Several days ago I posted a photo from Internet vigilante Charlie Flowers' Facebook page that i contended showed he had an English Defence League connnection. Richard Bartholomew looked at the same photo and thought I had made an 'imaginative leap.'
Flowers' or one of his 'Cheerleader' associates has resolved the issue themselves by posting new photos to Facebook of Flowers meeting with EDL youth division leader Joel Titus, an activist with a history of violence who was recently arrested for assaulting a photojournalist, and Matthew Kaplan, who Bartholomew reports is the paid EDL publications coordinator responsible for leaflets and press releases.
In comments to Bartholomew's earlier post, Flowers' or one of his supporters seems to have been most animated by the accusation that Flowers may be affiliated with or have affinity for racists or white supremacists. This latest photo seems a calculated response meant to subvert that conclusion. An anti-Fascist publication describes the mixed-race Titus as the figure the EDL "parades to the media as proof of their non-racist agenda." Kaplan is a Jewish American student from Seattle, which supposedly rebuts the EDL's reputation for Nazi affinities. Kaplan has appeared at several EDL demonstrations waving the Israeli flag. However the presence of minorities and Jews is hardly a defense. Racism and religious persecution are as much about who you exclude as who you let in.
Flowers and his Internet vigilante friends the 'Cheerleaders' claim to be opposed to Islamic extremism, but they are actually against Islam and target Muslims indiscriminately, just as their fellow travelers in the EDL do, and there is no better evidence of that than the intimidation tactics they engaged in the at Talk Islam blog, publishing several front page contributors' home addresses and sending mail to one blogger's home. They have also repeated threatened me (I also contribute at Talk Islam).
None of those targeted - Hussein Rashid, Aziz Poonawalla or myself - could be described as anything other than moderate or progressive Muslims who have wrtten against extremism and religious violence.
In Berlin, Nazi Party leader Joseph Goebbels intentionally provoked Communist and Social Democratic actions by marching SA [Brownshirt] storm troopers into working-class neighborhoods where those parties had strongholds. Then he invoked the heroism of the Nazi "martyrs" who were injured or killed in these battles to garner greater public attention.
Around 500 Tamils took part in the Pongku Thamizh (Tamil uprising) rally in Milan in Northern Italy this summer.
Anti-immigration Northern League Party of Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni is seeking a moratorium on the building of mosques as a preventative measure to future terrorist attacks.
The demand for blocking mosque building comes as a reaction to the recent arrest of two men suspected for planning attacks in Milan, Italy's northern financial hub.
La Stampa, a local Italian newspaper quoted Maroni on Thursday stating that "Islamist terrorism" runs deep in Italy and must be stamped out.
"These arrests show that Islamist terrorism is entrenched in Italy, and that we must be vigilant," Maroni told the paper.
"Unfortunately it is not easy to distinguish between places of worship and those that recruit terrorists and finance the planning of attacks," he added.
Ally of the conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the Northern League began a motion in the lower house of parliament banning the construction of places of worship for Muslims and cultural centers in Italy.
The motion comes as a preliminary step to curb the increasing number of mosques until parliament passes an official law on their establishment.
John McCain, who has harshly criticized the idea of sitting down with dictators without pre-conditions, appears to have done just that.
Some of Pinochet's victims.
In 1985, McCain traveled to Chile for a friendly meeting with Chile's military ruler, General Augusto Pinochet, one of the world's most notorious violators of human rights credited with killing more than 3,000 civilians and jailing tens of thousands of others.
The private meeting between McCain and dictator Pinochet has gone previously un-reported anywhere.
According to a declassified U.S. Embassy cable secured by The Huffington Post, McCain described the meeting with Pinochet "as friendly and at times warm, but noted that Pinochet does seem obsessed with the threat of communism." McCain, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time, made no public or private statements critical of the dictatorship, nor did he meet with members of the democratic opposition in Chile, as far as could be determined from a thorough check of U.S. and Chilean newspaper records and interviews with top opposition leaders.
At the time of the meeting, in the late afternoon of December 30, the U.S. Justice Department was seeking the extradition of two close Pinochet associates for an act of terrorism in Washington DC, the 1976 assassination of former ambassador to the U.S. and former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier. The car bombing on Sheridan Circle in the U.S. capital was widely described at the time as the most egregious act of international terrorism perpetrated on U.S. soil by a foreign power.
'It's very difficult to turn anything around because they've eliminated all opposing ideas inside. I mean it's the problem of the Soviet Union, right?'
Chris Hedges writes: Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. That it is still in power, and will remain in power after this election, is a testament to our inability to separate illusion from reality. We still believe in "the experts." They still believe in themselves. They are clustered like flies swarming around John McCain and Barack Obama. It is only when these elites are exposed as incompetent parasites and dethroned that we will have any hope of restoring social, economic and political order.
"Their inability to see the human as anything more than interest driven made it impossible for them to imagine an actively organized pool of disinterest called the public good," said the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, whose books "The Unconscious Civilization" and "Voltaire's Bastards" excoriates our oligarchic elites.
"The difficulty is you have a collapse, you have a loss of face by the people who are there, and it's not just George Bush, it's very, very deep," Saul said. "What we're talking about is the need to rethink the departments of economics, of political science. Then you have to rethink the whole analytic method of the World Bank. If I'm the secretary of the treasury, and not a guy like [Henry] Paulson, but I mean a sort of normal secretary of the treasury or minister of finance, and I say, OK, we've got a real problem, let's get the senior civil servants in here. Gentlemen, ladies, OK, clearly we have to go in another direction, give me some ideas. Well, those people don't have any other ideas because at this point they're about the fourth generation of what you might call neoconservative globalist managers, unfairly summarized. So they then go to the people who work for them, and you work down; there's no one in there with an alternate approach. I mean they'll have little alternatives, but no basic differences in opinion. And so it's very difficult to turn anything around because they've eliminated all opposing ideas inside. I mean it's the problem of the Soviet Union, right?"
Saul pointed out that the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s, those that went on to become part of the Fascist experience, were "to shift power directly to economic and social interest groups, to push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies" and to "obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest-that is, challenge the idea of the public interest."
Sound familiar?
I do not think George W. Bush or Barack Obama or John McCain or Henry Paulson are fascists. Rather, they are part of a cabal of naive, mediocre and self-deluded capitalists who are steadily weakening political and economic structures to a point where our democracy will become so impotent that it can be blown aside, probably with broad popular support. The only question is how this will happen. Will there be a steady and slow decline as in the late Roman Empire when the Senate ended as a farce? Will we see a powerful right-wing backlash from those outside the mainstream political system, as we did in Yugoslavia, and the rise of a militant Christian fascism? Will there be a national crisis that allows those in power to instantly sweep away all constitutional rights in the name of national security?
I do not know. But I do know that what is coming, as long as our oligarchy remains in charge, will not be good. We will either recover the concept of the public good, and this means a revolt against our bankrupt elite and the dynamiting of the corporatist structure, or we will extinguish our democracy.
Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball today, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) attacked the patriotism of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), based on his alleged relationship to former Weather Underground member William Ayers and the values of Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. "I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views," said Bachmann. "That's what the American people are concerned about."
She then went further, suggesting that all liberal views - held by people such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, professors, and all Americans who identify themselves as "liberals" - are "anti-American." When host Chris Matthews, stunned by her remarks, asked Bachmann how many people in Congress hold anti-American views, she responded, "You'll have to ask them."
A Roma (Gypsy) woman begging in Milan. Recently, the Italian government decided to fingerprint all Gypsies, including children. What began as a targeted campaign against Muslims is now spreading to become a larger, white supremacist movement under color of a Fascist political takeover.
Salaam writes: Gabriele Marranci is an anthropologist who was born and raised in Italy. He is currently doing research in Singapore, but he frequently visits and is closely attuned through family and friends to Italy. Link to complete essay after excerpt.
Gabriele Marranci writes: In Italy, in a new and unrecognisable Italy, everybody is losing. Yet only few Italians seem to notice this. Italy is today probably the most concerning and least friendly country of the EU, marked by the return, from bottom-up, of a fascination with a defeating, and defeated, past called Fascism. Notwithstanding the similarity in the terminology, dress styles, and references (the Lega Nord, the most social nationalist party of Italy, has 'green shirts' only because it cannot refer to brown ones), this revival of fascism is not like the historical one.
The progressive stages of xenophobia that has marked the home of pizza and 'bel canto' began with the fear of Muslims and their cultures. The great majority of Italians, though not hating Muslims, have formed chimerias about Islam. Fallaci helped after September 11 to develop them from 'concerns' and 'fear' of a different unknown religion, to hate for whomever practiced that religion. She wished to bomb mosques, or at least one of them. Although Fallaci and others (in particular within the Lega Nord ) were responsible for, not always cleverly disguised, ideological incitement toward violence, there were other individuals who decided (as usually happens) to make real, what Fallaci and others fantasised about.
The reality is that Italians, the majority of them, do not care. Too busy with economic issues and social instability, endemic unemployment, workers alienation and unbelievable exploitation (my sister had to work without salary for months as 'probation' before she was granted a temporary contract of three months), the majority of Italians remain silent; a minority celebrated the beginning of the new crusades, and a few others, often from the radical left, protested. Lega Nord, with the European MP Mario Borghezio took part in the planned, but than forbidden, Nazi event against Islam organized in Cologne. An event that even Robert Spencer felt the need to distance himself from and rejected.
Lega Nord is a social nationalist, populist party, and a dangerous one, whose main force comes from the fear of others and the idea that immigrants can take over the white-celtic man. Vulgar in its language, reminiscent in its populism of Fascism, Lega Nord, mixes a fake Celticism (to replace Aryanism) with a new idea of the- again fake and historically nonexistent- superior nation, the Padania, Lega Nord shifts recently from targeting mainly Muslims to all not-white (hence non-Celtic) foreigners.
Italy today is experiencing an unprecedented (and unusual in its violence even during historical fascism before the German-imposed racial laws) racism and xenophobia. So unexpected and violent has been the phenomenon that even a post-Fascist like Gianfranco Fini (today president of the Parliament) had to raise the alarm. There is no area of Italian civil society which has not been affected by this new wind of xenophobia and violent racism.
Recently during the match for the World Cup qualification in Sofia, the Italian supporters started to invoke the 'Duce', sung 'Fascist songs' and attacked the hosts because they were 'communist', despite the historical changes in Bulgaria. Children are not spared from this white supremacist new culture: finger prints for little Roma (Gypsy) even when they are Italian, vandalism of children's work representing their perception of multiculturalism, attempts to form 'migrants only' classrooms and impose an 'Italian-ness test' for entry into Italian schools on children of legal migrants. I have been informed of racism within school and even Sunday Church schools.
What began as a hate for a religion, Islam, has moved on to race, ethnicity and old fashioned hatred of different skin colours.
