Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: England is 'cesspit' breeding Islamists

Lo dice Wole Soyinka, premio Nobel per la letteratura
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/02/soyinka-england-cesspit-islamists
England is a "cesspit" and breeding ground for fundamentalist Muslims, 
the Nobel laureate and political activist Wole Soyinka has said in an 
interview in which he also accused Britain of allowing the existence of 
"indoctrination schools".
His extraordinary attack on what he views as Britain's part in fuelling 
Islamist terrorism was published on the US news and opinion website The 
Daily Beast. It was coupled with his assertion that the 1989 fatwa 
issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie meant that the 
assumption of power over life and death had passed "to every 
­inconsequential Muslim in the world".
Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature in 
1986, made his claims in response to a question about his homeland of 
Nigeria being added to the watchlist of countries deemed to be 
incubating terrorists, after the failed attempts of Umar Farouk 
Abdulmutallab to bring an airliner down over the US on Christmas Day.
"That was an irrational, knee-jerk reaction by the Americans," the 
writer said. "The man did not get radicalised in Nigeria. It happened in 
England, where he went to university.
"England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist 
­Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. 
But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach 
apocalyptic violence.
"And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding 
ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there …"
Soyinka added: "This is part of the character of Great Britain. 
Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort 
of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of 
accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness."
The attempted Christmas Day bombing has helped to raise fears that some 
British universities are becoming places in which young Muslims are 
radicalised – ­Abdulmutallab attended University College, London. But 
Soyinka, who splits his time between the US and Nigeria, suggested that 
British Muslims were being radicalised earlier in their lives.
"I doubt you can have the kind of indoctrination schools in America as 
you do in the UK," he said. "Besides, there's a large body of American 
Muslims in the US – the Nation of Islam – which has created a kind of 
mainstream Muslim institution. The Muslims there are open Muslims, 
whereas in Europe they tend to go into ghetto schools. "The Nation of 
Islam provides an antidote in the United States to fundamentalist Islam 
– which is why individuals from America have to go abroad to find 
radical teachings."
And , speaking about the fatwa issued by Khomeini against Rushdie, he 
said: "It all began when he assumed the power of life and death over the 
life of a writer. This was a watershed between doctrinaire aggression 
and physical aggression. There was an escalation. The assumption of 
power over life and death then passed to every single inconsequential 
Muslim in the world – as if someone had given them a new stature.
"Al-Qaida is the descendant of this phenomenon. The proselytisation of 
Islam became vigorous after this. People went to Saudi Arabia. Madrasas 
were established everywhere."

 Lo dice Wole Soyinka, premio Nobel per la letteratura
e io dico che dovunque tu vada, le cose volgono al peggio per gli
ebrei. Mi sa che devi fare come nella canzone di Jannacci..."quelli
che 5 minuti prima di morire diventano interisti, così muore uno di
loro"

 radical teachings."
Anche questa.

 Analisi molto intelligente, direi.
  a cui si puo' aggiungere questa. L'avvocato di Lady D racconta
l'antisemitismo dell'Establishment britannico.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article7009513.ece
The outsiders
He acted for Princess Diana in her divorce. In this exclusive account,
he writes for the first time of her unexpected interest in Judaism and
the subtle anti-Semitism he faced from the Establishment
Anthony Julius
When I acted for Diana, Princess of Wales I was exposed to a subtle form
of anti-Semitism that I had neither expected nor experienced at any
previous time in my life. My first job was to sue the person who had
surreptitiously photographed her exercising at a gym. I then acted for
her in her divorce.
She telephoned me one afternoon and asked me to come to see her at her
home in Kensington Palace. She had received two letters, one from her
husband and one from her mother-in-law. Both required of her that she
agree to a divorce. The letters had arrived within an hour of each
other. She asked me to review them with her. Could I help her draft
replies to them? Could I act for her in the inevitable divorce?
I told her that it would be my first divorce case. She replied that it
didn’t matter — this would also be her first divorce.
Until then I had avoided doing divorce work; it had no appeal to me. In
the event the divorce was not complicated. The parties behaved well.
Terms were agreed relatively quickly; there were no unpleasant exchanges
about the children.
Diana lived as if in a vacuum. She was under-educated in the approved
style of her class and gender. She was very receptive to new
experiences, which meant that she was sometimes taken by odd fancies.
She had a strong desire to please, to leave her interlocutor happy, but
often without quite understanding what that person was “about”.
She was intuitive, but not always accurate in her assessments of people.
Sometimes she went wildly wrong — not just in the big things, but also
in odd misreadings of moods or sentiments. I never had the feeling that
she set out to impress; perhaps she had surrendered that ambition as a
child. But she wanted to be valued. She would talk about her “work”, by
which she meant her charities.
She was interested in Jews but had no idea about them, save that Jewish
men (she had heard) were more likely than the men of her own class and
background to treat women decently. She was happy to take Jews to be
hostile to everything to which she herself was hostile. She once said to
me that she should never have married into a German family.
She was interested in everything that was outside her own world; she had
a tendency to esteem a thing just because it was not part of her world —
even more if it was excluded by her world. She herself was not quite of
that world, but did not belong to any other either. She gave the
impression of living in a general condition of alienation, but that did
not prevent her from operating successfully in many different milieux.
Since everything about and around her was of interest to the media, I
myself became of interest to the media. Several newspapers and magazines
published profiles of me, in the main composed of clichés. As a Jew I
was an “outsider”, not “Establishment”, and this confirmed Diana’s own
“outsider” status. I was also an “intellectual”, a contrast to the
unacademic Diana. My background was middle-middle-class, a contrastwith
Prince Charles’s lawyer, Fiona Shackleton, a partner at the royal
family’s law firm.
The profiles tended to be uncertain how to assess the significance of my
Jewish identity, save that they all took it to be of immense
significance. I also started receiving odd letters during this time.
Some gave me advice, some chastised me for disrespect towards the
monarchy and some were anti-Semitic. It was all rather bemusing, but
nothing more than an intermittent, minor distraction from the
negotiations themselves.
The piece in the Saturday July 13, 1996 edition of The Daily Telegraph
was of an entirely different order. The newspaper had been markedly
friendlier to Charles than to Diana during the divorce. The item
appeared the day after the settlement had been announced. Under the
headline “Solicitors with irreconcilable differences”, it read: “It
became clear almost immediately that the incompatibility of the Prince
and Princess of Wales stretched even to the solicitors they had employed.
“The prince, as expected, had chosen the bridge-playing Fiona
Shackleton, 39, of Farrer and Co, who had also represented the Duke of
York in his separation agreement.
“One of the country’s most respected family law specialists, much of
Shackleton’s career has been geared to arranging favourable divorce
settlements for her clients. She adopts a conciliatory approach.
“Unfortunately, her softly-softly approach is at odds with the more
bullish attitude of the princess’s solicitor. Anthony ‘Genius’ Julius,
39, is not a divorce lawyer but a specialist in media law, acting for
Robert Maxwell and once employed by the Daily Mail.
“His background could not be further from the upper-class world
inhabited by his opposite number. He is a Jewish intellectual and Labour
supporter and less likely to feel restrained by considerations of fair play.
“‘I’d be very worried if I were the royal family,’ says a Cambridge don
who taught him. ‘He’ll get lots of money out of them’.”
The author went on to speculate about whether I had secured a good
settlement for the princess.
I did not see the item until I was told about it. Several people
telephoned me the following Monday. The legal director of the Telegraph
group also called me. Complaints had been received. I should know that
the journalist had written “outmoded considerations of fair play”. It
was a sub-editor who had cut down the phrase to “fair play” and she was
Jewish herself. Still, what would I like the paper to do? I said that it
could do what it liked.
The next day, at the foot of another story about the royal divorce, the
following item appeared: “Our royal divorce coverage last Saturday
included profiles of the legal principals involved, Anthony Julius, of
Mishcon de Reya, for the Princess of Wales, and Fiona Shackleton, of
Farrer and Co, for Prince Charles.
“Intended to compare and contrast their styles, but without in any way
seeking to question his professional integrity, we referred to Mr
Julius’s background as a Jewish intellectual in a context which we now
recognise, to our profound regret, to have appeared pejorative.
“Many readers have taken the strongest exception to this paragraph,
making clear that they regard it as a racial slur. In acknowledging the
force of this criticism, we offer our sincere apologies to Mr Julius and
to all those who took offence.”
This was an edgy, easily embarrassed anti-Semitism — quick to run for cover.
I am among those Jews who have sought out anti-Semitism or, more
precisely, placed myself across its path. Many years ago, when I was
about 10, I took a train journey to Birmingham with my father and a non-
Jewish business associate whom I will call Arthur. My father owned a
number of menswear shops, mainly in the West Country. It was a familiar
experience for me to see him in the company of other businessmen seeking
his advice or asking for favours. Arthur was one such man and his
conversations with my father always had a slightly cloying, ingratiating
quality. I remember that on this occasion he was talking about his
daughter, who was about my age but whom I had not met.
Arthur rambled on, my father patiently listening, while I read a book.
And then Arthur said something like the following: “Do you know, Morris,
she has got a special little friend, a Jewish girl, and we had the girl
over for tea last weekend. I must say, the child has got the most
beautiful manners.” He beamed.
Nothing else was said on the subject and after a short period Arthur
wandered off to the dining car to buy a drink. My father turned to me,
fuming: “Did you hear what he said?
I am supposed to be impressed that he actually had a Jewish girl over to
his house for tea? And that she had beautiful manners?”
“So what are you going to say, Daddy?” I asked.
“Nothing, of course. What is there to say?”
That evening we took quite a late train home and found ourselves sharing
an open carriage with the players of a First Division football team. The
train stood in the station and the football fans packed the platform.
Autograph books were being pushed through the small aperture at the top
of the carriage’s sealed windows and the players were laughing and
calling across to each other and to their fans. They were also swearing
volubly and this began to irritate my father. After a few minutes he got
up and went over to the table where some of them were sitting.
“My young son is with me. Would you please moderate your language?” I
was horrified. There was a moment out of time when the players stared at
my father, he stared back at them and the fans outside continued to
stare into the compartment. And then, miraculously, the players
quietened down.
It was an astonishingly brave thing for him to have done and I told my
school friends about it the next day. I was both embarrassed and proud.
But I did not tell them about my father’s failure to confront Arthur,
although I have reflected on it many times since then. It was not a
failure in courage on his part. I do not think he ever in his life
retreated from a fight. It had instead something to do with an
unwillingness to condescend to being offended, a refusal to acknowledge
the hurt caused by the insult implicit in Arthur’s remark — that it is
noteworthy when Jews behave well. It is as if my father thought, “I’m
not going to let him see that he’s got to me.” But it also had something
to do with not wanting to appear to be “touchy”.
“Oversensitivity” to slights — worse, imagined slights — is commonly
supposed to be a characteristic of Jews. Arthur intended to please my
father, not to offend him, so why take offence? Indeed, perhaps he meant
no more than that the little girl had the kind of manners that Jewish
children everywhere are celebrated as possessing. Let Arthur see that he
is dealing with another Englishman and not with an excitable Jew.
Last, it had something to do with the conviction that there are certain
things that will always remain unsaid between Jews and non-Jews, among
which is the acknowledgment that offence has indeed been taken. Such an
acknowledgment will not be understood; it cannot be communicated;
it is best left alone. The Jew who does not “speak out” is therefore to
be regarded as a realist, not a coward. There is no shame in silence in
these circumstances.
My father could perhaps have said, quite gently, “It’s not so
remarkable, Arthur, that a Jewish girl has manners.” But I am sure that
he knew what kind of reaction he would have prompted — confusion,
embarrassment, resentment. It would have been an excruciating moment for
both men.
Or so I suppose my father might have reasoned, if he had been driven to
justify his decision to let Arthur’s remark pass. I am sure that it was
not the first time that he had thus been tried.
Of course, one could not grow up as a Jew, living in part among Jews,
without hearing of anti-Semitism. For Anglo-Jewry in general,
anti-Semitism is the background noise against which we make our lives.
Almost always barely audible, one then must strain to detect it,
although very occasionally it irrupts into a dissonant, heart-stopping
din. The question of the extent of my experience of anti-Semitism, then,
is perhaps best answered thus: just enough. That is, just enough for it
to inform my understanding of the subject but not so much as to
overwhelm me.
In the main my parents were concerned to protect me from the news that
Jews had enemies. (On the 20th anniversary of the end of the second
world war, when the newspapers were full of references to Hitler, I
asked my father who he was. “A bad man and someone you don’t need to
know about,” was his reply.) Their worst stories of anti-Semitism were
from their childhood — mainly wartime stories of evacuation, although my
father had tales of impassable streets in the East End where Gentile
kids prowled, ready to attack the Jewish kids on their way to school.
But this was street-gang stuff, spiced by available abuse — name-
calling, half-understood, in the main used to provoke a response: “Stick
a lump of pork / Upon a fork / And give it to the Jew boy / J-e-w
b-o-y-s.” Or the staple accusation, “You killed Christ”, or even simply,
“You’re a Jew!”
Wartime evacuation was for both of my parents their real point of entry
into a hostile non-Jewish world. In 1940 my father was evacuated to
Isleham, a village near Cambridge. He was 12. He was packed up by my
grandmother and seen off by her at a London railway station in the
company of many other children. The families who took the children in
were mostly paid to do so. Some would have taken children anyway,
without compensation; others doubtless just did it for the money.
My father and his friend Izzy Cohen were delivered to a farm where they
stayed for some months. On the first night Izzy wet his bed. The next
afternoon, returning from their temporary school, the boys saw sheets
hung out on the line, stained, for the whole street to witness. The
farmer’s wife was standing outside near the washing line. When she saw
the boys, she began to chant, “Look what the dirty Jews did.”
I heard this story from my father on more than one occasion. He usually
told it along with another one, about how a bag of sweets that he had
with him when he arrived at the farm was taken by the farmer and his
wife, never to be seen again. The tone in which he told these stories
communicated the message “this is how unkind some people can be to small
children”. It was never “this is anti-Semitism”.
My mother was seven at the start of the war. Like my father she left
London but, in her case, in the company of her parents and her brother.
They settled in Maidenhead and my mother was sent to the local primary
school.
She was the only Jewish child there. It was not long before the other
children found out that she was Jewish and they would taunt her during
playtime, shouting, “She’s a Jew, she’s got horns in her head”, and then
running away. She did not understand, she tells me, what they meant.
After a while she did not want to go to school and she spent most of
each day crying. Her parents went to see the headmaster. He was
sympathetic and soon put a stop to the bullying.
Once things had settled down, she had many friends back to her house to
play. Yet the invitations were never reciprocated and although there was
never any unpleasantness, she knew to stay at the door when she called
round to collect her friends at their homes. In her last year at the
school she was appointed head girl.
In due course my parents met and married and settled down in Southgate,
a north London suburb. They had four sons, of whom I am the eldest. We
were sent to non-denominational schools where we had mostly non-Jewish
friends (home invitations always reciprocated), while our parents
confined their own social contacts to members of my mother’s extended
family and the mainly Jewish business associates of my father.
At my primary school, when the pupils stood in the main classroom to
recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Jewish boys also stood, but squashed
together in the unlit, slightly dank cloakroom next door.
In my secondary school, after announcements, the headmaster would nod to
the “Head Jewish Boy”, who would stand up and lead the Jewish pupils out
of the hall. We would assemble in a number of classrooms for “Jewish
prayers”, which consisted of the older boys shouting at the younger boys
to shut up and listen, although to what we never heard. In due course I
became Head Jewish Boy, chosen by the headmaster from a group of Jewish
sixth-form volunteers.
I did not think the position odd and I was pleased to have been chosen.
Most Anglo-Jews today infer the existence of English anti-Semitism from
a bias they perceive in reporting on the Middle East. The bias dismays
them; it is an intrusive presence in their lives; they take it to derive
from a hostility to the Jewish state of Israel; they relate this
hostility to a broader animus towards Jews.
Yet they would not maintain that the hostility they sense, however
demoralising, is directed at them. They would probably regard as
exceptional, for example, a newspaper columnist’s statement, a few years
ago, that he ignores letters about Israel written by correspondents with
Jewish names. The animus is instead an ambience. And this is consistent
with a more general sense of how English anti-Semitism operates — by
stealth, by tacit understandings and limited exclusions.
There was nothing stealthy, however, about the treatment I received in a
pamphlet entitled “Who are the Mindbenders? The people who rule Britain
through control of the mass media”. It came out in 1997 and a “revised
edition” appeared two years later. It was first published anonymously,
although the author was later revealed to be Nick Griffin, now the
leader of the BNP.
Griffin is a Holocaust denier and an admirer of David Irving. In 1998 he
was convicted of inciting race hatred and received a two-year suspended
sentence. He was, I imagine, somewhat less troubled than the Telegraph
by the possibility that what he had to say about me might be thought
anti-Semitic.
The pamphlet’s general argument is that British democracy is a sham
because the media, which are controlled by the Jews, determine what the
electorate thinks. The Jews pursue a specific programme. They denigrate
British race pride and promote race intermarriage. They are protective
of their own racial group and act in concert. Griffin explains that he
is not an anti-Semite, if by that is meant a person who wants to hurt or
kill Jews.
The Jews will be safe provided they obey the law, remain loyal and
desist from poisoning the minds of the British people. It is the usual
fantasy: a brainless, hypnotised mass at the mercy of the Jewish
conspiracy. The pamphlet plays on right-wing populist anxieties about
the “takeover of our brains” by the media and gives them an anti-Semitic
twist.
There are three passages about me:
“Anthony Julius — the Princess of Wales’s lawyer and author of a vicious
attack on the great poet T S Eliot, whom he regards as anti-Semitic.”
“In T S Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, lawyer and literary
critic Anthony Julius launched a virulent attack on the late
Anglo-American literary giant as an ‘anti-Semite’. Among the evidence
produced for this heinous crime was Eliot’s alleged ‘hostility to a type
largely of anti-Semitism’s own invention, the anarchic intellectually
subversive Jew’.”
“To Julius, and others like him, any criticism of Jews by Gentiles —
even when justified by facts and experience — is ‘anti-Semitism’. In
reality, such paranoid over-sensitivity often creates hostility to
innocent Jews where none existed before.”
The pamphlet, a witless piece of work, is indebted to the writings of
the neo-Nazi William L Pierce (whom it describes as an “American
patriot”). It conforms in every particular to a form of discourse
recently identified by the US philosopher Harry Frankfurt — that is, it
is bullshit.
The contrast between the Telegraph item and the pamphlet is plain, I
think, and allows an initial understanding of the difference between
mainstream and fringe English anti-Semitism. Both complain about the
Jews’ unfair advantage over Gentiles.
For the Telegraph, the advantage arises because individual Jews do not,
on the whole, “play the game”. For Mindbenders, it arises because Jews
stick together and dominate society by manipulating the minds of
Gentiles — most of whom are too dumb to realise what is happening.
These episodes were early intimations that the closed season on
anti-Semitism would come to an end.
Singled out for scrutiny
Between 550 and 600 anti-Semitic incidents, such as graffiti attacks on
synagogues or graves, are reported in Britain every year. But how
pervasive is the more subtle “Establishment” anti-Semitism?
Sir Martin Gilbert, the historian, has condemned as anti-Semitic two
newspaper articles that questioned the inclusion of two Jews on the Iraq
inquiry panel: himself and his fellow historian, Sir Lawrence Freedman.
Gilbert told an Israeli radio station that the articles in The
Independent and The Independent on Sunday had implied that “as Israel
supported the war in Iraq and America supported it, and America is of
course controlled by the Zionist lobby, therefore we would not be
impartial in our inquiry because we would favour the war because Israel
favoured the war”.
He asked: “What were the religions or characteristics or ethnic
backgrounds of the other three members ? They were of no interest to
these anti-Semites, so that was very unpleasant.”
The authors of the articles — Sir Oliver Miles, former ambassador to
Libya, and Richard Ingrams, the former editor of Private Eye — both
denied being anti-Semitic.
Richard Woods

Analisi molto intelligente, direi.
quando la società post-vittoriana è entrata in crisi con la contestazione 
giovanile e quant'altro, di fatto si è voluto mettere in disparte tutto il 
vecchio sistema di valori, anche quei valori di buon senso che forse 
avrebbero dovuto animare la transizione dall'impero al commonwealth of 
nations... Se prima quello che si faceva, nella retorica comune, lo si 
faceva for Queen and Country con connotati certamente un po' retrò, dopo 
tutto questo è stato buttato alle ortiche come un passato brutto e 
disdicevole e si è trovato più liberal aprire tutto a tutti in maniera 
indiscriminata. Ora se ne pagano le conseguenze... Quindi io penso che sia 
proprio il contrario e che si sia trattato del rifiuto, da parte delle 
generazioni nate dopo la guerra (ma anche già degli anni '20-30), del 
passato coloniale ed imperiale (e del relativo contorno morale ed 
ideologico), rappresentato fondamentalmente dagli usi e dalla morale dei 
propri genitori, che ha provocato questa smisurata apertura....senza 
discernimento...appunto quando i giovani di allora hanno iniziato a pesare 
politicamente...
Sarebbe al contrario il caso di comprendere che non tutto è oro ciò che 
luccica e che forse si è buttato via il bambino con l'acqua sporca. Penso 
che i giovani di allora siano abbastanza maturi per farlo. :-) 

 l'antisemitismo dell'Establishment britannico.
mi sa che l'uniforme da pinguino indossata per l''invito in parlamento
ha avuto l'effetto prevedibile, ovvero il povero Nahum ha passato la
serata a spiegare a tutti i convenuti che non era un cameriere. Sono
cose che capitano, ma Nahum l'ha presa sul personale, e come al solito
generalizza, e vai con l'Estabishment (notare la Maiuscola!) britt
antisemita. Se il britt testaccino vuole chiosare, e ridere del
pinguino sionista, è benvenuto.

 She was intuitive, but not always accurate in her assessments of people.
In altre parole, era un'idiota.
"What can be said at all can be said clearly‭, ‬or else one must be
silent."