Mr Abrahams and the Labour Party

From 1992-95 I worked for the Fabian Society. Our meetings were attended by a variety of people: students and academics, hacks and Labour Party members, politicos and wannabe politicos. The presence of someone such as Gordon Brown at one of these meetings was not in the least bit unusual, nor that of any other senior party figure. As an affiliated part of the Labour Party, our job in opposition was to provoke thought about the party's policies.

One of the regular - indeed, one of the most assiduous - attendees at those meetings was David Abrahams. He would mix, as would everyone in that milieu, with backbenchers, front benchers, NEC members and Shadow Cabinet members. 

Many of those people are now ministers. Others are Cabinet members, some very senior. It is possible - just - that when they say they have no idea who David Abrahams is, or cannot recall ever meeting him, they are telling the truth. It is, after all, possible that there are people in the country who have never heard of, say, Gordon Brown. Possible, yes; but very, very unlikely.  

Indeed, far from keeping himself to himself, as is being written, Abrahams was about the pushiest person I ever came across in my time at the Fabians - and in politics, that is saying something. He would ring up the office asking about meetings and contact; at those meetings, he would make a bee-line for the most senior politicians in the room. He was, in short, keen to be noticed.

There are some people who just give off a bad vibe. I recall a number of times when Abrahams offered us a donation. You get a nose for these sort of things (unless, it seems, you are Labour General Secretary or running for office within the party), and we decided at the time to steer well clear. As a member, he was entitled to attend various meetings, but we had no obligation to accept money or offers of work from anyone.

Everything about the current story smells. Abrahams' explanation of his behaviour makes little sense. Can he really have gone from being one of the pushiest and most self-aggrandising people I came across to being so afraid of publicity that he chanelled donations through other people? I don't think we have got remotely to the bottom of the Abrahams side of this story.

As for the politicians, I simply do not believe those ministers and Labour officials who have been round the block for all these years who say they do not know Abrahams. It is inconceivable that they have forgotten him: he has a manner one simply does not forget.

If his status as a donor was anonymous and no one knew who he was, how come he was in the front row of Tony Blair's farewell speech?

Make up your own minds whether you call that deceit or forgetfulness. I've made up mine. They know who he is all right; they must do if they have been at party functions. They just don't want to admit it.

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What's really wrong with Irving

Max Hastings suggests the real problem with the antisemitic distorter of historical evidence: 

...I could endure Irving's possessing the most embarrassingly malodorous breath in London, because he provided access to people and material of historical importance.

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Write to your MP now about asylum for Iraqi translators

Dan Hardie, the indefatigable organiser of the blog campaign to get asylm for Iraqi translators, has asked me to link to this post. I am happy to do so. Here's what he has to say. As you can see, the government's supposed help is unravelling, and things are more urgent than ever:

I’ve had emails from three people who claim to be - and who almost certainly are- Iraqi former employees of the British Government. All three say that they and their former colleagues are still at risk of death for their ‘collaboration’.

We’ll call the first man Employee One. He worked for the British for three years: ‘I started in the beginning of the war with Commandos (in 30 of March 2003) then continued with 23 Pioneer Regt, and in 08 / 07 / 2003 I have joined the Labour Support Unit (LSU)’. His British friends knew him as Chris.

The British Government has announced that he can apply for help if he can transport himself to the British base outside Basra, or to the Embassies in Syria or Jordan. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that there might be problems with this.

I can email and telephone this man: so can any Foreign Office official. It should not be impossible to verify his story and then send him the funds he needs to get to a less unsafe Arab country. But that is not happening.  

Here’s an email exchange we had the other day. My questions are in italics.

1) Are you still in Iraq? ‘Yes, I’m still hidden in somewhere in the hell of Basra.’  

2) Is there any reason you cannot travel to the British Army base at Basra Airbase to ask for asylum? ‘Of course, we cannot travel to BIA (Basra International Airbase) due to the militia keep watched all the ways to BIA and they got their own fake check points there although, we claimed for asylum through the internet (we sent our application to the claim office at BIA) . But we afraid that the British are going to take a long time to process our claims also we are very worried if they will offer just some money instead of asylum, please sir inform all the British people that we looking for asylum and just the asylum will save our lives, also we can’t travel to Syria anymore to claim for asylum there as the Syrian government issued new conditions for Iraqis who want to travel to their country.’ 

 3) Can you tell me how and when the militias threatened you?‘In 2006 I have threatened by militia that hated me because I work and help coalition forces in Iraq, I told my bosses about that but they said we can’t do anything for you because we have nothing to do with civilian and we don’t have any army rules or orders to help you, then I continued my daily work with British army, few days later the militia attacked my house trying to catch me but I was at the work at that time, they beaten my family and told them: we want your son or we will kill all of you!!!! ‘Since that day I decided to leave my job and change my home place but until this moment the militia trying to find and kill me, I’m always changing my place trying to hidden from them, they know that I left my job but they don’t care, they just want to kill me they called me collaborator and traitor and they asked everybody know me about my place, they told them: anyone know anything about  (name) he should tell us immediately and also they said: we will never give up until we catch (name). They work for ministry of interior so they controlled most of government departments and they work under that cover.’  

4) Do you have any family members who are also threatened by militias or who depend on you? If so, how many of them are there and how old are they?  ’Of course, my family depends on me especially in the finance side as I’m the older son between seven sons and daughters they got, on other hand my parents cannot working as they are very old.’ 

Employee Two is in Syria, and is applying for aid from the British Embassy in Damascus. He can prove that he has worked for the British for over 12 months, after the magic date of 1st January 2005.

But he still isn’t safe.  He is staying illegally in Syria, having considerably over-run the 15-day visa on which he entered the country. He’s been obliged to get forms for asylum or resettlement aid from the Syrian Government security men who guard the British Embassy.

He tells me ‘If I see any syrian officer i really get fear , becuase of my expired visa.’ The British Government, which asked us to accept that it was invading Iraq in part because of its horror at the brutality of the Ba’athist dictatorship, is now perfectly happy to leave its own former employees to the mercies of Syrian Ba’athists.  

Colleagues of this man are also hiding in Damascus and are even worse off than he is, because they don’t meet the perverse and arbitrary time stipulations.  He writes: ’I know 4 former interpreters worked less than a year (for the British: DH), but they went to the embassy and they filled the paper with out telling the guards we had worked for less than a year. The syrian guards have got instructions from the embassy (British Embassy in Damascus: DH), that (they) do not give that form to any interpreter who worked for British less than a year or any former interpreter who worked in 2003 and fled to syria before 2005.’

Employee Three sent me copies of his Army ID card and photos of him with smiling Scottish soldiers. He worked for the Army in 2003, who then recommended that he work for Erinys- a private security firm which the British Government hired to form an Oil Protection Force. Yes, a mercenary firm: a mercenary firm hired by our Government and paid for with our money. Both when working for the Army and when working for the British Government’s proxies, he was identified as a target by the militias.

The British Government made him a death squad target. That same British Government will not be giving him any kind of assistance; not even a small cash handout to help him live elsewhere in the Middle East. It has announced that it will not help any Iraqi whose direct employment ended before the 1st January 2005: that Johnson Beharry was awarded the Victoria Cross for acts of courage in May and June 2004, when the Mahdi Army attacked the British and were fought off with many hundreds of casualties.

You’ve heard this before, but it’s now more important than ever. The last lot of letters and emails got the Government to announce a change in policy: an inadequate change,badly implemented.  The next lot of letters and emails will force the Government to announce another change in policy, one that will be properly implemented and will not be based on leaving people to die.  

Your MP’s address is The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA. His or her email address is probably SURNAMEINITIAL@parliament.uk (eg BROWNG@parliament.uk ).  Please use the talking points below to send an email and a print letter to your MP, and chase them for an answer. And be courteous: an insulted MP will not raise this matter with Ministers, and that will lead to more avoidable deaths. 

When you get an answer, email me at danhardie.blog@gmail.com and let me know what they said.   I agree that it seems egocentric for me to ask you to put your MP in touch with me: but what alternatives do we have?

I am in direct contact with Iraqi employees pleading with me to do something to help them. I cannot help them. Members of Parliament- including David Miliband- need to read what these Iraqis are saying. 

 

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Tim Marshall's blog

Sky's superb foreign editor, Tim Marshall, now has a blog. An instant must-read.

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Ingerland - who cares?

Wally with the brolly.

First, a confession. When I looked at the odds on Betfair for last night's game, I couln't believe my eyes. Yes, England had home advantage, but on any reading of form and stats, Croatia are a far better team than England. So why were England 1/2 and Croatia 7.8/1? Forgive my lack of patriotism, but in a two horse race (well, three really, given that the draw was also possible) two have the better team at such astonishing odds seemed bonkers. So I helped myself to a sizeable bet. 

No, I didn't want to win. Call it an insurance policy against what transpired.

But that leads me to the real point. No one - literally not one - of my fellow football fanatics said last night that they cared about England going out. We'd all have liked England to win and were cheering when Crouch equalised (after what was a laughably soft decision to award a penalty; if that was a penalty, I'm Brian Clough's illegitimate daughter). But were we dsitraught at the end? Not in the least (and I was the only one with any money riding on it).

We started talking about why we were so unbothered by England's defeat. By far the main reason, we agreed, was that we all care far more about our club. An England defeat is disappointing but no more. An England win would be nice. But a club victory, or a defeat, is what really gets us going.

Why? In part, because we have no connection with the players in the England shirts.  Why's that? Because we think they are over-rated buffoons without a hint of self-awareness. They talk - and are talked up - as if they are the 'golden generation' (to use that ridiculous phrase) who will take Emgland to glory. But as is plain every time they put on a shirt, they aren't anything close to golden. There are a handful of world class players - Owen, Gerrard, Becks of old - but most are comically overrated. And the idea that they have the skills which are a prerequisite of winning a major tournament is risible. They don't even have the self-knowledge to play to their strengths, like a second-rate team such as Greece (the European Champions).

The upshot of this is that, for all the fuss the media makes about Ingerland, most fans I know couldn't really care.

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Titches and goals

Martin Samuel has a riveting piece in today's Times on the underlying cause of the uselessness of the England football team:

This morning I would like to challenge Sir Trevor Brooking, and everybody involved in the organisation of youth football in this country, to a game. One condition: new rules.

The goal will be 3.057 metres high, which equates to more than 10ft, roughly one and two thirds the size of Paul Robinson, making it physically impossible to touch the bar from a standing jump. (When the Australian security forces erected a fence to protect the world leaders attending the APEC conference in Sydney this year, it was three metres high.)

The goalline will be 9.174 metres long (about 30ft) or almost five Scott Carsons laying head to toe. A goalkeeper standing in the middle would have to dive almost five metres to get his body behind the ball and adequately protect inside his posts; the present width of the whole goal is 7.32 metres.

The length of the pitch will be 150.4 metres (165 yards), placing the halfway line at 75 metres. Using these dimensions, for a goalkeeper to get the ball out of his half from a grounded goal kick, he would have to clear, without bouncing, to the midway point of the opposition half with pitch measurements as they are now. The edge of the penalty area will be extended to 20.68 metres (23 yards), almost a third again on the present space, and the width of the pitch will be 112.80 metres (124 yards), which is a greater expanse than the length of most present pitches. Everything else will be the same, including the number of players and the duration of the match.

And when this travesty of a game is finished, when everybody is exhausted and fed up and utterly frustrated with demands that are at odds with the strength of the human body and the fundamental skill-based nature of the sport, then, and only then, will we comprehend what it is like to play football as a ten-year-old in England.

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Hitchens on Bennett

Do read Christopher Hitchens' wonderful dismissal of the Ronan Bennett piece I mentioned yesterday.

Here's an extract:

Failing entirely to "discriminate", Bennett places criticism of Islamism on all fours with anti-semitism, hostility to the Irish, and to other xenophobic moments in our past. And yes, of course, we remember those bombs that the Jewish refugees from Russian czarism placed in our streets. We remember how (before they became good old assimilated types) they ululated praise for suicide from their synagogues, demanded the segregation of the sexes, insisted on special prayer-rooms at work, exemptions from certain laws and on the censorship of newspapers that didn't "respect" Judaism. One would have to have a capacity for fantasy of something like that order to believe in the Ronan Bennett universe of modern persecution where "those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are anti-semites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists." In which known world is that happening?

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How to beat a wife

Also from Tom Gross, here are some tips from a Saudi cleric on how one should beat one's wife in accordance with Islamic law. The trick is not to leave marks:

Sheikh Muhammad Al-’Arifi: “If neither [admonishing nor refusing to share your bed] works with her, what is the third option?”

Guest: “Beat them.”

Al-’Arifi: “That’s right. How is this beating performed? What do you think?”

Guest: “Light beatings.”

Al-’Arifi: “Light beatings in what way?”

Guest:” For example, I wouldn’t beat her in the face...”

Al-’Arifi: “…If you beat her with a toothpick, or if you beat her lightly with your hand, and so on, it is meant to convey: ‘Woman, it has gone too far. I can’t bear it anymore.’ If he beats her, the beatings must be light and must not make her face ugly. He must beat her where it will not leave marks...” 

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Turning against suicide bombing?

Gideon Rachman has some interesting thoughts on the attitude to suicide bombing in the Muslim world: 

[T]here is interesting evidence that America is doing a lot better on the hearts-and-minds front than is generally acknowledged. This first occurred to me a couple of weeks ago, when I was writing a column on Pakistan, and turned to the Pew polls of global opinion. Normally, if you are looking to prove American unpopularity around the world, Pew is a reliable source of bad news. And indeed, the approval ratings for America in places like Turkey and Pakistan - not to mention the Arab world - are as low as you might expect.

But there was another number in the Pew polls that struck me. The sharp decline in the support for suicide bombing among Pakistanis. The obvious explanation is that it is easy enough to express support for suicide bombers when it is Israelis or American troops who are the targets. But when suicide terrorism becomes a daily curse in your own country, the whole idea loses some of its attraction.

What I initially missed is that this decline in the support for Osama bin Laden - and for terrorism in general - is now fairly general across the Muslim world. This fact was pointed out to me this morning by David Pollock, a former American diplomat (now a think-tanker), who was once in charge of studying public opinion in the Islamic world for the US government. Pollock thinks that now that many Muslim countries have experienced suicide terrorism at home - think of Egypt, Morocco and Jordan - they are turning against the whole idea.

The most dramatic and imporant example of this trend has come in Iraq. The "Anbar awakening" may sound like a made-for-the-media soundbite. But the decision of Sunni tribes to turn against al-Qaeda is looking increasingly like a turning point of sorts in Iraq.

The moral of the story is that however badly the Americans blundered in Iraq, they could never be remotely as brutal, murderous or plain stupid as al-Qaeda. Gradually, large parts of the Muslim world may be realising that.

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Bennett's terrible exaggerations

There's a terrible piece by Ronan Bennett in the Guardian today, on Martin Amis' views about Muslims and Islamists.

It's made all the worse by the fact that Bennett's central thrust - that some of Amis' remarks about dealing with Muslim terrorism might verge of racism - is worth exploring. But rather than deal with the nuances or the issues which Amis has raised (whether Western civilisation is more advanced, whether Islam needs some kind of reformation, etc.), he makes a series of grotesque exaggerations and uses them to trot out the usual drivel about Islamaphobia:

Muslims who argue for Muslim schools are criticised by journalists who send their children to Christian or Jewish faith schools. Muslim women who choose to wear the niqab are upbraided by powerful politicians who claim to feel "intimidated". Those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are antisemites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists.

As for the idea that anyone who argues against the war is routinely called an al-Qaida sympathiser: pathetic. I have been, and remain, one of the most passionate advocates of the war. I think the opponents of war were dangerously wrong-headed. And yes, it stands to reason that some of them are al-Qaida sympathisers - namely, er, those who, um, are al-Qaida sympathisers. But no one I know of thinks that the overwhelming majority of opponents were al-Qaida symapthisers. They were just plain wrong.

And, of course, he trots out the lie that anyone who criticises Israeli behaviour is labelled antisemitic. I'll tell him what does veer towards antisemtism - making up the lie that anyone who criticises Israel is attacked as an antisemite. 

Bennett's piece is the perfect example of why the left is in so much trouble, and by extension why we all are. The thought process which refuses to engage with any critique of Islam or, even more so, Islamism, is the thought process which leads supposed liberals to ally with proponents of wife beating. And it is the thought process which leads to the defeat of Western civilisation.

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