Greg Lance - Watkins (Greg_L-W)
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. Re-TWEET my Twitterings.
is what gives the remaining 10% a bad name!
Wall To Wall Misinformed Hysteria re France’s largely self inflicted deaths, to which Nigel Farage & other irresponsible cults & individuals have added fuel in return for damaging propagandist’s populism; I happily include Francoise Hollande, Marine Le Pen, Benjamin Netenyahoo, David Cameron & many others amongst those seeking populist votes in their misinterpretations, be they based on ignorance or venality.
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Hi,
I have added little in the last few days as there is little or no point in trying to guide a whipped up crowd in a political firestorm fed by a grossly irresponsible media.
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but fail to understand why this;
this:
this:
and this:
are offensive to others, particularly those of a very frail and waring belief structure which sets factions and cults within its collective superstition at odds, and being a largely unmodernised bronze age culture which underlies the ‘faith’, why is anyone surprised when they react against such violent images – consider the obscene and violent behaviour of the Westboro Baptists, and the Mormons who have killed numerous book dealers for daring to provide proof their chosen superstition is pure hokum or the so called christians who kill doctors and blow up clinics because they disagree or the christian cult which denies help to children whose lives can be saved with modern medicine.Need I continue?
To understand something of the background to the hypocrisy that is portrayed as French Patriotism though more accurately can be shown to be Nationalism thinly masking their overt racism.I do not believe that this extrapolation of the torrid little cartoon is coincidental:
I like Volaire unequivocally defend the right of freedom of speech and people’s right to say what they believe, that I may have utter contempt for such an individual, who abuses this fundamental right, is also true and doubly so when it is done for commercial or personal gain, as with Charlie Hebdon.
Never does the ill manners and ignorance of the inadequate who exploits this privilege, to the detriment of others, justify ANY form of physical or violent reprisal – their was a lapse of ethic and is best rebutted by ethical reprisal and censure.
With the privilege of freedom of speech comes responsibility – sadly a value widely abused as with comedians who push their right to freedom of speech with obscenities and abuse as a substitute for competence in the field of humour.
It is clearly an abuse of freedom of speech to deliberately and gratuitously insult and abuse the beliefs of others and the greater the offence cause the greater that abuse.
Little wonder that Charlie Hebdo was teetering on the verge of bankrupcy and closure with its tasteless and mature abuse of others in the name of satire – gratuitous offence is not satire it is the defence of a charlatan for inability.
I understand that Charlie Hebdo was not only failing to increase circulation but was in fact non viable with a maximum of 60,000 copies an issue and had recently launched a fund raising appeal and effort to raise €1,000,000 to stave off closure failing rightly to raise even 10%. It is hard to consider it a satirical magazine when in reality it was a failed and rather noxious publication pandering to racism and anti establishment values or lack thereof.
Perhaps further consideration of a posting I made previously on another of my blogs is worthy of republication:
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How France Treats It’s Citizens – To their eternal shame.
Posted by Greg Lance-Watkins on 22/10/2011
How France Treats It’s Citizens – To their eternal shame.
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Posted by: Greg Lance-Watkins – Greg_L-W.
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Hi,
much is made of British mistreatment of Muslims.
let me be very clear here, before I start – I do not buy into any belief in any god or gods and tend to believe there has been no greater source of evil, or cover for evil, than mankind’s determination to invent gods to worship/blame and then seek to force these superstitions on others.
In todays world we are in the main saddled with the evils of a triumverate of rival bronze age superstitions, invented with the purposes of control, a back up for tribal laws drawn up by elders and an answer for questions that could not be left for ever in the too difficult column!
Science has moved on, as has the thinking and recording abilities of mankind in the intervening years since Judaism, Christianity and Islam were invented and formed their many cults and schisms as rivals within the doctrines battle for power.
These master plans have to varying degrees moved on to capture new audiences as with adding spare god like beings (prophets, angels and the like) to entrap the multi theists. Meanwhile new rituals and depictions were apposite to capture other followers, as with those who worshipped women to who the sop of ‘Mary’ in some quaint form of deity was added or ‘hallos’ to depict the sun and be a symbol of the sun god worshippers be they amongst those worshipping Ra in Egypt or the rising sun of Wicker and the Celtic Druidic cultures or even the sun worship amongst the Incas and Aztecs.
Now of course so called Christianity is a host of different factions be they Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Orthodox, liberal, WeeFree, Presbyterian, evangelical, Morman, born again, Mixed Presbyterian, New Life Ministry, Alpha Group, Emmanuel Baptist, Westboro baptist, church in Wales, high church, low church, Cathar, trapist, Russian orthodox, Greek orthodox, Quaker, franciscan, Fallmouth New Life Church, United Reform Church, dominican, Scottish Presbyterian, Dutch reformed, house, reformed, methodist, Jehova’s Witness, Later Day Saints, and a host of other rival factions in christianity alone!
For a few 100 more factions in christianity alone CLICK HERE
Each with their own leaders, prophets, founders, customs and singular certainty making a mockery of the entire concept of so called ‘religion’.
The jews, the zionists, the khazara, the ashkenazi, the frummers, the muslims, the wahabe, sunni, shiite and their ilk are all broken into yet more fragments and possibly the only man who had the measure of them can be understood more clearly if you CLICK HERE
To add perspective realising VY Masses Majoris at 62.5 AU is 1,000s of times the size of our sun at 1.2GM which is 1,000s of time the size of our weeny planet at 5.5MGM which itself is almost 3 times the size of Mars and much larger than Ceres, Iris Pluto and our own moon!
Minded of, in my opinion, the utter irrelevance of mankind and our incredible insignificance in terms of our planet let alone our solar system and more significantly our universe as we understand it I find it completely implausible to believe in gods, let alone a supreme being overseeing us.
It seems that gods are little more than a bronze age superstition dreamed up on the back of earlier superstitions; superstitions that are and have remained arcane.
I do not deny that there are many people, indeed peoples, who have a need to believe in some all powerful being, both to answer to in their aspirations and to blame for their own failures. It is when these rather bizarre and disparate rival views are used to inculcate rivalry, hatred and a need to protheletise that the concept becomes a force for evil and the more strident the belief is the more damaging that evil becomes.
I have no desire to force those who need a prop in their lives to kick over that prop but just as they might believe it unkind of me, were I to show their views to be false and force that view on them I find it deeply offensive that they seek to force their superstitions upon me.
I have lost more good friends as a result of their desperate insecurity and wish to force their views on me than for any other reason, force which is often initially displayed in the odious manner of patronising attitudes of we know better – when clearly they know nothing but seek to substitute knowledge as a terminology for their various beliefs.
I am happy for my friends, and others, that they have a prop for their lives and the goals that their superstition provides for them and do not seek to dominate their view with mine. However please do not expect me to silently stand by and be insulted and abused when they display the desire to convert me or promote their, to me, risible superstition – particularly when in the whole of human history they can not offer a shred of evidence nor a body of proof of their opinion.
It is for these reasons that I believe that a State religion is no more than a display of the desperate insecurity of that would be State and where better to display this than the obscenity of the behaviour of zionism and zionists in Palestine and the manner in which, in the name of judaism, the peoples of Palestine have been dispossessed, abused, hounded, persecuted and imprisoned behind walls and wire, in the world’s largest open prison in the name of the evil that judaism has permitted zionism to carry out in their name – to their eternal shame.
Indubitably the closes relation of the zionists are the followers of islam and it is easy to identify a number of States that are founded on the evil of enforcwement of their chosen supertition upon its peoples be that the oppresive wahabe followers of the kingdom of the Sauds, the extremism of the Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Oman, TAS and more where the barbarism of their laws and customs is endorsed and practiced by their rulers in the name of some twisted and evil interpretation of the bronze age writings of a self styled cleric and prophet sponsored by the wealth of his considerably older wife!
Mohammed clearly drew up the tennets of belief in support of a largely rural peoples in a harsh desert region, short of water, where many of the peoples were nomadic – a codex designed to display hospitality, generosity, tollerance and other common values amongst the numerous family tribes, a codex by which they could live alongside each other in some harmony, a step forward from endless inter tribal rivalries.
It was not long before the doctrine and its codex of civilising laws fell into the hands of men of evil seeking to interpret it to their own gain be they sunni, shiite, wahabe or a mriad of factions following false prophets and their so called martyrs; many martyred in the name of one display of jealosy or greed or another between the factions.
Let us in the context of these facts consider France, which may seem something of a leap – but is it!
France, which lays claim to ‘the enlightenment’ yet through its history has resorted to barbarism, brutality and acts of cruel indifference and arrogance with the cloak of ‘patriotism’ being misrepresented as that of ‘nationalism’ as a particularly febrile cover for unbridled racism.
Consider the barbarism of the 1,000s of women burned at the stake in France in the Middle Ages and the cruielty of the great war lords of France where in massive oppulence the likes of the Dukes of Corsay starved their peasant farmers and massacred their rivals – behaviour so redollent of the regime of the Sun King and the palaces and life style of Versailles.
When in 1830 the French invaded Algeria confronting muslims and their heritage they devised, over the next century their codex of law for the conquered peoples of Algeria an ‘Indigenous Code’ that not only denied the indigenous peoples any right or opportunity to access education for their children, self respect or positions of any responsibility in governance. A codex that justified French brutality and maswsacres of literally 1,000s of the indigenous peoples.
The barbarity of the French was akin to the brutality of the Spanish & Italian Conquistadores in central and south America of a previous era.
The French claim of civilisation is only surface deep only as displayed by the fact that when eventually in 1954 the Algerians rose against this bestial behaviour, seeking independence and the dignity of self determination.
The efforts to repress the Algerians were obscene in their brutality with the French Government tacitly authorising torture, beatings and killings and never holding anyone to account as they spirited away the criminals acting on the State’s behalf, be they police, French paras or Legion Etranger.
Little wonder that the Algerians increasingly retaliated more violently with the FLN, CRUA, APP & MNA when General Massu instituted concentration camps for some 2 million rural Algerians and punitive strikes against villages that were thought to perhaps harbour dissidents from the FLN which he ruthlessly destroyed on the orders of Charles de Gaulle in 1956 forming the groundwork of ‘apartheid’ as practiced by the boers in South Africa.
Then in 1958 General Salan implemented a policy of division enforced by the injustice of collective responsibility in the style of the Nazis in the conquest of such areas of France that did not succumb.
Finally the vote for independence was forced upon the French and was almost unanimous in its opposition to French rule.
Some 4-6 million French citizens living in ghettos in France are of Algerian descent to this day, where due to the racist nature of the French and the brutality of their management of minorities the hatreds have continued and they are treated disgracefully, building a future of unresolved problems, where those of Algerian descent have difficulty in finding education for their children, health care, housing and work, leaving them bereft of hope and with increasing, and dangerous, resentment wherwe the French seek to blame the results on Islam when clearly it is only the evil lunatic fringe of Islamism thaty exploits this in terms of criminality – similar to the criminal exploitation in Ireland by the IRA!
Consider the reporting of the French massacre of those of Algerian descent in France of 1961, as featured below and consider what problems such brutality is storing up for the France of the future in its racist nationalism and it would seem deservedly so!
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The modern massacre that shames the French: The police slaughter of Algerian immigrants (just 50 years ago) that’s been airbrushed from history
By Tony Rennell for MailOnline
Updated: 01:14, 22 October 2011
View comments
A solid phalanx of French riot police in blue and black uniforms held their ground at one end of the bridge over the River Seine that connects the western suburb of Neuilly to the centre of Paris.
They were a terrifying sight, fully kitted out for battle and raring to go. At the other end stood another line of police, also armed with batons and rifles.
In between them stood around 100 unarmed and very frightened Algerians. Carrying banners and placards, they had come onto the streets of the French capital with 30,000 others that day to protest at official curbs on their freedom to move about the city.
The date was October 17, 1961 – 50 years ago this month – and the bloodbath that was to unfold that autumn day was to be one of the most barbaric and shaming events in ‘civilised’ Europe’s post-war history.
Violence: Algerian protesters were slaughtered by French police on the streets of Paris on October 17, 1961
It still casts an uneasy shadow over France’s large population of North African immigrants. For decades, the truth about October 17 was suppressed. Even today, to a certain extent, France is deluded about what it reveals about the dark racist streak in the country’s psyche.
Under the presidency of General Charles de Gaulle, France was the land of liberty, equality and fraternity, yet what lay just beneath the surface was about to be revealed — repression, racism and violence.
The police began to advance, slowly, from either side, but this was no ‘kettling’ exercise designed to contain and disperse the demonstrators. The intention was to beat, maim and kill.
The trapped Algerians — citizens of France, in fact, because Algeria was at that point still a French colony — had nowhere to run.
As the two police lines met, batons were swung, shots were fired, panicking men, women and even children were cut down. Some were hurled, dead or alive, into the waters of the Seine.
All over Paris, similar fatal clashes were taking place as the police used indiscriminate and unfettered force to break up the demonstration.
Under the presidency of General Charles de Gaulle, France was the land of liberty, equality and fraternity, yet what lay just beneath the surface was revealed that night – repression, racism and violence
Algerians arriving from the shanty towns on the city outskirts where they lived were ambushed at Metro stations, herded together and beaten with truncheons. Eye-witnesses saw police cornering Algerians in side streets and clubbing them at will.
At some of Paris’s most famous tourist landmarks — from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysees and the Latin Quarter — there were vicious and utterly one-sided street battles.
Hadj Abdel Aziz was organising demonstrators in the Place de la Nation, the same square where, in the French Revolution 200 years earlier, the guillotine had operated. It was now the scene of a new kind of terror.
‘The police shot at people, who fell down wounded or dead,’ he says. ‘Everyone scattered, and I ran to the entrance to the Metro where I was kicked and crushed. I got home covered in blood and broken by my wounds.’
How many Algerians did not make it home is still a matter of conjecture and dispute. The official police figure that day was an impossible three dead — two Algerians shot and one, they said, who had died from a heart attack. Algerian sources went to the other extreme, claiming 300 deaths.
The exact number has never been pinned down. In so far as there is any consensus even now on the October 17 death toll, it is only that anywhere between 32 and 200 were killed.
Disgrace: The event still casts an uneasy shadow over France’s large population of North African immigrants – and for decades, the truth about October 17 was suppressed
What is certain is that for weeks after, bodies were washed up on the banks of the river. According to the Left-wing writer Simone de Beauvoir: ‘Corpses were found hanging in the Bois de Boulogne and others, disfigured and mutilated, in the Seine.’
Some of the police involved were so disgusted at their own actions that, many years later, they confessed to taking part in a hate crime.
‘For two hours we hunted and shot anything that moved,’ says one, named Raoul Letard. ‘We were waging a war and our adversary was the Algerians.’
So what precisely was it that sparked off events that left the streets of Paris and the river Seine running with blood?
In Algeria, France’s North African colony since 1830, separatists had been fighting a bloody terrorist war for independence for seven years, and were on the verge of winning.
The 200,000-strong Algerian community living and working in France at that time were considered by the security forces to be a suspicious and dangerous fifth column.
Some of the police involved were so disgusted at their own actions that, many years later, they confessed to taking part in a hate crime.
The violence of the fighting in Africa had spread on to the streets of France as supporters of the two rival factions vying for power in Algeria clashed openly in Paris.
When they weren’t killing each other, they targeted policemen with bullets and bombs.
Onto the scene came one of the most controversial figures in modern French politics — Maurice Papon.
He had been a leading figure in the French police force that collaborated with the Germans in World War II. (In 1998 he would be convicted of having rounded up Jews to send to Auschwitz, jailed for ten years and disgraced.)
But in the aftermath of the war, he and many other collaborators like him had been accepted back into the fold.
He became a police chief in Algeria, and in dealing with the guerrilla forces of the Algerian National Liberation Front, the FLN, he built a fearsome reputation for brutality, summary executions and torture.
And then he was appointed prefect of police in Paris to crack down on any trouble from Algerians in the city.
The lugubrious Papon — the sort of man who never used a nutcracker when a sledgehammer would do — immediately set out his stall by recruiting a special police force of former soldiers who had fought for France in Algeria and had no love for its people.
He gave them free rein to stop and search, detain without charge and torture French-based members of the FLN.
De Gaulle dismissed the killings as ‘a matter of secondary importance’, and in 1968 issued an amnesty to all police personnel for crimes committed during the war with Algeria
In essence, he unleashed a dirty war against the entire Algerian community, all of whom he considered to be suspects.
But the FLN was not about to be cowed. With diplomatic negotiations underway to bring the war in Algeria to an end and give the country its independence, it attempted to hurry things along by stepping up terror attacks on the streets of Paris.
Twenty policemen were killed, half of them in the first two weeks of October 1961.
At one emotion-charged funeral, Papon promised retaliation. ‘For each blow received, we’ll respond with 10,’ he told them. He then announced a curfew on the so-called ‘French Muslims of Algeria’. They were banned from the streets between 8.30pm and 5.30am.
The FLN hit back with mass demonstration, ruthlessly using death threats to coerce some of its more reluctant supporters to join in.
Cannily it gave the order that they were to go on to the streets totally unarmed, with not even a penknife that might be seen as an offensive weapon and invite retaliation. Organisers even frisked those taking part to make sure they weren’t carrying hidden weapons.
Some demonstrators were arrested and taken to police headquarters near Notre Dame, where they were confined in a courtyard and battered to death. Police handing out the beatings first removed the identification numbers from their uniforms.
Papon flooded Paris with 7,000 police, possibly more. He wound them up to a pitch of fury and then unleashed them with the promise they would never be called to account for anything they did that day.
‘I give you my word that you will be covered,’ he told them.
The stage was set for a vindictive act of vengeance that would quickly descend into mass murder.
Nor was it just in the streets that violence took place. Some demonstrators were arrested and taken to police headquarters near Notre Dame, where they were confined in a courtyard and battered to death.
Police handing out the beatings first removed the identification numbers from their uniforms.
Senior officers — quite possibly even Papon himself — watched the brutality, ignoring pleas by shocked officers to halt the killing.
Meanwhile, as many as 14,000 other Algerians were being rounded up and detained in internment centres. There, more harsh treatment was meted out with rifle butts and pick handles.
‘They tortured us with hot iron rods to learn the names of our leaders. At night they woke us with jets of water,’ says one man.
He recalled having to go through a gauntlet of baton-wielding riot police to get to the toilets. ‘We preferred to pee in our pants.’
A cover-up began as soon as the mayhem on the streets subsided, with Papon maintaining his men had fired only after they themselves had been shot at. He claimed that any bodies in the street were the result of in-fighting among Algerians themselves. The Paris newspapers generally accepted this explanation and dug no deeper.
The Communist Party spoke out against what had happened, as did isolated groups and some individuals in the Paris council and the national government.
It was not until the Eighties suspicions about what happened on the terrible day rose to the surface and investigations began
But since cameras had been confiscated from photographers who filmed incidents that did not fit the official story and newspaper accounts were censored, there was no hard evidence to go on.
There was no wave of revulsion that could disturb the French government’s position. The waters closed over the entire incident.
Then, when the Algerian war ended in a truce just months later in March 1962 and Algeria won its independence, the hate-filled events of October 17, 1961, seemed redundant — best glossed over by all sides in the spirit of co-operation between France and the new Algerian government.
De Gaulle dismissed the killings as ‘a matter of secondary importance’, and in 1968 issued an amnesty to all police personnel for crimes committed during the war with Algeria. No one was ever brought to account, and silence about what had happened remained unbroken for two decades.
Now, 50 years on, it is finally clear that the French police force inflicted grotesque, racially-motivated violence on a community whose actions in no way merited the extreme punishment handed out to them.
It was not until the Eighties that suspicions about what happened on that terrible day rose to the surface and investigations began.
In 1991, a book reconstructing the day in detail put the number of Algerian deaths at 200 and used the word ‘massacre’.
Papon sued the author for libel, but lost the case after being forced to admit the body count he had put at three was at least ten times that figure.
France and the world finally opened their eyes to what had happened on the Neuilly Bridge, the Place de la Nation and all the other dark spots in the so-called City of Light.
Now, 50 years on, it is finally clear that the French police force inflicted grotesque, racially- motivated violence on a community whose actions in no way merited the extreme punishment handed out to them.
Some believe that the massacre was the result of confused government policies towards North Africans in French society, which simultaneously tried to promote integration by offering them special assistance in health, education and jobs — while actively stoking up resentment against them.
The result of these mixed messages was an eruption of killing and a rift between the communities that has not healed to this day. Racism is rife in France and attacks on North Africans remain sickeningly commonplace.
They tend to live on blighted housing estates, the successors of the earlier shanty towns. Even today, these estates are regularly subjected to curfews, and paramilitary forces move in to deal with any disturbances.
French Algerians report they are made to feel unwelcome in the city centre and Paris’s tourist spots.
France seems at last to be coming to terms with the shameful events of October 17, which is an official day of remembrance. But whether it has really learned any lessons from the brutal attacks on the Neuilly Bridge is another matter.
Probably the sadest part of this story is that it is far from a single event and was the backbone of French north African policy over 130 years, a policy that has changed little to this day, when time and time again France is castigated by Amnesty International’s annual reports for the high level of deaths in custody of French citizens of Algerian descent and constant reports of brutality by the forces of the French Government.
One need look no further than the history of Mali, Chad, Niger, CAR and the like for further examples of such exorable colonial behaviour and brutality towards the indiginous peoples and Rwanda was a French colony where the French did such damage that it led to genocide where the French aided the Hutu and became complicit in the genocide.
Consider the manner in which the French fled Viet-Nam at Dien Bien Fu not only abandoning such allies as they had amongst the people leaving all records to incriminate them but using the Legion Etranger to cover their backs as they fled, resulting in abandoning the Legion to torture and death as the city fell.
For all its protestations of civilisation France has a long record of duplicity as displayed by the acquiescence to Nazi Germany of its Vicchy Government and in a nation of some 60 million many are surprised to note that the much vaunted Maquis amounted to a mere 2,000 at best whilst the likes of Francoise Mitterand and his cronies colluded with the Nazis and together with Klaus Barbie deported 1,000s of French jews in an act of ethnic cleansing to the Nazi run slaughter institutes of Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Treblinka and the like.
It is hard to consider that any form of uprising of those of Algerian descent in France, even as French citizens, is other than well earned!
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Regards,
Greg_L-W.
Posted by: Greg Lance-Watkins
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I also find the thoughts of Dr. Richard North of complimentary value:
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Saturday 10 January 2015 |
 No one with any just claim to understanding the events of the last few days can be unaware of the uneasy relationship between French society and the estimated four million people of Algerian descent in the country. They are, in the words of Dr Martin Evans, writing in 2011, disproportionately poor and discriminated against; at times their young, caught between two different cultures. Only a few years later, that is as true now as it was then but, in 2004, we saw written that the Algerian immigrants in France were “poor and ghettoised – and are a standing challenge to France’s traditional image of itself and its cultural identity”. A year later, we see written this, a narrative about the fate of the descendants of the north Africans who had been drafted in to help with the reconstruction of France after the Second World War. They were housed in what the French call Les cites, and we are told: The[se] “ghettos” are specially built for excluded and disfranchised migrants from France’s former North African colonies – mostly Arabs and Muslims – and other parts of the world. Clustered on the peripheries of France’s big cities, Les cités proved to be laboratories for dissent and resistance against oppression. The children of the immigrants who built France after World War II are being pushed further outside the French society. It is important to emphasise that the French youth who are protesting against police violence and the policy of the French political establishment, are French citizens. They were born into first and second generation immigrants communities from France’s former colonies. They are not motivated by religion, and the protest has nothing to do with Islam and Western cliché of “Islamic fundamentalism”. It is a protest against oppression and racism. This is the only way the youth can express their anger and frustration at French political establishment which deny immigrants to be integrated in their diversity. Successive French governments failed to come up with a fair and successful integration policy. The “second class citizens” have been pushed further out of the centres into France’s larger suburbs of Paris, Nice, and Lyon Toulouse, Marseille, Strasbourg and other big cities where their parents once provided cheap labour for France’s factories. The youth are excluded from the French society, and subjected to brutal and Nazi-like police harassments, encouraged by racist policies. In its annual report in April 2005, Amnesty International have criticised the “impunity” provided to police and police violent treatments of youth from North African origins during the provocative identity checks. In fact, an Arab or an African man has no right to look a policeman in the face during this deliberate and daily racism faced by young people of colour. Interestingly, the Amnesty International report for 2013 shows how little things have changed. Two years before that report, though, an unlikely source, the Daily Mail published an article describing how in 1961, during the war with Algeria, French police had slaughtered upwards of 200 protesting Algerians – some thrown into the Seine to drown. Some demonstrators had been arrested and taken to police headquarters near Notre Dame, where they had been confined in a courtyard and battered to death. Police handing out the beatings first removed the identification numbers from their uniforms. Senior officers watched the brutality, ignoring pleas by shocked officers to halt the killing. On this, the freedom-loving French press were completely silent, paving the way for an official cover-up, whence in 1968 De Gaulle dismissed the killings as “a matter of secondary importance” and issued an amnesty to all police personnel for crimes committed during the war with Algeria. In 2011, the Mail wrote: Some believe that the massacre was the result of confused government policies towards North Africans in French society, which simultaneously tried to promote integration by offering them special assistance in health, education and jobs — while actively stoking up resentment against them. The result of these mixed messages was an eruption of killing and a rift between the communities that has not healed to this day. Racism is rife in France and attacks on North Africans remain sickeningly commonplace. They tend to live on blighted housing estates, the successors of the earlier shanty towns. Even today, these estates are regularly subjected to curfews, and paramilitary forces move in to deal with any disturbances. French Algerians report they are made to feel unwelcome in the city centre and Paris’s tourist spots. Also covering the same events was the Observer, which concluded that few would argue that the tribal murders committed by Paris police half a century ago are likely to be repeated today. However, it added, “nor would anyone pretend that the discriminatory policies which gave rise to such horrors have disappeared from modern France”. Four years later, the same author makes a plea for people not to blame the current bloodshed on France’s Moslems. Writer Nabila Ramdani argues: The three French-Algerian men believed responsible for the 12 deaths in Paris on Wednesday would have been steeped in a recent history of this conflict which, in the 1960s, was exported from the battlefields of Algeria to Paris itself. During one notorious atrocity in 1961, up to 200 Algerians were slaughtered around national monuments, including the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame cathedral. Many were tossed into the Seine from some of the most beautiful bridges in the world and left to drown. Half a century on, the violence has subsided but there is still a strong sense of resentment among alienated communities living in housing estates on the outskirts of the capital. Many are Muslims of north African origin who complain that discrimination against them extends to every field of life, from housing and employment to the right to religious expression. This is particularly so as politicians of the left and right regularly blame Islam for these social problems, which in fact have nothing to do with spiritual faith. To add to this narrative we even get Robert Fisk, with plausible arguments which say that “Paris attack brothers’ campaign of terror can be traced back to Algeria in 1954”. That much and much more is indeed arguable, and plausibly so, but not according to the self-appointed “experts” on the comment thread of my 366 Comments. A significant number will have it that Islam is the primary or even sole motivator for the killing, insisting that alternatives are “not up for debate”. This is alongside those who rashly and irrationally argue in support of Farage that the killings are a consequence of multiculturalism. Yet, by even the most basic of definitions, multiculturalism is a celebration of diversity, manifest in an official policy where cultures other than the host culture are maintained and supported. Underpinning multiculturalism, of course, is tolerance of other cultures, and there is nothing whatsoever in the French treatment of the Algerians that can be called tolerant, or in any respect be identified with multiculturalism. Those that argue otherwise are demonstrably wrong, and by reference to easily verifiable facts. Furthermore, all this is very far from academic, and comprehension is not assisted by ill-informed prattle. As I have argued many times, the greater part of any solution to an ill is correctly to identify the problems. The often bigoted and always blinkered insistence of some on reducing complex problems to a series of formulaic mantras is misguided and damaging. Not least, as I have argued elsewhere, we are dealing with the effects of tribalism – and the breakdown of tribal disciplines – and the relationship with Islam, which is probably a powerful, if scarcely recognised phenomenon. Whatever the actual causal factors, they are bound to be many, with complex interactions. Thus, those with the ability to influence the debate should keep their minds open to a range of possibilities. The issues we are dealing with are too important for polemics, political posturing and the blind certainties that we have seen over the past few days. By that measure, then, I stand by my view that Farage – and those who support him – are both wrong and dangerous in promoting their superficial mantras. We need better than this, and if people such as Farage can’t shape the debate responsibly and with more understanding than they have shown, they are best keeping quiet.
Richard North10/01/2015119 Comments |
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Friday 9 January 2015  The date of the Guardian piece (illustrated above) is rather significant – it was published in 2012. The theme is rather familiar, a litany of woes of the French-Algerian community of 4 million, and the way they are so very badly treated by the French, “second-class citizens” being a rather optimistic description. Franco-Algerian history, of course, goes way back, but includes a savage war of independence, where state-sanctioned torture and reprisals were widely used by the French military, in an inglorious episode in its history. Given then there current way that those of Algerian descent are treated, and by comparison with, say, the number of mass shootings you get in the United States, one could venture a cautious option that it is remarkable that there have not been more such episodes such as the Charlie Hebdo shooting. In the context, therefore, the very last thing one might be comfortable saying that is that “uncontrolled immigration” was in any way a contributory factor in the shooting, that it was a function of “multi-culturalism” or that there was any aspect of the shooting which could be attributable to a “fifth column living within our own countries … out to destroy our whole civilisation and our way of life”. On a purely factual level, therefore, Farage is wrong in his comments, and even if he had a point to make, his timing was execrable. Offering a political analysis not a full day after the shooting was poor judgement, and especially as the full facts are very far from being known. Political rivals, therefore, are quite right to condemn Farage. Once again he has shown poor judgement and a lamentably superficial understanding of complex issues. What is terrifying, though, is the comments on the likes of the Breitbart site – and even – it would appear – the bulk of the Daily Mail comments, which appear to support the Ukip leader. We know full well that newspaper web comments do not reflect majority public opinion (or we would probably have a Ukip government in power), but they do demonstrate that there is a very large number of people who cannot think straight, and allow themselves to support Farage’s ill-founded comments. In the fullness of time, there will be lessons to learn from this shooting, and it is going to take careful thought and evaluation to come up with the right lessons. But political leaders who are prone to jump to the wrong conclusions, on the basis of flawed analysis, and incomplete information, are not to be trusted. By that measure, Farage, once again, has shown that he is entirely unfit to lead a political party. But some of his followers and supporters are also showing that they are not people whose judgement can be trusted either. They may deserve Farage – but we don’t.
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Richard North09/01/2015366 Comments |
Peter North’s comments on the issue are also unequivocal:
CLICK HERE
Or HERE also HERE and HERE & HERE plus HERE & HERE
There is a great deal more factually supported opinion on his blog worthy of reading, when you can find the time.
The great danger we in Britain face as a result of what has happened in France as a result of French racism over many years is that in this year, facing a general election, particularly and with the light weight ill informed populism of Nigel Farage and his cult of irresponsible followers that the two British parties of stature and standing may try to exploit the situation to fend off Ukip’s crass challenge.
A challenge that has done great harm to the EUroSceptic and particularly the EUroRealist cause by conflating it with scraping the gutters of politics for the easy & populist voters who as Oswald Mosley, Adolf Hitler and others before and since realised by pandering to racism they would gain traction for as long as it was cloaked in claims of Nationalism; as you will recall Mosley was voted man of the year in 1934 and Hitler in 1938 for the influence and exploitation of democracy as was Nigel Farage in 2014!
The great danger is that the Police will set about Empire building and both the Tories & Labour will seek the unthinking and ill informed votes from the populist pool by clamouring for greater arming of the police!
Before considering arming more police do be minded that in France, with a similar population to that of Britain they failed to save lives having 17 people killed by 3 armed hooligans despite deploying 90,000 armed police of a total of 220,000 French police who are armed.
In Britain we have on the mainland handled many years of active murder by the IRA and subsequently by dishonest individuals exploiting the simple minded failures in their social group in the name but not the spirit of Islam. This we have done with currently just under 5,000 armed police officers and a reticence to deploy our military forces in a civil role in the country.
In any civilised nation where a death penalty for any crime it is clearly a mark of failure accrued by every single lethal weapon deployed. Let us not forget the fact that the British police can not name a single uninvolved life saved by the use of lethal force in the hands of the police yet it is not difficult to construct a list of individuals thus murdered by armed police (with a hat tip to Wiki):
- Dean Joseph (5 September 2014 in London)
- Anthony Grainger (3 March 2012 in Cheshire, England)
- Mark Duggan (4 August 2011 in London, England)
- Olaseni Lewis (3 September 2010 in London, England)
- Ian Tomlinson (1 April 2009 in London, England)
- David Sycamore (30 November 2008 in Guildford, England)[5]
- Mark Saunders (6 May 2008 in London, England)
- Ann Sanderson (11 June 2007 in Sevenoaks, Kent)
- Jean Charles de Menezes (22 July 2005 in London, England)
- Azelle Rodney (30 April 2005 in London, England)
- Philip Prout (4 May 2004 in Cornwall, England)
- Andrew Kernan (12 July 2001 in Liverpool, England)
- Harry Stanley (22 September 1999 in London, England)
- James Ashley (15 January 1998 in St Leonards, England)
- Diarmuid O’Neill, Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer (23 September 1996 in London, England)
- Richard O’Brien (4 April 1994 in London, England)
- John Mikkleson, unlawfully killed (July 1985 in London)
- James Kelly, killed in police custody (June 21 1979 in Liverpool, England)
- Blair Peach (died 24 April 1979 in London, England)
- Percy Toplis (6 June 1920 in Cumberland, England)
We must do all we can to resist such an irresponsible act of seeking votes by our politicians in their efforts to pander to the unthinking garnered from such a populist clamour for greater powers; clearly greater powers invested in the state are by deffinition a loss of freedoms for the peoples for who that state are but servants!
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Greg_L-W..
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