Islamofauxbia – The Smearing of Steven Greer

As Bristol University Professor David Miller comes under scrutiny for his latest outburst of conspiratorial anti-Semitism, a suspiciously-timed set of complaints against another Bristol University Professor have emerged, this time related to apparent Islamophobia.

The University of Bristol Islamic Society (BRISOC) have mounted a targeted campaign against Steven Greer, Professor of Human Rights at University of Bristol Law School, accusing him of espousing; “Islamophobic hate speech”, “colonial bigoted views”, “anti-Muslim rhetoric”, and even implying that his lectures justify “hate crime towards Muslims”.

 

The Lies of the Anti-Prevent Lobby

Two stories have emerged recently which have generated the usual tiresome attacks against the prevention strand of the UK government’s anti-terrorism strategy.

Firstly, the role of Independent Reviewer of Prevent was recently given to William Shawcross – the author and son of head British prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal, Hartley Shawcross.

As is customary in such circumstances, opponents of Prevent quickly set about searching for incidents to dredge up from the new appointee’s past that could conceivably be used to contest his abundant suitability for the job.

 

The Sacrilegious Right

The depressingly inescapable issue of blasphemy has once again become topical in recent days.

If the spectacle of adult human beings in the 21st century furiously outraged on behalf of an imaginary friend or a long dead warlord wasn’t ludicrous enough, spare a thought for the mental capacity of people willing to inflict violence and subjugation upon anyone with the temerity to express less than flattering takes on these apocryphal characters.

 

The Killing of Rayshard Brooks

Around 10:30pm on Friday 12^th June, Atlanta police responded to a call of a man asleep in his car in the drive-through lane of a local Wendy’s restaurant, blocking other customers’ access to the establishment.

Officer Devin Brosnan arrived to find Rayshard Brooks, a 27 year old black man, passed out at the wheel of his vehicle. He approached Brooks and ordered him to pull into a parking bay and clear the way for other customers to use the outlet. Brosnan was then joined by Officer Garrett Rolfe 14 minutes later who suspected that Brooks was intoxicated rather than, say, a narcoleptic for whom spontaneously losing consciousness while queuing for a burger was a run of the mill occurrence, and asked him if he would be willing to complete a field sobriety test.

 

Drive-By Sympathy

Last weekend incredibly tragic news broke that a 19 year old girl had been gunned down outside a Blackburn supermarket in a drive-by shooting.

There were many notable characteristics about the victim. She was “beautiful, much-loved, bright, passionate, hard-working, and ambitious”. She was involved in charity work and was studying to fulfil her ambitions of becoming a solicitor. The one characteristic that overrode all of these however, at least in the minds of cynical and irresponsible ideologues, was that she was a Muslim.

 

24 Carat Goldblum

I’ve long enjoyed the work of eccentric actor Jeff Goldblum. The calibre of films he’s appeared in over the years is wildly varied but his stilted and quirkily emphasised delivery of even the most pedestrian and poorly scripted dialogue can render fodder like Independence Day reasonably enjoyable, despite the less than helpful presence of Will Smith.

Last weekend though, Ru Paul’s Drag Race – a garish reality TV competition about cross-dressing performers – became an unlikely vehicle for Goldblum to instigate a dialogue of actual substance.

 

The Gilding of Mehdi Hasan

If I were to write a list of things that could make life under a global pandemic lock-down exponentially more torturous, I doubt I’d have an imagination sadistic enough to conjure up the atrocities that have been inflicted upon us recent days.

First up was the news that the BBC were replacing Match of the Day with re-runs of Mrs Brown’s Boys: a bawdy and archaic cookie-cutter sitcom roughly as amusing as a cancer diagnosis in a Christmas card.

Next, a naked Madonna broadcasting from a candlelit bathtub full of rose petals, informing us from behind a mask of six figure Botox that we’re all in the same boat really.

 

Approaching Racism

“I’d rather punch 300 innocent people and 1 genuine Nazi, than punch no Nazis at all.” – Godfrey Elfwick

Stardate 2020 is in full swing and yet our primitive and tedious obsession with race and skin-colour trundles forward with grating obstinacy. Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle received something of a hard time in the media not long back since she and her husband announced some boring decision about their boring lives in a boring tone of voice that I’m too bored to go into. Almost inevitably this castigation of the young Duchess, we were told by “experts”, was motivated by the fact that she’s a black woman – this despite her being significantly lighter-skinned than I would be after a lunch-hour in a beer garden on a reasonably clement day.

 

Race-baiting with David Vance

One of the more troublesome aspects of social media allowing virtually anybody to appoint themselves to the role of independent journalist, is that unscrupulous propaganda merchants will eagerly take advantage of this unregulated space for the purpose of circulating lies and thereby furthering their own nefarious agendas. And without a virtually limitless capacity for research it’s sometimes hard to know whether the reports you’re reading at any given time are accurate and trustworthy.

 

Questioning Corbyn

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was interrogated by veteran interviewer Andrew Neil for the BBC on Monday evening in preparation for the up-coming general election, and the results were not pretty to say the least. In fact Corbyn’s performance was so car-crash appalling that conservative websites are simply using the full unedited and unannotated video as pro-Tory promotional material.

Far from the anti-establishment renegade, and breath of fresh air to British politics that his supporters invariably characterise him as, we were instead presented with a squirming and irritable supply teacher whose medley of equivocations, banalities, and routine auto-responses were indistinguishable from any other career politician you might care to name, save perhaps for his rare level of ineptitude and the visible frustration he allows himself to display over having his political positions questioned.