The Daily Mail have published a rather odd hatchet job on Gavin Freeguard, Harriet Harman’s culture advisor. Gavin formerly worked for the Media Standards Trust, who are part of the Hacked Off Campaign. This fact, and some year-old tweets from Freeguard where he (shock! horror!) criticises David Cameron allow Mail journalist Richard Pendlebury to paint Gavin as some kind of Manchurian spad.
We desperately need to hear strong arguments against state-regulation and ‘licensing’ of the press. Left-wingers love to loathe the Daily Mail, but it is a hugely influential newspaper with one of the most visted websites on the Internet. There is no better platform for the arguments against statutory regulation to be presented.
And yet, on the eve of the Leveson Inquiry report publication, there is nothing in today’s editorial on #Leveson. Instead, the Daily Mail editors choose to run a piece which appears to be little more than an ad hominem attack on someone who previously worked for the Media Standards Trust. The pro-regulation camp will spin this a more evidence that the press is unserious about the regulation debate, and more interested in attacking individuals in order to sell newspapers – precisely the sin that (the critics say) makes the case for regulation!
As someone who is very wary about the prospect of state regulation of the press, I find it very is frustrating that the newspaper that could be the most powerful voice for press freedom is pursuing such a short term agenda, squandering its platform, and undermining the case for press freedom at such a crucial moment.
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I am usually a supporter of ‘political correctness’, especially when it concerns speech. I think it is far better for someone who says something offensive to be criticised and recieve a social sanction for being ‘politically incorrect’ than for them to suffer any kind of legal censorship.
It is therefore incumbent upon me to condemn genuine acts of ‘political correctness gone mad’ when they occur. These are usually instances of local government officials take progressive legislation too far. There have been two ridiculous cases of this kind in the past week: A man won an employment tribunal case against Trafford Housing Trust after they saw he had posted comments against gay marriage on his Facebook Page; and a foster-couple in Rotherham had a couple of kids removed from their care when it was discovered they were members of UKIP.
I note that the authorities acted on information gleaned from the aggrieved people’s private lives. The couple’s membership came from a “tip off” apparently, and the demoted Christian man was posting on his own Facebook wall. Both these things acts of political expression took place in that liminal space that is not private but not necessarily fully public either. But the fact that the employers and Rotherham Council have been punishing these people, based on their actions and beliefs expressed in this mid-way space, is highly disconcerting. This is the sort of thing we need human rights legislation for – to protect the overreach of the state and employers into areas that are not their business. It’s ironic that the concept of human rights is also often derided as ‘political correctness’. Had Rotherham Council and Trafford Housing Trust had a better understanding of free expression, freedom of association and the right to a private life, they may not have made the mistakes that made the headlines.
Ugh. I just unwhittingly clicked on a YouTube video showing the immediate aftermath of the assasination of Ahmed Al-Jabari in Gaza. A passer-by drags out dead body from the car… and half of it is missing. It is sickening and certainly Not Safe For Work or children. I wonder how long it will remain live on YouTube before the company removes it for being too graphic.
The video is a huge contrast to the clinical black and white footage distributed by the Israeli Defence Force. Ever since Operation Desert Storm there has been discussion of the way in which TV pictures frame our view of war, sanitising the horror. In recent years there has also been much analysis of the ‘gamification’ of war, as soldiers brough-up on video games join the army and begin shooting real people. The two contrasting images of the same incident speak to that dehumanising tendency.
The gruesome, visceral aftermath also provides some understanding of the hatred towards Israel that steams out of Palestine. In the background of the video you can see children observing the scene. I am glad that I never saw such sights in my childhood. Is it any surprise that those who experience such visual traumas grow up to hate those responsible? Time and again, I find my thoughts returning to this 2005 essay by Laurie King on the symbolism of the body in war, occupation and resistance:
These violations [at Sabra and Shatila] of individual bodies were not haphazard or random acts carried out in the heat of murderous rage, but rather, part of a grammar of political exclusivity, a systemic and coherent — though certainly deranged — message that an entire group could be violated, perhaps even eradicated, with impunity. The message of that massacre endures and echoes a quarter of a century later. Its scars are social, physical, and symbolic, and are felt far beyond the scene of the crime.
So what we have here are different methods of dehumanisation. The fact that these people we fight against are our fellow humans is forgotten in the melee and the maelstrom. Some comments psoted below the video of the half-body:
Lol, not much of him left, and nice slug trail to boot (link)
I wish wars still involved swordmanship and valor but now we got this lame no effort shit. Oh well. (link)
Where’s the rest of him? Ah well…One less scum bag polluting the world (link)
These are not the comments of those who see the other side as human.
See also: Twitter and the anti-Playstation effect on war coverage.
I looked back through the archives of this blog, to see what I wrote about the previous military interventions in Gaza. The comments I offered then seem to work pretty well for the current crisis too. From 2006:
These events are a tragedy in the strict sense of the word, where the traits of the main characters make certain events inevitable. Sure, Israel didn’t start it. Watch any one of the countless Greek Tragedies that will plague this year’s Edinburgh Festival, and you will see that it is never the protagonist’s fault. Hercules didn’t start it. Electra didn’t start it. Clytemnestra didn’t start it. But at the end of the play, when everyone’s dead, one still thinks “if only you had been different.” Nasrallah is the malevolent deity, nowhere to be found yet omnipresent at the same time. He laughs at how easy it is to provoke this tragedy.
I also wrote:
Another blood feud is created, ready to be concluded in some Tel Aviv pizza parlour in 2012.
That turned out to be right. In 2009 I wrote about how the asymetric warfare practiced by Hamas and Hezbollah can outmanoever Israel:
If you’re faced with a situation where bombing civilians seems to be the only course of action left open to you, then you’ve already been outmanoeuvered, you have already lost, and the only thing you are playing for is your own soul, your own humanity.
All this seems right for 2012, too.
This statement from President Peres seems to fall precisely into the tragic, circular logic discussed above:
This is ridiculous for two reasons. First, collective punishment of the Gazans is not the only possible course of action. This fascinating but depressing article in the New York Times by Gershon Baskin, and Israeli negotiator who helped secure the release of Giliad Shalit, outlines just one alternative course of action that was open to Israel – negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas. According to Baskin, Ahmed Al-Jabari (the Hamas leader assasinated by Israel last week) was the man best placed to deliver a cease-fire, a project in which he was actively engaged at the time of his death.
Peres’ comment is absurd for a more practical reason – Israel’s “eye-for-an-eye” style retalitory policy has not made its citizen’s safer. Just the opposite, in fact: the military intervention has actually caused an increase in rocket attacks. The first Israeli citizens to die from rocket attacks this year were killed last Thursday, after the Government began bombarding Gaza. So the current military action fails on its own terms.
The lastest person to be prosecuted forgiving offence on social media is eighteen year old Sam Busby, from Worcester. Like Matthew Woods, he posted jokes about missing schoolgirl April Jones on Facebook.
Last week I went on the BBC Radio Worcester Breakfast show to make the case that while abhorrent, the prosecution was a step too far. You can listen to my contribution via the embedded player below, or listen on the PodoMatic website. Continue reading