Music · Brooklyn Funk Essentials · I Got Cash

NSFW! NSFW! NSFW! Danger, Will Robinson!

I got cash in fuck you quantities.

Dragged back into thinking, writing about the eighties and El Thatch, I tried, really, I tried, to think for a weekly music post of something appropriate from that time that I actually like, which I might want to listen to again.

There's plenty that works politically but not so much that still does it for me musically now (er, Bronski Beat? My first publication was on them but I don't want to actually hear it again). Britfunk was still, er, finding its feet. Sooo, as I had this saved on my 'maybe post this sometime' list ... here's Brooklyn Funk Essentials' slamming 2000 sweet FU by extension to Thatcherism and Thatcher's children.

It's addressed to the NYawk version of those same Londonist a***holes. NYLON if umust ...

I got cash in fuck you quantities
Know what?
That makes you uncomfortable?
Fuck you and the Range Rover you drove in on

Fuck your Saab convertable

And fuck your twice weekly trips to the analyst
Stupid mutha fuck

Does Labour want these disabled people jailed?

Ok. First up, I am NOT researching this to death. So you can forget that: FU. I am not descending rabbit-holes and reading endless PDFs about who knows what. But what I do know is that Labour people are suggesting that the people talked about in a Guardian blog post be jailed.

I am not researching to death because I am applying common sense. I don't need to read a lot of academic literature discussing a subject in the abstract. The ideology is in those PDFs and the result is the result -- jail.

The Guardian post is by Tuppy Owens, the legendary campaigner on sexual politics, and it is about disabled people paying for sex. Which is stuff that happens.

There are people in the UK Labour Party who want these people to go to jail. All clients of prostitutes must be punished for their own good and society's betterment, they and their ideology say. They literally claim that these disabled people are committing violence against women. They aren't campaigning for disabled people to be imprisoned but that's precisely where their ideology ends up at.

Those opposing what Owens is describing, the reality she is describing, can talk themselves into a hole, a rabbit hole. The end result, the reality which they have already enacted in much of Scandinavia, which they want in the whole of Europe, would put these disabled people in prison.

They may claim they don't want jail, they just want to 'name and shame'. But what if they aren't ashamed but defiant? They refuse to pay fines?

Oh, and it is people. Owens describes men but disabled women pay for sex too.

This is the reality of the so-called campaign to end prostitution. These Labour people, who think 'Miracle X' policy will 'end this scourge', would put disabled man X (oh, it will likely be a man) in prison.

Is the Labour Party in favour of imprisoning these disabled people?

Dissemble.

Of course I have a further point. This is an extrapolation on something which has annoyed me for a long while.

These feminist arguments on prostitution always ignore male prostitution. If they bother, they try to shovel it into the worst aspects of the female sex trade -- just like Dworkin abysmally did with gay porn -- but it always ends up in the same place that the shoveling of much of the female sex work choice into 'forced trade' has. See the Guardian expose on how independent women choosing sex work all become 'sex slaves' in NGOs eyes.

Let me be blunt. Feminists arguing against sex work don't give a f*** about male sex workers*. I am a gay man and I have seen this again and again -- gay sex workers are collateral damage, if they're considered at all. The laws that result, and impact them, they, feminists, could care less about. Because they impact men. Gay or not, they're still men.

I'm wrong? Show me how I'm wrong. I wish I could think otherwise, 'friend of da gayze' Mary Honeyball MEP. Yes, you. You do give a f***? Where? How? Vera Baird, Harriet Harman, Gavin Shuker -- You too. And don't invent some 'international gay sex slave' racket when what we really mean is some Brazilian guy trying for a better life (and doing it) in London or Berlin.

No one is claiming that it is all 'Belle De Jour' for anyone, including gay prostitutes. But it ain't all sex slavery either and there are plenty of workers yelling at you otherwise. Gay ones you rarely hear from because the nice gays fit to drink tea in the parlor don't tend to stick up for them.

So, will you jail the disabled?

You invent ideological laws to meld society? How f****ing far are you prepared to go?

The very idea of jailing the disabled strikes at the ideology behind the 'Nordic model' laws proposed by Labour MPs, and which mostly male MPs might be too shit scared of ideological error to do anything but go along with. That's why I'm asking the question. This isn't rhetorical, because it may well happen. It nearly happened before in the UK and it's being pushed in Scotland and Wales.

There are very likely some LibDems, Greens, Nationalists and Tories who would go along with it too, but I'm talking about those Labour people who are driven to make this nightmare come true.

We have clear examples of real world decriminalisation of prostitution that works petty well. Much as we have of examples of decriminalisation of 'soft' drugs. Yet -- zoinks -- we, Labour, can't do that because, either, ideology is telling us not to or -- zoinks -- politics (DMail fear etc) is screaming no. So we end up on the verge of jailing the disabled.

Q: How about 'harm reduction'? Something which has a very long and established pedigree?

A: Can't have that, we read this PDF and spoke to some Swedes and our advanced Europa learning tells us otherwise.

Q: Sending disabled people who use sex workers to jail isn't really 'harm reduction', is it?

A: How dare you suggest we are proposing that and would you please shut up with your promotion of male violence. Are you a misogynist? I think we need a new hate speech law ...

Social democracy has a choice here and, in Europe at least, I can guess where we're going ... Europarliament debates on necessary jail disability modifications anyone? ...Who is telling the likes of Mary Honeyball where to get off? Who would dare?

* This is a rant. I do actually know that some feminists acknowledge male sex work.

Postscript 2: You could make it up

↑ This didn't happen

A last return to the subject of Stafford Hospital and not the statistics, this time, but the human face.

Steve Walker, whose coverage I have been covering, has secured a heart-rending interview with some of the nurses. The people made out in the same media who have played loose with numbers to be witches and evil. The people banned from speaking.

They explain how the level of care was tied to the removal of resources, not human behaviour, their behaviour. The vicious media campaign has devastated them:

Several of the nurses told me of their frustration at the media’s acceptance of the claims by campaign group Cure the NHS (‘Cure’) that nobody from the hospital had apologised to them for the poor care they felt their relatives had received. Two nurses told me that they had apologised in person to Cure leaders – even though they were apologising for something beyond their ability to prevent – and had been thanked for doing so.

One nurse told me of a day that she had worked an extra 12-hour shift at the hospital because there was no one else available to provide cover. As she left the ward, exhausted, at the end of a shift she wasn’t obliged to do, she saw that someone had scrawled on the notice board,

ALL A&E NURSES ARE BITCHES!

There was a sense of helplessness to put forward a counter-view, as all staff had been banned by the new chief executive from making any positive statements or responses on the grounds that it would be ‘insensitive to the families’. Yet when staff appealed to him to stop people from coming into the Accident and Emergency unit and abusing staff, he told them,

I can’t do that.

Staff are still banned from speaking out, especially to the press. But there was no such restraint in the opposite direction. One nurse was spat upon in the street several times, while others were called murderers as they walked with their young children. As I heard these stories, the outrage I felt was barely mirrored in the faces of those telling them. Instead there were red eyes, and tears – a sense of hurt and grief more than resentment.

These were not hard-hearted harpies, but kindly, capable women treated like monsters for circumstances outside their control. One told me:

They said everyone was responsible – but it wasn’t true. There was a lack of resources, a lack of numbers, a lack of even the right forms – how can we be responsible for that?

They did complain, and report, and use procedure, but this is a typical experience:

I blew the whistle about something. The next thing, I was ‘named and shamed’ in a staff meeting, with minutes and everything. I rang the NMC (Nursing and Midwifery Council) and the RCN in flood of tears and was told:

“You can fight it – but it’s Stafford. You won’t get anywhere.”

They feel betrayed. Says Walker:

The public’s anger has been directed at the wrong people – and we shouldn’t forgive the misdirection either.

• Stafford nurses speak out

My mum on M. Thatcher

I hadn't thought of much to add to the slew of M. Thatcher pieces until this morning, when a tweet caught my eye.

It was comments from Daily Mail Online:

Via MrsMarguerita

This is the Mail, that astonishing number of green up arrows tempered slightly by being the online version but still. 'Sacrilegious' comments on her memory in that bastion of the Middle England that Londonist opinion would assume universally loved Maggie.

This break with assumed reality reminded me of one of the oddest bits of memory I have from the eighties. MT survived the Brighton bombing by dint of having completed her ablutions and exited her bathroom, which was wrecked, a short while before the bomb brought the ceiling down.

My mum was and is the very definition of Middle England. Aspiring working class, Daily Mail reader (if unavailable then the Express) and probable, though I never asked, Tory voter. When this happened she expressed annoyance that the IRA missed her.

I'm not remembering that wrong. That's why it sticks out.

The disconnect

The Tories this week have refused any right to speech on why MT was hated across so much of the UK and abroad. I look at onepolitics for UK politics blog headlines and there was one moment when every single Telegraph blogger was fulminating against Thatcher critics.

Now this has developed to the ultimate ironic point that they want a capitalist campaign of record buying -- 'Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead' -- unmentioned on the BBC. Of course they're not just denying core beliefs (free speech, free enterprise) but being hypocrites. Look what was written when Thatcher contemporary the Labour leader Michael Foot died.

When the Miners' Strike was happening I was in a gay and lesbian support group and we worked solely with one village in South Wales. We travelled there a couple of times. The poverty was tremendous. It was only through the efforts of people like us that people there had food.

Of course the memories there would have been not just of the strikes the previous decade, which brought down the previous Tory government and which Thatcher was avenging, but of how Churchill had sent the troops to put down a miners' strike 70 odd years before. Two years ago locals complained when it was proposed to name a military base after Churchill in Glamorgan.

Those people, the Miners and their families, repaid that support in spades, by the way. The next year they travelled to the London Pride march with their banners and kids in strollers. And it was the Miners who led the union vote to push the first gay rights resolution through the Labour Party conference the next year, against Neil Kinnock's wishes, I might add.

Those mining villages, like so much of Britain, were decimated by the intentional destruction of British industry through her ideological insistence on monetarism, much like how communist ideology would upheave whole peoples in slavery to another blind ideological belief.

Mark Steel writes about what this meant for one Northamptonshire town built around a steel works:

The effect on Corby was like someone taking control of the Lake District and concreting in the lakes.

I was there to record a radio show about the town, and met Don and Irene, both in their seventies, at the Grampian Club. Don’s father had walked to Corby from Larkhall, near Glasgow, in 1932. I mentioned the steel strike and plant closure to Don, but he gestured as if it had somehow passed him by. It would have to be mentioned in the show, so I tried to find someone in the town with a story, an anecdote, something. But no one wanted to say a thing about it. During the recording, I asked if anyone had a story to tell from those days, but no one did, until it felt as if the whole audience collectively passed a motion that went: “I think you’d best move on to another subject, Mark.”

Afterwards in the bar, Irene told me: “We weren’t being rude, love, when we didn’t have a lot to say about the closure. But it wasn’t an easy time. Don marched from Corby to London with a banner. It made him angry about everything, we split up for a year because it was too much to live with. But we were lucky, two of our closest friends committed suicide in the months after the closure. So people would rather forget about those times really. But apart from that we really enjoyed the show.”

Perhaps the right's disconnect on negative talk of Thatcher is simply because they have no connection to these people? Either that or they patronisingly think 'those people don't know what's good for them'?

Why would people be celebrating her death in Brixton? Perhaps because they remember what the police were like in her day. I remember as I was there when people rioted. They used to strip search black men in the street.

Neil Harding has the best, I think, round up of twenty reasons why people might hate MT. It includes some counter-historical on the Falklands I'd forgotten about (because it's so totally whitewashed out):

The Falklands! In a gross piece of incompetence (or was it deliberate?) fails to avert the Falklands crisis by ignoring intelligence on the Argentine preparation for invasion in early 1982. Indeed she seems to positively encourage it by proposing scrapping the only warship we have there and having her defence secretary Nicholas Ridley openly say we didn't want the Falklands, thereby giving the impression we are not bothered about the islands! In 1978 when faced with the same intelligence, the Labour government quietly averts a war through diplomatic channels by threatening to send a taskforce. It's the classic tale, to divert attention from disastrous economic policies at home a crooked leader engages in a foreign war (except I'm not talking about Galtieri!). Perhaps Thatcher was getting advise from some of the brutal dictatorships she helped prop up in South America, "Would you like some more tea Mr Pinochet?". Number of British soldiers killed, 278, Argentines, 3000+. Blood on her hands anyone?

The one gay positive

Reading the gay conservative Andrew Sullivan, who I usually like, represented this disconnect particularly well (and he was very and literally disconnected, mostly, by 4,000 miles). I won't link to his spiel but after, bizarrely, arguing that the end of the mining industry was a good thing because it meant the end of 'black lung', he then credits her 'liberation of the market' with, I think, our progress towards ... gay marriage?

Richard Smith chronicled some of the weird gay reaction, including one description of MT as a 'gay icon' (dear g*d). And he did find this, which I recirculated on Twitter, lest we forget (and much as my memory of my mum's comment stuck with me their memory of this 1987 election poster has been erased):

The nasty Section 28 ("pretend family relationships" verboten in schools) has been mentioned in obituaries but not this homophobic electioneering. On the plus side they've noted her 1960s vote to decriminalise homosexuality but, less widely, Sullivan of all people forgets it, a positive linked, I think, to her scientific background, which has been recalled on climate change and the ozone layer. MT did allow her Heath Minister, Norman Fowler, to do the right thing on HIV/AIDS despite, allegedly and anecdotally, her being repelled by safe sex literature aimed at gay men.

Don’t Hate, Donate

Another thing cozy middle-class people like me learned during the Miners Strike from those subjected to it was the lengths MT would go to break the strike, echoing Churchill again. Illegal lengths. Violent lengths. This culminated in the infamous 'Battle of Orgreave' in South Yorkshire where, in scenes reminiscent of a 19th Century war, waves of police on horses descended on picketing miners. (I saw this elsewhere. On an anti-apartheid rally in Trafalgar square police formed into squares, just as infantry would have done at Waterloo).

Police had to pay out hundreds of thousands in compensation but, spurred on by the two-decade long campaign to get the truth about what happened at the Hillborough disaster, there is also a campaign to get the truth about what really happened at Orgreave.

And MT's death has led to this pitch to give to charities (donthatedonate.com now offline), including Orgreave:

Margaret Thatcher has died. We want to take the moment when our country is remembering her legacy, to remember the people her government hurt - people who don’t get pull-out supplements in national newspapers. People who don’t get ceremonial funerals in St Paul's Cathedral. The people her apologists forget, or want to forget.

Margaret Thatcher's last years were spent coping with dementia, a terrible illness. If, like us, you were disgusted by how she treated the least well off in Britain and around the world, the old line about not wishing something on your worst enemies still applies. We can’t help but think it’s pretty lousy to celebrate or gloat over anyone’s suffering and death and we don’t want anyone else to do it either.

We just want to place front and centre people who had no place in the Thatcherite worldview. And we want to do that in a way that can actually do some good. You can help us by donating to the excellent charities we have chosen to represent a fraction of them – the homeless, miners’ families, gay teenagers, Hillsborough survivors and South African victims of the Apartheid regime.

Nothing is stopping you doing more or taking the spirit of the Don’t Hate, Donate campaign in your own direction. Thank you so much for your support!

Much better than sending 79p to Sony for a Judy Garland song methinks?

The wunderkid fighting creationism

The panels on Bill Maher's show can often be boring. Last Friday's wasn't with a real fight between Socialist Senator Bernie Saunders and right wing blowhard Stephen Moore.

The highlight though, the point where I spit out my tea, was when the 19-year-old science activist Zack Kopplin joined the panel. After Moore made yet another stupid statement on basic science research ('why are we funding this ridiculous project! chortle, chortle ..') Kopplin shot back with "but we've already established that you are not a scientist." (Clip after the jump).

Kopplin is an amazing character. His fight against the spread of creationism in the school voucher programme in his home state of Louisiana has attracted the support of dozens of Nobel Laureates and has spread to other states. He started when he was 16.

The Louisiana Science Education Act allows teachers to bring in their own supplemental materials when discussing 'politically controversial' topics like evolution or climate change. It has led to some teachers removing established science textbooks altogether.

Kopplin has become a leader in the anti-creationist movement, exposing the fact that it isn't just a 'deep south' problem but a national one. He says:

So far, I have documented 310 schools, in nine states and the District of Columbia that are teaching creationism, and receiving tens of millions of dollars in public money through school voucher programs.

There is no doubt that there are hundreds more creationist voucher schools that have yet to be identified. The more than 300 schools I have already found are those that have publicly stated on their websites that they teach creationism or use creationist curricula.

Voucher schools are a conservative argument and have found favour here too in the UK, as 'free schools', where some have also been caught teaching creationism. Says Zack:

Advocates for vouchers argue that private schools and more competition would offer a better education for American students.  Schools that teach creationism and do not meet basic science standards will fail our students and do not deserve taxpayer funding.

We must speak out to prevent funding these creationist schools with our public money.

Watch Zack on Bill Maher and also a longer interview on Bill Moyers' show after the jump:

The quiet repression of non-believers

NOTE: I wrote about this subject in a story which failed to be published last year, and am publishing it now as a new IHEU report is gaining media attention that focuses entirely on Muslim countries.

--------

In 1988 in Sydney I attended a protest which I've never forgotten. It was defending the right of the Sydney Film Festival to screen Martin Scorsese's film 'The Last Temptation of Christ'. That film had been subjected to international protests, including a Molotov cocktail attack on a Paris cinema. In Sydney a mainly elderly and mainly female group counter protested and a number of these older women - dressed in black if memory serves - tried to assault the film's defenders, including me, and those attending the screening.

Last year in Athens, those attending a performance of the play 'Corpus Christi' were attacked by right-wing religious protesters and the police stood by. The Greek state then charged the play's organizers, producers and cast with blasphemy following a lawsuit filed by a Greek Orthodox Bishop. Greek law says that "a lack of respect for things divine, is punished with up to three months in prison."

A report, 'Freedom of Thought 2012: A Global Report on Discrimination Against Humanists, Atheists and the Non-religious' from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) covers the Greek developments in a global overview of the often forgotten side of religious persecution -- that of atheists, humanists and the non-religious.

The report extensively covers persecution in majority Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Mauritania, Malaysia and Indonesia but it also features other countries where state protection of religion and their persecution of those who dissent and mock draws less attention.

Many of those countries have a Christian church as the state religion and have prosecuted blasphemers, and it's not just the country you've probably heard about -- Russia and the Pussy Riot case.

In Germany insulting "the content of others' religious faith or faith related to a philosophy of life" can get you three years imprisonment. In 2010 a magazine was prosecuted for a cartoon about the pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church.

The German state of Bavaria gives Catholic bishops a veto on professorial appointments, including philosophy and sociology/political science, at state universities. That veto was unsuccessfully challenged in court in 2007.

Last year, the case of the lead singer of a Polish heavy metal band who ripped up a Bible and called the Catholic Church a "criminal sect" during a 2007 concert came to the Supreme Court. It found that he did have a case to answer and sent the case back to a lower court. The rock star could get two years in prison.

In many European countries Christian churches are state funded. In some parts of Switzerland there is a church tax, which private companies are required to pay.

The UK funds religious schools -- around one third of all schools -- who can hire and fire based on deviation from their religion (the same is true in Canada). British religious organizations providing social services can discriminate against employees in ways which other service providers cannot. Britain actually has the 26 most senior Church of England Bishops sitting in its upper house of parliament.

Although the UK has abolished its blasphemy law, since 2004 there have been comparable prosecutions for "offense" under the Public Order Act, such as one of a man who refused to remove a sign from his window which read "religions are fairy stories for adults". There is a campaign for the law's repeal, which the government has said it is sympathetic to, but it is yet to be repealed or amended.

Britain's colonial blasphemy law passed over to independent India and in 2011, citing it, the Indian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology told social media networks to screen and remove blasphemous content within 36 hours of receiving a complaint. The Indian Catholic Church has used that law against Sanul Edamaruku, a humanist who has exposed numerous "miracle" frauds. These include a so-called "weeping Jesus" statue which was actually underneath a leaky drain whose contents gullible supplicants were drinking (and falling ill from as a result). Last month two women who complained online when Mumbai was shut down following the death of a Hindu nationalist leader were arrested and their family attacked by mobs.

In Israel, you can be imprisoned for a year if "one voices in a public place and in the hearing of another person any word or sound that is liable to crudely offend the religious faith or sentiment of others." Israelis who are non-religious only got a limited right to marry in 2010 and interfaith marriages and divorces have to be conducted overseas.

The United States, despite constitutional separation of church and state, the report says:

Has long been home to a social and political atmosphere in which atheists and the non-religious are made to feel like lesser Americans or non-Americans.

Despite a 1961 Supreme Court decision, Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas still have in place constitutional provisions that bar atheists from holding public office. It was 2007 when the US Congress got its first and only openly atheist member in Pete Stark from California. In 2012 Stark lost and now there are no atheists in Congress.

Under the radar of media attention, the wealthy American Christian evangelical lobby, aligned with the Vatican and Islamic countries, have been pressing the United Nations for an international blasphemy ban. That notion was knocked back by the Obama administration in October 2012.

In America's military, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has fought "inappropriate religious incursion" by what the group calls "the fundamentalist Christian Taliban".

None of these examples matches the persecution in Muslim majority countries like Pakistan, but media coverage is partial. For example the tourist tropical paradise islands of The Maldives mandate that citizens must be Muslim. Non-Muslims cannot vote. Education, according to the Maldivian constitution, must inculcate obedience to Islam.

Two years ago a Maldivian air traffic controller threatened with death for abandoning Islam was found hanged from the control tower of the international airport which receives thousands of rich foreign tourists every day.

Ismail Mohamed Didi's suicide did not lead to a subsequent tourist boycott of The Maldives. [After this was written a tourist boycott campaign was launched, not because of Didi, or because of the arrest of former president Mohamed Nasheed, but due to a teenage rape victim being sentenced to be lashed for premarital sex].

The IHEU report has one upside. Despite the prosecutions for defying religion on social media, it is through social media that the non-religious are finding each other in religiously repressive countries. The report says that:

There are now Facebook groups of atheists in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Sudan, as well as more general online ex-Muslim and Arab language atheist groups.

,

Did French Muslims save Jews from the Nazis?

A recent film has sparked debate over the role of the Great Paris Mosque in saving Jews from the Holocaust.

'Free Men (Les Hommes Libres)' tells the story of an Algerian black marketeer caught by the Nazis and sent to infiltrate the mosque, suspected of harboring Jews. There he sees the horror of the Nazis actions against French Jews and forms an unlikely friendship with a Jewish gay man.

The film, screened last year in Israel, is one of a new wave examining the long buried reality of France under occupation.

It wasn't until 1969 that a French film truly confronted the reality of Vichy and collaboration. That was Max Orphuls' 'The Sorrow and the Pity', but it wasn't shown on French television until 1981. President Mitterrand refused to apologies for France's role in the deportations of Jews.

President Chiric finally acknowledged France's guilt in 1995. Last year Francois Hollande told the 70th anniversary commemorations of the mass roundup by French police of Paris' Jews that "the truth is that the crime was committed in France, by France." All Parisian students pay a visit to the internment camp at La Cité de la Muette ("The Silent City") in the suburb of Drancy.

In the film the head of the mosque, Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, is seen protecting Jews, largely through false papers saying they are Muslim. One who becomes friends with the protagonist is based on the famous singer Salim Halali, an Algerian Jew. After the Nazis become suspicious that Ben Ghabrit is forging papers, he has a false headstone placed in the cometary to show that Halali's grandfather was Muslim.

Says the film's director, Ismaël Ferroukhi:

It shows another reality, that Muslims and Jews existed in peace. We have to remember that − with pride.

His point is underlined by Halili being played in the film by the Israeli Palestinian actor and musician Mahmud Shalaby.

Shalaby told Haaretz:

As a Palestinian, I could identify with the suffering he endured as a Jew. Halali is not Jewish only, but also an Arab with characteristics of Muslims from North Africa. At that time, religion was not of importance. Jews and Muslims lived together in brotherhood and love, without anything to come between them. Halali united everyone.

The ability of the mosque to aid Jews came from the fact that North Africa Jews and Arabs shared many similarities, including similar names. According to Jewish-American historian Robert Satloff, it is not clear whether the mosque deliberately and knowingly chose to help Jews. However witness testimony claims that 1,732 Resistance fighters including many Jews were hidden in the cellars, in a part of the mosque normally out of bounds to non-Muslims. A button would provide an alert when there was a raid.

One document has been sourced demonstrating the concern of the occupation authorities about the mosque. The current head of the mosque says that individual Muslims would bring Jews they knew to the mosque to be helped but they have no documentation confirming their role during the war, which would be unlikely to exist anyway as it would have incriminated them.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial authority says that they have done research on the mosque's role but have been unable to confirm any details. If evidence were found, they say, "we would be glad to bring up the matter of recognizing Benghabrit as a Righteous Among the Nations."

The film's success has brought new information to light. At one screening, a consultant on the film, Benjamin Stora, a French historian, was told by a woman that -- contrary to assumptions -- it was not just Jews of North African origin who were saved. She said that her Ashkenazim Jewish mother was one.

Film trailer with subtitles after the jump:

Indigenous TV making Aussie strides

And now for some good news ....

Television about, produced by, staring and worked on by Indigenous Australians is making serious headway in Australia. This has been marked by wins at last night's Logies, Australia's serious TV awards, for two productions.

The wonderful actress Deborah Mailman won her third Logie for 'Mabo', the story of Torres Strait Islander Eddie Mabo's long fight for Native Title, which culminated in the landmark 1992 decision of the High Court of Australia which overturned the legal doctrine of terra nullius ("land belonging to nothing, no one"). Mailman played Eddie's wife Bonita, who joined Mailman in a tearful moment on stage as she accepted her award.

Redfern Now, the first ever contemporary drama series written, directed and produced by Aborigines and which Mailman also starred in won two Logies.

One of the producers, Darren Dale, said that the wins highlighted the work of Indigenous people in the television industry. He said:

I'm so happy to stand here on this stage, with great Indigenous writers, actors and blackfellas suddenly on prime time.

That is what makes Redfern such a great show, that finally at 8:30 at night on the public broadcaster on the ABC you see black faces, and I'm so proud of that.

The six-part 'Redfern Now' was set in the inner-Sydney suburb usually associated in the public's mind with deprivation and depression. The individual stories, produced by Indigenous production company Blackfella Films, introduced all Australians to a far more rich, real and nuanced community living in the 21st century metropolis.

Most of the cast, directors and many production staff are Indigenous with many of Australia's most famous Indigenous actors participating, including Mailman and Leah Purcell. Well-known English television writer Jimmy McGovern was story producer.

Said Mailman:

When you have Indigenous writers, directors and actors, it means you can be uncompromising and complex with your stories and characters because you're giving it insight that doesn't often come from outside a community. We hope people will come away from it with much more understanding and insight into who we are and into our stories.

Sally Riley, from the ABC, told The Guardian:

We take the audience to a place they've never been before. People are saying to me they didn't even know this world existed.

It's a landmark because for so long we have had other people telling our stories and the government telling us what we should be doing to help ourselves. This is a chance for us to comment on our own stuff, our own problems, our own issues.

The show was part of an ABC strategy to get more Indigenous storytelling into prime time and drew an average of three quarters of a million viewers. It has been commissioned for a second series.

In 2013 the ABC is planning more prime time Indigenous drama as well as a comedy series set in an Alice Springs radio station and a sketch comedy series.

The show came on the 20th anniversary of a famous speech by then Prime Minister Paul Keating. In it, Keating, for the first time, gave state acknowledgment to the wrongs done to Aboriginal people, famously saying "we poisoned the waterholes ... we took the traditional land … we brought the diseases and murders... we took the children from their mothers … how would I feel if this was done to me?"

That speech is now seen as setting the path towards the 'reconciliation' process which has since been embraced by both sides of Australian politics and most ordinary Australians.

'Reconciliation' is explored in one of the shows. In 'Stand Up' sixteen year old Joel wins an Indigenous scholarship to an elite private school. At his first day's assembly he's not singing the national anthem, breaking the rules.

Joel's dad doesn't want his son to sing, his mum doesn't want him to lose his opportunity. The school's principal is shown as torn between her history of support for 'reconciliation' vs her role as the guardian of school tradition. How the show ends demonstrates how 'reconciliation' works in the real world.

This episode highlights the increase in the number of Indigenous success stories which has come from the efforts of white people in Australian professional bodies and organizations. Other episodes tell the other side of the story, which is shown in persistent poverty amongst Indigenous communities as well as newly recognized problems such as sexual abuse and drugs.

'Redfern Now' shows can be watched in their entirety (at the time of writing) on this YouTube channel.

Watch a preview clip of the "Stand Up" episode and two clips from 'Mabo' after the jump:

Here's a website which deserves more attention: 2

Here's a website which deserves more attention.

No More Mister Nice Blog is a great read on American politics. Written by liberal New Yorker Steve M. (and he seems to have hidden his surname well) it's a wry take with occasional verges into a bite on liberal shibboleths and general faffing about, specifically Democrat waffling.

His sometimes hilarious writing reminds me of another discovery of mine from the last election campaign, the comical stylings of Charles P. Pierce at Esquire magazine.

On a simple blogger template, his 20 (?) posts per page is mainly text, so an easy load and a ripping long read, if you're at all interested in what the cousins across the water are up to.

Just to pick a couple of recent posts at random, he analysed a cover story from the National Rifle Association (NRA)'s magazine titled 'How and When Obama Will Come for Your Guns'. He does this quite often, fisks something from 'wingnuttia', poking fun but usually with a serious edge.

The story reads like something from the 'Left Behind' best-selling series of 'rapture' novels, or as he calls it apocalypse porn.

It imagines a future where Obama wins the Presidency again, a pretext arrives and through executive orders he manages to 'come furyer guns'. Insane then and even more insane looked at now, when the slaughter of twenty small kids looks like producing no change on gun policy.

This is as crazy as birtherism or 9/11 trutherism. It should be the sort of thing that gets published and read only on the fringes of society. And yet the organization that publishes this is the organization that determines America's gun agenda.

Imagine if no election law could be passed in this country without the imprimatur of a powerful lobbying organization led by Orly Taitz [birther leader]. Imagine if the Centers for Disease Control were powerless to respond to any epidemic in a way that ran afoul of [anti-vaccine former Playboy model] Jenny McCarthy.

That's where we are on guns.

In another post ('Testing whether barrel has a bottom') he discusses the rather remarkable news that Tony Perkins is being floated as a Republican candidate for the Senate from Louisiana.

Perkins runs a Christianist outfit called the Family Research Council, designated a 'hate group' by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. He has a history of associating with white supremacists and defended the former Republican Missouri Senate candidate Todd "legitimate rape" Akins.

Perkins regularly appears on TV opposing gay rights, something which various groups have protested given that his more outrageous statements off camera are never brought up so he's allowed to appear vaguely normal.

Steve wants Perkins to get the nomination:

I hope the 2014 Senate field for the GOP is literally 100% nutjobs. I hope they're all as far right as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. I hope it's Steve King and Paul Broun and Joe Miller and this guy. I hope some teabagger beats Mitch McConnell in the primary by dubbing him a liberal. I hope this happens coast to coast.

I know that even this probably won't work, but if anything could get the Beltway establishment, and thus the general public, to grasp that maybe, possibly, the Republican Party as currently configured is a menace to American society, it would be the systematic replacement of all of its arguably within-the-pale politicians with the most batshit-crazy extremists.

And yeah, I know that some of these clowns could win in their states, including Perkins. But the only way it might become clear to the establishment and public that the GOP is crazy is if there's no one left in the party's front ranks to provide a veneer of respectability, because they've all been replaced by lunatics.

More here.