Some reflection on events of recent weeks

There is something about blogging which requires instant response, and when just a week or two has passed since an event, it seems untimely to blog about it. This post is untimely in that sense, as it contains some of the things I have thought in response to some events which now seem not so recent.

Syria

I was struck by the under-reporting of some of the most extreme acts of violence by the Assad regime in Syria in what are hopefully its final weeks. Among the most brutal of its acts have been assaults on Palestinian refugee camps in Syria.

“Camps” is perhaps a misnomer, as these are really towns as old as many American or Australian cities, built of concrete, rather than the transient communities of tents and shacks the name conjures up. Some, like Dera’a, are “official” camps administered by the UNRWA, with kindergartens and health centres. More people live in “unofficial camps”, like Yarmouk, which has born the brint of regime attacks, a densely built-up suburb of Damascus, with multistory houses, hospitals, schools, heavy traffic, satellite dishes, electricity supply. (Read Arun with a View for evocative descriptions of Yarmouk; listen to an interview with a resident; read a 2010 BBC report on life in the camps; or read the account by solidarity tourist Sarah Shourd, who talks of a place of poetry readings, parks and boutiques.)

In July, there were reports of security forces firing on un-armed anti-regime demonstrations in Yarmouk. Here is a distressing video of the aftermath of one of the attacks on Yarmouk in August. The violence peaked early in September with four days of artillery bombardment, followed by ground assault (including the storming of the hospital and mass arrest of injured civilians). Later in September, there were reports of Palestinians killed and burnt by Assad’s forces and their bodies displayed in public, and of “sweeping” operations against Palestinian regime opponents, of snipers firing on children and old men. There have been reports of rape used as an act of war, and of summary executions of civilians, adult and child, male and female. This month, it is Dera’a camp, South of Damascus and closer to the Jordan border, that has been under attack, with heavy shelling around the mosque and many killed.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in these attacks, and thousands injured. Some 269 Palestinians have been killed in the Syrian conflict, most by regime forces (the PLO claims over 400) out of a total death toll of around 30,000 (of whom around two thirds are civilians). The Syrians claim the camps harbour terrorists and pose a danger to the country’s security.

The under-reporting of these horrific events is in contrast to the ways in which Israeli operations (which also claim to be against terrorists and necessary for security) are reported. When Israel has deployed aerial bombardment or ground assault on Palestinian communities, it is front page news across the Western mainstream media, and especially liberal media. In response, and quite legitimately, thousands march through Western streets, demonstrate outside Israeli embassies. Others boycott Israeli products; still others attack synagogues or desecrate Jewish graves. Progressive Jews in the diaspora write letters to editors denouncing Israel’s actions and disassociating themselves, “as Jews”, from the violence. How many demonstrations have their been in Western cities about Assad’s violence? How many letters and boycotts have Western trade unionists and intellectuals organised to protest about the deaths in Syria.

Syria’s operations are comparable in scale and excessive in intensity – so why the quiet response? It seems to me the only plausible explanation is that for the mainstream Western media, and especially liberal media, Palestinian lives are not valuable in themselves, but of value only in relation to the acts of Israel. Palestinians are never the story for the liberal media; it is always Israel that is the story.

(Just to be clear, I am not at all suggesting the Western media is wrong to report, or Western liberals wrong to protest, Palestinian deaths at Israeli hands. For the sake of comparison, in the much shorter Lebanon and Gaza conflicts of 2006 and 2009, there were respectively 1200 Lebanese civilians and 200-900 Palestinian civilians killed. For further reading on Syria, I recommend Pulse Media and Qunfuz.)

Libya

I was also struck by the under-reporting of the extraordinary acts of courage and dignity in Libya, when thousands of Libyan civilians, most notably in Benghazi, physically invaded the strongholds of the militias which have made life a misery for Libyan people since the revolution. Specifically, it was Islamist militias which were rejected, and most especially the militias associated with the horrific slaying of the American ambassador in Benghazi, an act which appalled the city. The uprisings against the militias were spontaneous, self-organised mass acts of ordinary people from a wide cross-section of Libyan society, including devout Muslims and in particular Sufis: acts of democratic rage, perhaps, or patriotic rage, or just decent rage.

Here, the quiet response of Western mainstream media, and especially conservative media, was in contrast to the obsessive attention to the horrible spectacle of mob violence “provoked” in the preceding days by the dirty little Innocence of Muslims youtube video.

I am not for one second arguing that the Islamist rage was not worth reporting and condemning and dwelling on at length; its reach and intensity shows its geopolitical significance. What I’m suggesting is that the comparative media neglect of the democratic rage is telling. The conservative mainstream media, at least in 2012, is only interested in Muslims and Arabs if they play the role of fanatical jihadis – just as the liberal media is only interested in Palestinians if they play the role of victims of Israel.

Genocide denial and rape culture

If you only read one other thing on the internet, please read this long and devastating post by Jeff Mudrick on the loathsome neo-Nazi Israel Shamir and the article he wrote in the CounterPunch rag which simultaneously denies and excuses Pol Pot’s horrific genocide in Cambodia, an article which left my incandescent with rage and sheer disbelief when I read it. Anyone who still thinks CounterPunch is in any way worthy of anything other than wiping up shit basically needs a lobotomy.

And that includes the editors of the Stalinist Morning Star, whose continued existence is dependent on the completely misguided support of funds taken from hard-working British trade unionists; the Star asked the Jew-hater Shamir to reprint a lightly bowdlerised version of his misogynistic, antisemitic, Slavophiliac, Christianist and dictator-worshipping CounterPunch-published attack on Pussy Riot, and then retreated in a most dishonest way, provoking the fascist Shamir to reach new heights of “Jewish lobby”/“Jewish Marxist” conspiracy theories. Shamir, of course, is also a close associate of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, who continue to promote his excrement.

Assange shares with Shamir and with their late mutual acquaintance Alexander Cockburn a visceral contempt for women. And that brings us to George Galloway. I have taken great pleasure in the National Executive of the National Union of Students resolving (against the votes of the Student Broad Left) to deny a platform to Galloway for his rape apologies. The indefatigable and gorgeous Galloway took a break from celebrating his third marriage to his 23-year-old fourth (or fifth?) wife and from servicing his long-suffering constituents in Blackburn Bradford by helping democratator Hugo Chavez get re-elected in Venezuela to threaten legal proceedings against the NUS.

(By the way, I think it is worth looking at Galloway’s sexual escapades, and specifically his three (or four?) possibly overlapping marriages to a succession of increasingly young non-white women, as well as Galloway’s bizarre adoption of a strange Arabic accent. Is there any reason whatsoever that “other fetishizer” is not an extremely appropriate term for Galloway?)

The NUS resolution against Galloway, the widespread revulsion against a London SlutWalk spokesperson who tweeted in support of Assange, the resignation of Selma Yaqoob from Respect: these are signs which inspire a certain amount of hope for me in the British left, that basic feminist and socialist principles actually might make a comeback against the decade or so of “anti-imperialist” frenzy that has gripped it. Am I wrong to have some optimism?

(Also read Irna Qureshi’s excellent account of disillusion with Galloway among Muslim women of Bradford.)

In other news

Meanwhile, and far more sanely, TNC has an excellent post on Mitt Romney and the 47%: do read it. Less sanely, Paul C suggests Gove might be the next fascist prime minister of Britain. And the fatter Peter has a nice post on some alternative voices from rageland.

Image credits: Yarmouk demonstrates, from Pulse Media; Anti-militia protests in Benghazi, from CNN.