today

The well-known commentator Robert Fisk says "Any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocent " and what is more in an article in the Independent he gives examples. Now this fact is probably well known to readers of usenet, well aware of trolls and simple lies, but possibly not to the sort of degree that Fisk details. It has got to the point where anyone who says anything at all nowadays, rightly or wrongly, has to face the fact that "nowadays everybody is potentially a David Bohm" and may be banished from humankind for ever and have their life ruined. And we do not have to look anywhere near as far as Danish cartoons to find this out.

Fisk cites in some detail the attempted persecution of Taner Akcam and states that Akram said "Allegations against me, posted by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, Turkish Forum and 'Tall Armenia Tale' (a Holocaust denial website) have been copy-pasted and recycled through innumerable websites and e-groups ever since I arrived in America. By now, my name in close proximity to the English word 'terrorist' turns up in well over 10,000 web pages."

Now what this has meant is, as Fisk notes "How much smut are the US and Canadian immigration authorities taking off the internet? And how much of it is now going to be flung at us when we queue at airports to go about our lawful business? "

Now it is possible to fight back against this sort of thing, as Rwanda tried to do when Turkey forced closure of a U.N. photo exhibition on the Rwandan Genocide. "There is no question that the Rwandan exhibition will be reopened at the U.N. along with the reference to the Armenian Genocide. By taking it down temporarily to get rid of that (brief) reference, Turkish officials have once again inadvertently publicized the Armenian Genocide to a worldwide audience, much beyond the four walls of the U.N."

In fact I have no particular complaint about Turkey and think there are many reasons for Ataturk to be admired, though clearly Armenian genocide is not one of them. But at the same time, the idea of the repressive regime of Tony Blair forcing the UK to side with (Armenian) genocide deniers, as seems to be the position of Turkey at this time, leaves me totally nonplussed. And certainly people like Robert Maxwell and 'Dame' Shirley Porter do no credit to UK politics or to UK politicians, particularly not to the Labor party. At the end of the day, spin and megaphone diplomacy by those gaining from the undoubted facts of Jewish and probably Armenian genocide places no Jew or Turk in a good light. Neither country should conceivably be made any serious offer to join the EU, for example, indeed the EU is bad enough already.

We can only hope that Blair, for example, may eventually meet his just deserts, as did Poulson. Indeed Blair strikes me as a kind of inferior Poulson, with ideas based on out of date economics at that. The South American style argument that "the other lot are far worse" is hardly satisfying.