Out of Place asks daring and timely questions about the silence at the heart of queer studies. Discussing ‘race’ alongside ‘queer’ often submerges raciality within queerness, leaving racialised groups silent and silenced–‘out of place’. Out of Place creates a space where queerness/raciality are brought together in creative tension to disturb these silences: to hear the invisible, to see the inaudible.
Out of Place takes the reader through an inspiring, illuminating and at times painful journey. The book explores queerness/raciality in the context of the ‘war on terror’; corporeal and social practices in and of space; relations between visibility and politics; and cultural, literary, linguistic and theoretical mechanisms of translation. The papers in Out of Place cut across academic theory, arts, activism, the media and everyday life. All the contributors to Out of Place address queerness/ raciality as a theoretical and political tool to analyse and challenge their own fields, epistemologies and ontologies. This groundbreaking and fascinating book is not just about what happens at the intersection of ‘queer’ and ‘race’, but also about how this intersection relates to and animates other aspects of life.
Uh-huh.
Unfortunately, one chapter in the book — Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘war on terror’, Jin Haritaworn, with Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem — has caused the publisher, Raw Nerve (Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York), to issue an apology.
The apology can be read here, while the following is an extract from Haritaworn, Tauqir and Erdem’s essay:
Our article focuses on the situation in Britain, where ‘Muslim’ and ‘homophobic’ are increasingly treated as interchangeable signifiers. The central figure in this process is Peter Tatchell who has successfully claimed the role of the liberator of and expert about Muslim gays and lesbians. This highlights the problems of a single-issue politics of representation, which equates ‘gay’ with white and ‘ethnic minority’ with heterosexual. At the same time, the fact that Tatchell’s group Outrage passes as the emblem of queer and hence post-identity politics in Britain shows that the problem of Islamophobia is not reducible to the critique of identity. The active participation of right- as well as left-wing, feminist as well as gay, official as well as civil powers in the Islamophobia industry proves racism more clearly than ever to be a white problem, which crosses other social and political differences…
Tatchell’s high status in the queer scene, the wider left and the mainstream press render criticism of him dangerous. We have already mentioned the two most important critiques by Puar and Feinberg from the US [Puar, Jasbir (2006) ‘On Terror: Queerness, Secularism, and Affect’, Keynote Lecture at the Out of Place conference in Lancaster, 24/25 March, 2006; Puar, Jasbir (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism In Queer Times, Duke University Press, Durham; Feinberg, Leslie (2006) ‘Anti-Iran protest misdirects LGBT struggle’, Workers World (17 July 2006), (accessed 17 October, 2006)]. Unfortunately, white allies in Europe who are prepared to make similar critiques in their own name are rare. This may partly be why queer Muslim activists in Britain have so far been alone in bearing Tatchell’s caustic defence. He has especially targeted individuals who refused to assume their role as exceptional tokens. In this, he has employed tactics of intimidation and aggressive divide and rule among queer Muslims, progressive Muslims and the Inter Faith Community. In a typical reversal of actual power relations, Tatchell has attempted to discredit those who resist his patronage, by interpreting their resistance as an attack, and himself as their victim…
Last night’s week’s episode of the new Australian shockumentary TV series Beyond the Darklands concerned Katherine Knight:
…who committed a murder that’s almost incomprehensible. In February 2000, the former abattoir worker stabbed her de facto husband to death, skinned him and then cooked his body parts in a pot on the stove. She then proceeded to set the table for his children’s arrival, complete with vindictive letters. This appalling murder shows the darkest reaches of the human mind. Katherine Knight is Australia’s first and only women to be jailed for the remainder of her life without parole. Tonight clinical psychologist Dr Leah Giarratano takes us inside the mind of Australia’s most vicious female killer and explains why she comes from Beyond the Darklands.
What turns normal people into monsters? Are they born evil or merely products of destructive environments? asks the show’s producers. Alternatively: “THE title and premise of this nausea-inducing series were all that was needed to accurately predict the substance of it: a prurient, luxurious rehash of a murder dressed up as some sort of project serving the public interest” (Larissa Dubecki, The Age, September 7, 2009). Which actually isn’t too bad a description of the social role of television: a prurient, luxurious rehash of reality dressed up as some sort of project serving the public interest.
Funnily enough — and let’s face it, the story is a barrel of laughs — Knight was a slaughterhouse worker, who took great delight in her work.
Which brings me, of course, to Mia Freedman.
Mia is a “journalist, blogger, author” and “mama”; she’s also the former ‘creative services director’ at Channel Nine. Former CEO Eddie Maguire “had brought Freedman across from Nine owner PBL’s magazine stablemate ACP to add a strong feminine voice to the channel’s traditionally male-dominated management culture” according to The Daily Terror (It’s goodbye from Mia Freedman, Marcus Casey, June 14, 2007). During her brief tenure at the network, Mia creatively serviced the network in the direction of a daytime chat-show called ‘The Catch-Up‘, an Australian version of US chat-show The View.
It was fail. It did, however, * Lisa Oldfield, who is ace, and for many reasons. For example:
The TV personality and wife of former One Nation politician David Oldfield reveals explosive details about her past drug abuse and depression. “Six months into taking a couple of ecstasy tablets on a weekend, I was introduced to cocaine.” Soon, she couldn’t “imagine life without it” and was combining the two drugs in a potentially lethal cocktail. After three months of heavy drug abuse, she lost control. “I was having violent episodes where I would throw things and scream at people — not bash anybody, but I had to be physically restrained. I abused my partner, he bore the brunt of much of it.” Lisa, who credits husband David with turning her life around, now wants to warn others about the dangers of drugs. For the full story, see this week’s issue of Woman’s Day (on sale March 12).
Further, she should sue herself, possibly with the help of a law-talking guy, for the following comments: “I’m just the most irritating individual you’ll ever meet. I’m a pompous snot and I brought them all down. But they went down fighting”. She should also be sued by Libbi Gorr: “I learned so much from Libbi (Gorr) — like how to be a complete bitch” (The Catch-Up rubbish, says Lisa, Herald Sun, June 15, 2007). Marieke Hardy is also mean and cruel and should be sued (Catch up with sisters and dolls, The Age, April 5, 2007).
Where was I?
Oh yeah.
In addition to being responsible for The Delight that was The Catch Up, Mia is The Occasional Vegetarian (The Age, September 7, 2009).
In her article, Freedman reveals that, for some years, she was an off-again, on-again vegetarian — ‘vegetarian’, in this context, not meaning ‘no meat’ but ‘no red meat’. Further, that, like a relatively large number of other grrls, her initial aversion to eating meat developed when she was quite young (12), and was the outcome of an emotional attachment to the (baby) animal in question, and an intellectual understanding of the process by which the cute fluffy became the yummy thing on her plate.
My own decision to pursue a vegetarian diet occurred in my last few years of high skool, and was triggered by my participation in a bout of vivisection in a Science class. Or rather, the nature of the participation of my classmates, whose fun and games with the tiny bodies of the mice we were meant to be cutting up — so as to learn more about digestive systems, I think — triggered in me a kind of moral revulsion: at the contempt being displayed for Animals, for Science, and for Education. I think this decision also functioned, on a psychological level, to distance myself from a particular form of aggressive masculinity, and the behaviours and values associated with it.
At which point, another diversion.
The concept of hegemonic masculinity was first proposed in reports from a field study of social inequality in Australian high schools (Kessler et al. 1982); in a related conceptual discussion of the making of masculinities and the experience of men’s bodies (Connell 1983); and in a debate over the role of men in Australian labor politics (Connell 1982). The high school project provided empirical evidence of multiple hierarchies—in gender as well as in class terms—interwoven with active projects of gender construction (Connell et al. 1982).
These beginnings were systematized in an article, “Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity” (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985), which extensively critiqued the “male sex role” literature and proposed a model of multiple masculinities and power relations. In turn, this model was integrated into a systematic sociological theory of gender. The resulting six pages in Gender and Power (Connell 1987) on “hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity” became the most cited source for the concept of hegemonic masculinity.
The concept articulated by the research groups in Australia represented a synthesis of ideas and evidence from apparently disparate sources. But the convergence of ideas was not accidental. Closely related issues were being addressed by researchers and activists in other countries too; the time was, in a sense, ripe for a synthesis of this kind.
The most basic sources were feminist theories of patriarchy and the related debates over the role of men in transforming patriarchy (Goode 1982; Snodgrass 1977). Some men in the New Left had tried to organize in support of feminism, and the attempt had drawn attention to class differences in the expression of masculinity (Tolson 1977). Moreover, women of color—such as Maxine Baca Zinn (1982), Angela Davis (1983), and bell hooks (1984)—criticized the race bias that occurs when power is solely conceptualized in terms of sex difference, thus laying the groundwork for questioning any universalizing claims about the category of men.
The Gramscian term “hegemony” was current at the time in attempts to understand the stabilization of class relations (Connell 1977). In the context of dual systems theory (Eisenstein 1979), the idea was easily transferred to the parallel problem about gender relations. This risked a significant misunderstanding. Gramsci’s writing focuses on the dynamics of structural change involving the mobilization and demobilization of whole classes. Without a very clear focus on this issue of historical change, the idea of hegemony would be reduced to a simple model of cultural control. And in a great deal of the debate about gender, large-scale historical change is not in focus. Here is one of the sources of later difficulties with the concept of hegemonic masculinity.
Even before the women’s liberation movement, a literature in social psychology and sociology about the “male sex role” had recognized the social nature of masculinity and the possibilities of change in men’s conduct (Hacker 1957). During the 1970s, there was an explosion of writing about “the male role,” sharply criticizing role norms as the source of oppressive behavior by men (Brannon 1976). Critical role theory provided the main conceptual basis for the early antisexist men’s movement. The weaknesses of sex role theory were, however, increasingly recognized (Kimmel 1987; Pleck 1981). They included the blurring of behavior and norm, the homogenizing effect of the role concept, and its difficulties in accounting for power.
Power and difference were, on the other hand, core concepts in the gay liberation movement, which developed a sophisticated analysis of the oppression of men as well as oppression by men (Altman 1972). Some theorists saw gay liberation as bound up with an assault on gender stereotypes (Mieli 1980). The idea of a hierarchy of masculinities grew directly out of homosexual men’s experience with violence and prejudice from straight men. The concept of homophobia originated in the 1970s and was already being attributed to the conventional male role (Morin and Garfinkle 1978). Theorists developed increasingly sophisticated accounts of gay men’s ambivalent relationships to patriarchy and conventional masculinity (Broker 1976; Plummer 1981).
An equally important source was empirical social research. A growing body of field studies was documenting local gender hierarchies and local cultures of masculinity in schools (Willis 1977), in male-dominated workplaces (Cockburn 1983), and in village communities (Herdt 1981; Hunt 1980). These studies added the ethnographic realism that the sex-role literature lacked, confirmed the plurality of masculinities and the complexities of gender construction for men, and gave evidence of the active struggle for dominance that is implicit in the Gramscian concept of hegemony.
Finally, the concept was influenced by psychoanalysis. Freud himself produced the first analytic biographies of men and, in the “Wolf Man” case history, showed how adult personality was a system under tension, with countercurrents repressed but not obliterated (Freud [1917] 1955). The psychoanalyst Stoller (1968) popularized the concept of “gender identity” and mapped its variations in boys’ development, most famously those leading to transsexualism. Others influenced by psychoanalysis picked up the themes of men’s power, the range of possibilities in gender development, and the tension and contradiction within conventional masculinities (Friedman and Lerner 1986; Zaretsky 1975).
~ R.W. Connell & James Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society, Vol.19, No.6, December 2005 (PDF).
But if I could eat all the animals, just imagine it, chompin’ on a chimp (or chimpanzee), imagine tearing into a tiger, chewing on a cheetah, what a neat achievement it would be!
The vast majority of people in Britain eat meat but have little knowledge of how that meat ends up on their table. In a powerful observational documentary, Slaughterhouse: The Task of Blood reveals the day-to-day workings of a small, family-run abattoir and attempts to get inside the minds of the people who work there. It’s a hidden part of British life, but the reality is that thousands of animals are slaughtered every day in abattoirs. This film shows the process of meat production as animals are killed, butchered and stored in fridges before being transported to retail outlets. It reveals the attitudes of the workers to their task, their colleagues and life. Slaughterhouse: The Task Of Blood is produced by BAFTA award winning film-maker, Brian Hill.
There’s Good News and there’s Bad News. First the Bad News:
‘White Power’ shirt man to face court
Eric Tlozek
ABC
September 14, 2009
Northern Territory Police have charged a 48-year-old Alice Springs man [Denis Donohue] who tried to sell “White Power” merchandise with offensive behaviour in a public place. The man has also been charged with making a false report to police regarding the alleged theft of his car numberplates. The Southern Region’s Acting Commander, Kym Davies, says the matter only became criminal after people told police they had been offended by the merchandise. “As a result of our investigations the 48-year-old man was arrested in Alice Springs in relation to those matters,” he said. “So he was arrested for making a false report to police and offensive behaviour in a public place and he’s been bailed to appear in the Alice Springs court.”
Now, the Good News:
On Saturday, boneheads from around Australia goose-stepped and jack-booted to their heart’s content at a gig in Melbourne organised by racist psychotics belonging to ‘Blood & Honour Australia’ and the ‘Southern Cross Hammerskins’ (principally Jesse !@#$%^ and Justin ^%$#@!. I would’ve gone, but sadly my invitation was lost in the post.
I think?
As for the muzak, at least three bands played: Open Season, Ravenous and The Commieknockers.
Jim from Open Season:
These days, finding suitable venues for a gig can be a real pain in the arse. Did you find it difficult to secure venues back in those days?
Back then we actually advertised when and where we were playing, we never had trouble in Sydney but a show we did in Melbourne was changed at the last minute when reds called in a bomb threat. Haha it is probably the same cowardly scumbag who does the same shit today, but now he hides behind his keyboard instead of calling from his closet. The only real trouble that we had at our gigs was guys and girls getting pissed up and fighting. One band that we played with The Bride Wore Boots came down from Queensland to do a show with us. They got lost going back to where they were staying and got beaten up fairly badly when they stopped in some [M]iddle [E]astern slum area.
Left wing losers. These days, their opposition toward us exists in the form [of] tough talk on internet forums, prank phones calls and the like… more of annoyance than anything else. Were they ever able to amount to being a real problem for you back then (don’t laugh I have to ask)?
Like I mentioned before, we never really had any trouble, only the one time with the bomb threat and we still ended up playing that night though in a different venue to say the least. As today everybody back then was scared of boneheads unless they outnumbered us by about 10 to one. They all talked the talk behind our backs but were nowhere to be seen when we were actually about.
Why are people so unkind?
Anyway, here’s a taste of what I (and you, probably) missed out on, courtesy of some d00d on YouTube, a track by ‘Open Season’, the 20-year-old band of boneheads who (like Quick & The Dead) have recently re-formed.
You can find Open Season and other nutzi merch for sale on Jesse’s website http://9percentproductions.com. Among the books on offer is The Turner Diaries by ‘Andrew Mcdonald’ (sic), the 1978 novel by good fascist William Pierce (1933–2002), former fuehrer of the US-based ‘National Alliance’. The novel has provided masturbatory funs for neo-Nazis the world over, but also allegedly inspired the good fascist Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) to go blow up the FBI building in Oklahoma in 1995, and in 1998, before three white men in Texas beat and dragged James Byrd Jr. to death behind a pickup truck, one of the men, John King, reportedly announced, “We’re starting The Turner Diaries early.”
Sadly, there are currently no Ravenous vids on YouTube — but moaron these and the other fascist bozos involved in the gig later (maybe). In the meantime, and on the plus side, the song ‘Ravenous’ by the band Arch Enemy has been uploaded. And here it is:
Note that the vocalist for Arch Enemy is German-born Angela Gossow, and Angela is no friend of fascism:
What is your political orientation? Are you a conservative, a liberal, a socialist maybe? Or do you think politics is just a piece of shit and you don’t care for it at all?
I am liberal, coming from the word LIBERTY. I do not accept racism, intolerance, hatred and discrimination in any shape or form. Everything we do is politics. Using textile bags instead of plastic is a political statement. I believe people are afraid of change, that’s why there will never be the much-needed reformations in our [W]estern society. Most people like to complain but do not like changing anything either. I believe each one of us can make a difference and I do stand up for my beliefs. I believe in respect and protection/preservation of this world and its creatures. I think most politicians have to make many compromises to step up the ladder. Many sell their integrity for power and money. Let[‘]s put it this way: There isn’t one politician out there I would trust.
In the Czech Republic, neo-Nazis David Vaculík and Tomáš Vassiov have been busy (allegedly) attempting to murder Roma and assaulting punks: “Vaculík and Tomáš Vassiov, a neo-Nazi from Opava who had a criminal record at the time, are suspected of last year’s incident at the Erna club in Rýmařov. A group of masked assailants threw smoke bombs into the club during a rock concert and then physically assaulted concertgoers as they fled the building. “The assailants were armed with sticks and other weapons,” Bruntál police spokesperson Pavla Tušková said at the time. An 18-year-old male was hospitalized as a result” (Vítkov arson suspect and [Workers’ Party (Dělnická strana)] sponsor allegedly part of brutal attack in Rýmařov, ROMEA, September 13, 2009). According to Czech Television, the Workers’ Party is heavily implicated in neo-Nazism: “CT said that it had photographs at its disposals [that] show that DS candidates Jiri Svehlik, Milan Hroch and Patrik Vondrak support neo-Nazism. Svehlik features in the photographs in a t-shirt of the Nazi Skrewdriver band, along with guitarist of the neo-Nazi Hlas Krve (Voice of Blood) band or with a flag in the colours of the German Third Reich. Patrik Vondrak is one of the organisers of a neo-Nazi event in the streets of the former Prague Jewish Quarter two years ago and Milan Hroch features on the photographs giving a Nazi salute together with members of the banned National Resistance group” (Czech Television: Workers’ party’s candidates support neo-Nazism, Prague Daily Monitor, September 9, 2009). Note that the “neo-Nazi event in the streets of the former Prague Jewish Quarter two years ago” — which took place on the anniversary of Kristallnacht — was a less-than-total success for the Czech and German members of the Master Race who attended.
In Germany, a small group of neo-Nazis belonging to the NPD and other, ‘autonomous’ nationalists, numbering approximately 100, enjoyed a day out in Hamburg on the weekend — an expedition kindly made possible by the provision of an honour guard of around 2,000 German police. The police were apparently required in order to protect the fascists from several hundred antifa, part of a larger crowd of thousands who were participating in a left-wing street festival. Having succeeded in allowing the neo-Nazis to spend a (very) short period jackbooting around Hamburg, police were also forced to confront anti-fascist protesters. Media reports claim (at least) 12 police were injured, and dozens arrested in the ensuing confrontation. Some photos of the fascist meatheads the German nanny state were protecting are available here.
In Greece, where the state plays an even more active role in the support of the far right, “The former head of Greece’s secret services Yannis Korantis is to stand for extreme-right party LAOS in next month’s parliamentary elections, the party said on Thursday” (Ex-top spy to stand for Greek far-right party, EJP [AFP], September 11, 2009). In other news, “a short video has just been released showing part of the police raid in Exarcheia on September 4. The video, below, shows policemen of the Delta force kicking and beating two of the four arrested (mostly in the last 30-40 seconds). According to eye-witnesses the arrested were tied to a tree. Leaving the area, the Delta force police were shouting “we took Exarcheia”. Three of the four arrested face felonies. One of them, a 27-year old, was so badly beaten that his lung was punctured and he is currently recovering in the Evangelismos hospital in Athens.” Or to put it another way: the great majority of the Greek police, seemingly ever-patient and self-controlled, have stood for years as kids baited and yelled, shoved and provoked. A handful of officers used well-placed elbows while batons were raised, criminals kicked and punched, and lungs punctured only in response to the blot on Athens that is Exarcheia.
In Russia, 11 teenage boneheads have been found guilty of blowing shit up and the murder of four untermenschen from China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. “Sova, a Moscow-based hate crimes monitor, said 47 people have been killed and 222 wounded in Russia this year in apparent hate attacks. Last year 107 were killed and 468 wounded. Sova’s Galina Kozhevnikova said the drop reflects a “tactical switch” of neo-Nazi groups from targeting non-Slavs to indiscriminate attacks, which are not classed as hate crimes” (Moscow jury: boneheads guilty of killings, Kyiv Post [AP], September 11, 2009).
In Serbia, Amnesty International has drawn attention to the existence of widespread — and government-endorsed — homophobia, with the release of a new report by Sian Jones, Amnesty International’s Balkans expert.
Over the past year women human rights defenders have been attacked in the media including being threatened with lynching. Such attacks are made by parliamentarians, members of ultra-right organisations and members of the security services indicted for war crimes. Other defenders have had their property destroyed, their offices attacked or been beaten by members of neo-Nazi groups.
Physical attacks and threats to the lives and property of human rights activists are seldom promptly and impartially investigated by the authorities. Few perpetrators are brought to justice.
The lack of political will on the part of the authorities to fulfil their obligations to guarantee human rights defenders their right to freedom of expression and assembly creates a climate of impunity which stifles civil society.
The LGBT community is marginalised even within civil society and criminal investigations into assaults on LGBT people, even where the perpetrators have been identified, are rarely resolved.
The Serbian authorities are obliged to protect the rights of all people to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. They must condemn publicly all attacks on and threats to human rights activists, and provide protection and support during the forthcoming Belgrade Pride later this week.
The report comes just a week or so prior to the heap ’em big Belgrade Pride march / party / rally / queer shenanigans. Anarchists and anti-fascists in Belgrade (Serbia) have supported queer struggles in the past, and also been subjected to threats, assaults, and other forms of repression. Most recently, five members of the Serbian group ‘Anarcho-syndicalist Initiative’ have been arrested and accused of ‘international terrorism’ by Serbian authorities. The five are alleged to have sprayed some graffiti and thrown a Molotov cocktail at terh Greek Embassy on August 25. If convicted, the five face up to 15 years in jail.
In 2001, fascist football hooligans — with a nod and a wink from Serbian authorities — attacked the last attempt at a Gay Parade in Belgrade, beating the shit out of the heavily-outnumbered queers. The attacks sparked widespread outrage across the global queer community. Like The Jew, Teh Gheys make a very convenient scapegoat for authorities, and a much easier target for workers’ frustrations than ruling elites. (See also : Homophobia as a weapon of war, Peter Tatchell, Outcast, No.2, October 1999.) The video below shows a d00d at the 2001 Parade armed with a red-and-back flag being attacked — which just goes to show, as Chunga of Melbourne punk band ‘The Worst’ remarked: ‘Anarchy is a fag!’
In Spain, the man accused of murdering a teenage antifa has gone on trial. Josué Estébanez, an enlisted soldier and neo-Nazi, is accused of stabbing 16-year-old Carlos Palomino to death on a Madrid subway in December 2007. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 29 years gaol.
Above : video of protest action at Serbian Consulate in Sydney, September 11, 2009. Below : Machine translation of article from Serbian media noting letter of concern from academics at the University of Belgrade (and other public figures), one drawing attention to the fact that the charge of ‘international terrorism’ levelled at the anarchists in Belgrade far exceeds, in seriousness, the charges against others responsible for a much more serious attack on the US Embassy in February 2008 (see : US embassy in Belgrade attacked, BBC, February 22, 2008). In that instance, 80 people were charged with hooliganism, theft and resisting arrest (see : Serbia Charges 80 People Over Riots, AP, February 29, 2008).
Belgrade group of public figures concerned about the accused for the attack on the Greek Embassy
BELGRADE – A group of professors of Belgrade University and public figures from the culture on Friday sent an open letter in which the public expressed concern about notice that against six suspects for the attack Molotov cocktails at the Greek Embassy in Belgrade to be indicted that they charged for an act of international terrorism.
“No desire to in any way justify this act, we believe our duty to point out to what we recognize as the political background of application of double standards, which can be disastrous impact on the further development of our society,” says the In an open letter signed by Zaga Golubovic, Želimir Žilnik, Todor Kuljić, Vladimir Ilic, Boris Dežulović, Sonja Drljević, Ljubomir Zhivkov and Vladimir Arsenijevic.
The group pointed out that during the protest 21st February 2008, years after the declaration of independence by Kosovo, torched the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade and was significantly damaged by fire, while one of the attackers lost his life on that occasion.
“The only participant in this attack which is found on the accused bench, charged with serious offenses against the execution of general security. In contrast, the authorities breaking a window at the empty building of the Embassy of Greece with two lighted bottles that are not led to fires, characterized as an act of international terrorism, which is the work of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Serbia stands next to the exercise of genocide, war crimes and conducting aggressive war”, says the letter.
Suspect that the 25th August, first wrote the graffiti on the facade of the Greek Embassy, and then threw two Molotovljeva cocktails are Ratibor Trivunac (28), Tadej Kurepa (24), Ivan Vulovic (24), Sanja Djokic (19), Nikola Mitrovic (29) and Ivan Savic (25).
Update : Oh yeah. The muppets belonging to the English Defence League are planning demos for London on September 13(?); on September 19 in Luton (again); on October 10 in Madchester; and on Walpurgisnacht in Leeds.
Pretty much as expected, really.
As previously noted, ‘Stop Islamisation of Europe’ (England) announced a rally to take place outside of a mosque in Harrow (Middlesex, England), on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 — ostensibly in order to protest the ‘Islamisation’ of England (and Europe). This deliberately provocative act was rendered moreso by the fact that it was scheduled to take place during Ramadan, the holiest month in the Muslim calendar. The efforts of SIOE (England) — which is a paper organisation with, supposedly, only two ‘actual’ members, a Danish bloke named ‘Anders Gravers’ Pedersen and an English fella called ‘Stephen Gash’ — were supplemented by those of the ‘English Defence League’ and, presumably, assorted other anti-Muslim riff-raff.
Prior to the protest, local authorities, including Muslim groups, called for calm. An announcement (posted on September 11, 2009 at 6:33 pm) on the main SIOE site reads:
Stephen Gash was told by a senior sergent [sic] of the police to call off the demonstration in Harrow. He was then arrested to prevent a breach of the peace…
More than 1000 mainly [M]uslims gathered infront [sic] of the SIOE demonstration where they stopped people to attend [sic] the demonstration.
The police could not handle the [M]uslim counter demonstraters [sic]. The senior sergent [sic] said that he didn’t want any of his policemen killed.
According to media reports, one person was arrested to prevent a breach of the peace, but was released shortly thereafter — this may well have been Gash.
On the day, there was some division, it appears, between the largely older and more ‘conservative’ figures in the local Muslim community and its younger members, with elders urging non-confrontation and yoof wanting to communicate much more directly with the anti-Islamic mob. As it happens, the combined forces of SIOE and the EDL appear not to have attracted too many supporters, with estimates of those protesting against ‘Islamisation’ numbering anywhere from a mere handful to perhaps as many as 100. Complicating this picture is the fact that police claim to have stopped a number of individuals heading to the rally from approaching the mosque, and the generally chaotic nature of the day’s events, with somewhere between 1-2,000 counter-protesters also being present. ‘harrowunited’:
Over 300 EDL, SIOE, Casuals United and BNP supporters PROMISED they’d attend the EDL Harrow demonstration on the demo’s Facebook page. Less than 20 of these idiots turned up! Outnumbered 80 to 1 by a crowd of 1,600 locals (blacks, whites, local school kids, Gujus, lefties, Hindus, Muslims and Christians) the EDL lasted less than 5 minutes in the back-streets around Harrow & Wealdstone station, and were sent packing before they got anywhere near Harrow Mosque.
A couple of EDL got badly slapped as a huge crowd surged over to tell them to get the fuck out of our city. The rest ended up hiding behind the police… enjoy the mugshots! 8 people were arrested, all of […] them EDL.
Unfortunately I was too busy to film during the best bits, but EDL were told in no uncertain terms “You are totally out-numbered. Fuck off. Go home. You are not welcome in our town. Do not come back.”
The only thing EDL achieved was to to spark the creation of Harrow’s new Anti-Fascist movement, which will be more than ready to deal with them if they come back.
Of the counter-protesters, most appear to have been drawn from the local Muslim community. ‘Unite Against Fascism’, however, also called upon its supporters to attend the counter-protest, and the presence of UAF lollypops appears to confirm at least some did so.
In the end, the few anti-Muslim bigots who did rock up to Harrow were forced to hide behind police lines, from the relative safety of which they were able to taunt the local yoof. Of the police, there appears to have been an inundation, and their role in protecting those who came to protest against ‘Islamisation’ naturally propelled some to throw a few things in their direction.
From the perspective of those who organised the protest, images of Muslim (/Asian) yoof attacking police lines are useful insofar as these can be used to demonstrate to the Great British Public the ‘irrational violence’ of the ‘Islamists’, and hence reinforce their claims that Islam is an alien and subversive doctrine. That these images should have this effect, however, depends upon the existence of a receptive audience, one which is unable or unwilling to recognise that SIOE (England) and the EDL aim at producing precisely this outcome, and are engaged in a deliberately provocative course of action; further, one to which it is highly unlikely that any other community — especially one subject to as much public prejudice and various forms of state monitoring as the Muslim population is in contemporary England — would, on the whole, react in a dissimilar manner.
In the end, given the relative absence of confrontation (and especially violent confrontation), and given the fact that SIOE/the EDL (and the BNP and ‘Casuals United’) fielded such a minuscule number of their muppet supporters, it’s hard to see how the event was anything other than a failure for organisers. More worrying, perhaps, is the extent to which these and other such events may be used to justify further legal and political restrictions upon the right to protest.
We R back on air tomorrow.Thank you to our loyal listeners 4 all ur msg’s.Your support has been amazing,& we luv u.See you in the morning. (4:31 AM Aug 17th)
Kyle Sandilands is ace. So is Jacqueline Ellen Marie Last O’Neil Henderson. Sadly, their brand — ‘The Kyle & Jackie O Show’ — has been badly disembiggened by its strong word association football with the terms ‘rape’ and ‘concentration camps’. Unless your name is Adolf Hitler (a number of whose worshippers are gathering in Melbourne this weekend), ‘rape’ and ‘concentration camps’ are not normally categorised under the heading ‘Fun’, and so other brands which rely on ‘The Kyle & Jackie O Show’ brand for ‘fun’ (meaning: profit) are at risk of also being disembiggened via their own association football with Kyle and Jackie.
And rape.
And concentration camps.
Worryingly, one major sponsor, US-based corporation Optus, has withdrawn its support for the show. If others follow, Kyle (but not Jackie — she’s a grrl, and made of Pepsi) is fuct. The fact that ‘The Kyle & Jackie O Show’ may continue to rate its socks off, or that the pair have 367,532 followers on Twitter means jack shit. Political Economy of the Mass Media 101. Speaking of Jack (and shit), Mister Marx has penned a short essay in defence of Kyle: ‘Leave Kyle Sandilands alone, says Jack Marx’ (NEWS.com.au, September 10, 2009).
At least Kyle didn’t upload a video like this to YouTube.
Neo-Nazi skinheads belonging to Blood & Honour (B&H) Australia and the Southern Cross Hammerskins are gathering in Melbourne this weekend to commemorate the death of B&H’s co-founder, Ian Stuart Donaldson, in 1993.
As in previous years, the boneheads have organised a gig to remember Ian, and arranged for a number of different bands to play, including — it seems — a US band called ‘Rebel Hell’.
Jesse ******, a leading Australian Hammerskin, will be playing at the gig with his band Ravenous. Jesse maintains both a YouTube channel and an online shop called 9 percent productions [http://9percentproductions.com/].
Among other things, 9 percent sells (neo-)Nazi music — including the album ‘Freezer Full of Nigger Heads’ by the US band Grinded Nig — and merchandise — including swastika pins and keyrings.
Here’s Jesse singing with the Belgian neo-Nazi band Kill Baby Kill, who played the 2008 memorial gig (at The Beaconsfield Hotel). Note that KBK vocalist, Dieter Samoy, has a conviction for assaulting a black man.
The song is called ‘Oh no here comes an Abo’.
NT ‘Nazi’ makes tearful on-air apology
ninemsn staff and wires
September 11, 2009
A man who sold racist T-shirts in Alice Springs has gone on radio to make a tearful apology — but doubts remain about his sincerity.
Denis Donohue went on ABC Radio in Alice Springs today to make amends after receiving death threats for selling garments emblazoned with a Nazi swastika and the phrase “White Power”.
“I’d just like to apologise to all the good people in Alice and around Australia,” he said, adding that the shirts were only a drunken joke.
“I’m so sorry about what I said and there’s no real malice or reason behind it.”
Choking back tears, Mr Donohue said selling such T-shirts was “just the things you do when you have a bit of a drug problem”.
“But that’s not the excuse,” he said.
“I’ll cop it sweet. I dug my hole.”
But National Indigenous Times editor Chris Graham questioned Mr Donohue’s apology.
“Really, it’s a matter for the people he’s harmed whether they accept his apology,” he told ninemsn.
“I actually think it takes some guts to go on the radio like he did but I find it very hard reconciling that with the stream of racist abuse he directed at me yesterday.
“He says he was drunk but he sounded precisely the same as he did on the radio.”
Mr Donohue had previously said his business venture was only meant to be a “bit of a giggle”.
“It was only meant as a joke,” he said.
“You do-gooders are just going to make a bloody mockery of it.”
According to the National Indigenous Times, local police and council officials had refused at least two requests by local residents to shut down the man known as “Red”.
He had been selling the offensive merchandise from his car in the main street of the desert town.
But Mr Donohue also told the paper that he was giving the shirts to people who wanted them, including some police officers.
He said Aboriginal people were the source of all the desert town’s problems and described them as “mongrels” and “bludging leeches”.
Mr Graham said that the sales of the t-shirts — which apparently followed the death of an Aboriginal man who was beaten to death allegedly by a gang of white men — points to “a larger issue that we have out here and that the community on all levels has to deal with”.
“Everybody except Australia thinks we have a race problem — it’s like an alcoholic who won’t admit that he’s a drunk,” he said.
The five men accused of the fatal assault of trainee ranger Donny Ryder are facing murder charges.
Nazi T-shirts ‘a bit of a giggle’
AAP
September 11, 2009
A MAN who sold racist T-shirts emblazoned with a Nazi swastika and the phrase “White Power” in Alice Springs has gone on radio to make a tearful apology.
Denis Donohue said his business venture was only meant to be a “bit of a giggle”.
“It was only meant as a joke,” he said.
“You do-gooders are just going to make a bloody mockery of it.”
According to the National Indigenous Times, local police and council officials had refused at least two requests by local residents to shut down the man known as “Red”.
He had been selling the offensive merchandise from his car in the main street of the desert town.
But Mr Donohue also told the paper that he was giving the shirts to people who wanted them, including some police officers.
He said Aboriginal people were the source of all the desert town’s problems and described them as “mongrels” and “bludging leeches”.
But Mr Donohue went on ABC Radio in Alice Springs today to make amends after receiving death threats.
“I’d just like to apologise to all the good people in Alice and around Australia,” he said, adding that the shirts were only a drunken joke.
“I’m so sorry about what I said and there’s no real malice or reason behind it.”
Choking back tears, Mr Donohue said selling such T-shirts was “just the things you do when you have a bit of a drug problem”.
“But that’s not the excuse,” he said.
“I’ll cop it sweet. I dug my hole.”
White power shirts ‘a joke’, says vendor
Nick Calacouras Northern Territory News
September 11, 2009
POLICE are investigating white supremacy T-shirts featuring a Nazi swastika that are being sold in a Territory town.
Denis Donohue said he had been selling the shirts in Alice Springs for two years and had given them to police officers, nurses and prominent members of the Territory’s legal community.
The T-shirts and baseball caps have the words “White Power” emblazoned on them with a Nazi swastika.
But Mr Donohue said it was all a joke.
“That was just a novelty thing because I was sick of them all breaking into my home,” he said.
“I was just trying to stick a thorn into them”.
Acting Assistant Commissioner Rob Kendrick said police were investigating the shirt sales.
“The shirts are provocative in nature and we certainly consider them offensive,” he said.
He said the sale could breach laws regarding obscenity and offensive behaviour.
“We will, if necessary, pursue a prosecution”.
“(But) our focus at the moment is tracking down the man selling these shirts”.
Mr Kendrick said he was concerned by claims that police officers had obtained these shirts.
When the Northern Territory News suggested to Mr Donohue that his shirts could promote ethnic cleansing or racial violence, he replied: “says who?”
“I just did it to grab attention. We’re not holding meetings or anything. It’s not like I’m in the Ku Klux Klan,” he said.
Mr Donohue said he has advertised these shirts for years from a sign in the back of his car – but he has never sold them.
“I can’t sell them. Nobody wants to buy them. But I do give them away to people who want them,” he said.
“The only ones who are complaining are white bastards. It is just the do-gooder whities and it has been blown out of the bloody water”.
NATIONAL, September 10, 2009: An Alice Springs resident has responded to the alleged bashing death of an Aboriginal man by five young white men by selling “Alice Springs White Power” t-shirts and caps from his car.
And it’s all happening outside the Alice Springs Town Council offices, with local police and council officials refusing at least two requests by local residents to shut the man down.
The t-shirts and caps were yesterday on display in the passenger side window of a 4WD ute parked directly across the road from the council chambers. The number plates on the vehicle read ‘GANGSTA’, and a hand-written sign was taped to the back passenger window advertising the shirts and caps.
The sign included pricing – $25 for a shirt, $25 for a cap or to [sic] for $35. The shirt includes a Nazi swastika symbol, and the sign includes a mobile number, 0410 366 701.
The sale of the merchandise follows the July 25 death of Donny Ryder, an Aboriginal trainee ranger, aged 33. Mr Ryder was walking home along an Alice Springs back street when a group of five white youths aged 19-24 allegedly alighted from a 4WD and bashed him to death.
The youths have each been charged with murder, and up to nine counts of reckless endangerment – about a half hour before the bashing death the youths also allegedly drove their vehicle at itinerant Aboriginal men and women camping on the dry bed of the Todd River…
While there’s been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over Kyle Sandilands’ latest dickheaded commentary (Magda Szubanski oughta consider going to a concentration camp in order to lose weight — hurr hurr), REAL! LIVE! neo-Nazis will be gathering in Melbourne this weekend (Saturday, September 12), and in Sydney in a fortnight (September 26/27). I’ve already blogged about the former event; this post concerns the Sydney Forum.
The principal organiser of the Forum is the Australia First Party (NSW). AF is lead by “The Mad Arab” Dr James Saleam, a 53-year-old most famous, perhaps, for his previous leadership role with the fascist groupuscule ‘National Action’ (NA) in the 1980s — a position only interrupted by his jailing in 1991 for organising a shotgun assault upon the home of Eddie Funde, the African National Congress representative to Australasia. (Saleam was replaced by Michael (De) Brander — Brander has a conviction for assault, lost a case brought against a journalist for calling him a racist, and has been published by Quadrant magazine.) Two of Herr Doktor’s most amusing recent expeditions into political activism have been his interview with the neo-Nazi Carl D. Thompson on Carl’s (US-based) ‘National Socialist Movement’ radio show and his declaration that the police murder of Northcote teenager Tyler Cassidy in December 2008 was the result of a political conspiracy, in keeping with his delusion that I and others colluded with the police to have Cassidy shot; attention to which fact would be drawn by AF participating in a protest at the Coroner’s inquest.
Other AF members of note include Cr Bruce Preece; Peregrine John Beverley ex-Confederate Action Party Jewell and Peter Schuback (vice-president of the Australian Long Distance Owners and Drivers Association) — bothlosing candidates in the last Queensland state election; (in NSW) Tony Pettitt, Terry Cooksley, George Atkinson, Darrell Wallbridge, Greg Bailey, Richard Hedditch, Kevin Baldwin, Nathan Clarke, Ian McBryde and Jim Smith; and Jim Perren, a neo-Nazi from rural Queensland whose blog, Whitelaw Towers, is regularly used to excoriate The Jew, Aborigines, The Jew, the Australian Protectionist Party (splitters!), The Jew, Communists, The Jew, homosexuals and Muslims.
And The Jew.
Place
The Forum was last held in 2007, at the Eastwood RSL and at Jim’s Bunker in Tempe. Odd that the RSL, an organisation some of whose members fought the Nazis, if I remember correctly, should provide a venue for AF, but presumably money is more important than ‘politics’ as far as Eastwood RSL is concerned. Note also that Jim’s Bunker was the site of a murder in 1991, when Wayne ‘Bovver’ Smith (25) was shot eight times with a sawn-off .22 rifle by fellow NA member Perry Whitehouse. When Whitehouse blew him away, Bovver was wearing a singlet bearing the message: Say No To The New Gun Control Laws.
In 2006, the Estonian House Co-operative Society was extremely proud to boast of its support for a fascist forum; in 2005, the Russian Club (in Strathfield) wisely decided, and to its credit, that it did not want to be associated with the promotion of anti-Semitism, racism, and fascism, and canceled the Forum’s booking, forcing organisers to re-locate the party to Jim’s Bunker.
In 2009, the venue for the Forum is a heap ’em big secret.
This is to confuse and to upset המוסד למודיעין ולתפקידים מיוחדים.
Program
The Master of Race Ceremonies at the 2009 Forum — as he has been at every Forum since its inception in 2001 — will be German-born neo-Nazi Welf Herfurth. A former member of the NPD, One Nation Party, Blood & Honour Australia, and currently Volksfront Australia, Herfurth is a Holocaust denialist, and close comrade of professional denialist Frederick Töben.
The person responsible for maintaining the Sydney Forum website and MySpace page, as well as promoting it on the White supremacist Internet forum Stormfront, is the horse fancier Nicole Hanley. (The Sydney Forum website was established by a pseudo-crackademic called David McBryde, a heap ’em big fan of Leo Strauss.) Hanley, like Herfurth, is a Holocaust denialist, and was formerly(?) involved in the neo-Nazi skinhead network Blood & Honour; her signature on Stormfront reads “My grandfather died at Auschwitz – he fell out of a machine gun tower”.
Although the identity of the Forum’s very special international speaker has yet to be announced, word on the virtual street is that it will be US racist ‘Andrew Yeoman’, of the San Francisco-based groupuscule BANANAs.
Yeoman, like Herfurth, claims to be an ‘anarchist’. As such, it is highly likely that the handful of teens who constitute Herfurth’s followers will also be in attendance. Most prominent of these is Geelong-based racist Scott Harrison. Scott (‘NoCrusties’) is a former member of the Stormfront forum, and his attitude to Nazism, and the Holocaust, mirrors that of his Master Herfurth:
Today, 05:35 AM
NoCrusties
Australian Nationalist
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Australia
Posts: 460
Re: New photos of Nazis having fun in the sun
They are celebrating the girls graduation from Jewish strangulation school?
“…The photos provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos, the so-called Auschwitz Album, a compilation of pictures taken by SS photographers in the spring of 1944 and discovered by a survivor in another camp. Those photos depict the arrival at the camp of a transport of Hungarian Jews, who at the time made up the last remaining sizable Jewish community in Europe. The Auschwitz Album, owned by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, depicts the railside selection process at Birkenau, the area where trains arrived at the camp, as SS men herded new prisoners into lines.
The comparisons between the albums are both poignant and obvious, as they juxtapose the comfortable daily lives of the guards with the horrific reality within the camp, where thousands were starving and 1.1 million died…”
Croatian fascist Tomislav Sunic interviewed Andrew Yeoman recently on his radio show; Sunic (another denialist) was the honorary bloody foreigner/international guest speaker at the 2007 Sydney Forum.
As for the other speakers so far announced — James ‘110% White’ Saleam, Andrew ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ Fraser, John ‘911 Was An Inside Job!’ Bursill, Terrie-Anne ‘Fuck Off We’re Full’ Verney and David Astin — they have been joined by “Harry Fritz-Gerald Beahrends” and Steve Grey. Steve spoke at the Inverell Forum in 2009 (a Forum which Herfurth addressed in 2007, which fact prompted Pauline Hanson to withdraw from the event). The Inverell Forum is a larger, rural, longer-established, and more entertainingly batshit version of the urban-based Sydney Forum.
Steve has a BSc in Building Technology from Brunel [U]niversity (UK) and A levels in Maths, Physics and chemistry. He is an inventor with international patents for a lightweight folding portable structure. For three years he has studied, in his spare time, the history of suppressed “Free Energy systems” and he stumbled across a website www.Cheniere.org that described the military applications of electronics for altering the weather. He now believes this is occurring around the world on a regular basis and provided examples to evidence his beliefs. He showed what’s being done and what the implications are for mankind’s future.
The paranoid wackos of this seedy West London tenement had one thing in common — the conviction that Jews, Freemasons, homosexuals, Gypsies, Jesuits, anarchists and Communist Party members were all agents of subversion under the control of a ruthless global elite directing world events to their advantage…
Bonus!
Luke Connors (‘Casapound’ on the ‘Australian Identity Forums’; formerly ‘Young Soldier’ on Stormfront) provides a rather amusing account of the various obstacles he encountered while trying to organise the Patriotik Yoof League, an attempt by Dr James Saleam to establish a yoof wing for AF. The footage was taken at the 2005 Sydney Forum, and kindly uploaded to JewTube YouTube by Queensland AF member Jim Perren (‘Whitelaw Towers’). The PYL eventually boiled down to one, solitary, lonesome, tennis-playing-and-not-especially-youthful bloke from Brisbane called John Drew.
Drew was kicked out of AF earlier this year, ostensibly for being overly-appreciative of Pauline Hanson. (And the male body.)
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
