Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Free Palestine Demo Yesterday on Thames South Bank, No violence.
Relatives visited us over the weekend. We decided to take a bus down to Waterloo. Getting off on Waterloo Bridge we walked down steps planning to stroll along the South Bank . Near the bottom was a group of some pro-Palestine demonstrators. I sat down close to them. They chanted a slogan and were entirely peaceful and well behaved. They didn't harangue or abuse me or anyone else there. They weren't scary or threatening.
I'm not a member of the group so I had no say in what they did or chanted. Personally I would have preferred some harsh criticism of genocide, especially killing children.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Oli Brown on
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I understand that Greta was initially quite animated about the genocide in Venice.
@Mike C - you can use that 😉
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Oli Brown, could you please explain that reference for me? Do I correctly assume it's a dig at Greta Thunberg?
Or if Oli Brown declines to answer can someone else help me.
From the second line I suspect it's an attempt at a joke.I don't regard genocide as a suitable topic for joking. Or comedy in general.
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And now, half way to Venezuala, Greta's flotilla has to turn around and head back through the Med and the Suez and then around the Arabian Peninsula to show solidarity with the oppressed Islamic Republic and her friends in Tehran.
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Oli Brown suggests that Greta Thunberg wishes "to show solidarity with the oppressed Islamic Republic and her friends in Tehran."
Well, Greta may have personal friends in Teheran. But the rest of that post appears to be either a bad joke . Or just made up.I tried searching online for anything from Greta Thunberg expressing her solidarity with the Islamic Republic of Iran. So far no success.
Therefore, Oli Brown would you please help me out by posting here links to the factual sources you found - preferably from the writing or words of Greta herself. I'm happy to be corrected and apologise.
When the facts change my respect for truth means that I change my mind. My horror and compassion at the entirely avoidable killing and injury to unarmed protestors (or anyone else) is no less whether these crimes happen in Iran, the U.K, or elsewhere.
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This article from yesterday's Telegraph describes the hypocrisy.
Where are the luvvies when you need them? Where is their outrage, their fury, their passion as thousands of freedom-loving Iranians, sons and daughters, are being massacred by millenarian Islamist theocrats?
Many Leftist entertainers, personalities and activists spent years occupying our streets, flooding social media, denouncing Israel’s just war of self-defence in Gaza as “genocide”, and yet now, when actual crimes against humanity are being committed in Iran, their near-silence is deafening. Every horror they claimed, falsely, Israel was inflicting upon Palestinians, the Iranian regime is actually meting out to its own people: protesters are being shot in the back of the head or machine-gunned in the streets, hospital rooms are being broken into, young people summarily executed, dissidents tortured.
It is pure, unadulterated evil, an obscene moment in history, a stain on humanity. So where are the chants of “from the Gulf to the Caspian Sea, Iran will be free”? Where is Greta Thunberg’s flotilla? Why isn’t Bob Vylan firing up the crowds against the Ayatollahs? Where are the pins, the Shir o Khorshid emblems, the pictures of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the emojis, the student protestors, the sit-ins, the storming of lectures, the mass demonstrations taking over central London?
The hypocrisy is sickening, the double standards despicable. The luvvies don’t really care about Iran, just as they are largely unbothered by deaths in Sudan, the persecution of the Uyghurs and the pogroms of October 7. They are more interested in demonising Israel and the West than in saving innocent lives.
The human rights lawyers, the ICC, the ICJ and all the other acronyms have proved equally useless, and we are still waiting for the UN resolutions and investigations. Three months ago, the UN Human Rights Council elected an Iranian regime diplomat to its advisory committee, an Orwellian parody if ever there was one. Tom Fletcher, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, falsely claimed last year that “14,000 babies” were facing starvati..., fuelling much anti-Israel hatred. As of Wednesday evening, his X feed has so far made no mention of the horrendously real Iranian massacre.
Why is there no such thing as LGBTQ+ for Iran, or Iranian Lives Matter, or Justice for Iran, or groups advocating “intersectional resistance” to the Ayatollahs’ “patriarchy and occupation”?
If you are the wrong kind of victim, the luvvies don’t care about you. As long as a regime is anti-Western, its atrocities don’t matter, or are whitewashed.
Where have those who supposedly care about ethnic cleansing been as millions of Iranians fled their beloved homeland since 1979, fuelling a diaspora of 4-6 million?
Erfan Soltani, 26, will be executed for demanding basic rights. Where are the anti-death penalty advocates who always protest America’s penal regime? Iran persecutes gays, women and religious minorities. Where are those bishops who claim to care about religious freedom in the Middle East? Where are all those who keep telling us (wrongly) that America is turning into a Handmaid’s Tale, when confronted with a real-world, woman-hating theocracy?
The Iranian director and filmmaker, Javad Ganji, was murdered last week. Why didn’t anybody at the Golden Globes care? Why did Mark Ruffalo not mention him? Where was the solidarity?
Mojtaba Torshiz, a former midfielder for Tractor, the Iranian football league winners, left his daughters with his parents and went out to protest. He and his wife were murdered. Rebin Moradi, 17, one of Tehran’s most promising youth footballers, was assassinated. Where are the international footballing authorities? Where are the Premier League footballers taking the knee?
For many not especially ideological celebrities or activists, loudly supporting Gaza was an act, a performative ritual, to signal their virtue, their membership of the high-status “good people’s” club. Iran’s young are heroes, taking on IRGC thugs and dying for their beliefs, yet speaking up for them isn’t modish, so the celebs keep shtum.
Such behaviour is despicable, but not as bad as those of the true believers. Millions of educated people across Europe and America have succumbed to the omnicause, an anti-Western, totalitarian mindvirus, the byproduct of hundreds of years of intellectual error from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Karl Marx, from Jacques Derrida to Edward Said, laced with Leninism, superstition, conspiratorial thinking and prejudice.
The omnicause deems America, Israel and the capitalist world as the epitome of Westernness, the fount of all evil, guilty of every “ism” and “cide”, and thus promotes and supports third worldist regimes and causes that undermine our societies. It is nihilistic and shape-changing, embracing any doctrine that advances its ends, regardless of contradictions.
Countries and movements are judged according to what they represent, not their actions; the Iranian revolution of 1979 is the original fusion of Leftism and Islamism, so it remains a model for deluded proponents of the omnicause.
This is why so few Western activists support Iran’s freedom-fighters. These dissidents are pro-freedom, pro-America and pro-democracy. They curse Hamas and Hezbollah, and demand the end to Tehran’s handouts to its proxies, anathema to our useful idiots.
The “oppressed” aren’t meant to have agency, so sinister motives must be attributed to the protesters, such as being in hock to foreign spies.
The Left dismiss their critics as “Islamophobic”, so cannot process scenes from Iran where women burn their compulsory hijabs and where crowds reject state-enforced religion as part of a secularist uprising.
There is a growing grassroots alliance between the Jewish and Iranian diasporas. There are Israeli flags in every anti-regime demo in Britain and America, and imperial Iranian flags in every pro-Israel demo. The regime-funded death squads of October 7 were horrifically similar to those roaming Iranian cities today; one day, a free Tehran will resemble Tel Aviv.
The failure of the Islamist dictatorship is total. The banks are collapsing. Chants of “Jāvid Shāh”, long live the Shah, dominate anti-regime demos; only a total break with the past 47 years will suffice.
The luvvies have disgraced themselves. This regime is one of the most monstrous on earth. We must all combat it. Its collapse, when it comes, will be akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall – but this time, rather than being freed from communism, millions will be liberated from Islamism. Long live a free Iran.
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Permalink Reply by Martin (Woodside)
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A good article, not forgetting the same luvvies who fawned over Alaa Abd el-Fattah.
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Hi Oli, you posted insinuations about Greta Thunberg expressing solidarity weith the Islamic Republic Government of Iran. I requested that you provide some factual references linking to your sources.
You responded with an article from the Daily Telegraph which has no such references . Should I take this to mean that you have no factual sources for your post. I can see many reasons why some people may not be Greta Thunberg fans. But please can we agree to stick to news or comment about her which has a factual basis. I would apply the same principle if I was posting some comment about you or anyone else.
P.S. You've persuaded me to read stuff by and about her.
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Martin. Have you ever read any history of anywhere in the world, where you found yourself feeling sympathy with the colonised? Or the enslaved? Or with ordinary humans pressured by great violence out of their homes or countrysides or cities in the interests of "great powers"; or just a medium power. And presented as inferior, or less civilised, or in any way opposed to the interests of the "side" your school books taught you, or maybe your parents told you were the good guys of the world?
I write this to you as I'm thinking about a man from the U.S. whose books I've read who described his astonishment learning as a student that Davey Crocket his childhood hero, died bravely defending part of the U.S. at the Alamo from a foreign attack. Because at the time it was legally part of Mexico.
A similar surprise from my college teachers was that English law was more than interpreting what some people in wigs in the UK said it was. And that there is a Law of Nations. Which was a better idea than Imperial might is right.
So there is no need for me or others to find what you Martin call "a new cause". Instead we can simply remember or maybe relearn our own country's history. at least part of the reasons for The United Nations; and its institutions such as the General Assembly; the World Court and more.
Admitting my own wide ignorance, I and maybe others could accept a need to learn the truth about violence and injustices in many countries. Even if it means occasionally paying attention to a "nasally song from a guitar-strumming Billy Bragg."
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Colonisation Alan, as you must know is a very subjective and often complex thing. Even the Alamo, some may argue that the land may well have originally belonged to an indigenous tribe. While watching Zulu on TV some years ago, a young nephew walked in and asked who the goodies were, that was a good question. The famous Pythonesque phrase "What have the Romans ever done for us" demonstrates that not all colonisation was necessarily bad.
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Permalink Reply by Mike Capozzola
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Alan: I've been seeing these pop up a bit and it's a good sign that not everyone thinks Hamas are the heroes of the story or believes their PR
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Alan: These stickers are spot-on. It makes me happy to see resistance to the false narratives being peddled.
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"False narratives?" "Spot on?" Resistance? If ypu'd be willing to swop and compare thoughts, views, observations and facts from stuff we've read . . . then I'm willing to do so.
But I'm not interested in more propaganda apologising for genocide, apartheid, racism, murder of children, ethnic cleansing and more.
All from a state which fails to follow International Law.Is it better or worse than Iran? Arent both states in the Death Club?
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