of the Mau Mau in Kenya. Drawn by John Hicklenton, one of the artists who drew Nemesis the Warlock, the strip was so horrifying that the staid printers threatened not to print it. ‘But’, writes Mills, ‘we got it through and I’m proud to have shed light on at least one aspect of our country’s evil colonial past.’ (pp.155-6).
This would have been very controversial when it appeared, especially as many of the documents were still classified until only a decade or so ago. The British army’s repression of the Mao Mao was indeed horrific, with internment, torture, mutilation and massacre. There’s a book about it, Africa’s Secret Gulags, and a few years ago a group of former Kenyan internees won a court case against the British government for what they had suffered at the hands of the army. This is one of a number of areas where comics in the 1980s did tackle contemporary politics, and stood up for the poor, marginalised and oppressed in Thatcher’s Britain.
I’m not sure Mills would have been so lucky with the strip on Palestine today, though. As we’ve seen, the Israel Lobby now has absolutely no qualms about smearing whole masses of decent, self-respecting Jews as self-hating anti-Semites, as well as respectable, sincerely anti-racist non-Jews. This is utterly despicable, and it’s disgraceful that the Board should be a willing party to such foul libels.
There’s been some coverage here in the west of the underground Christian church in China. China’s a Communist state, and although religion has been allowed to re-emerge after its ferocious persecution under Mao, it is heavily regulated. There’s an official church, which has to agree to and abide by the various conditions set down by the Communist authorities. Alongside this is a growing underground church, that meets in secret and is heavily persecuted because it is outside the control of the Communist party.
Fewer people, however, are aware that there’s also a growing underground church in Iran. The Anglican church in Tehran, which is recognised and tolerated, is remarkable for a Christian church in a Middle Eastern, Islamic country, in that most of its members are indigenous Iranians. About three per cent of the Iranian population is composed of Armenian Christians, who have their own churches. But outside these official, tolerated churches, there is a secret church of indigenous Iranians, who are turning from Islam to Christ. Apostasy is banned under Islamic, sharia law. The penalty has traditionally been death, although some law schools were of the opinion that the death penalty could only be imposed if the apostate then blasphemed against Islam. Other legal scholars stated that the apostate from Islam should be imprisoned for three days so that they could reconsider their decision to abandon Islam. If they repented during this time, they would be spared. This means that those Iranians converting to Christianity do so at the risk of their own lives. They are savagely persecuted and imprisoned. At the same time, the Iranian authorities surround the Armenian churches with armed police to make sure that only Armenians go there to worship. The Armenians have adopted a series of tactics to help their Iranian co-religionists avoid the police. One of these is teaching them a few words or phrases of Armenian, so that they can pass themselves off as Armenian Christians, and so avoid arrest, imprisonment and torture.
This isn’t widely known in the West, and I don’t think this is an accident. America is a profoundly religious country, but I think the support of religious freedom by the American military-industrial complex is, and has always been, cynically utilitarian. There was a massive campaign of Christian evangelism and preaching in America itself during the Cold War. You think of all the extreme right-wing Christian movements that emerged in the 50s, like Moral Re-Armament, and so on, that were dedicated not just to spreading Christianity, but also combatting Communism. Or, for that matter, just about any other left-wing, progressive movement. Even if it was led by other Christians. Communism is an aggressively materialistic political system. Marx actually wrote little about religion, beyond his famous words that it was ‘the opium of the people’, but he certainly believed his system was an extension of the materialist doctrines of the ancient world and the Enlightenment philosophes. He took over their critique of religion and that of Ludwig Feuerbach, which viewed religion as a projection of humanity’s own alienated essence, and extended it. Lenin himself was bitterly anti-religious, and the persecution of religious believers – Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, the followers of indigenous shamanic religions and so on – was state policy in many Communist countries.
Hence the promotion of Christianity and the defence of religious freedom against a persecuting, literally Satanic, evil empire was a useful ideological tool for the capitalist leaders of society during the Cold War. Thus much of the religious literature published during the Cold War stressed the anti-Christian nature of Communism to the point where this overshadowed the other atrocities and crimes against human rights committed by these regimes. Such as the artificial famines Stalin created during the collectivisation of agriculture, the deportation of ethnic minorities to Siberia and the persecution of dissenting socialist and Communist intellectuals.
But very little is said about the persecution of the underground Iranian church. And I don’t think this is an accident. I think it’s because it doesn’t serve American geopolitical interests, and those of its allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. China’s a Communist country, and so atheism is the official state dogma, even if it is not as rigorously enforced as it has been. But Iran and the other Middle Eastern countries are religious states to a greater or lesser degree. And American foreign policy in the Middle East has consisted of supporting theocratic and Islamic fundamentalist regimes and movements against secular Arab nationalism or socialism, as these are seen as too close to Communism. Hence the hostility to Gamal Nasser’s Egypt, which was socialist, but not Communist. In the case of Saudi Arabia, America and the West forged an alliance that goes back to the 1920s. In return for the right to exploit the country’s oil, America and the West pledged themselves to support the country and its rulers. Saudi Arabia is an extremely intolerant state, where the only permitted religion is Wahhabi Islam. No other religions are tolerated. There are indigenous Shi’a Muslims, but they are also savagely persecuted. Their villages do not have running water or electricity, and their religious literature and holy books will be confiscated if they are discovered by the authorities. A few years ago the Grand Mufti, the religious head of Saudi Arabia, declared that the Shi’a were heretics ‘worthy of death’, a chilling endorsement of religious genocide. And the Shi’a aren’t the only non-Wahhabi community to be subjected to his prayers for pious violence. The other year he also led prayers calling on Allah to destroy Jews and Christians.
Saudi Arabia is one of the main sponsors of Islamist terrorism. It is not Iran, nor Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. 17 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and the trail from them goes all the way to the top of Saudi society. They were active sponsors of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which became the Taliban. The current Saudi king and his head of intelligence were also responsible for funding and aiding al-Qaeda and ISIS in their attacks on the other Islamic nations of the region. In continuing to support Saudi Arabia, America, Britain and the other western countries are supporting a viciously intolerant state that persecutes other religions, including Christians.
The other pillar of western interests and foreign policy in the Middle East is Israel. Israel is a White, European/American settler state, and it looks towards Europe and America rather than the Middle East. And it’s also religiously intolerant. The official state religion is Orthodox Judaism. Israel defines itself as the Jewish state, and the Law of Return stipulates that only Jews may become citizens. The Israeli government has also repeatedly refused calls to allow the Palestinians, who fled the country in 1948 fearing massacre by the Israelis to return, as this would upset the ethnic composition of the country. At the same time the Israeli state has pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, expelling and massacring the indigenous Palestinian population. And this includes Christians.
Before the foundation of Israel in 1948, 25 per cent of the population of Palestine was Christian. Now it’s only one per cent. The literature on the dwindling Christian community states that this is because of pressure from both Israel and Islam. The Christian community has suffered persecution from Muslims, as they are seen as traitors, even though many Palestinian Christians are as bitterly opposed to the Israeli occupation as their compatriots. However, other historians have also pointed out that traditionally, Muslims and Christians coexisted peacefully in Palestine. In one of the papers on Israel and Palestine in Albert Hourani’s book, The Modern Middle East, it is stated that Muslim Palestinians traditionally regarded Christian churches as mawsin, an Arabic term which means holy, sacrosanct, and were thus treated with respect. Palestinian Christians, however, have complained about their treatment by the Israeli authorities. Special permits are required before new churches may be built, and the authorities are not keen to give them.
And like Muslims, Christians have also been attacked by Israeli racist extremists. A little while ago a Christian monastery in Israel was the subject of a price-tag attack by Israeli extremists. The price-tag attacks are acts of destruction in retaliation for Palestinian attacks on Jews or Jewish property. They’re called ‘price-tag’ because the attackers leave a mock price-tag behind giving some cost for the damage done. The Israeli authorities were keen to distance their country from the attack, and tried to present it as somehow unique. But I got the distinct impression that this is far from the case. About ten or so years ago Channel 4 screened a programme by a Black presenter, in which he went to Israel and covered the maltreatment of Christians there. This included an attempt by a group of Orthodox Jews to terrorise the members of a church of Messianic Jews. In fact, the Messianic Jews were saved by the Muslim doorman, who effectively blocked the Orthodox posse from coming in. And the programme gave the impression that this was actually quite common, and that it was frequently Muslims, who saved Christians from violence at the hands of Jewish settlers.
This is all kept very hidden from the American Christian public. The tours of Israel arranged by right-wing Christian Zionist groups in America and the Israeli authorities will not allow American or western Christians to meet their Palestinian co-religionists. And while there’s a considerable amount of information on the web about Israeli intolerance and persecution of Christians, in the mainstream western media it is always presented as the fault of Muslims. And the right-wing press, such as the Times and Telegraph, have published any number of articles presenting Israel as the protector of the region’s Christians, often with quotes from a Christian Arab to that effect. Thus the Christian Zionist right in America are supporting a state, which has expelled the majority of its indigenous Christians from its borders and continues to limit their freedom of worship. Just as it does Muslims.
Some of the motivation behind this Christian Zionism is based in apocalyptic theology. Christian Zionism started in the 19th century, when some Christians decided that they wanted to refound the ancient state of Israel in order to bring about Christ’s Second Coming. This now includes a final battle between good and evil. This used to be between the forces of capitalism and Communism, but has now morphed into the forces of the Christian West and Israel versus Islam. At the same time, the American Conservatives started supporting Israel in compensation for the defeats America had suffered in the Vietnam War, so that American Christian leaders declared that the Israelis shared their values.
I also think there’s an element of religious imperialism here as well. In the 19th century British explorers to other parts of the Christian world, including Greece when it was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, and Abyssinia, declared that these nations’ traditional churches were backwards and obstacles to their peoples’ advancement. They therefore recommended that they should be destroyed, and the Greeks, Ethiopians or whoever should embrace one of the western forms of Christianity instead. it wouldn’t surprise me if the same attitude permeated American Zionist Christian attitudes towards Middle Eastern Christians. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the same kind of Christian fundamentalist pastors, who rant about how ‘Satanic’ Roman Catholicism is, also don’t believe that the ancient churches of the Middle East – the Syriac and Coptic Churches – are also not really Christian.
Thus American imperialism, and the Christian Zionists in the case of Israel, are supporting states dedicated to removing the indigenous Christian communities from their parts of the Middle East.
And American Christians are more fervent in their Zionism than American Jews. Norman Finkelstein has repeatedly stated and demonstrated how American Jews were traditionally uninterested in Israel. And Tony Greenstein, a Jewish British critic of Zionism, has also shown that the majority of Jews around the world wished to remain in the Diaspora, but live as equal, respected citizens of the countries in which they were born. There are a growing number of Jewish Americans, who despise Israel because of the way it persecutes its indigenous Arab population. This includes Jews, who have suffered genuine anti-Semitism abuse and violence.
Within Israel itself, there is opposition to the official religious policy of the state. There is a sizable minority that would like a total separation between synagogue and state. Other Israelis don’t go this far, but do want Israel to become more secular. And there is tension between Reform Jews, and the Orthodox, who do not regard their theologically more liberal co-religionists to be proper Jews, and may even regard them as anti-Jewish.
But American Conservatives are unable or unwilling to understand Middle Eastern Christians, or why they would not want to support Israel. A few years ago Ted Cruz addressed a meeting of Middle Eastern Christians in America. This went well, until he started urging them to support Israel, at which point he was surprised to find that he was being booed. Part of his speech urged them to support the Israelis, because of the terrible persecution of Jews in the past. But the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected this argument, pointing out that they are being persecuted by the Israelis because of the way Europeans persecuted Jews. Cruz walked off, making comments about anti-Semitism, if I recall correctly. He failed to understand that to his audience, the Israelis were those doing the persecuting.
And this ignorance and the views and political situation of indigenous Middle Eastern Christians seems to be common to elite America. It’s shown by Trump’s decision to relocate the American embassy to Jerusalem, which has been supported by the leader of the Democrats in Congress, Chuck Schumer, and Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton. All of whom will stress their identity as Christians when it suits them.
It isn’t just rising Islamism and Muslim intolerance in the Middle East that is a threat to the indigenous Christian communities there. It is also American imperialism, and the country’s alliance with the ethnic and religiously intolerant regimes of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Thus, the media only covers Christian persecution when they can blamed it on Islam, But when it’s awkward for the American, and western military-industrial complex, the media is silent about it.
Peter Hitchens is somewhat of a political maverick. He started his political career as a Trotskyite, before gradually abandoning Marxism and embracing Conservativism. He’s not a supporter of gay marriage, although he admits that opposing it is a lost battle. He supports the reintroduction of the death penalty, the return of grammar schools and more stringent punishments as a deterrent to crime. He’s also very strongly anti-cannabis.
Against that, he has opposed the selling off of council houses and does not believe that private firms should run prisons, as the maintenance of justice and its machinery of punishment and correction should be the exclusive preserve of the state. He got up the nose of his editors at the Mail of Sunday for persistently referring to David Cameron as ‘Mr Slippery’, or similar derogatory names.
And he absolutely despises Blair, whom he terms ‘the Blair creature’, for his invasion of the Middle East. Hitchens has made it very clear in his column that he loathes Blair for sending so many courageous men and women to their deaths in an illegal conflict.
And he is also very definitely not going along with the current Beeb propaganda against the Russians over the war in Syria.
This short video of his appearance last year on the Andrew Marr Show by Scot TV, Hitchens refuses to go along with the general condemnation of the Russians for bombing Aleppo. He makes the point that the al-Nusra Front, whom we are now being told to support by our government and media, are Islamist terrorists, and a form of al-Qaeda. He states that the footage we see of noble white helmeted rebels rescuing the injured victims of Assad and Putin is propaganda footage. We are not allowed into those areas, so we don’t see what’s really going on. Also, we are not shown the horrors that our shelling and attacks, or those of the rebels we are currently backing, have perpetrated on Assad’s supporters.
Hitchens is absolutely correct, but his stating this horrifies Marr’s two other guests.
In recent months there have been well-documented reports of the supposed heroic rebels massacring those trying to flee rebel-held areas. In the last incident, a suicide bomber scattered crisps and food in front of train, so that the children of those fleeing would first leap out of the train to scrabble for them. He killed 68 people. 12 of these were kids.
There has also been the suggestion that the victims of the poison gas attack, which was falsely blamed once again on Assad, were in fact pro-government villagers kidnapped by the rebels, and then killed by them, their bodies then used as macabre props for a very nasty piece of propaganda.
And the rebels have also faked poison gas attacks several times in order to draw America into the war, setting of chemical weapons themselves as ‘false flag’ attacks.
Hitchens is very much a member of the Tories, but I respect his integrity and independence on this issue. Just as I like him for his manifest disrespect to David Cameron, although his reasons may not be the same as mine.
He is absolutely right about Syria, and it is refreshing to see him speak in contradiction of the lies and propaganda we are being fed by the government and news media.
After the Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, here’s another Arturo Ui figure in this country, whose racial populism should be opposed. Paul Nuttall, who looks to me like Ade Edmondson as the stupid, vulgar and violent hooligan Eddie Hitler in his and Rik Mayall’s comedy series, Bottom, has just become head of UKIP. And Hope Not Hate have today put up ten good reasons why decent people should oppose him and his party. Here’s their list of 10 reasons, with a few of my comments underneath.
1. He has strongly supported Farage’s ‘Breaking Point’ billboard. That was the party’s advert that showed a line long of immigrants supposedly queuing up to get into Europe. It aroused strong criticism because it was almost identical to a Nazi poster, showing the lines of eastern European Jews, who they accused of threatening to overrun western civilisation.
2. He believes there is a secret coordinated Muslim plot to become a majority in Europe.
The Islamophobic right has been claiming that this is the case for years, despite demographic evidence to the contrary. It’s called ‘Eurabia’, and is based on the belief that Muslim birthrates are so far ahead of White European population growth that within one or two generations we’ll be a minority in our own countries. It’s a nasty, vicious lie, and one that has been exploited by the hatemongers in the Fascist right. There’s a propaganda movie on YouTube that shows pictures of street fighting and a Europe in flames, which claims that this is what will happen to Europe by the ’20s, when there will be a civil war between Muslims and their Leftist allies on one side, and ‘patriots’ – read: Nazis, on the other. There was a scandal in Wiltshire about a year or so ago, when one of the Kippers in that county made a speech, or series of speeches, claiming that this would happen. This was rightly greeted with so much outrage that the politico had to resign.
3. In a speech in the European Parliament, Nuttall labelled the response of the EU to the refugee crisis as “freedom of movement of Jihad”.
Which is the same argument Trump uses to support his ban on Muslim immigration: some of them might be terrorists. Despite the fact that, as they’re refugees, jihad is the reason they’re fleeing the Middle East.
4. He wants to ban the burqa.
One of the reasons this needs to be resisted is that it gives the state the power to dictate religious observances, which should be a matter of individual choice, contravening the human right to freedom of religion. And if it can be done to Muslims, it can be extended to other religious or philosophical groups.
5. Nuttall has called for the NHS to be privatised.
To support this, the article in Hope Not Hate has a link to this video below, by the National Health Action party, where Nuttall calls it a ‘monolithic hangover from days gone by’. This alone is an excellent reason for shunning Nuttall and his wretched party.
6. He wants a 31% flat rate of tax, meaning the rich pay far less.
7. He wants prison conditions to be made deliberately worse and the 1967 Criminal Justice Act to be abolished.
Despite the constant refrains of the likes of the Heil and Express, prisons are grim places. The Mirror this morning carried a report on the rising number of suicides in British prisons, which are far more than those outside. And Private Eye has regularly carried news stories in its ‘In The Back’ column about young offenders committing suicide, or being beaten to death by the other inmates, sometimes in adult jails. Does Nuttall really more useless and avoidable deaths in prison? It’s also unsurprising that he also wants the return of the death penalty, which Hope Not Hate points out would mean that Britain would share the same attitude towards crime as Belarus, a military dictatorship.
8. Nuttall believes climate change is a “hair-brained theory”.
It’s also not going to surprise anyone that he’s also another supporter of fracking.
9. Was one of only 14 MEPs to vote against a crackdown on the illegal ivory trade.
People have been concerned about the devastation of elephant populations in Africa, thanks to the illegal ivory trade since at least the 1990s. A few years ago I think one of the royals even suggested that objects made from ivory before the international ban date should be junked as a deterrent to the poachers by making ivory absolutely unsaleable. Clearly, this view is not shared by Nuttall, who obviously is no fan of conservation and protecting the environment.
10. Opposes same-sex marriage.
This seems to be the bog-standard, default position of the majority of Kippers. Or at least, those who open their mouths.
All of this just shows that, not only is Nuttall deeply bigoted, and his party opposed to many of the institutions, not least the NHS, which have made Britain a healthy, tolerant society, but it also bears out what Tom Pride and many other bloggers have also shown: that the Kippers aren’t offering anything new, or different, but are the extreme right of the Tory party.
With Hillary Clinton looking like she’s going to be the Democrat candidate for the Whitehouse, The Empire File’s Abby Martin takes a good, long look at what Hillary really represents in this video. And it’s ugly. Very ugly.
Hillary’s campaign is heavily backed by corporate donors. These are most notoriously the Wall Street banks she has bailed out, including Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, but also the private prison industry, the pharmaceuticals, private healthcare, private schools and just about every other fat cat big multinational. Contributors to the Clinton Foundation have included the Saudis and Victor Pinchuk, the oligarch now partly responsible for turning Ukraine, the home of Gogol, Mussorgsky, and Nestor Makhno (for the Anarchists out there) into a post-Soviet banana republic. She’s also supported fracking and the NAFTA agreement that has outsourced jobs from America, as well as destroyed the industries of the other countries that have signed it.
While Bernie Sanders is the people’s candidate, Hillary’s been helped out by the system of superdelegates that the Democrats put in place way back in the 1980s to stop popular, populist candidates coming through. The votes of these privileged individuals vastly outweigh those of the ordinary delegates. And 1/3 of Hillary’s are unsurprisingly drawn from big business.
Hillary’s political history may also be described as ‘chequered’. This would be a euphemism. She started out as a Republican, campaigning for Barry Goldwater, the notorious pro-Segregation candidate. She’s tried to shrug this off as a case of personal naivety, but her activism on his behalf came after the initial peaceful protests, the freedom bus rides. She was part of the Republican reaction.
Her career in the Democrats has been untainted with racism either. The Democrats lost the Southern White vote after they embraced a minimal welfare establishment – medicare and Medicaid – and desegregation. Bill and Hillary attempted to reverse this, and win back White voters by launching the New Democrats in the ’70s and ’80s. These had an anti-welfare, pro-death penalty stance, calculate to appeal to White voters. There was also a strong racist undercurrent to her rhetoric. The Clintons attacked ‘welfare queens’ and ranted about urban ‘superpredators’, feral young males, who in the media were almost always identified with Blacks. She’s tried to distance herself from her past there, apologising for what she claims was a poor choice of words. They weren’t poorly chosen. Quite the opposite. She knew precisely what she was doing.
As Bill and her also know what they’re doing to the poor peasants of the world under the guise of charitable assistance. They’ve set up an organisation to provide help to the peasant farmers of the Developing World, such as the people of Africa. But it’s not a charity. Far from it. It’s a for-profit organisations, and the big businesses that back it expect to get something back in return. It’s another way of enslaving the Developing World’s peasant farmers under the guise of assisting them.
The video also documents her hawkish attitudes to defence, from selling arms to the Saudis, helping organise a coup against a democratically elected government in Honduras, and most notoriously, supporting the invasion of Iraq. She also tried to distance herself from this decision, but history shows that she was strongly in favour of the Iraqi invasion and urged her nation to support George Bush. She has also been responsible for the carnage into which Libya has descended through arming the rebels, who overthrew and killed Colonel Gaddafy. She’s shown on TV laughing about Gaddafy’s execution. The result has been what everyone else warned her about – the emergence of an unstable state governed by Islamist militias. She also wants America to ramp up its presence in Afghanistan. Martin states that Hillary stands for perpetual war.
And most chillingly, Hillary has repeatedly stated that she’s in favour of war with Iran, including the use of nuclear weapons. Again, it’s hard to disagree with Martin when she says that this makes Hillary immensely dangerous, as a war with Iran would be much far-reaching than the Iraq invasion. Indeed it would. It’d be a recipe for global chaos, and would mean that America was effectively at war with the whole Shi’a Muslim world.
And Martin makes it very clear, that as a woman she rejects Hillary’s campaign to gain women’s votes, because she leaves out immigrant women, poor women, and the women of the nations she’s bombed. Here’s the video:
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