August 2005

From The Independent this morning:

Meanwhile, it was claimed yesterday that CCTV tapes depicting Mr de Menezes’ last moments were handed out to police but returned blank.

Tube Lines, the company which runs Stockwell station, said it had not been aware of any faults on its cameras on 22 July.

The Mail on Sunday quoted a senior transport union official as saying: ” After the incident, the police took the tapes away. When they brought them back three or four days later, they said, ‘These are no good to us. They’re blank.’”

This whole thing is a cluster-fuck of biblical proportions. Every day the official story changes. Something is seriously, seriously fucked up. The police destroying evidence? What do we call this, Stockwellgate? The “officers” (read “murderers”) are on holiday and won’t report to the IPCC for another week or two, if at all. The results of the enquiry won’t be revealed for another three years. In the meantime, nobody is asking the real questions from 7/7 and most of the country pretends that the minority who are asking, are conspiracy theorists, traitors or just lunatics.

I say the small minority are the ones who are the most British. I say we are more British than the Daily Telegraph. I say we are more British than Tony Blair. I say we are more British than Sir Ian Blair. We hold the values of truth, justice and liberty higher than any of these duplicitous, nefarious, treacherous cunts.

The Met chief, the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister must all tender their resignations immediately. They are destroying our country by appealing to the basest whims of the populace and taking advantage of the loyalty and devotion to the flag of the majority of the country, including the larger Muslim population.

In the old days, heads would roll for far less than this. Think about it:

1. The Prime Minister took us to war over a bunch of lies. Facing (or possible instigating) the biggest challenge to this country since World War 2, he decided against all advice against any public enquiry over the events of July 7th 2005. But he still has a job
2. The Home Secretary took a holiday during the biggest crisis this country has faced since World War 2, and let a knave and a liar like Sir Ian Blair run the show in his absence. But he still has a job
3. The Met Chief lied, lied and lied again about a cold-blooded, public state execution. There is ample evidence for a cover-up. But he still has a job

Where is our decency? Where is our integrity? Where is our sense of fair-play? These, and not the jingoistic and arbitrary set of values proposed by The Telegraph define us. It is frankly, racist of The Telegraph to call the Western world the “Anglosphere”. And the values of decency, integrity and fair-play extend further than to a nation that has no identity right now and is still struggling to define it, but they would be a good start. These are the values that my father taught me represented this country. Ones he was proud of and I was too. And now while many of my peers look at me and my kind with suspicion, I wonder if they notice that we hold these values nearer and dearer than they do. Blind loyalty to a leader and a system is ugly and stupid. Its values we should bind ourselves to, pledge allegiance to.

• If demanding decency, integrity and fair-play from my government makes me a traitor, then so be it.
• If asking for the truth instead of blithely ingesting shit on a daily basis from our jingoistic press makes me a conspiracy theorist, then so be it.
• If expecting transparency, accountability and fairness from our police makes me a terrorist, then so be it.

My Chief of Police lied, murdered and was stupid. One out of three means a sacking. By all accounts, he should be hung out to dry.

My Prime Minister lied, lied and lied. His unimpeachable falsehood and immutable hubris have cause the deaths of the finest soldiers in the world as well as my fellow Muslims. Not many people see the soldiers as the victims of an uneccesary war, perhaps more should. They are paid to die, sure, but they are not paid to die for the hubris of a self-serving, imbecilic, glory-seeking cunt who I’m sorry to say, has stained the image of the office occupied by true greats like Churchill and Thatcher who took their positions and the lives of their soldiers, very seriously indeed.

And my Home Secretary? Well, a man who takes a holiday at a time like this is not even worthy of contempt. He’s the motherfucker that needs to get stripped of citizenship and deported. To Antartctica. Naked.

If we can’t expect decency, integrity and fair-play from our leaders, then what kind of a nation have we allowed ourselves to become?

A combination of a heavy cold, some extra time with my wonderful daughters and what felt very much like another mini-stroke last week have conspired to limit my posts recently.

It got me thinking about those macho Lem-Sip adverts that seem so 80s in their outlook. “Yeah, I’m a man, I took one of these Lem-Sip pouches and now I can conquer the world”. In Japan, the culture of working until you quite literally, drop dead, is called karoshi. Closer to home, Sid Watkins, a paediatrician, self-adminstered anaesthetic in an attempt to cope with his 100-hour-a-week workload. This begs the question of course, why was he taking anaesthetic, doesn’t that put you to sleep? Perhaps he should have tried Lemsip Max Strength.

To many of you, the hard work culture is no surprise and you don’t need me to tell you how hard you work. You’re the one reading this from your desk when everyone else has gone home. It’s just an unpleasant fact of life that we work so hard in the UK. We just blithely assume that it’s like this everywhere. It isn’t. Granted, an Indonesian teenager would think we live a relatively easy life. Hard to imagine that people have it tougher than us, right?

I won’t go into the arguments here about why working too hard actually accomplishes nothing. That’s for another day and something I used to go into at great length years ago. What I will say is that all this Lemsip crap drives me nuts. If you’re ill, you’re meant to go to a pharmacist, get some drugs and get on with it. Now I’m all for working hard, been there done that for 20 years. I’m also all for putting work before family when it counts. I’m also for working through illness. Been there, done that, got the operation scars, brain damage and scarred retinas to prove that too. But there’s a time and place for all that - the 1980s.

So seriously, what next?

“Hey John, you sound shit!”
“Brian, it’s this cancer thing, it’s kind of dragging me down”
“No worries, try this” (Brian, John’s boss, hands him a small sachet, John raises his eyebrows and exclaims)
“Hmmm! Chem-Sip! Restores flagging work drive and burns you out at work before the cancer kills you? Looks great! Says it’s faster than chemo, at curing and killing you! Great!”

Fast forward to another day, John is bald, albino white and has lost half his body-weight, and wears the smile of a skeleton
“How’s that report coming along John?”
“It’s on your desk Brian, thanks to Chem-Sip.” (John taps the box twice to accentuate the “Chem-Sip”)
Cut to Chem-Sip box. End

Taking work too seriously is ridiculous. Life is far too important. Work hard. Be ethical. Pay your dues, but no more. The Work Ethic is noble. But don’t kill yourself. Have you ever tried doing a day of work from beyond the grave?

Almost exactly 41 years ago, we, Great Britain, carried out our last executions. Finally, in 1969, the death penalty was abolished for murder.

There were some notable miscarriages of justice which resulted in posthumous pardons being granted, including the cases of Mahmood Mattan and Derek Bentley in the late 1990s. What is particularly apt to note today is that the Birmingham Six would have been executed had the death penalty still been in place.

There have been calls to reintroduce the death penalty, but all such calls have been chucked out of the Commons.

Now of course, we have Sir Ian Blair conducting executions without due process of any kind. No trial. No suspicion (only the block was under suspicion!). No evidence. No jury. No threat. No heavy jacket. No bombs. No wires. No rucksack. No pursuit. No threat. The subject was restrained, and yet - straight to execution.

Shit witnesses (”he had wires sticking out” - fuck off - you sound like the prick who talked about an asian lad on the number 30 bus fiddling with his rucksack - where is the CCTV evidence for that bus, would that be incriminating too perhaps?) only serve to confuse matters. What is needed is a full, independent public enquiry into both the July 7th bombs and the state-backed execution of Jean Charles de Menezes.

What enrages me the most is the unbridled mendacity of the police not to issue statements immediately to dampen any speculation about the innocence of the man. Sir Ian Blair would have known immediately that de Menezes was innocent, that he had no bombs, no parkas, no wires, no rucksack, no guilt and no Qur’an. The press are hugely guilty of peddling huge quantities of shit, but it is the Metropolitan Police and chiefly, Sir Ian Blair who are guilty of the biggest fuck-up in policing in a long and notable line of police fuck-up history in this country.

The man was demonstrably bombless and could have been stopped at any time. And then he was restrained and finally shot on the tube. What the fuck?

The whole shoot-to-kill-to-protect doublethink has got to be stopped now, otherwise we become little better than terrorists ourselves. After all, brown-skinned males are now six times more likely to be stopped and searched. I don’t think it’s too big an extrapolation to think that a brown-skinned man is the most likely person to be executed for nothing next - and then we must ask - who is terrorising who?

Last night, Channel 4 managed to get leaked information from the inquiry into the state execution of Jean Charles de Menezes. Hundreds of bloggers, perhaps thousands, were not only vindicated (though I doubt we require the vindication of a press that has so singularly failed in its duty to deliver news and not propaganda) – but will be taken more seriously by a public so behind the lies and cover-ups that so define out government, press and police force.

A lot of excuses are about to be written by those who believed the lies promulgated by Sir Ian Blair and his cronies in the aftermath of the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes.

1. The police stated that de Menezes was wearing a bulky coat. The evidence shows that he was in fact wearing a light jean jacket.
2. The police stated that de Menezes vaulted the barriers. The evidence shows that he used his Oyster card.
3. The police stated that de Menezes was acting suspiciously. The evidence shows that de Menezes even had time to pick up a free paper and that he couldn’t possibly have been acting suspiciously.
4. The police stated that de Menezes ran from the police. The evidence shows that the only time de Menezes ran was in the last moments when he saw that there was a train on the platform.
5. The police stated that he was directly linked with terrorism. It was clear within a day that de Menezes was less a terrorist than Sir Ian Blair.

It’s clear that the police, in the immediate aftermath of the execution of a completely innocent man, covered the facts up with lies, distortions and wholesale fabrications, only for the real story to escape very quickly.

We now know the following:

1. The government lie on a regular basis, but Tony Blair has no precedent in the grand tradition of liars because he lied to take us to war and has been lying ever since.
2. The Metropolitan Police, at the highest level, lies. Brazenly, shamelessly and knowing full well that an enquiry will show them to be liars, but that anything really incriminating can be covered up further in the interim.
3. The press lies. But then, this is to be expected. It is their job to lie.

I can now completely understand why Tony Blair immediately ruled out a Public Enquiry into the 7/7 bombings. He wouldn’t want the truth to get out. The bombs were under the train. I fail to see why I should treat this evidence any differently from the evidence at the time that Jean Charles de Menezes was wearing a jean jacket.

Whether there was a conspiracy or not is irrelevant. What is pertinent is that the facts were covered up so brazenly by an organisation that is supposed to be held up as a paragon of truth. What is pertinent is that grand lies were spread instead of there being an admission that the first implementation of a disastrous Israeli technique in mainland Britain had been a ruinous failure.

“That lying bastard, George Bush, is taking a five-week vacation in time of war”

-Cindy Sheehan addressing the Veterans For Peace at their annual convention in Dallas last Friday

The movement against the illegal occupation of Palestine and the illegal war against Iraq has finally found its poster girl. It really had to be a mother. A white one at that. There is no more heart-rending sight and sound in the world than that of a mother who has lost a child. However, when the face is not one of our own, whatever group we align ourselves with, the impact is not quite as deep.

Some people call it compassion fatigue. I just call it human nature. You’re bound to align yourself to a group. When times are tough, you just ditch the groups that aren’t important to you. That’s why I talk about “When the Chips Are Down” etc. Sometimes we just have to make up our minds who we are. The more labels we have, the harder it is for us to be labelled, the harder it is to be understood, but - and I really believe this - the more human one becomes. The extreme of labelling, the pinnacle of polarity can be found in the question “Black or White?” This has found its most profound political expression, thanks to the Western media machine and the dangerous rhetoric of Bush, Blair and Sharon in the question “Freedom or Terrorism?” We simply aren’t allowed to conduct any kind of debate until we decide which side of the line we’re on. Once we decide, debate is over, war has begun.

“And the second way to defeat the terrorists is to spread freedom. You see, the best way to defeat a society that is — doesn’t have hope, a society where people become so angry they’re willing to become suiciders, is to spread freedom, is to spread democracy.”

-George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., June 8, 2005

Now I know the world isn’t as simple as a bunch of del.icio.us or gmail tags, but we are in essence a sum of our labels. Our uniqueness, our individuality and to an equal extent our conformity to a tribe is to a large extent determined by our affiliations.

When times get tough, some of the labels at the periphery are, well, marginalised. I am a Londoner, I am British, I am Pakistani, I am Muslim, I am a Liverpool fan, I like Dunhill, I like Paul Smith, I support the England football team, I like the Pakistan cricket team etc. etc. In recent weeks, there has been an external drive to change my labels which I have forcefully resisted. In fact, there has been a quickly shot-down, hopefully never-to-be-resurrected drive to re-label me as a British-Pakistani or British-Asian. Is this what the children of colonialism get in return for a lifetime of loyalty?

Some have tried to strip me of “Pakistani”, others have tried to question my attachment to the labels “British” and “Londoner”. I have resisted all of these attacks. I reserve the right to call myself all of the above. Certainly, my attachment to Dunhill and Paul Smith are not deal-breakers, but you could no more stop me supporting Liverpool than you could stop me being a Londoner. How’s that for a paradox? Deal with it!

In this time of shifting labels, questioned identities and narrow perspectives, the one label that has emerged as the most powerful, the one that nobody can question without questioning their very existence, not the radical “Islamists” nor the extremist and evil ideology of the Axis of Evil of Bush, Blair and Sharon - is the label “mother”.

One mother is asking why her son had to die for a lie. One mother is ruining the holiday of a president who has had more time off than any president in history. One mother is asking the question that was asked during Vietnam - “How do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?”

Of course, the political message was there and is more than adequately covered by the brilliant xymphora, but the over-arching message for me was the demand for justice that only an articulate, grieving mother can put forward as she continued addressing the standing audience at the Dallas convention:

“My son was killed in 2004. I am not paying my taxes for 2004. You killed my son, George Bush, and I don’t owe you a penny…you give my son back and I’ll pay my taxes. Come after me (for back taxes) and we’ll put this war on trial.”

Motherhood is more than a label. Without it, there is no human race. With it, even the best efforts of Bush and his pals to eradicate humanity can be thwarted.

After all the recent tough stuff, if this doesn’t cheer you up, nothing will.

In essence, one man gone mental with a bunch of real instruments, reproducing the entire set of music from Super Mario (the SNES version). I’m very, very impressed and still have a huge smile on my face.