His government, he said, was rejuvenating the job market by getting people off benefits and into work: “Everyone should work who can.” It was the “saddest figure in Europe”, he said, that Hungary had the lowest employment rate in the EU.

For the long-term unemployed – a disproportionate number of whom are Roma – this means taking part in the government’s new public work programme. According to Jeno Setét, a Roma activist, between 70% and 80% of Hungary’s Roma population do not work (the rate for the whole population is around 10%). This scheme aims to get 300,000 people into work by 2014 via a sort of community service scheme for which participants are paid less than the national monthly minimum wage (around 80,000 HUF – £214 – for unskilled workers) but slightly more than they would receive in benefits.

Anyone unemployed for 90 days is offered a place on the programme, which administers projects cleaning streets or sewers, cutting down trees or building football stadiums or dams. Refusal to accept a placement will result in all social security benefits being stopped to the refusenik and family. Gyöngyöspata was chosen last year to run a pilot scheme. Unemployed locals – almost exclusively Roma – were deployed to cut down trees in a nearby wood.

For Setét, the public work scheme is a “smokescreen” that will do little to help Roma get “real” jobs and will reinforce their position at the bottom of Hungarian society. “If people on the scheme were paid properly and trained properly, I’d be all for it,” he added. “But they are not. Right now it’s a way of humiliating people and paying them a slave wage.”

While the system of “work for benefits” does not involve the obvious racism present in the Hungarian version, it does not even pay more than benefits and is not even in public services but consists of fake “work experience” schemes for large commercial organisations and also carries the threat of lost benefits. The US version is known to have pushed people into food banks and soup kitchens by withholding benefits in the absence of work; our other fellow-traveller in this is a notoriously racist country in eastern Europe which is becoming an undemocratic pariah state.

Italian prosecutors have urged a jury considering an appeal by two convicted murderers of British student Meredith Kercher to remember her family. …

Before a packed courtroom, prosecutor Giancarlo Costagliola denounced the media campaign that made “everyone feel like the parents” of Knox and Sollecito.

“As you make your decision, I wish that you jurors feel a little bit like the parents of Meredith Kercher, a serious, studious girl whose life was taken by these two kids from good families,” he said.

This statement is obviously an attempt to appeal to the emotions of the jury (I wasn’t aware that appeals had juries; they don’t in the UK, where trials can be held with a jury but all appeals are held by panels of judges) and treat the case as some sort of judicial theatre in which the jury is an audience. The feelings of the Kercher family are irrelevant here, because what is being decided is not whether Amanda Knox and her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito serve fifteen years, thirty or more, but whether they are guilty at all, or totally innocent. The reason we don’t “consider the victim” (or the family of the victim) in such cases is because they are not the ones at risk of a miscarriage of justice; the defendant is.

If the Kerchers choose to continue believing that Knox and Sollecito are guilty in the fact of much evidence that they are not, that should not persuade anyone that they are in fact guilty. The judge should have intervened, stopped his rhetoric and told the jury to ignore it.

On Saturday I was reading a lot of tweets complaining about the “disablist” language being used, specifically the trend of calling Anders Breivik a madman or a nutter. One tweet I recall compared the use of anti-Muslim slurs with slurs related to mental illness (there is an article expanding on this issue at Liberal Conspiracy here). To me, the comparison does not hold, because the anti-Muslim slurs are (and were, in the hours immediately after the attacks before it became obvious who was responsible) accompanied by harassment of, and assaults against, Muslims in the streets. People know the mentally ill come in different types, that not all would commit mass murder, and (most importantly) are not all aligned with one another. If a Muslim did it, people would say “the Muslims did it”; if it was someone with mental illness, nobody would say “the nutters did it”.

More to the point, this insistence on calling someone who commits a heinous and perverted act a nutter seems to be an easy way of avoiding accepting the reality that evil exists, and people will do evil things while perfectly sane, whether for fun, or for personal gain, or out of some bizarre ideology as was the case here. I am not talking about calling someone’s politics mad, or calling them a “right-wing nut”, “Marxist lunatic” or something similar; I am talking about the assumption that the criminal must be “mental”, rather than evil. I have not read Breivik’s manifesto, but nobody who has done has suggested that it bears the hallmarks of mental illness, or even of extreme embitterment (for example, that of Marc Lepine, who carried out the massacre of women in Montreal), but of hard-set nationalism and bigotry, particularly against Muslims.

There were two brilliant articles about this incident published today, one by Charlie Brooker in the Guardian and another by Craig Murray on his own site. Brooker takes apart the ridiculous guesswork that made up the news coverage of the incidents on Friday night, while Murray notes that right-wing activists whose rantings may have inspired Breivik get an easy ride compared to Muslims who are suspected of links to terrorism:

Isn’t it extraordinary that right wing terrorists are seldom called terrorists, and are always said to have acted alone. Muslim terrorists, however, are always part of the international al-Qaida network, even when they and their motives were obviously homegrown. Any connection by any Muslim terrorist to any mosque or preacher is sufficient to condemn that mosque or preacher loudly in the media as an instigator of terrorism – even though they may never have heard of the terrorist. There are people in Guantanamo for approaching a decade just because they were at the same meeting as someone else. Yet exactly the same kind of links by Breivik to his right wing hate preaching US inspirers like Geller are simply glossed over by the mainstream media.

This may, of course, be because during the past decade, the majority of successful terrorist attacks have been by Muslims; far-right terrorism was known of before (Oklahoma, Soho nail bomber) but although a number of incidents have happened such as neo-Nazis stockpiling weapons, they have carried out no successful attacks which have caused anyone’s death. This has now changed, and one hopes that there will be less tolerance for the “Eurabia” conspiracy theories and allegations that there is some sort of Muslim/leftist plot to take over Europe. This kind of theory about another religious minority has already led to one genocide in Europe, and we know that many of those responsible for this propaganda against Muslims are Jewish, and almost all of those who are not are vehemently pro-Israel, so they have no excuse to plead ignorance. Regardless of whether they knew anything about Breivik or support his action, as “Flying Rodent” at Liberal Conspiracy notes, the potential of their rhetoric for inducing violence should have been obvious:

Melanie Phillips and the gaggle of paranoids that make up the internet’s nutty ‘Counter-Jihad’ movement are loudly insisting that they don’t advocate acts of violence or terrorism.

For now, let’s assume that’s true and move on from there.

What, exactly, do they imagine it is that they are advocating?

I ask because the message they’ve been sending out loud and clear is that Europe is under threat of imminent enslavement, and quite possibly genocide, at the hands of a sinister cabal of Marxist fifth-columnists in cahoots with one of our largest ethnic minority groups, the latter of which they portray as irrevocably violent and totalitarian.

Unsurprisingly, they’re stridently in favour of “resisting” this theoretical dictatorship.

That being the case, what kind of “resistance” do they expect the urgent threat of Nazi-Commie-Jihadist European domination to inspire in their readership? A sudden upsurge in the creation of idiot blogs?

… I think that now, more than ever, fingers need to be pointed squarely at those who have been disseminating this poisonous cack, and searching questions need to be asked.

First up – What the fuck did you think you were doing?

The enthusiasm Breivik showed for the so-called English Defence League led to them being put on the defensive, and Jeremy Paxman attempted to interview Stephen Lennon, AKA “Tommy Robinson”, on Newsnight on Monday evening. Lennon gave the obligatory condolences to the people of Norway and insisted that his organisation condemned violence and all forms of extremism and that they were called “naive fools” by Breivik, but then insisted that there was an “undercurrent of anger” that could not be swept under the carpet. In other words, a veiled threat from the same political tendency: if you don’t listen to us, there is going to be violence. The EDL are already well-known for violence, and despite the rhetoric from Lennon/Robinson about “extremism”, the language we hear shouted at their rallies is aimed at all Muslims, and Islam itself (such as “Allah, Allah, who the f*** is Allah?”), the EDL itself having been formed in response to al-Muhajiroun’s demonstration at the soldiers’ parade in Luton. The practice of throwing the behaviour of individual Muslims, or small groups of Muslims, at the entire Muslim population is common on the British right, and not only the far right (note this example in Standpoint from September 2008).

For the entire period since 9/11, there has been a steady stream of propaganda against Muslims in the west, not only in the right-wing blogosphere but also in the mainstream right-leaning press in the English-speaking world and probably beyond, and much of it has consisted of outright lies — claims that Muslims are somehow taking over Europe when they are under-represented in all major political parties (and thus parliaments) in Europe, the proof offered consisting of occasional concessions to Muslim sensitivities, often by commercial organisations seeking to please customers, and many of the alleged concessions (to do with piggy banks or tinted swimming-pool windows) are false, or distortions of the truth, anyway. The American right no doubt resented the French and Germans for staying out of Iraq, but they are certainly not being “taken over” by Muslims but passing repressive legislation against their respective Muslim communities.

It should surely be expected now that any future incidents of racists stockpiling weapons or conspiring to launch acts of terrorism or “war” will be treated as harshly as if they were Muslims training for jihad or raising money for such, and that violent provocations by the EDL or any spin-off will not be tolerated. The EDL, however, are not the Islamophobic right’s brain trust, by a long shot. It remains to be seen whether the mainstream journals of the British and American right will be somewhat more responsible about commissioning articles by conspiracy-minded bigots like Patrick Sookhdeo and Mark Steyn. They must not be treated as a pressure valve for a groundswell of anger against an over-powerful Muslim community, because such a thing does not exist. They are dangerous propagandists, trading on demonstrable falsehoods, whose rhetoric could, given the right circumstances, cause terrible violence. Free speech or not, no purportedly responsible journal or politician should touch them.

The above report is about a young girl who was born in Spain to two British parents but never issued with a birth certificate (because the parents mistook some other document they were given at the hospital for the certificate) and now cannot prove her identity, and thus get a passport or a discounted bus pass (or, when she is old enough, a driving licence). Readers might notice that the comments to the article contain the usual flood of ill-informed, bigoted nonsense, with a few helpful suggestions, such as that people have proved their family lineage in the absence of a birth certificate with sworn affidavits that someone is their relative, as people born in many parts of the world do not have birth certificates.

The family complain that they cannot go on holidays with their daughter because they are unable to get her a passport. The Daily Mail echo this complaint. Surely they know that if the UK belonged to the Schengen accord, we would be able to travel freely in Europe without a passport, as people living on the mainland already do: they just drive straight across, even at former “Iron Curtain” borders such as between Austria and the Czech republic and Hungary. The Government has not signed up to this, mainly because it fears a backlash from papers like the Daily Mail which would result if it were even suggested. Of course, people would be glad of being in the Schengen area when they realise they could travel to France without a passport, requiring only photo ID and then only when boarding a plane.

However, there is not much use arguing about who is to blame for the mix-up; she was born seven weeks prematurely, so the mother might well have been more concerned about her daughter’s health than filling in forms. It should not, in this day and age, take a birth certificate to prove that someone is a child of a British citizen, anyway — all that would require is a DNA test of the girl and one of the parents. It’s easy to prove; the authorities should get on and let it happen so that this young woman can have a normal life.

The above article lays out some of the conspiracy theories people in France entertain about why the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been arrested and charged with rape in the USA. It seems that nobody wants to admit that the reason someone accused him of trying to rape her is because he might have actually tried to rape her, rather than because she is a tool of some grand anti-French conspiracy. In Wednesday’s Guardian, Isabelle Germain, a French journalist and “founder of the online pro-parity magazine Les Nouvelles News”, wrote about similar attitudes among the French establishment and in their media.

Strauss-Kahn is indeed innocent until proven guilty, but the question must be asked why it is assumed that a politician accused of rape must be the victim of some kind of conspiracy. The man is a banker and politician and was an intending presidential candidate for the French Socialist Party, which is an established centre-left party much like Labour in the UK or the German Social Democrats. It was understandable that people thought the accusations against Julian Assange were politically motivated, because he had caused the establishment a lot of embarrassment and threatened to continue doing so. He did not have elective office and was not seeking any, and to be accused of having an affair would not have harmed him in the slightest. The same is not true for a politician. I don’t know about France, but I cannot remember any politician being accused of rape, but I can remember an awful lot of stories about extra-marital affairs which led to the resignation of the man (as I remember, it has almost always been men) involved.

In Friday’s Guardian, Kira Cochrane noted that Strauss-Kahn has a reputation in Paris in particular as someone who likes to chase women, or as they call such men there, a lapin chaud (hot rabbit). He has also been accused of attempted rape in the past, by a family friend who is a well-known journalist, but when she was interviewed about the incident on French TV in 2007, Strauss-Kahn’s name was bleeped out whenever she said it. She also noted that excuses have been made to the effect that Strauss-Kahn does not fit the profile of a rapist (when no such profile exists, and in any case, a man with a history of aggression towards women would surely fit it if there was), but overwhelmingly, the reaction seems to be indignation that one of theirs has been accused of a serious sexual offence, with articles by such men as Bernard Henri Levy who seemed to think he should not have been treated like “a subject of justice like any other”, which is, of course, exactly what he is at the moment. Suzanne Moore also notes that he defended Roman Polanski, the case against whom is much clearer. The Daily Beast, a blog based at Newsweek, notes that the French press have named the accuser and given details of her private life as well as speculated on her physical appearance and how attractive she might be. As for Bernard Henry Levy, Nick Cohen accuses him of selectively championing women’s rights in the Islamic world while denying them at home (well, his idea of championing Muslim women’s rights is to deny headscarf-wearers an education).

Strauss-Kahn’s prior remarks are also somewhat incriminating: in an interview with the French newspaper, Liberation, he suggested that “money, women and [his] Jewishness” could be used against him, and that he could be the victim of a honey-trap involving “a woman raped in a car park and who’s been promised 500,000 or a million Euros to invent such a story”. Again, why suppose that he would be accused of rape, as opposed to having an affair or perhaps sexual harassment? It seems odd that he would make such an accurate prediction about something that rarely happens, except to men who abuse women, which he knew he did all the time anyway … and if anyone wants to make sure he doesn’t become the next president of France, it’s not out of anti-French sentiment and it’s unlikely to be anyone outside France.

I had meant to post a longer entry about this issue, but was too busy watching the debate on The Big Questions (“Does Britain Have a Problem with Muslims?”). Last week it was reported that the Prime Minister David Cameron had requested New Scotland Yard (i.e. the London police) to get involved in the Portuguese investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in Portugal in 2007 and has not been seen since (although Cameron has denied that he ordered the Yard to get involved). There are those who have said that the British state cannot justify the costs of getting involved in every foreign police investigation into a crime involving a British citizen when it is cutting services to everyone, including children and disabled people, at home. The above article makes the point that Cameron only got the London police involved in this because he is “like them”, i.e. middle-class and white.

Eddie Nestor, who presents the drive-time show on BBC London, said that the debate that had taken place behind the scenes at the station had been very vociferous, far more so than what had been heard on the phone-in show. Among the common arguments is that the McCanns are themselves stupid parents for having left Madeleine alone for however long it was that they were not there, that no decent parent would leave a young child unsupervised for any length of time, or at least longer than it takes to go to the toilet and return to them.

These days, parents have been fined for leaving toddlers in the care of older children while they go to the shops, something which has been roundly condemned (including by me) as a loss of common sense and an intrusion into people’s private lives, but of course the idea that you shouldn’t leave a young child entirely unsupervised is nothing new. There are a whole host of other dangers, such as that the child could cause an accident and nobody would be there to help them, or even that they might wake up and be distressed and have nobody there. However, to say that it’s a couple’s own fault if their child is abducted while left alone is tasteless in the extreme. Older children get abducted as well, even at ages where it would be acceptable to let them go to school on their own, let alone be left home alone; for that matter, so do adults.

It’s no longer acceptable to suggest that a woman might be to blame for being attacked because of what she was wearing, so why can people say, in the most vituperative terms, that a parent is at fault if their child is abducted? The world simply is not full of monsters, and most of them will not abduct a three-year-old (they are more likely to harm an older child). The issue of whether the London police should be involved is a separate one; the couple are not from London and went to Portugal knowing that in that country, Portuguese law applies and the Portuguese police are responsible for enforcing it, not the British police.

I’m not sure if social engineering refers to the genocide being an attempt at socially engineering the Cambodian population, or the engineering required to motivate so many people to kill so many people. However, it was not like any of the other genocides which were aimed at eliminating a group for reasons that were against racially-defined groups, rather than an ill-defined ruling class. However, the Nuremberg and German Blood laws were not the only examples of races being targeted by specific laws restricting their movements and dictating who they could marry. Similar laws existed in Tsarist Russia, confining Jews to increasingly smaller pockets of the former Polish empire; laws banning intermarriage (mainly against blacks) existed in South Africa under Apartheid (after the fall of Nazism) and in the USA before, during and after World War II.

The other genocides included ordinary people to a far greater extent than the Nazi Holocaust did. Granted, people worked in industries that were intended to facilitate the concentration camp and murder complex, but not everyone had to know that the Jews being transported to the camps were being murdered and various myths were circulated such as “evacuation to the East”. Even the collaborationist regimes in eastern Europe stopped sending Jews to Poland when they learned that they were, in fact, being massacred. By contrast, in Rwanda ordinary people killed others, and betrayed friends to the killing gangs; in Bosnia, people also turned on their friends and neighbours who had assumed that there was no real difference and certainly no enmity between them until months earlier. Bosnia involved people that were probably just as well-educated as the Germans of the late 1930s and there were actually schools in Rwanda as well (some of the elite had, no doubt, been educated in France or Belgium).

Some of the more recent genocides include a further factor: an international community that stood aside and did next to nothing while people were massacred under their noses. It’s true that the western powers, such as the USA, turned back shiploads of refugees and expected some to settle in places which were vulnerable to invasion by Germany, but they were not in a position to actually stop the Holocaust taking place. In Rwanda and Bosnia, the UN stood by and in one case allowed the Serbs to seize men and boys from a town they had captured, who were subsequently massacred; at international conferences, people procrastinated by quibbling over terminology, using “acts of genocide” rather than simply saying “genocide” (which would have automatically mandated action), and designating “safe areas” rather than protected “safe havens”, which proved not to be safe at all. The UN could not stop every incident of genocide or mass murder, of course, but at that time, there was enormous popular support for military action to stop the killing but nothing happened until it had been going on for four years (in contrast to 2003, when there was an invasion of Iraq in the face of massive popular opposition in this country).

I also believe that Holocaust Memorial Day should be about all recent genocides and not just the Holocaust. We were actually fighting the Germans at the time they were carrying out the Holocaust; when Rwanda and Bosnia were in flames, we wrung our hands and pulled up the drawbridge and quibbled about words. I have some suspicion that this is, in fact, why we concentrate on the Holocaust: because there is no guilt on our part or our political classes’ part. As well as this, Holocaust memorialising is often linked to advocacy for Israel at a time when it is the perpetrator of injustice, and has a noisy international propaganda machine and influential supporters in most western capitals. We should not be reinforcing myths about the Jews being the most persecuted race ever when they are, in fact, a privileged minority in modern British society. Rather, we should be using the opportunity to look at how we treat downtrodden people, refugees and so on, and expose “acceptable” prejudices and the way our media fosters them, because these are the things that laid the foundations for the genocides of the past. The event should not just be about patting ourselves on the back for something our grandparents did more than sixty years ago.

(Image source: Wikimedia.)

This is an article about the rise of the “Sweden Democrats”, a far-right party which has been increasing its share of the vote in its country over the past couple of years and looks likely to get seats in Parliament fairly soon. That is worth reading in itself, but there are also some myths that are popular in the right-wing press and blogosphere about how Muslims are “taking over” Sweden, as well as their supposed fondness for raping white Swedish women:

A 2008 government report, which drew entirely on the experiences of teachers, police and social workers, described a place where Islamic orthodoxy was enforced by young thugs; women were forced to wear headscarves and children segregated in religious free schools. There was a small riot after one of the 20 or 30 unofficial mosques in cellars was closed when its lease was not renewed, and nastier riots when the Israeli tennis team played a Davis Cup match in the city last summer.

But this isn’t Beirut or Baltimore. It isn’t even Tower Hamlets. I was told at Lund University that a foreign graduate student who lived in Rosengård for a couple of years couldn’t understand why anyone would call it a ghetto. He came from Liverpool. Certainly, I can’t think of another slum in Europe that has broad, well-signposted cycle paths on which stately middle-aged women in headscarves pedal their groceries home.

The houses are for the most part low blocks arranged in squares around playgrounds, on a familiar Swedish model. Even in Herrgården, where there are a few boarded-up windows, the play areas are clean and well-maintained.

And about those rape statistics …

In another publicity stunt, the party released a report claiming to prove, from government statistics, that immigrants were five times more likely than native Swedes to be convicted of rape. What the statistics actually show is that they are five times as likely to be investigated for rape, but experts point out that this may be due in part to racism in the criminal justice system, and that the absolute numbers are very small: when the Sweden Democrats claimed that 10% of the rapists convicted in their survey were Iraqi, they were talking about 12 men. If 0.04% of native Swedes are investigated for rape in one year, the corresponding figure for immigrants is 0.22%.

Read it all.

Joan Wallach Scott, the author of The Politics of the Veil, on the real motivation behind the move to ban the niqaab in France:

The national assembly’s action came on July 13, as the country prepared to celebrate the birth of republican democracy in the revolution of 1789. Banning the burqa on the eve of the Fête Nationale provided a clear affirmation of true Frenchness.

It followed a year in which President Sarkozy included a minister of immigration and national identity in his cabinet. The title of the new post conveyed the message that if national identity were in trouble immigrants were the source. The president and his minister called for a countrywide conversation on the meanings of national identity. There were to be contests and town-hall meetings to articulate what it meant to be truly French. When that effort fizzled, they came up with more draconian measures. Sarkozy proposed, this month, to take away the citizenship of foreign-born French citizens if they were convicted of crimes such as threatening the life of a police officer. Children born in France to foreign parents (once presumed to automatically qualify for citizenship) would be denied citizenship if there were any evidence of juvenile delinquency.

This month, too, began the expulsion of the Roma, said to be illegally camped throughout the country and responsible for all manner of crimes. Despite an outcry from those who denounced the expulsions as echoes of Vichy (the government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s), these activities have made “security” a prime focus for politicians and public opinion pollsters. Whether it will deliver another term to Sarkozy in 2012 remains to be seen.

The immediate effect is to conjure a fantasy spectre in which foreigners endanger France and are made to take the blame for all its economic, social and political problems.

The people advocating bans on veils on supposed women’s rights grounds are, she says, never normally supportive of efforts to improve the lot of women; some of them have opposed laws on domestic violence and sexual harassment. It’s all about forcing people of foreign descent to adopt white cultural norms, along with white feminists thinking that they have the right to dictate what liberty means for all women.

There is also the myth (which Joan Wallach Scott mentions but does not refute) that 1789 was somehow the “birth of republican democracy”. It wasn’t. After that came the Reign of Terror, Napoleon and a period of restored monarchy; republicanism did not become stable in France until the Third Republic.

This is a story about Romanian workers who were tricked into coming to the UK to sell cosmetics on a “commission-only”, “self-employed” basis. This involved selling the products in a department store and being paid only for what they sold, not for the time they spent trying to sell them. The result was that on some days, the workers might receive only £4 for the whole day. However, they were also charged above market rates for accommodation, which one worker has described as “very dirty”.

The brand, “Ever Since”, is a ‘luxury’ brand and the products contain minerals sourced from the Dead Sea. Here is the website of the company that runs their website. Yep, they’re Israeli. (I didn’t realise this when I first noticed this story.) I wonder what the name “Ever Since” actually refers to? Not a name you’d readily think of when trying to come up with a name for cosmetics. It has a sort of ring a bit like “time immemorial”.

Regardless of Ever Since’s origins, self-employment is a common scam and it’s an easy way for companies to get around responsibilities of handling employees’ tax and National Insurance and even paying them a decent wage. It’s one thing to use commission-only and self-employment when someone is out of supervision and when it’s up to them to go out and drum up business, but quite another when someone is working eight hours a day in a department store.