CLOSING THOUGHTS
Listened yesterday to a discussion on Woman’s Hour examining the role women have played in the ‘Arab spring’ and the ongoing struggle for women's rights in the Middle East. However no mention, aside from a brief reference to sharia law, of the role of Islam, obviously considered too hot a topic. This kind of creeping censorship needs close watching, it has now become almost impossible to have a discussion in the broadcast media on the regressive role played by Islam in every society in which it is entrenched. Now Islam is far from being the only rampantly misogynistic religion, it does however manage to outdo both Christianity and Judaism in this respect, quite an achievement!
Meanwhile across the Islamic world women continue to experience grotesque levels of violence, discrimination and open hatred whilst their erstwhile liberal comrades in the west are silenced by the fear of being labled ‘Islamaphobic’ or of being a ‘cultural imperialist.’
On yesterday’s Today programme Shami Chakrabarti director of Liberty was defending an unelected House of Lords, whether this was in a personal capacity or represented the views of Liberty was not made clear.
Liberty has a less than honorable record in defending free speech over the last few years and I let my membership lapse a few years back as a consequence of its failure to stand up to islamacist bullying. Unlike its American counterpart The American Civil Liberties Union it has shied away from unpopular causes, e.g. the case of Mrs Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang, http://alextalbot.blogspot.com/2009/11/strange-case-of-ben-and-sharon.html.
The writer Nick Cohen, who is extremely active in PEN, which fights against censorship, describes Liberty as a workshy organisation and says that he has never seen Ms Chakrabarti at any of their events.
The former National Council for Civil Liberties has always had a tainted past and at its inception was little more than a communist front organisation.* If it is to shake of its past and become a genuine fighting organisation for freedom of expression it had better learn that freedom of speech also extends to those holding unpopular and sometimes repugnant views, Islamacists yes, but also evangelical Christians, Holocuast deniers and even members of the EDL.
The last copy of The London Review of Books drops through my letterbox for this year. Relationships with periodicals can be a somewhat stormy affair; the fortnightly arrival of the LRB used to be something I relished, however more recently the love affair has started to go cold. The last couple of editions have contained a vicious sneer ridden ad hominem attack on Nial Ferguson by someone called Pankaj Mishra, whilst the next edition contained an appalling apologia for the Gaddafi's regime, at the same time seeking to discredit those who fought to bring it down.
Now I hold no particular brief for Mr Ferguson but the intellectual dishonesty of Mr Mishra’s article would have brought shame on a first year undergraduate, in short it stank.
The LRB has produced some dismal copies in the past, most notoriously in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and I have considered my subscription but then it goes and redeems itself with a brilliant review of Austerlitz by W G Sebald or by reproducing Alan Bennett’s diary.
The release of the Thatcher cabinet papers under the thirty year rule has produced much controversy, not least in the shape of Geoffrey Howe’s comments about letting Liverpool decline. He claims not to remember holding these views. Now I have held many views over the years, a few, surprisingly few in fact, that I am not proud of, but I have never forgotten holding them. Do you forget these things?
We are heading now for the end of the year and as a sentimentalist and romantic by inclination I should avoid at all costs what the poet Wilfred Owen called ‘the intolerable instant of the change,’ but something in me compels attendance and the indulgence of some passing thoughts on those who have died in the year now also meeting its end.
*George Orwell sought to set up the Freedom Defence Committee as an alternative.
Meanwhile across the Islamic world women continue to experience grotesque levels of violence, discrimination and open hatred whilst their erstwhile liberal comrades in the west are silenced by the fear of being labled ‘Islamaphobic’ or of being a ‘cultural imperialist.’
On yesterday’s Today programme Shami Chakrabarti director of Liberty was defending an unelected House of Lords, whether this was in a personal capacity or represented the views of Liberty was not made clear.
Liberty has a less than honorable record in defending free speech over the last few years and I let my membership lapse a few years back as a consequence of its failure to stand up to islamacist bullying. Unlike its American counterpart The American Civil Liberties Union it has shied away from unpopular causes, e.g. the case of Mrs Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang, http://alextalbot.blogspot.com/2009/11/strange-case-of-ben-and-sharon.html.
The writer Nick Cohen, who is extremely active in PEN, which fights against censorship, describes Liberty as a workshy organisation and says that he has never seen Ms Chakrabarti at any of their events.
The former National Council for Civil Liberties has always had a tainted past and at its inception was little more than a communist front organisation.* If it is to shake of its past and become a genuine fighting organisation for freedom of expression it had better learn that freedom of speech also extends to those holding unpopular and sometimes repugnant views, Islamacists yes, but also evangelical Christians, Holocuast deniers and even members of the EDL.
The last copy of The London Review of Books drops through my letterbox for this year. Relationships with periodicals can be a somewhat stormy affair; the fortnightly arrival of the LRB used to be something I relished, however more recently the love affair has started to go cold. The last couple of editions have contained a vicious sneer ridden ad hominem attack on Nial Ferguson by someone called Pankaj Mishra, whilst the next edition contained an appalling apologia for the Gaddafi's regime, at the same time seeking to discredit those who fought to bring it down.
Now I hold no particular brief for Mr Ferguson but the intellectual dishonesty of Mr Mishra’s article would have brought shame on a first year undergraduate, in short it stank.
The LRB has produced some dismal copies in the past, most notoriously in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and I have considered my subscription but then it goes and redeems itself with a brilliant review of Austerlitz by W G Sebald or by reproducing Alan Bennett’s diary.
The release of the Thatcher cabinet papers under the thirty year rule has produced much controversy, not least in the shape of Geoffrey Howe’s comments about letting Liverpool decline. He claims not to remember holding these views. Now I have held many views over the years, a few, surprisingly few in fact, that I am not proud of, but I have never forgotten holding them. Do you forget these things?
We are heading now for the end of the year and as a sentimentalist and romantic by inclination I should avoid at all costs what the poet Wilfred Owen called ‘the intolerable instant of the change,’ but something in me compels attendance and the indulgence of some passing thoughts on those who have died in the year now also meeting its end.
*George Orwell sought to set up the Freedom Defence Committee as an alternative.
