The Increasingly Pressing Need for Israel to Behave Better

On Monday the British House of Commons endorsed a Labour MP's motion supporting diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state. Though non-binding this follows hard on the heels of the new Swedish Government announcing it will recognize Palestine. Both parliaments have been up till now supporters of Israel's right to a peaceful existence.

'Richard Ottaway, a Conservative lawmaker and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who said he “stood by Israel through thick and thin, through the good years and the bad,” and “under normal circumstances, I would oppose the motion tonight; but such is my anger over Israel’s behaviour in recent months that I will not oppose the motion. I have to say to the government of Israel that if they are losing people like me, they will be losing a lot of people”'

'Advocates of the measure rejected the idea that recognition would harm the peace process: "There is no peace, and there is no process.."'

'The most recent American-mediated talks collapsed in April. Meanwhile, Israel continues to build new settlements or expand existing ones, thus shrinking the territory available for a Palestinian state and ignoring an international community that considers such construction illegal. The recent war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, which killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and 73 Israelis, has increased the sense that violence will keep recurring while peace remains elusive'.

We have travelled a long way from how we felt when we sat in front of our TVs and cheered on Israeli troops as they were winning the Six Days War.  Now, at the very same time as militant Islam gets more ghastly by the month, the Israeli government grows uglier in its determination to behave like some sort of throwback imperial power. Their military is not yet a mirror of the British Black and Tans in early C20th in Ireland, but it is trending in that direction as the intransigent Israeli settlers grabbing land from Arabs look more and more like Edward Carson's Ulster Unionist thugs in pursuing what they claim to be their right.

Nothing changes - might is still right.

Business Women Doing Sexy

Long ago we became used to seeing pretty woman featured front and centre in ads for everything sleek and desirable, from fast cars to high-end condos. These adverts were and are created by professionals.  Lately though the habit is spreading to more homely communications. A recent news picture of a law firm's partners had the male lawyers hardly visible hidden out of the way behind a row of chairs in which sat an undoubtedly attractive set of their female colleagues, each in fashionably short skirts with their elegant legs arranged decoratively from left to right as the viewer's eye travels along the row.

Below is the online version of a picture accompanying a newspaper article on small business.

 

In it we can see that the lady general manager of Vicinity (a small business rewards provider) is clearly wearing a skirt, but the focus is on her upper body and open countenance. In the larger version in print however, we see a pair of impressively long legs pushed forward and sideways as she balances rather precariously on a chest of drawers in her office. Hardly her everyday office posture one assumes! The fact that Ms Waslander is a tall, wholesome and healthy young woman is tangential to the purpose of her business. 

In this age of real concern about women still not being taken seriously enough in commerce, I am puzzled why such successful and intelligent women let themselves be photographed in even mildly provocative postures that have little or no relevance to the objectives of their company.

Hey, I like looking at elegant girls just like any red-blooded boy, but let's return to the real point of promotion - getting the company recognized for its management's business talents rather than its slate of attractive females.

Defining Acts 'Intended to Outrage Feelings'

Humour and Hindu gods don't mix (Reuters/Mukesh Gupta)

 

A promising publishing house in India, the Aleph Book Company, has been targeted by a Hindu bigot as it attempts to reprint and sell a scholarly book on Hinduism, one already withdrawn from that market by a Penguin India concerned about the uncertain wording in Indian defamation law. "Mr Batra, who is a member of a conservative Hindu cultural group, said he would take legal action against Aleph unless it withdrew 'On Hinduism', which he said had several 'objectionable passages that offended the sensitivities of the Hindu community."

"The problem is that Wendy Doniger is maverick and brilliant. Her wit bubbles up and escapes her, almost in spite of herself. Consider this line about the representation of Shiva through a phallus, known as a linga: 'The linga in this physical sense is well known throughout India, a signifier that is understood across barriers of caste and language, a lingua franca, if you will'.  I think it is a clever appropriate line, but I know that my uncle Chetan, who makes yearly pilgrimages to Mount Kailash would take umbrage at it. Joking about his favourite god is blasphemy, as far as he is concerned, never mind that Doniger knows her Sanskrit and Upanishads better than he does.." Shoba Narayan on qz.com.

Not that long ago our Christian ancestors used to burn and/or disembowel anyone whose religious opinions they really didn't want to hear. The  modern wannabee Islamic 'Caliphate' in Syria/Iraq simply rapes and/or beheads to avoid being offended. But, although it is probably less fun, it is much cheaper just to file an intimidating lawsuit. You don't even have to enrol your fellow fundamentalists. 

Even in established democracies there is quite an opportunity for legal harassment - just a few examples are lawsuits to force the teaching of Creationism in school biology classes; to force schools to cancel Christmas, but also to force employers to accord professed believers in the likes of Wiccanism time off work to celebrate; and those to break valid patents owned by inventors who have not the funds to contest in court.

Beyond the courts is the plague of extralegal government-mandated tribunals that seek out, punish and publicize our individual but politically-incorrect expressed views on race, gender or social proclivities. Above all this is the free-rein and one-sided Court of Public Opinion managed by the gutter press and social media.

Language as a Insult

Back in  the early 1970s when I left the land of my birth to travel 'out' to Canada, the language of Empire still ruled our thought processes. While Britain was handing off its colonies as fast as it decently could, the mindset of POSH - port out, starboard home - remained ingrained in the way we spoke about the world. Indeed during my seven years in the 1980s running the Canadian subsidiary for an old-established English firm, my UK colleagues with international responsibilities referred to any trip offshore, including to the old Dominions, as "going out to territory".  By then I had developed some sensitivity to local attitudes, and, try as I might, I could never persuade a single one of our frequent visitors from HQ to consider how condescending use of the 'out' phrase sounded to their offshore-born colleagues.

My American counterpart, British like me, had an even more frustrating time reigning in the terminology of his head office visitors. Our main office down there was in Concord, the birthplace of the Revolution. This colleague and I had periodic meetings with Joe, our worldwide Chairman. At these discussions in a local Massachusetts hotel bar, as the brandies consumed increased in number, Joe would loudly defame the locals' manners and mores using his rich Yorkshire vocabulary. Joe's two great national dislikes were Yankees and Germans. Germans after all had started two terrible wars, and Americans only came in on the right side after the real work had already been done. Unlike his American counterpart, our CEO in Germany could not claim to be British to dodge our Joe's contempt.

British postage stamps still do not carry the name of their country of origin, presumably on the basis that Britain invented this method of paying for mail. US businesses (as the 'World's Only Superpower') rarely put 'USA' at the end of their address nor their country code in their telephone number.

Such little slights are the things that can antagonize foreigners; unfortunately they don't teach you that in school where you are (or were) a Top Dog country.

Snake Oil Sales in Scotland

Many of us in the 4.7 million Scots Diaspora in Canada are anxious at the real possibility of Alex Salmond (memorably characterised in a recent newspaper spread as the ‘ultimate snake-oil salesman’) persuading a majority of voting residents to throw off the UK and the nefarious ‘English’, and so consign our long and world-changing shared history to the dustbin.

As one whose heritage reflects both of the founding cultures of modern Scotland, the Gaelic on my Anderson/MacDonald/McKeddie side and the Lowland Scots/Northumbrian Anglian on my Watson-Weatherburn side, I find the “Kilticisation” and “Braveheartism” of the SNP campaign both deceptive and hypocritical. Unlike Ireland, Scotland was never oppressed by the ‘British’ after the Union of the Crowns and many of the regiments that fought for the Hanoverian dynasty during the Jacobite rebellions were Lowland Scottish or Highland clans. There can be little doubt that firstly Tony Blair, with his cynical belief that a Scots Parliament would support Labour, and then Cameron by allowing himself to be thoroughly outfoxed by Salmond, bear a great deal of blame for the coming debacle. Whichever way the vote goes, the hornet’s nest has been stirred up.