Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Muslim Conservative candidate uses homophobia in her election leaflets. It's like the gay community's equivalent of the blood libel:
In her campaign literature, Sayeeda Warsi, Conservative candidate for Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, claims that Labour's lowering of the age of consent from 18 to 16 left children vulnerable to be "propositioned for homosexual relations", and that homosexuality was being peddled to children as young as seven in schools... In her leaflet Mrs Warsi, the Conservatives' first female Muslim candidate, says: "Labour has scrapped section 28 which was introduced by the Conservatives to stop schools promoting alternative sexual lifestyles such as homosexuality to children as young as seven years old... now schools are allowed and do promote homosexuality and other alternative sexual lifestyles to your children. Labour reduced the age of consent for homosexuality from 18 to 16 allowing school children to be propositioned for homosexual relationships. Later in her leaflet Mrs Warsi is quoted saying: "I will campaign strongly for an end to sex education at seven years and the promotion of homosexuality that undermines family life."... Mrs Warsi, who has a seven-year-old daughter, stood by her leaflet last night: "It's a statement I make as I believe it. It is factually correct. Everything in this leaflet is fact."
That's a special kind of fact obviously. In much the same way that The Protocols are 'fact'.
Meanwo', from the SIndy...
WMD DOSSIER MASSAGED FOR ARAB WORLD
Robert Fisk in London April 24. -
When Tony Blair published his notorious 2002 "dossier" which falsely claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, Downing Street also produced an Arabic version which contained significant deletions and changes in text that substantially altered its meaning. A translation carried out for The Independent reveals for the first time that several references to UN sanctions were cut from the Arabic text. On one page, the words "biological agents" were changed to read "nuclear agents". Arab journalists who reported on the dossier culled their information from the Arabic version - unaware that it was not the same as the English one.
I'm not sure how Fisk knows this by the way, I would have thought it equally possible that an Arab journalist might read the English version, certainly more likely than a Western journalist being able to read the Arabic one.
While there is evidence of sloppiness in the translation - a 2001 Joint Intelligence Committee assessment of Iraqi nuclear ambitions is rendered as 2002 - many of the changes were clearly deliberate, apparently in an attempt to make the dossier more acceptable as well as more convincing to an Arab audience.
At the time, the USA and Britain were trying to convince Gulf states that Saddam Hussein still represented a major threat to them - in the hope of seeking their support for the 2003 invasion - while the Arab world was enraged at the disastrous effects UN sanctions had on child mortality in Iraq. In the "Executive Summary" at the start of the English edition, readers in Arabic were reminded that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against Iran and his own people before the 1991 Gulf War. But the fact that he had admitted this after the Gulf War was deleted, along with the fact that he agreed to give up his WMD. The apparent intention was to convince Arabs that Saddam remained an imminent threat.
In some cases, too, the Arabic text was hardened to remove any doubts that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. The alteration of "biological agents" - biologia in Arabic - to nuclear (la-nawawiya in Arabic) is obviously deliberate, and may reflect the belief that an Arab audience would be more fearful of nuclear weapons than biological agents.
I'm interested in this point. After all, surely the Arab world knows about Hussein gassing the Kurds? Or do the Kurds not matter in the Muslim world, so they wouldn't really care that he'd used them on them? Why would the Arab world be more scared of nuclear missiles, unless they are mentioned because everyone knows Israel has some?
References to "damaged" Iraqi factories have been changed to "destroyed"(tadmir in Arabic), giving the impression that US and British air strikes in 1991 were more accurate than in fact they were.
On Iraq's nuclear programme, the English version of the dossier says that two research reactors were "bombed" in 1991. In the Arabic, the two reactors are described as "destroyed".
Isn't there an argument for cock-up rather than conspiracy? The intelligence agencies of both America and the UK have both admitted they are crap when it comes to knowing what's going on in the Arab world, isn't there a possibility that they might not have translators that are any good?
Lord Goldsmith's advice on the Iraqi War was finally leaked at the weekend, confirming what was pretty much known, that he said it was illegal before having some sort of Damascene conversion to deliver a final opinion that it was all above board.
Apparently the Romans, at the height of their empire building, would insist all their wars of invasion were actually wars to defend themselves, despite the fact that their sheer size made such a claim preposterous. Remind you of anywhere today?
So, we have Lord Goldsmith initially thinking the war could not be justified legally, only to suddenly change his mind, we have the intelligence services unable to give Number 10 evidence of WMD in Iraq or any reason to think that Saddam Hussein was a threat to his neighbours, only for that to somehow morph between them and 10 Downing Street to "weapons ready to deploy in forty-five minutes" and a Prime Minister who's remaining justification is that 'the ends justify the means', despite the fact that his own religion says that is not a moral position.
And what we can be sure is, on the six of May, we'll have a man soaked in the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, British troops and Doctor David Kelly as our Prime Minister.
In her campaign literature, Sayeeda Warsi, Conservative candidate for Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, claims that Labour's lowering of the age of consent from 18 to 16 left children vulnerable to be "propositioned for homosexual relations", and that homosexuality was being peddled to children as young as seven in schools... In her leaflet Mrs Warsi, the Conservatives' first female Muslim candidate, says: "Labour has scrapped section 28 which was introduced by the Conservatives to stop schools promoting alternative sexual lifestyles such as homosexuality to children as young as seven years old... now schools are allowed and do promote homosexuality and other alternative sexual lifestyles to your children. Labour reduced the age of consent for homosexuality from 18 to 16 allowing school children to be propositioned for homosexual relationships. Later in her leaflet Mrs Warsi is quoted saying: "I will campaign strongly for an end to sex education at seven years and the promotion of homosexuality that undermines family life."... Mrs Warsi, who has a seven-year-old daughter, stood by her leaflet last night: "It's a statement I make as I believe it. It is factually correct. Everything in this leaflet is fact."
That's a special kind of fact obviously. In much the same way that The Protocols are 'fact'.
Meanwo', from the SIndy...
WMD DOSSIER MASSAGED FOR ARAB WORLD
Robert Fisk in London April 24. -
When Tony Blair published his notorious 2002 "dossier" which falsely claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, Downing Street also produced an Arabic version which contained significant deletions and changes in text that substantially altered its meaning. A translation carried out for The Independent reveals for the first time that several references to UN sanctions were cut from the Arabic text. On one page, the words "biological agents" were changed to read "nuclear agents". Arab journalists who reported on the dossier culled their information from the Arabic version - unaware that it was not the same as the English one.
I'm not sure how Fisk knows this by the way, I would have thought it equally possible that an Arab journalist might read the English version, certainly more likely than a Western journalist being able to read the Arabic one.
While there is evidence of sloppiness in the translation - a 2001 Joint Intelligence Committee assessment of Iraqi nuclear ambitions is rendered as 2002 - many of the changes were clearly deliberate, apparently in an attempt to make the dossier more acceptable as well as more convincing to an Arab audience.
At the time, the USA and Britain were trying to convince Gulf states that Saddam Hussein still represented a major threat to them - in the hope of seeking their support for the 2003 invasion - while the Arab world was enraged at the disastrous effects UN sanctions had on child mortality in Iraq. In the "Executive Summary" at the start of the English edition, readers in Arabic were reminded that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against Iran and his own people before the 1991 Gulf War. But the fact that he had admitted this after the Gulf War was deleted, along with the fact that he agreed to give up his WMD. The apparent intention was to convince Arabs that Saddam remained an imminent threat.
In some cases, too, the Arabic text was hardened to remove any doubts that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. The alteration of "biological agents" - biologia in Arabic - to nuclear (la-nawawiya in Arabic) is obviously deliberate, and may reflect the belief that an Arab audience would be more fearful of nuclear weapons than biological agents.
I'm interested in this point. After all, surely the Arab world knows about Hussein gassing the Kurds? Or do the Kurds not matter in the Muslim world, so they wouldn't really care that he'd used them on them? Why would the Arab world be more scared of nuclear missiles, unless they are mentioned because everyone knows Israel has some?
References to "damaged" Iraqi factories have been changed to "destroyed"(tadmir in Arabic), giving the impression that US and British air strikes in 1991 were more accurate than in fact they were.
On Iraq's nuclear programme, the English version of the dossier says that two research reactors were "bombed" in 1991. In the Arabic, the two reactors are described as "destroyed".
Isn't there an argument for cock-up rather than conspiracy? The intelligence agencies of both America and the UK have both admitted they are crap when it comes to knowing what's going on in the Arab world, isn't there a possibility that they might not have translators that are any good?
Lord Goldsmith's advice on the Iraqi War was finally leaked at the weekend, confirming what was pretty much known, that he said it was illegal before having some sort of Damascene conversion to deliver a final opinion that it was all above board.
Apparently the Romans, at the height of their empire building, would insist all their wars of invasion were actually wars to defend themselves, despite the fact that their sheer size made such a claim preposterous. Remind you of anywhere today?
So, we have Lord Goldsmith initially thinking the war could not be justified legally, only to suddenly change his mind, we have the intelligence services unable to give Number 10 evidence of WMD in Iraq or any reason to think that Saddam Hussein was a threat to his neighbours, only for that to somehow morph between them and 10 Downing Street to "weapons ready to deploy in forty-five minutes" and a Prime Minister who's remaining justification is that 'the ends justify the means', despite the fact that his own religion says that is not a moral position.
And what we can be sure is, on the six of May, we'll have a man soaked in the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, British troops and Doctor David Kelly as our Prime Minister.
