The last bastions of sexism and misogyny.

 Readers of this blog are encouraged to comment on its content and take part in healthy and stimulating debate on the issues raised. Indeed to paraphrase Churchill although I may not agree with the views expressed I will defend with all my might their right to express their opinions. In the “About me” sidebar to this blog is the statement ,  “ You will find no censorship here, so please leave a comment without having to get through a minefield of security questions , if you wish to do so.“ As you will see from the content the author is not afraid to tackle some of the controversial issues of the day, head on, and stimulating debate and opposing views are encouraged. Those who oppose what I have to say are as welcome to add their two penneth as those that agree as well as others who can add a valid additional, enlightening contribution.
 I do expect certain standards to be maintained however and derogatory remarks about gender, race, ethnecticity  religious beliefs, misogyny and sexism are unwelcome. 

 My two regular readers will be aware that this author is a lifetime supporter of Birmingham City Football Club and I occasionally have to apologise to  them when I have a rant on the subject.  It is not an easy life being a supporter of, “Blues” who have staggered from crises to crises throughout their history and the one rule that I apply to them is always to expect the unexpected.  One consolation however is that we do possess the finest football supporters anthem in the land, “Keep Right on to the End of the Road, courtesy of Harry Lauder and Alex Govan. The song includes many apposite lines:-

Ev'ry road thro' life is a long, long road, 

                                                Fill'd with joys and sorrows too,

As you journey on how your heart will yearn 

For the things most dear to you. 

With wealth and love 'tis so, 

But onward we must go. 

Chorus:

Keep right on to the end of the road, 

Keep right on to the end, 

Tho' the way be long, let your heart be strong, 

Keep right on round the bend. 

Tho' you're tired and weary still journey on, 

Till you come to your happy abode, 

Where all the love you've been dreaming of 

Will be there at the end of the road.

 Most football fanatics, saddos that they are subscribe to fans forums to exchange banter about issues concerning the club. I am also a member of  The Blues Trust which campaigns for fan ownership of football clubs or at least some form of dialogue with the club, or representation on the board.  Sadly most football forums remain the last bastions of sexism and misogyny.  This is a shame because not ony are some of the comments deeply offensive but women subscribers should be encouraged but it is my experience that they soon tire of, in Trump’s immortal words " locker room gossip".

 I post to the footymad site ( see “ Places I Visit  - Singing the Blues “  in the sidebar )  which for many years was the leading Blues supporters site. It had a lifelong Blues supporter as its moderator, who although he allowed the odd inevitable disputes was stringent on clamping down on racism, religious intolerance, foul or abusive language, homophobia, sexism and misogyny, and rightly so, as these fan sites are read by young children and teenagers, searching for the latest information or gossip about the club. The site was formed a very long time ago and was at its heyday in the 1990"s with a massive following and posters from all over the world, including a former New Zealand international centre back. The site however took a massive hit when the advertising became so intrusive whilst drafting posts and viewing the comments of others that people left in droves. Back in the 1990's blogging was in its infancy but, to its credit, the site listed " The Blues Bloggers " across the top of the forum and included such illustrious posters as FatBuddah, Rags, Kwaky, BlueTitch and yours truly.

 Some members of this fanzine migrated to a new kid on the block, Small Heath Alliance, which was also commercially run, but had a reputation for some abrasive posters and laddish behaviour and I am aware of at least two former STB posters who gave up after suffering all kinds of dogs abuse in response to their posts. There are rules in place for the Forum but I am afraid sexism and misogony have driven away most of the few female contributors. There was a recent example of this when Birmingham City F.C. announced that their female team was, in line with political correctness and modern thinking,  henceforth to be called " Birmingham City Women" and not the more gentler, "Birmingham City Ladies" which this old berk, stuck in the past, has a preference for. 

 The announcement was placed on Small Heath Alliance and resulted in a discussion thread in which a number of laddish but also deeply offensive sexist and misogynist posts were included. The thread can be read here, but I caution regular readers of this blog that terms and words are used which would not be permitted here.

 So there you go, even with the increasing popularity of women"s football and female referee's assistants, the neanderthals like Andy Gray and male posters on fanzines continue to mar the contribution to the sport for women with their remarks. I would suggest that one answer, as with the former STB moderator, is for the owners of these sites to make clear in their rules that this type of language will not be tolerated and for the moderators to enforce the rules.

 There was one peculiar and amusing anecdote to this tale, the irony of which would not have been lost on the likes of Oscar Wilde. With political correctness creeping into most areas of life, and certainly in the remit of the chiefs of the BBC, I posted the afterthought, tongue in cheek, that perhaps in some Orwellian future, the F.A. might make it obligatory that there should be mixed sex teams, plus members of the LGBT community, with the odd priest, vicar and mullah thrown in for religious equilibrium. Much to my surprise the post was banned with the moderator giving the reason that,  " What is being a member of a LGBT community anything to do with it ? No religion on the main board either, thanks". Ah, such is life.

Addendum:-

I offered the site proprietor the right of reply and this was his response, which I thank him for. In response to his final paragraph the answer is  that I have always been prepared to challenge the views of posters, that I strongly disagree with, and if he cared to browse this site, and his, he will quickly see that I challenge those things which are abhorrent to me. He well knows the type of abuse that I would have got , if I challenged/ confronted the people concerned. They can answer for their posts on here if they wish to do so. I will, of course, accept his invitation to link to this blog from Small Heath Alliance.:-

I actually agree that football fanzines / forums can be misogynistic and homophobic but I feel that this is just a reflection of football and society in general. 

However I think that football forums in particular are a great agent for change, it allows people with wildly different values and beliefs to correspond with each other and talk about the issues at hand. Hopefully after reading or contributing to threads like the one linked some will change their minds. Surely people having that discussion is one of the main reasons that Blues Women changed their name so publicly. 

In the 17 years that I have run SHA it has always been my policy that so long as people could stay civil and within the laws of libel then no conversation was off limits. This policy has been pushed to it's absolute limits at times but in general it has worked and the community has flourished. 

The fact is that while some people have drifted away over the years there has never been a major schizm in the community. The fracturing of communities is a massive problem for forums and society in general, but as a believer in multiculturalism I think that it's important to listen, understand and confront the views of others. How can we do that if we actively prevent those views from being aired? By refusing to allow differing opinions to be aired then these people are ghettoised into smaller like minded communities where a filter bubble is created and views become more extreme as time goes by due to a lack of challengers. You can see this in action on sites such as Facebook and Reddit where communities like Britain First and r/The_Donald hold toxic groupthink views which then cause real problems in 'The Real World'. 

I actually think that your blog post is part of the problem, would ask you is why you felt the need to write a blog post criticising people from afar to an audience that you are confident will share your views, but you won't directly and publicly confront the people whose views you find so abhorrent. You should actually post it on the site and give the people who contributed to the conversation in question a right to reply too. 

Cartoon of the year?

Morris Men.

Melanie.

The fear barrier has been crossed in Gaza.

The following article first appearmed in Counterpunch.

Israel’s Premature Celebration: Gazans Have Crossed the Fear Barrier

by RAMZY BAROUD

60 Palestinians were killed in Gaza on May 15, simply for protesting and demanding their Right of Return as guaranteed by international law.

50 more were killed since March 30, the start of the ‘Great March of Return’, which marks Land Day.

Nearly 10,000 have been wounded and maimed in between these two dates.

‘Israel has the right to defend itself’, White House officials announced, paying no heed to the ludicrousness of the statement when understood within the current context of an unequal struggle.

Peaceful protesters were not threatening the existence of Israel; rock throwing kids were not about to overwhelm hundreds of Israeli snipers, who shot, killed and wounded Gaza youngsters with no legal or moral boundary whatsoever.

8-months old, Laila al-Ghandour was one of the 60 who were killed on May 15. She suffocated to death from Israeli teargas. Many, like her, were wounded or killed some distance away from the border. Some were killed for simply being nearby, or for being Palestinian.

Meanwhile, Ivanka Trump, daughter of US President, Donald Trump, ushered in a new era of international relations, when she and her companions unveiled the new US Embassy in Jerusalem.

She was ‘all smiles’ while, at the exact same moment, hundreds of Gazans were being felled at the border. The already dilapidated hospitals have no room for most of the wounded. They bled in hallways awaiting medical attention.

Ivanka has never been to Gaza – and will unlikely ever visit or be welcomed there. Gazans do not register in her moral conscience, if she has any beyond her immediate interests, as people deserving of rights, freedom and dignity.

At the border, many Gaza kids have been coloring their bodies in blue paint, dressing up in homemade costumes to imitate characters from the Hollywood movie, ‘Avatar’. They hoped that, by hiding their brown skin, their plight and suffering could be more relatable to the world.

But when they were shot, their blood gave them away. They were still human, still from Gaza.

The international community has already condemned Trump’s decision to relocate his country’s embassy to Jerusalem, and declared his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital ‘null and void’, but will it go further than mere words?

Will the international community remain trapped between hollow statements and no action? Will they ever truly recognize the humanity of Laila al-Ghandour and all the other children, men and women who died and continue to perish under Gaza’s besieged skies? Will they ever care enough to do something?

The plight of the Palestinians is compounded with the burden of having a useless ‘leadership’. The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has been busy of late, demanding allegiance from the occupied Palestinians in the West Bank. Large signs and larger banners have been erected everywhere, where families, professional associations, unions and companies have announced, in large font: the “Renewal of Loyalty and Support to President Mahmoud Abbas.”

‘Renewal’? Abbas’ mandate expired in 2009. Besides, is this what Abbas and his Fatah party perceive to be the most urgent matter that needs to be addressed, while his people are being massacred?

Abbas fears that Hamas is using the blood of the Gaza victims to bolster its popularity. Ironically, it is a shared concern with Israeli leaders, the likes of Israeli army spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus. The latter said that Hamas has won the PR war at the Gaza border by a ‘knockout.’

This propaganda is as false as it is utterly racist; yet, it has persisted for far too long. It proposes that Palestinians and Arabs lack human agency. They are incapable of mobilizing and organizing their collective efforts to demand their long-denied rights. They are only pawns, puppets in the hands of factions, to be sacrificed at the altar of public relations.

It did not dawn on Conricus to note that, perhaps, his army lost the ‘PR war’ because its brutes shot thousands of unarmed civilians who did nothing, aside from gathering at the border demanding an end to their perpetual siege; or that, just maybe, the PR war was lost because Israel’s top leaders announced proudly that Gazans are fair game, since, according to Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, “there are no innocents in Gaza.’

Ivanka will go down in Israel’s history as a hero. But Palestinian Resistance is not fueled or subdued by Ivanka, but by the sacrifices of the Palestinians themselves, and by the blood of Laila al-Ghandour, who was denied even a celebration of her first birthday on God’s besieged earth.

The US government has decisively and blatantly moved to the wrong side of history. As their officials attended parties, galas and celebrations of the Embassy move, whether in Israel or in Washington and elsewhere, Palestinians dug 60 more graves and held 60 more funerals.

The world watched in horror, and even western media failed to hide the full ugly truth from its readers. The two acts – of lavish parties and heartbreaking burials – were beamed all over the world, and the already struggling American reputation sank deeper and deeper.

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may have thought he had won. Comforted by his rightwing government and society on the one hand, Trump and his angry UN bully, Nikki Haley, on the other, he feels invulnerable.

But he should rethink his power-driven logic. When Gazan youth stood bare-chested at the border fence, falling one drove after the other, they crossed a fear barrier that no generation of Palestinians has ever crossed. And when people are unafraid, they can never be subdued or defeated.

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Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London). His website is: ramzybaroud.net

Nakba

 Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day when the Palestinians were deposed of their land and houses which had been theirs for many, many years.. It was where they had put down their roots and generations had handed the keys to their homes from one to another. 

 When the state of Israel was created Following the 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as al-Nakba, the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes were not allowed to return following the Lausanne Conference of 1949. After this the Palestinians were essentially left with Gaza and the Left Bank.Since then the Israelis have slowly stolen their remaining land, in contravention of UN resolutions, and built settlements and a huge and monstrous wall has been built by the Israelis dividing Palestinian from Palestinian.
 Gaza has become a concentration camp blockaded by the Israelis and the Egyptian military with thousands dying of starvation and lack of medical supplies. Ironically after the history of the Jewish people it is they that are now exterminating the Palestinian people. As Nakba approaches the people of Gaza are protesting, at the border fence, on Palestinian land created by the Israelis, and as they approach the fence are being mowed down in their hundreds from live fire, from the Israeli army who are acting like ruthless terrorists. 
Tomorrow is Nakba Day and thousands of protesters have been mown down by Israeli gunmen and the nations of the world, who preach to us about the evils of terrorism and radicalisation, will avert their eyes and do nothing. But we can act as individuals by supporting such organisations as the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund.  The Israeli government shames the Jewish people. May you go in peace.

Moments later this amputee was shot dead by Israeli IDF terrorists. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told an emergency meeting of the Security Council that Israel had acted with restraint.

Jerusalem.

The following article is taken from Counterpunch ( see sidebar - The uncensored truth from within the USA ) which I invite any readers to view and, if possible to make a voluntary donation to, as it is one of the most remarkable and informative daily journals left surviving.

DECEMBER 12, 2017

Trump’s Jerusalem Ploy

by JOHN WIGHT

Photo by Kristoffer Trolle | CC BY 2.0

President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is not only a clear violation of international law, but a moral outrage when it comes to its acquiescence in apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the violation of the rights of the Palestinian people.

Delivered with the insouciance of a mafia don parcelling out territory to one of his capos, in this instance Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump’s announcement did not so much signal the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital as it did provide confirmation that the US and Israel are rogue states.

Under the stewardship of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has embraced with unfailing ardour a rejectionist stance when it comes to a Palestinian state. He knows that peace, a viable peace, cannot exist and will never exist unless justice for the Palestinians is placed at its heart. Hitherto the Israeli prime minister had stood isolated in his obduracy – even if opposition to it had been more sotto voce than meaningful on the part of a supine international community – but now in Trump his greatest dream has come true, providing him with a willing partner in his refusal to depart as much as an inch from his embrace of Israeli exceptionalism and belief that Israel’s right to the land of Palestine is inviolate.

In truth, of course, Israel has never and will never have any right to Palestinian land – unless, that is, religious and biblical obscurantism, buttressed by settler colonialism, is the kernel of international law and diplomacy in the 21^st century.

Jerusalem is unequivocally and indisputably a part of occupied Palestine, adjudged such by both the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations. Its ooccupation also constitutes a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, specifically Article 49 concerning forced transfer and deportations of civilians out of an occupied territory, and the transfer of its own civilians into said territory.

Thus the violation of international law reflected in the assumption of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is clear and inarguable, just as it has been over its decades-long occupation. What has been lacking, and grievously, throughout this time is the requisite will on the part of the international community to take serious measures by which to compel Israel to conform to its obligations under international law as a UN member state.

The only reason Israel has been able to continue to flout those obligations is its longstanding alliance with Washington, providing it with unparalleled military, financial, and military support. The bond which the political establishments of both countries share is long and, in the inimitable words of the 44^th President of the United States Barack Obama, “unbreakable.”

The point surely, though, is that no one is asking or expecting it to be broken. All people who are of goodwill expect, and are entitled to expect, is that Washington – with the extirpation of its own indigenous population as part of its own shameful history – stand on the side of international law (the operative word here being ‘international’) instead of being complicit in its breach, as it has been and continues to be when it comes to its support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Trump’s recklessness and disregard for the craft of diplomacy has once again thrown a metaphoric hand grenade into the midst of an issue and region that needs another incendiary development like a malnourished man needs to go on a crash diet. Does the current US president think this is a game? Does he understand that he’s supposed to be the leader of the most powerful country in the world and not a recurring character in The Sopranos?

The barrage of criticism that has met this development from across the world tells its own story. It is a development which constitutes the final nail in the coffin of the Middle East  peace process, pushing the Palestinians down the path towards physical resistance in the form of a third intifada as a consequence.

Who could possibly blame them? Decades spent existing under the brute heel of occupation in the West Bank – where Jewish only illegal settlements have expanded and continue to spread, where hundreds of checkpoints are a daily reminder of their subjugation and degradation, occupied land the natural resources of which have and continue to be expropriated – can only but leave a sour taste.  Meanwhile, Gaza continues to exist under a siege that amounts to collective punishment, one that evinces no sign of abating anytime soon. Taken together, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ has been engaged in a mass experiment in human despair.

Ironically, such a brazen move by Trump can only weaken rather than increase Israel’s security. It will serve to marginalize moderate Palestinian voices and allow more radical ones to come to the fore, able to point to this measure as irrefutable evidence of the futility of a diplomatic solution to the crisis, attracting support for their belief in resistance by any means necessary, including, as mentioned, physical resistance. Increasingly, it seems this is the only language these thugs in tailored suits understand.

That Trump’s understanding of the Middle East, with all its complexities, is of insufficient breadth to fit on the back of a postage stamp, is not in dispute. Indeed it is tempting to ascribe to the 45^th president the withering verdict of one of his predecessors, Lyndon Johnson – “so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.”

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John Wight is the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent Hollywood memoir – Dreams That Die – published by Zero Books. He’s also written five novels, which are available as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1