Week 41 2014

Tendring Topics….on Line

Coping with Islamic State

            So now we are officially ‘at war’ with IS (Islamic State) with our aircraft already striking IS targets but with the promise that there will be no ‘boots on the ground’.  This may slow down Islamic State’s progress but I don’t think it will stop it; much less reverse it.  Its principal effect will probably be to recruit more enthusiastic young people from the UK and no doubt, from other ‘western’ countries, into the IS ranks.  Now, so it seems, British teenage girls are making for Turkey as the first step towards becoming brides of their IS heroes in Syria!  It’s strange (well perhaps it isn’t) that we never hear of young people travelling to Syria to help those ‘moderate forces’ opposing President Assad that the UK and the USA are so eager to support.

            I heard on the tv a few days ago an ‘authority’ on Middle Eastern matters declare that the IS uprising is a result of Britain’s failure a year ago to take decisive action against President Assad.  This, so he said, had enabled President Assad’s army to defeat the ‘moderate opposition’ and leave the extreme jihadists in control. What rubbish!  Does he really imagine that if Assad had been overthrown, those moderates would have prevailed over IS?   On the contrary, without Assad, his army and the substantial number of Syrians who remain loyal to him, IS would probably now be ruling the whole of Syria. 

            The Iraqi army has proved woefully unable to halt the IS advance.  The Kurds have been more successful but they are not a national army and the Turks are unwilling to let them have the heavy weapons they need, because of their fear that they might be used to create an independent Kurdistan – part of which would be part of what is now Turkey!  The only effective national army in the Middle East, experienced and hardened in battle with Islamic State, is that of President Assad.  It is time we made our peace with him and accepted him as an ally.

            No doubt the pre-civil war Assad regime had its faults (what Middle Eastern regime hasn’t?) but it was an oasis of freedom and tolerance compared with some of those whom we now claim to be our friends.  Saudi Arabia in particular is the source of the poisonous doctrines that IS puts into practice.  The overwhelming majority of those known to be responsible for the 9/11 outrage were from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia regularly abuses human rights in much the same way as IS, but only on its own people.  Half its population (the women) are regarded as the property of members of the other half!   I have little doubt that IS’ initial funding came from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  Now, of course, IS doesn’t need outside funding.  They have enriched themselves from their conquests in Syria and Iraq.

 A regular blog reader points out in an email that IS, unlike Hitler and his Nazis, is part of a militant movement that is sweeping the globe.  The Archbishop of Canterbury accurately described it as a ‘many headed Hydra’. Islamic State in Syria and Iraq has the same motivation and the same objectives as the Islamic jihadists who abducted, and still hold, those Christian teenage girls in Nigeria; those who constantly threaten the government of Pakistan, who are fighting for control of Libya, and who are likely to take over Afghanistan as soon as the last GI leaves.

I am reluctant to criticise Obama and Cameron for authorising air strikes on IS targets.  I am sure that they have done so reluctantly and that they are both well aware of the risk of their countries being dragged into a third ‘Gulf War’.  I really have no idea of what their course of action should be.  My blog-reading email correspondent clearly feels the same.  ‘I don’t think we can stand idly by and let these people take ever more and more land, forcing completely peaceful populations out of their towns and villages and murdering anyone who opposes them.  I feel that the priority should have been the defence of the innocent and humanitarian relief – and that does need boots on the ground.  Surely we have the hardware to put a ring of steel around these villages and keep the enemy at bay without getting deeply involved.  It can’t be right for all the Kurds to have to move into refugee camps in Turkey’.

No, of course it isn’t.  My knowledge of military tactics is (to say the least) extremely limited – but I am sure that it wouldn’t be possible to defend all those vulnerable towns and villages as my correspondent suggest. I don’t think we should underestimate the fanaticism and determination of these jihadists. National boundaries mean nothing to them.  If they successfully drove all the Kurds out of Iraq and into Turkey they’d drive on into Turkey!

I am just a little disappointed at the reaction to Islamic State of the majority of peaceful and moderate Muslims in the UK and Western Europe. Imams have condemned the actions of IS as unislamic but -  where are the angry street demonstrations and demands for a fatwa that were provoked by Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ and the cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper?  As well as increasing Islamophobia in the ‘western world’ and providing encouragement to members of such Neofascist organisations as BNP, English Defence League and some Ukippers, it is surely the ultimate blasphemy to suggest that the torture and slaughter of any of his human children is in accordance with the will of God.

I had been persuaded that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance and that jihad doesn’t really mean a ‘Holy War’ but the inner struggle within us all against the forces of evil.  The members of Islamic State and other similar organisations worldwide are doing their best to persuade me (and thousands of others) otherwise.

‘Ring of Steel’

My email correspondent’s  use of the phrase Rings of Steel to protect non-Islamic communities in Iraq and Syria from the fury of the Islamic State, reminded me that Ring of Steel was the headline on the front page of the weekly Clacton Gazette on Thursday 25^th September.  A sub-heading announced that Special Branch, undercover police and sniffer dogs are to be drafted into Clacton in a huge security operation for the town’s high-profile by-election on 9^th October – a fortnight away as that particular Gazette was published.  If I publish this blog on the internet on Monday 6^th October as I intend, it will be just three days away. 

A news article within the Gazette points out that this by-election will have the highest profile in English political history and its announcement has come just as the country is put on a heightened state of alert against possible terrorist threats.  Police say that there is no known terrorist threat in Clacton but electoral organisers are taking no chances.  Ian Davidson, Tendring Council’s Chief Executive and Returning Officer for the Clacton By-election, told a Gazette reporter that, ‘This election is massive in terms of attention and national politics – the spotlight is on Clacton politically.  We have been in touch with Special Branch and the Police because there are potential security issues and we are taking every precaution to make sure it is a safe and secure count.  We have never had Special Branch at an election before. There is no information of a specific security threat, but we are taking every precaution because of the national and international profile of the by-election’.

Tendring’s district police commander, Chief Inspector Russ Cole said that local police officers would be visiting polling stations throughout the day and there would be a police presence at the count.  ‘We are very much driven by intelligence, and the intelligence we are looking at says there are no major public disorder or counter-terrorist issues but we want to make sure we have enough policing assets’.

I don’t know whether or not my experience has been shared by others but it saddens me that have to say that Ukip and Douglas Carswell have dominated the election campaign.  I have lost count of the number of items of  election literature I have received telling me what a wonderful chap Carswell is, how fortunate we are to have had him as our MP and how important it is that he should be re-elected (but this time as a Ukipper) at the by-election.   These have included leaflets, posters to stick in my window and two apparently personal letters one that addresses me as ‘Dear Ernest’ and the other as ‘Dear Neighbour’.  Douglas Carswell and I have never even met and are certainly not on ‘first name terms’. I have no idea where ‘Dear Douglas’ lives but I’m quite sure it isn’t in my neighbourhood.  I have also had a Ukip doorstep canvasser call on me and among the junk phone calls I had yesterday (1^st October) was a lady urging me to put a cross against Carswell’s name on the 9^th.

Of the other contestants, I have received election leaflets from the Labour, Conservative and Lib’Dem candidates plus a phone call on behalf of the Labour candidate.  And that’s it.  Ukip, it seems, has unlimited funds and lots of eager volunteer supporters.  The others haven’t.

 Ukip’s policies embody everything that I most dislike in politics.  I don’t like their attitude towards Europe, towards global climate change, towards ‘green’ issues generally and towards taxation.  The situation in the UK today, with a great many people (including myself) having lost faith in any of the traditional political parties, is uncomfortably like that in Germany in the late 1920s early ‘30s.  They sought a politician who distrusted politics and offered an alternative path.  They found such a politician in Adolf Hitler.  We’re in danger of finding one in Nigel Farage.

I have a postal vote and have already used it.  For the first time in my life I voted for the Conservative candidate - not because I want him as an MP, but because he offers the best chance of keeping Ukip defector Douglas Carswell, out!

           

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Week 20 2014

Tendring Topics…..on line

The Odessa Steps – déjà vue?

          One of the most striking sequences in The Battleship Potemkin, a very early classic silent film, is of the massacre of unarmed protesting civilians by the Tsar’s Cossacks on the Odessa Steps, a giant stairway providing the main access to the town of Odessa from the Black Sea.  The film tells the story of the mutiny and takeover of the Potemkin in 1905 by its crew, provoked by brutal treatment and maggoty rations.  At about the same time there was an attempted revolt against the Tsar in Moscow and elsewhere throughout Russia.  The revolt was put down with extreme brutality.

            The Potemkin with its mutinous crew put in at Odessa and the mutineers were supported by the town’s people.  The film, directed by Eisenstein, shows them gathering on the Odessa Steps  (elderly men and women, students, a mother with a baby in its pram) to welcome the mutineers,  and being massacred by Cossacks and other of the Tsar’s troops.   It is a very vivid and memorable sequence, subsequently much used for propaganda purposes.  I saw the film for the first time two or three years ago and it certainly impressed me.

            History records though that it didn’t actually happen – not like that anyway.  In Odessa there were demonstrations in support of the mutineers and of the revolt against the Tsar.  The Tsarist troops did respond and did quell the revolt with brutality – but there was no spectacular massacre on the Odessa Steps.

            Perhaps in time to come someone will make a film about another massacre that took place in Odessa a week or so ago.  Again there was a public protest – this time against the pro-western government in Kiev and in support of the pro-Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine.  It seems though that there was also a rival demonstration by supporters of the Kiev government – described by their opponents as violent Fascists and Nazis.  Violent they certainly were.  They drove the pro-Russian demonstrators back to take refuge in the local trade union building, and then threw in petrol bombs setting the building on fire.  There were over 40 victims – either burnt alive by the fire, or dying when leaping from upper windows to escape the flames.

            Meanwhile the police watched – and did nothing.  Who knows?  Perhaps there were so many pro-Kiev demonstrators that there was nothing else they could do.

            A glance at a map of Ukraine will make clear the significance of the events in Odessa.   This Black Sea port is many miles south-west of ‘eastern Ukraine’ where many of the inhabitants are ethnic Russians and most of them favour closer ties with Russia rather than with the EU and NATO.   It is clear that in Odessa and, no doubt, in many parts of Western Ukraine there are a considerable number – though probably a minority – of residents who have a similar outlook.   I expect too that in Eastern Ukraine there is also a minority loyal to the Kiev government.  That being so, any system of Federal Autonomous regions would leave large numbers of people still feeling that they weren’t represented.

            I think that if Ukraine is to have anything like a lasting peace ‘the West’ and the Russians need to forget their ‘cold war’ enmity and co-operate instead of competing both economically and politically.  We all face a common enemy in militant extremist Islam.  The USA the UK and other NATO countries, the Russian Federation and China have all suffered from the acts of terrorism of the jihadists.  They need to pull together, with mainstream Muslims both east and west, to defeat them.   Squabbling over Ukraine is just a distraction from the real struggle (Tony Blair got it right for once!) that faces civilisation.  

            Russia and the EU should break down the trade barriers between them and give Ukraine equal access to each economic bloc.  Ukraine’s permanent neutrality should be guaranteed by both NATO and the Russian Federation.  The reduction in Ukrainian defence spending that could follow such an agreement, plus economic access to both the EU and Russia, would surely give a tremendous boost to the country’s economy and give it the possibility of achieving a living standard equal to, or higher than any in the world.  Both the EU and Russia would also benefit.  The only losers would be the armaments manufacturers who thrive on ‘wars and rumours of wars’!

I wish I thought that there was even the remotest chance of all that happening!

‘Bloodshed divides, prayer and forgiveness unite’

          Thus declared Russian Quakers after they had recently considered the situation in the Ukraine..  They called for restraint by all parties and abstention from violence in any form.  ‘We are for purely peaceful and non-violent activities in defence of their claims and protection of their rights by everyone, regardless of which group of the population they represent in Ukrainian society. .Peace cannot be enforced by military means and no circumstances can justify armed warfare.

Note – Quakers have had a long and friendly relationship with Russia.  Two Tsars; Peter the Great in 1697 and Alexander I in 1817, joined Friends at Meeting for Worship when visiting England. Also in 1817 the Tsar invited English Quaker Daniel Wheeler to plan and supervise the drainage of the marshes and reclaim land near St Petersburg – a task that engaged him for thirty years!   A daughter-in-law of novelist Leo Tolstoy was a Quaker, and British and American Quakers were active in famine relief and other relief and rehabilitation work in Russia in the aftermath of World War I, the revolution and civil war.  In 1921 alone British and American Quakers fed some 212,000 people.  They remained a presence there throughout the 1920s.

The present Quaker presence is centred on Friends House Moscow.  Type Quakers in Russia or Friends House Moscow into Google, for a wealth of information on the subject.

Applause for David Cameron…….again!

            A fortnight ago I applauded David Cameron’s declaration that the UK is a Christian country and that we should be glad that of it.  This week I am again endorsing one of his public statements. No, I haven’t changed my political outlook. I don’t think I could ever vote for an election candidate from his party – unless, of course, it seemed to be the only way of preventing a U-kipper from topping the poll! There are though surely some topics on which all people of good will and compassion will agree and act.  David Cameron found one of them when he denounced, with real passion, the evil acts of the Boko Haram terrorist organisation in burning down a school in a remote part of Nigeria, abducting some 200 teenage girl pupils and threatening to sell them into slavery or forced marriage. Subsequently the same organisation has kidnapped more teenage girls and carried out more murderous terrorist acts in the same country.

            Mr Cameron was quite right too in pointing out that these were not isolated acts committed by a small group of terrorists in a remote part of Africa.  They are part of a loose movement of fanatics who practise a perversion of Islam that subjugates women, detests ‘western’ education especially for women and girls, and seeks to gain God’s approval by carrying out a hate-filled jihad of violence against everything that the rest of the world values.  They were responsible for ‘9/11’, for the tube bombings in London and for the many bomb outrages in Russia, including those before the winter Olympics in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad).  I fear that they are to be found among those whom Britain and the USA have been supporting, trying to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria.

            The USA the UK, France and China have all volunteered to assist in securing the liberation of those kidnapped girls.  I am sorry that Russia is not among them.  They have had longer and more recent experience of dealing with jihadist terrorists and could probably have offered valuable help and advice.  It is also important that we should obtain the vocal and visible support of the great majority of Muslims.

            We have seen them take to the streets in protest when their Koran has been burnt or defiled, or their prophet insulted.  I’d like to see them do the same about the abduction, imprisonment and sale into slavery of those Nigerian teenagers.  They, the majority of peaceful Muslims who are happy to live in peace and friendship with those of other religious faiths, have the greatest reason for supporting the downfall of the extremists.  In the short term, acts like those of the Boko Hara and other Islamic terrorists, fan the flames of Islam-phobia.  ‘Phobia’, it should be remembered, means fear.  The acts of these terrorists give others cause to fear.

            Then again it is only the contents of the Holy Book of any religion that are sacred.  The book itself is the work of human hands.  If one copy of the book is burnt or defiled, a hundred other copies can be printed to replace it.  But each one of those abducted teenage girls is precious, a child of God, created by God in his own image, unique and irreplaceable.  To defile, misuse or deliberately injure any one of them is a most grievous sin.   To claim, as these extremists do, that they are doing so in obedience to God’s will is surely the ultimate blasphemy.  It is the sin against the Holy Spirit that Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet of Islam and much more than that to Christians, declared to be the one unforgivable sin.

            The deliberate harm of even one of God's children evokes more sorrow – and perhaps anger - in Heaven than the burning of a score of holy books.  I hope that the majority of peace-loving, tolerant Muslims will denounce with fervour these acts of terror and blasphemy by those who claim to share their faith, and will support efforts to end their activities.