Iraq: Only You

I don’t like being known as the ‘only gay Iraqi activist’”, Amir Ashour says...

Independent.

Tony Blair: Judgement!

I think we can all agree that Britain's leading war criminal should be strung up with piano wire upside-down outside the nearest petrol station behind Asda.

Syria: Sodomy In Action

The Advocate.

As with Iran a decade ago, and Russia a year ago, you can now tell when the right is getting ready for war, as they suddenly highlight homophobia in a designated country.

Altogether now; 'They throw gay men off buildings!' 

Update: David Cameron's call to arms in the Commons on Thursday...

“In the Middle East, they are seeking to establish their vision of a caliphate across Iraq and Syria, forcing people in those areas to yield to their rule or face torture or death. They have beheaded aid workers, organised systematic rape, enslaved Yazidi women and thrown gay people off buildings. All these atrocities belong to the dark ages.”

Andrew Percy, Conservative MP for Brigg & Goole writing in the Telegraph.

Google 'Syria gay/s buildings' for endless examples of this 'Bombing for gay rights' mantra.

Gay Star News: Pornography As Propaganda?
Only carpet bombing can stop this!

7/7: Cartoon

Peter Brookes, The Times.

Hillary Clinton: Thank You Ma'am!

Back in 2009 (four years before the current presidential hopeful formally endorsed marriage equality), then-Secretary of State Clinton expressed concern over purported torture of gay men in Iraq in one of many released conversations from 2009 with her adviser Cheryl Mills, reports the Washington Blade.

“So sad and terrible," wrote Clinton of the alleged antigay brutality in Iraq. "We should ask Chris Hill to raise this w govt. If we ever get Posner confirmed we should emphasize LGBT human rights.” ...

The Advocate

And that, unbelievably, is the story.

Yup, Clinton once sent a private email saying she thought reports of gay men in Iraq being tortured and murdered was 'sad and terrible', this was in the chaos unleashed in the wake of a criminal war she'd always supported.

And this - apparently - shows she has 'always' supported LGBT rights, even though she was speaking out against equal marriage at the time.

One wonders what squish-squish sad-face sadness she felt over the countless gay men that must have died as 'collateral damage'.

And what would she do about it?

Send in the rainbow-coloured drones?

The gay media's fawning over this appalling woman is sickening.

Here's a quick corrective, Codepink's Medea Benjamin on Hillary The Hawk.

Her election campaign looks like being political pinkwashing defined.

I doubt her own press office could think they'd get away with trying to push such utter bilge.

The above epic exercise in point-missing puffery was regurgitated by both of our own pink stenographers to power, Pink News (New emails reveal Hillary Clinton thought Iraq's treatment of gays was 'sad and terrible'), and Gay Star News, who gave it the exact same crass spin as the Advocate... 

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
the homosexual journalist.

But seeing what the man will do 

unbribed, 
there's really no occasion to.

Humbert Wolfe, 1930, adapted.

Tony Blair: Don't Laugh!

Daily Telegraph.

And now let's take a quick look at today's Telegraph cartoon...

War: War Is Stupid

Peter Brookes, The Times.

Dan Savage: Conservative

World Net Daily video columnist Molotov Mitchell (yeah we’d never heard of him before this either) has employed some creative logic to come to these conclusions: Dan Savage is worse than the Westboro Baptist Church, and he should fly with the church to Iraq to protest ISIS...


Queerty.

Perhaps only in America could Dan Savage not be seen as conservative.

Where being left or right is defined not by where someone stands on US foreign policy or economics, but on guns, god and gays.

Savage is a 'patriotic' power-serving media whore pushing the American dream - get rich, get married, get kids - to gay men.

Here's his infamous 2002 article Say 'YES' To War On Iraq.

If he believed that right-wing drivel he should have gone to Iraq twelve years ago.

'The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.' Chomsky.

PS Remember Democrat Dan's bonkers boycott of Latvian vodka to protest Russia's anti-gay 'holocaust'? As with Iran and Israel/Palestine, 'gay rights' are invoked to defend Western imperial interests.

Morland: Made In Britain

@mortenmorland for The Times.

• How The War On Terror Created The World's Most Powerful Terror Group - Patrick Cockburn.

PS On reflection Fagburn gets the feeling his interpretation of this cartoon may be very different from the artist's intention.

Edinburgh: There Goes The Neighbourhood

Now which do you consider the more important story; two posh queens not liking some working-class people moving nearby (and they haven't moved yet, such is their misery), or thousands of Yazidis being trapped on a mountain?

PS 'There are thousands fewer there than estimated previously, and those who remain are in a better state than expected,' said the US State Department, after so nobly bombing them in their name.
The number of people on Mount Sinjar has now been reduced from 50,000 to 'thousands'.

Drones: We Kill All

Do you think a drone missile can tell the difference between Yazidis and ISIS?

Why does America suddenly care about the plight of a people 99.99% of them would have had to Google yesterday?

Why not bomb Tel Aviv?

^^^ My friend Darren done made this cartoon. x

PS Here's Chris Woods' excellent DronesWatch.

Mail On Sunday: Where Did It All Go Wrong?

From loving wife and mother to runaway lesbian...

From schoolboy to jihadist...

Welcome to Broken Britain!!!

T E Lawrence: If Only They'd Listened To You

T E Lawrence's map of the Middle East, 1918.

"They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters but to win a show of their own."

Tony Blair: Is Still A Cunt And Mad As A Lorry

Telegraph.

The Times.

Martin Rowson for The Guardian.

The Independent.

Our boys! One for the army-loving gay media here. 

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Karl Marx.

Iraq: Buggered

Peter Brookes for The Times.

Well done all!

النصر على إيزيس ! الموت النظام العالمي الجديد ! الموت لأمريكا !

Here Is The News: Sorry

We were sorry to hear about all those bombs in Nasiriyah,
in Kirkuk,
Baghdad.
We were sorry to hear 30 people died, and 200 were injured.
We had an editorial meeting and we thought this was a story.
But then something happened in some place that matters.
We'll try and squeeze something in near the end of the show.
So sorry 'bout that.
So sorry.

Iraq: Ten Years After

The day will get off to a cloudy start.
It will be quite chilly
But as the day progresses
The sun will come out
And the afternoon will be dry and warm.

In the evening the moon will shine
And be quite bright.
There will be, it has to be said,
A brisk wind
But it will die out by midnight.
Nothing further will happen.

This is the last forecast.

Weather Forecast, Harold Pinter, March 2003.
And remember, whatever you say, say nothing...

There's an old story about Oliver Cromwell. After he had taken the town of Drogheda. The citizens were brought to the main square. Cromwell announced to his Lieutenants: "Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men." One of his aides said: "Excuse me General. Isn't it the other way around?" A voice from the crowd called out: "Mr. Cromwell knows what he's doing!"

That voice is the voice of Tony Blair "Mr Bush knows what he's doing!" But the fact is that Mr Bush and his gang do know what they're doing and Blair, unless he really is the deluded idiot he often appears to be, also knows what they're doing. They are determined, quite simply, to control the world and the world's resources. And they don't give a damn how many people they murder on the way. And Blair goes along with it.
 
Speech, October 2002.

Well, that went well didn't it?
And a big "Hello!" to all you orphans and widows and other bereaved lovers, family and friends.
Sorry about that.

Homecoming: Like Soldiers Do

Coalition For Equal Marriage have released their homo promo video, Homecoming.
It would be silly to criticise it for being "sentimental" - I presume much of the point was that they wanted to tug at a broad range of heart-strings.
Just like it's meant to be "sweet" and "nice" and "inoffensive".
"No horses were frightened during the making of this picture" etc.
And the chaps seem a bit Merchant-Ivory, if you know worra I mean...
But I wonder why the case for gay marriage so often seems to be conflated with military service - there's a (real-life) soldier and his boyfriend on the recent cover of Attitude magazine.
"Have you heard the one about the Iraq veteran who can fight for his country but can't get married?"
They seem a lovely couple, but I wonder why such imagery has been given such prominence in this debate.
Why are soldier boys the poster boys for UK marriage equality?
Is a gay soldier the ultimate image of a "good gay"?
Do they show that gay men can be "real men"?
A certain kind of gay man loves this idea - witness the paroxysms of excitement over that photo of the real-life US marine kissing his boyfriend that went viral earlier this year.
Homecoming: Not Queens. 
Is the argument that we should be allowed to gay-marriaged as a thank you for helping out in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Is this like the less radical suffragettes who threw himself into the Great War effort to show their loyalty to king and country?
Is this emotional war porn?
Support our gay boys!
Just askin'.

Johann Hari: Busted!

"Johann Hari has been suspended for two months pending the outcome of an internal enquiry. We have no further comment to make." Oops!
Surprisingly nobody has taken Hari up on writing this bollocks in 2004.
The biggest joke is that The Independent didn't "suspend" Hari for writing lies about Iraq.
Silly sod.

Johann Hari: Oops!

"As an amusing aside from our usual ruthless criticism of everything existing, here’s a little insight into the workings of the mainstream media. We’ve long found this piece of super-liberal journalism rather lulzy- it’s an attempted take-down of Italian communist and every ultra-leftist’s favourite “psychopath”, Toni Negri, by Orwell Prize winner Johann Hari from The Independent in 2004. Hari interviews him at the ICA in London, and carefully tries to balance his horror at the Gulag with his horror of Negri’s flagrant disregard of a no smoking sign, heavily implying throughout that Negri is a murderous terror-monger. It was a poor interview, failing to even attempt to engage with his writings on the grounds that it’s too impenetrable, although he paints a vivid picture of Negri as a personally rude and rather objectionable man.
"A great introduction to this formidable “old terrorist” is the book “Negri on Negri”, published in 2003, where Anne Dufourmentelle produces an in-depth interview, based around a lexicon of his thought, and forming a much more cohesive and thorough look at the man’s ideas and life. But reading through it, a strange sense of deja-vu settled over us. Where have we read that before? This week, it was bought to our attention.
"Hari’s “interview”, vivid and lifelike and seemingly full of conflict between the two great minds, seems to contain whole passages lifted from Dufourmentelle’s much lengthier interview. Compare and contrast… [Go here]

Deterritorial Support Grouppppp.

Hari fesses up to making stuff up here.
Cue shitstorm.
Today Johann Hari blogs;
"Yesterday on Twitter I was accused of plagiarism. This accusation is totally false – but I have reflected seriously on this and do have something to apologize for.
"When you interview a writer – especially but not only when English isn’t their first language – they will sometimes make a point that sounds clear when you hear it, but turns out to be incomprehensible or confusing on the page. In those instances, I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible..."

The non-apology is as bad as the original accusation.
For more on Mr Hari's dodgy journalism see Fagburn - passim, but here and here
Mr Hari is perhaps best known for telling lies about Iraq in the run-up to war.
Have a look at various critiques of Hari on MediaLens, as a frequent servant of power.
Fagburn's favourite article by Johannna is when he - overnight! - became an expert on late-19th century Anarchists here.
I wonder where she got all that from?
Silly moo.

Update: Andd he's now been accused of ripping stuff off from Attitude, too.