REFLECTIONS ON A DYING MONTH

The Unmentionable Odor of Death

Welcome to 2015 

Amidst the mass of justifications, apologia and weasel words that poured out following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, few comments were quite as disgusting as  the cry that has gone up if satirizing religion was ok why not to make jokes about the holocaust? Here is the execrable Mehdi Hasan:-

 “Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so…”

Mehdi Hasan
Well once you manage to clamber over your sense of disgust and pondering of the question of “why would you want to,” you soon realize that sand is being thrown in your eyes. As David Paxton points out in his brilliant dissection, by far and away the best piece written about the Charlie Hebdo affair:-

 ‘Mocking Islam is not the same as antisemitism. Why? Because anti-Judaism is not the same as antisemitism. They were not abusing all Muslims but the main character in their story, therefore the comparison is false. Charlie Hebdo mocked the god of the Old Testament, this should be enough to qualify as a fair comparison. They weren’t murdered for it.’

Now as it happens should you wish to see cartoons ‘mocking the Holocaust,’ you need only visit Gaza, Iran or a scattering of places throughout the Middle East. They are not funny. Though isn't it interesting that, as Howard Jacobson observed, ‘…it’s always the freedom to be an anti-Semite the “But Brigade” protects.’

Cartoons about 9/11 I have seen, some making a sharp point about the cretinous mind-set of the Jihadi suicide squad, some in poor taste. Still I don’t remember any effigy burning and riots in midtown Manhattan.

As to a real ‘what about,’ the mass murders by the deranged psychotics of Boko Haram of over 2000 men women and children, an event that almost got lost in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo slaughter, there has been a lot less heard. Some, particularly from the ‘what-about’ brigade will see this purely as evidence of racism. Racism certainly played a part, African lives being less ‘news-worthy,’ though as Gary Brecher points out even here the picture is more complex. And it is worth noting that it is not just African lives that seem less newsworthy, hundreds are being killed in Russia’s fight to annex large portions of eastern Ukraine, though not receiving media attention. The public experience atrocity not as statisticians, one brutal murder filling the consciousness in a way that thousands cannot. It is how we are made. 
Part of the problem is also the increasingly difficult job of reporting from war regions, particularly on groups like IS and Boko Haram. When the subjects of your reporting consider it fair game to kidnap and behead you it is hardly surprising that reporters willing and able to risk frontline reporting has dwindled.  For the few that do we should be truly grateful for they are the voice of the voiceless.
As to Boko Haram when I look at the contorted features of the leader it is as if the nightmare forces envisaged in an H P Lovecraft story, repressed for millions of years, is now bursting out and being unleashed upon the planet.

No sooner had we witnessed the grotesque spectacle of world leaders from brutal repressive states, such as Saudi Arabia, marching in Paris under the banner of Je Suis Charlie, than the death of the Saudi King resulted in condolences of the most repulsive ass kissing variety being presented to this brutally repressive 8th century theocracy.  Thus John Kerry tweeted:

 “King Abdullah was a man of wisdom & vision. US has lost a friend & Kingdom of #SaudiArabia, Middle East, and world has lost a revered leader.”

The Secretary of State felt comfortable issuing this sickly drivel at the same time as a Saudi Citizen,  Raif Badawi,  had just received a first dose, 50, of 1,000 lashes for the ‘crime’ of writing in a blog that the Kingdom would be a better place if it became more liberal and democratic. He also got a 10 yr. prison sentence. 
The prison sentence is somewhat redundant as it is unusual to survive the full 1,000 lashes, effectively he received a death sentence.  Partly due to international pressure the next tranche of public whipping has been postponed twice. The Saudi authorities announcing that his wounds had yet to fully heal. This, one presumes, they did to show their ‘caring side.’ The wounds, having been inspected by a ‘doctor,’ 1] needed to properly heal before being opened up again. 
The KSA a place in which 'police' recently dragged a woman into a public square screaming her innocence. She was decapitated. As the planes touched down bearing obsequies foreign dignitaries they may still have been washing the blood from the square.


Death felt present everywhere in January, particularly in Iraq and Syria. Though it was Syria that provided the one beacon of light in the gloom as a democratic left militia, in which men and women fought together, defeated the forces of Daesh in Kobane. This you would think have been the cause for wild celebration on the left. But no, the victory was greeted by a shabby squalid silence. The silence of a  liberal left that was more outraged by the soft pornography of Tits in the Sun newspaper than the mass rape and enslavement of Yazidi women and children in Iraq.
So let me pay my tribute here to the men and woman of the YPG/J you truly are the heroes of a degraded time.




[1] Presumably the KSA has a the British Medical Association or its American equivalent the AMA. If it has and condones such practice then the Medical establishments across the free world should shun all contact. 

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