Bartholomew's Notes

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of right-wing think tanks, it’s now one year since Policy Exchange promised to pursue the BBC’s Newsnight “relentlessly, to trial or capitulation” if it dared to broadcast a report which Policy Exchange claimed was libellous. The report was broadcast on 12 December 2007, and was available on the BBC iPlayer for a week after that.

This means that is now too late to bring a claim of libel over the televised report; they could still go after written material on the BBC website, although at this stage that would be very lame.

More importantly, however, the fact that Policy Exchange failed to follow through is evidence that Dean Godson is full of it, and that the threat was made to try to bully the BBC into suppressing newsworthy information which Godson did not want in the public domain. Shameful, and a mockery of Policy Exchange’s supposed support for “libel reform”.

I last blogged on the dispute here.

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Let’s check out the latest from the website of “Global Anti-Terror Network” VIGIL.

Oh dear…

I previously blogged on VIGIL here and here. As regular readers will know, I’m no fan of Islamism, but that doesn’t mean any weird group that presents itself as “anti-terrorist” should be given a free pass – and there was much about VIGIL that seemed to me to undermine its credibility.

Dominic Whiteman, who was VIGIL’s “European Zone Director”, is now apparently at the Centre for Social Cohesion.

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As I have blogged several times over the past few months, the right-wing London Swinton Circle has been riven by factional strife, which has now led to there being two Circles of Swinton: one is led by Alan Harvey, while the other is chaired by a certain Allan Robertson. The latter groupsicle insists that Harvey has been expelled, while Harvey declares that he is now in charge of the “official” London Swinton Circle. A few weeks ago I noted that the Robertson faction’s website included a message directed at Harvey, berating him for getting into certain arguments and warning him not to “pass yourself as acting on behalf of the Swinton Circle or allow anyone else to do so”; that message has now been removed, and Harvey’s rival website (which has been running for some years) carries the notice that

An Emergency General Meeting of the London Swinton Circle, at which the crisis resulting from the events of July 22nd will be discussed and the appropriate decisions taken, is planned for next month…After this EGM it is anticipated that normal regular activities of the organisation will be resumed.

Unfortunately, however, he also promised that last month…

The Robertson faction website does now include a notice that

The London Swinton Circle is not associated or affiliated with “The Springbok Club”, nor does the Swinton Circle hold joint meetings with “The Springbok Club”.

Harvey, by contrast, tells us that there was another joint LSC-Springbok Club event in November:

…at which the guest of honour was Mr. Michael Shrimpton, the famous barrister and national security consultant. In his most revealing and powerful address Mr. Shrimpton told something about the international forces which lay behind the abandonment of the British Empire post-World War II, which culminated in the betrayal of Rhodesia, and also gave an in-depth account of some of the little-reported facts about those involved in the recent US Presidential Election.

There was also a “joint event” in October.

I have blogged on the Springbok Club in the past; as Alan Harvey himself puts it:

In a nutshell our policy can be summed up in one sentence: “We want our countries back, and believe this can now only come about by the re-establishment of civilised European rule throughout the African continent”.

The Springbok Club website also has a page dedicated to Harvey’s S.A. Patriot magazine, where he declares his support for “separate racial development” and “global white leadership”. A few indistinct sample covers are given; here’s an older one that Harvey removed from the site a while ago:

Clive Derby-Lewis is currently serving a life sentence for his part in the assassination of communist politican Chris Hani; he told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997 that his action was religiously motivated:

As a Christian, my first duty is to the Almighty God before everything else. We were fighting against communism, and communism is the vehicle of the Antichrist.

Despite Harvey’s far-right and racist background (he was also formerly in the National Front), the Springbok Club has had a stream of fairly high-profile speakers, although it is not here alleged that any of them were aware of the views propounded on the Springbok Club website, or that any of these speakers sympathise with Harvey’s opinions in any way.

However, some of the speakers are preposterous: the barrister Michael Shrimpton, for instance, boasts of how he “expose[d] propaganda operations such as the faked ‘hood’ Abu Ghraib photo”, which was supposedly created by the Syrian secret service. There’s also the disgraced ex-MP Neil Hamilton, who is shown on the Springbok Club website posing in front of the apartheid-era South African flag; Harvey tells us he “gave a riveting keynote speech in which he recalled his own fond memories of South Africa during the era of civilised rule” (that was in 1998; ten years on, as Oliver Kamm has noted, Hamilton and his wife appeared in a London pub performing a “camp cowboy act” as “second billing to a chain-wearing, whip-lashing S&M duo called Topping and Butch”).

Also on the list is the historian Andrew Roberts, who in 2007 half-heartedly – and vulgarly – threatened to sue journalist Johan Hari for “tens of thousands of pounds” for (among other things) suggesting in the New Republic that his praise for the Springbok Club reflected poorly on him; and Anthony LoBaido, who writes pieces on South Africa for WorldNetDaily.  Intriguingly, the Springbok Club website has also recently been updated to include the names of some past speakers which had previously not been publicised.

UPDATE: How’s this for timing? Hugh Muir in the Guardian reports on the latest from the Robertson faction of the Swinton Circle:

we see that in February, the Swintonites [Harvey] left behind will have as their guest speaker Alistair McConnachie, who, in 2001, triggered resignations from Ukip by writing to the Scottish press saying the Pope had been duped over the Holocaust. Clarifying his position, he later wrote, “I don’t accept that gas chambers were used to execute Jews for the simple fact there is no direct physical evidence to show that such gas chambers ever existed.” No one can guarantee similar controversy when he speaks, but we guess he won’t be dull.

There’s more on McConnachie here.

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As “Turmoil Continues Over Shoe-Throwing Incident” (as the media puts it), let us turn to Biblical scholar Kenneth Bailey for a bit of background:

Rengstorf also uses Ps. 60:8; “Upon Edom I cast my shoe,” as evidence of asserting ownership. Rather it is a very strong insult. At Assiut College in Egypt in the early sixties a young American teacher, inexperienced in Oriental attitudes towards shoes, woke a sleeping student one morning by throwing a shoe across the room at him. A thousand students rioted that day in protest over the “insult”. In public speech the speaker apologizes before using the word “shoes” in deference to its being nearly a four-letter word”. (1)

Lynne Long’s Translation and Religion adds (p. 164):

The shoe connotative meaning [of disrespect] is also used in the Iraqi Arabic expression ibn al-qundarah (son of a shoe) which is the cultural equivalent in English to ‘son of a bitch’.

As well as the famous shoe-beating of Saddam’s statue, a biography of Yasser Arafat by Barry and Judith Colp Rubin includes the detail that

The West Bank bureau of al-Jazira television was closed down for a time after a preview of a program on Lebanon’s civil war showed a demonstrator holding a pair of shoes over Arafat’s picture… (2)

President Qahtan Muhammad al-Shaabi of South Yemen was on the receiving end of a shoe-throwing crowd in Aden in 1968 (3), and in Bangladesh in 2006 lawyers threw shoes at a pair of Islamic militants who had been accused of killing two judges. According to Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328), followers of al-Arabi’s pantheist theology ought to be “beaten with shoes” (4); Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb recommends the same treatment for homosexuals (5).

Meanwhile, the Iraqi ambassador to the US has been keen to point out that the shoe-thrower is enjoying far better treatment than he would have done under Saddam Hussein; however, if it true that he has been beaten and is likely to be banged up for 15 years that is going to ring somewhat hollow. My view is that if you break the law to make a political protest you have to face consequences, but these surely have to be proportionate and civilised. Needless to say, you also have to be willing to be publicly associated with your political act forever after.

****

(1) Poet & Peasant ; And, Through Peasant Eyes, p. 186n.
(2) Yasir Arafat, p. 235.
(3) Ivor Lucas, A Road to Damascus, p. 91.
(4) Rafiq Zakaria, Discovery of God, pp. 182-3.
(6) Lamia Rustum Shehadeh, The Idea of Women in Fundamentalist Islam, p. 66.

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From Christian news-site OneNewsNow:

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, the president-elect said he will follow the tradition and use his full name — Barack Hussein Obama — when he takes the oath of office. “I think the tradition is that they [previous presidents] use all three names, and I will follow the tradition,” he said. “I’m not trying to make a statement one way or another. I’ll do what everybody else does.”

But best-selling author Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch thinks Obama’s statement is ironic in that throughout the campaign it was considered taboo to mention the Democratic candidate’s middle name.

“Because it was suggesting that he had some connection to Islam and to the Islamic world,” says Spencer. [And] now he’s exploiting the same thing. Although he says that it’s only because every president uses his full name when being sworn in and he’s simply going to follow that tradition, it does seem as if there’s a signal being given here that there’s more to it than that.”

I try to resist simply chronicling the utterances of demagogues, but sometimes one sees something so stupid and so lacking in good faith that it cannot pass unremarked.

We all remember the anti-Obama right’s election campaign efforts to create fear of Obama based on his middle name. The likes of Spencer and Walid Shoebat  insisted on either always giving Obama’s full name or writing formulations such as “B. Hussein Obama”. The claim of a “taboo” also appears on Politico; but just how many times did we hear about “John Sidney McCain”? Shoebat was typically dishonest  (and absurd) when he complained about the injustice that saying “Barack Hussein Obama” is not received the same way as “Hilary Rodham Clinton”, but we all know that “Rodham” is a surname rather than a middle name, and that it is a long-established part of of Clinton’s professional and public identity. Most people recognised that those who chose to emphasise “Hussein” were either crackpot obsessives or opportunists playing on prejudice and fear as a substitute for proper political argument. Even McCain understood that, which was why he scolded Bill Cunningham. If the name became a “taboo” – which is arguable – it was because anyone serious did not want to be associated with such a low tactic.

So what exactly is the “signal being given here” that Spencer believes follows from the fact that Obama is going to follow usual practice at the swearing-in ceremony? He doesn’t say, and the good Christians who run OneNewsNow don’t feel the need to ask. Spencer’s comment is vacuous, but presumably he’s now so surrounded by fawning anti-Muslim keyboard warriors that any old rubbish will do.

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Wikileaks has published a “Strictly Private and Confidential” letter it has received from British libel specialists Carter-Ruck concerning its re-publication of newspaper articles Nadhmi Auchi. However, I wouldn’t advise linking to it or discussing it too freely; it includes the warning that Wikileaks is “incurring liability” for hyperlinking to a Pentagon Report which has been “discredited” and to an article origjnally published in the Washington Times.

Carter-Ruck warns Wikileaks that unless it removes the offending material, Auchi “reserves the right” to bring a libel action in England. In some ways it would be nice to finally have a case which establishes once and for all whether hyperlinking does indeed incur liability, or whether an English High Court judge can grasp the technical pointlessness of such a restriction (except when a url itself contains a libellous statement). It would also be a good chance for the USA to showcase its new legal protections for US-based writers and publishers facing British libel actions.

Meanwhile, calls for libel law reform in the UK are getting louder, despite my pessimism of just a few days ago; today there was an adjournment debate in the House of Commons. Liberal Conspiracy reports:

The debate was initiated by Labour MP Denis MacShane, with support from Lib Dem Norman Lamb and Tory Michael Gove, (Gove is, of course, still a working journalist for the Times, and Denis MacShane is a former officer of the National Union of Journalists who regularly writes in the national media.

MacShane expressed his concern over libel tourism, which he described as ‘an international scandal which shames Britain’. He also proposed a ‘small claims court’ system for libel which would limit the amounts of fees totted up by lawyers in defamation cases, saying ‘the object [of defamation proceedings] is to gain correction and an apology, not to create a racket for lawyers’.

The idea of libel being settled as a “small claim” is one that I have strongly advocated. Another crucial reform, it seems to me, is to introduce a “public figure” distinction, as exists in the USA. This would include the sub-definition of “limited-purpose public figure”, who

is one who (a) voluntarily participates in a discussion about a public controversy, and (b) has access to the media to get his or her own view across.

That’s important for investigating the backgrounds of those involved in politics and political activism; it is unacceptable that someone who shoots off in a public debate on a subject can suppress discussion of controversial politically-related events in their past, as has happened more than once in the UK over the last couple of years.

Hopefully someone will raise these issues at the up-coming English PEN and Index on Censorship public inquiry into libel legislation.

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From the New York Times:

Is it libelous to falsely report that someone is not circumcised?

That question is at the heart of an unusual lawsuit filed in United States District Court in Brooklyn recently against Centropa, the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation, an oral-history project, based in Vienna and Budapest, that focuses on Jewish life and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.

In the lawsuit, John F. Singer, 49, of Queens, claims that Centropa published an online interview in 2005 that quoted his mother saying that neither of her sons had been circumcised as infants. Mr. Singer asserts that he told the center’s director, Edward Serotta, that he was, in fact, circumcised as an infant, and that Mr. Serotta approved the publication of the article containing the incorrect claim anyway.

A footnote in Leonard B. Glick’s 2005 Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America gives some background as to why Singer might feel cut up about this (p. 292-3):

In an analysis of talmudic regulations pertaining to men with damaged or incomplete genitals (called tumtum), [David] Kraemer in [Reading the Rabbis, p. 123]…shows that, in the minds of the rabbis, “the uncircumcised male, like the tumtum, is a person of ambiguous sexual identity…One who is uncircumcised is not only not fully Jewish but also not fully male…the uncircumcised Jewish male is not only barely a Jew – he is also, from the Jewish perspective, barely a male”.

In nineteenth-century America, Rabbi Abraham Rice ruled that (p. 143):

Such a boy or man was to be regarded as an alien…He could not be counted in the quorum of ten men (minyan) required for public prayer, and he and his neglectful parents were to be regarded as apostates with no share in “the world to come.” Only a hemophiliac whose two brothers had died after circumcision could be excused.

Contemporary physicians added the supposed detail that “pathological impulses originating in a long ‘irritable’ prepuce could travel everywhere from feet to brain” (p. 161).

(Hat tip: Bulldada Newsblog)

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Despite the recent exposé of children suffering in Africa due to witchcraft accusations and the subsequent outrage, there are still some true believers. One has just left a comment, suggesting that even I might be a witch. Over to Idongesit Elijah Okpombor (links added):

Yes Richard. I have read your reply to my mail some time ago. Well richard, some adults do prompt children to confess witchcraft, but not the child I told you about. She was not prompted to do so. The mother was tested and confirmed to be HIV positive alongside other ailments. When she was not responding to treatment, they decided to yield to the conditions the little girl gave and the woman came up alive. Now, Richard, I’m not writing this to convince you that children can be witches. I do not need to convince you for it to be true. Your not believing it does not change anything.

Something else you should know is that, children do not learn witchcraft. it is a possession in the spirit that a child contracts in many different ways, the most rampant being from edible products. You may not agree with any of these. At least, I know that the environment you find yourself has made you extremely ignorant of this.

Well, you say there are no child witches in the UK, Japan, etc. Richard, there are. That you’ve not heard of any yet, as rampant as it is in Africa, does not deny their existence. And You know something, witches always try to get people to believe that they do not exist, so they can perpetuate their secret wicked acts. And the way you sound, are you sure you aren’t one?

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Those of us who have looked across the Atlantic for a beacon of hope against oppressive UK libel laws will be disurbed by a new case. The Institute for Justice reports (links added):

In perhaps the most striking example of a disturbing national trend, Dallas developer H. Walker Royall has launched a lawsuit spree to silence any media or public affairs commentator who dares expose his [alleged] attempted abuse of eminent domain.  Similar suits have been filed in Tennessee, Missouri and elsewhere by developers and governments looking to silence critics of eminent domain for private gain.  

Royall worked with the city of Freeport, Texas, to try to condemn a generations-old shrimp business owned by the Gore family to make way for a luxury marina.  The project became the subject of the book, Bulldozed: “Kelo,” Eminent Domain, and the American Lust for Land, authored by veteran legal journalist Carla Main…After journalist Main wrote her book exposing the [alleged] Freeport land grab, Royall sued her as well as her publisher, Encounter Books, for defamation.  He even sued nationally renowned Law Professor Richard Epstein who wrote a blurb for the book’s dust jacket.  When someone reviewed the book, he sued him.  When two newspapers published that review, he sued them.

“Eminent domain” is known in the UK as “compulsory purchase”. Libertarian conservatives dislike it on the grounds that that it allows big government to infringe private property rights, although liberals will surely share concern that governments would prioritise the wishes of developers over less-powerful land-owners. And everyone will hopefully be equally appalled that libel law is again being used as a response to criticism.

As Ed Brayton notes, conservative libertarian attorney Timothy Sandefur has some commentary on this:

This is an absurd violation of freedom of expression. Mr. Royall is clearly a “public figure” under the Supreme Court’s decisions in cases like Gertz v. Robert Welch and New York Times v. Sullivan, which means he can’t use accusations of libel to shut down criticism of him. But I suppose if you have contempt for private property rights, it isn’t hard to also have contempt for freedom of expression. Mr. Royall’s lawsuit is an outrage: a clear violation of the First Amendment, and a frivolous abuse of the legal process.

Our friends at the Institute for Justice have taken on the defense of Ms. Main and Prof. Epstein…

That’s nice, but what if Main and Epstein had not been able to secure the support of this organisation? Royall’s claim may be “absurd”, but such a strategy could still cause someone a lot of misery and stress – even in America.

Incidentally, the “public figure” distinction is one basic reform we could do with in the UK. But momentum for reform is slow  in the UK; and while in the USA we see true libertarians opposing the use of libel laws in the name of free speech,  in the UK right pseudo-libertarians are quite happy to make libel action threats themselves to shut down debate.

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James M. Hutchens’ Christian Zionist “Jerusalem Connection” has sent out another e-newsletter, this time promoting an article by Michael Freund, founder of  Shavei Israel. According to Freund:

More than five centuries after the expulsion and forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jewry, the results of a new genetic study might just spur a return of historic proportions to Israel and the Jewish people. In a paper published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, a team of biologists dropped a DNA bombshell, declaring that 20% of the population of Iberia has Sephardic Jewish ancestry.

…The finding that 20% of the population of Iberia is descended from Jews will likely take Spain and Portugal by storm…Imagine if just 5% or even 10% of Spanish and Portuguese descendants of Jews were to return to Judaism. It would mean an additional 500,000 to 1 million Jews in the world.

I can see why Freund would enthuse over this, but it’s less clear why a conservative evangelical like Hutchens would want to promote the idea of “500,000 to 1 million” Portuguese and Spaniards embracing a religion other than Christianity. Such are the mysteries of Christian Zionism.

Meanwhile, if Freund is keen to find more recruits for his DNA-and-soil nationalism, he could look closer to home; as Israeli (anti-Zionist) historian Shlomo Sand recently argued in Le Monde:

Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.

Of course, that doesn’t preclude the possiblity of some dispersion in the centuries after 70 CE, for various reasons. For instance, as I discussed just a few days ago, there was some adverse climate change between 100 and 700 CE.

(PS: I should add that while I think this is of historical interest, I believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be resolved by focusing on human rights rather than poring over ancient history)

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