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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Ed Webb

Ed Webb

How Austria made the study of Islamophobia a crime | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • my academic work on Islamophobia was cited as a reason for the terrorism allegations. The intelligence agency’s regular reports outlining why I was seen as a security threat delved deep into my academic work on Islamophobia, relating it to conspiracy theories and claiming that my Catholic director at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, was a staunch Islamist.
  • According to the regional court, my “activities in the preparation of the so-called Islamophobia Report and activity with the Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University is intended to disseminate the fighting term ‘Islamophobia’ with the goal of preventing any critical engagement with Islam as a religion […] in order to establish an Islamic state […]”.
  • there is a lot of work to be done on behalf of the Austrian intelligence service, which has been primed by alarmist experts spreading conspiracy theories to draw a picture of an immediate Muslim threat.
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  • the Austrian political elite has to ask itself how it sees the future of Muslims, who constitute nine percent of the population, in the country. While most political parties have been either silent or supportive  of anti-Muslim policies, the infamous Operation Luxor is a welcoming occasion to rethink the approach of the past years.
Ed Webb

'Where Tunisia Leads, Britain Follows' - Byline Times - 0 views

  • Fuelled by populist politics, a nationalistic press and the apparent desire to confront complex problems with ‘red meat’ and increased nationalism, Tunisia’s President has steered his country on a dark course.
  • rather than address the core problems facing Tunisia, its President – buoyed by a supportive media – has embarked on a populist witch-hunt of his political opponents and now one of the country’s most vulnerable groups. 
  • As the UK Government focuses its efforts on pushing through an immigration bill that it itself admits has only a 50% chance of meeting international legal thresholds, there are parallels between both sets of leaderships. Like Tunisia’s President, Rishi Sunak Government is attempting to use populist nationalism and the wilful demonising of migrants as cover for its own gross economic mismanagement and flailing popularity.
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  • many acknowledge their fresh of support for the President since his crackdown.  Asked about the 21,000 or so black migrants residing in Tunisia, no one here is racist, they say – they simply want to distinguish between those who are here legally and illegally. It sounds reasonable enough. In fact, it could probably pass for small talk at a Conservative Party fundraiser. However, at least in Tunisia, that reasonableness fades when pressed. “They’re selling cocaine, they’re selling their wives and their girlfriends to each other,” Bassem, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, told me. “They’re even buying boats and taking still more migrants to Europe.” In this part of Ariana, every Tunisian has a lurid tale, always experienced at one remove, which they reel off as ‘proof’ of the criminality of the country’s black migrant population.
  • To date, none of these stories are troubling Tunisia’s mainstream media, which appears more focused on defending Tunisia’s national image and parroting the President’s attack lines than delivering facts to a public growing increasingly hostile to the unwarranted international condemnation it feels itself subject to.
  • the UK’s established media has spent the past week fixated on the employment terms of a BBC sports commentator than scrutinising a law that stands to make the lives of tens of thousands of people immeasurably worse.
  • Just as the UK media is yet to truly reckon with the financial impact of Brexit on the country’s poorest, so the Tunisian media is unwilling to fully address the consequences of the suspension of the World Bank partnership and the increasing uncertainty surrounding a sorely needed IMF bail-out. 
Ed Webb

Corsican language ban stirs protest on French island | France | The Guardian - 0 views

  • A court in Corsica has prompted outrage by banning the use of the Corsican language in the island’s local parliament.The court in the city of Bastia cited France’s constitution it its ruling on Thursday that French was the only language allowed in the exercise of public office.Corsican, which is close to standard Italian and has about 150,000 native speakers, is considered by the UN’s cultural organisation Unesco to be in danger of becoming extinct.
  • the court said local rules effectively establishing “the existence of a Corsican people” were also a violation of the constitution.
  • Macron said last month that he had “no taboos” about reforming the status of Corsica, which is a sunny Mediterranean island beloved by holidaymakers. But he insisted that Corsica had to remain part of France.
Ed Webb

One of those days. - by Mic Wright - 0 views

  • The Labour front bench is stuffed with spreadsheet sadists and it’s not my problem that some people find their brand of managerial authoritarianism more palatable because of politesse.
  • ‘We’ assume it will not and can not ever happen here. It is the same British exceptionalism that leads people to believe that everyone wants to come to Britain as a refugee even as the numbers show that is far from the case. The most effective policy our political class has in deterring asylum seekers and immigrants of all kinds is to continue to make this a miserable place to live: a culture defined by paranoia, cruelty, and greed and utterly unwilling to face up to the darkness in its history and present.
  • If Keir Starmer wins the next election he will scrap the Sunak approach, fall back on camouflage waffle about cracking down on people-smuggling gangs and ensuring new safe routes. And the number of people conning their way to a life in Britain by abusing the asylum system will continue to skyrocket, with all the baleful consequences that implies for our rapidly unravelling society.This line of argument from the right is stupendously disingenuous; numbers have rocketed under the Tories’ brand of cruelty. If you really hate refugees and immigration generally, it’s Starmer’s Labour who you want in power.
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  • The morality of the UK government’s policies towards refugees is treated as an afterthought across almost all of the media
  • In a film on institutional racism that wasn’t shown on British terrestrial television, after clips of politicians including Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, and Harold Wilson all expressing variants of the ‘swamped’ by immigration rhetoric, Ambalavaner Sivanandan — the late novelist and director of the Institute for Race Relations — said:Looked at in terms of the history of race and immigration in this country, it says one thing to me: What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after.
  • With a press and media that want to pretend that we have ideological diversity in politics where there is virtually none, we are living in a one-party state that changes which colour of managerial autocrat fronts it once every decade or so.
  • Is it really so surprising that newspapers that are generally too mimsy to print the word fuck would flee from the word ‘fascism’? Especially when the fruits of this system have been so bountiful to their proprietors.
  • make comparisons to the 1930s; its fascism did not arrive fully formed but crept forward day by day. You can’t keep saying it’s “just one of those days”. Those days add up.
Ed Webb

Fringe interests - by Mic Wright - 0 views

  •  
    righteous anger driving piercing analysis
Ed Webb

Minutes of Boris Johnson Meeting with Cambridge Analytica 'Would Directly Undermine Tru... - 0 views

  • release of the minutes and official correspondence related to Boris Johnson’s meeting with the now-disgraced data firm Cambridge Analytica in December 2016 would “directly undermine the trust and confidence between the UK and US”, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said. On 8 December 2016, while serving as Foreign Secretary, Johnson held a meeting with Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix. According to Government records, the meeting was held “to discuss [the] US political situation”.
  • “Cambridge Analytica was a commercial company. It was doing commercial work, most recently for a political candidate in the US. There is simply no good reason why its dealings with the UK Government should be a closely guarded state secret. “The Foreign Office is relying on an exemption on the grounds that releasing the information could ‘prejudice relations’ with another state or jeopardise the ‘promotion or protection’ of UK’s interests abroad. But how?… I think this begs many more questions than it answers.”
  • “It is significant that Johnson met with Nix less than a month after Trump was elected,” Ian Lucas, a former Labour member of the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee, told Byline Times. “Remember that Nix specifically worked on digital campaigning and will likely have been ambitious, at this time, to promote his role in Trump’s election and secure more work from right-wing politicians on the back of it. Johnson was interested enough in Nix’s role to meet him.”
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  • the Conservatives and Johnson have benefitted since this time from the techniques pioneered by Cambridge Analytica – exploiting the UK’s lack of digital campaigning laws. Johnson in particular “has resisted regulation of it at every stage and this is further evidence that we must wake up to the threat it poses to our democracy,”
  • It has also been claimed that Cambridge Analytica worked on the pro-Brexit campaign, with Leave.EU’s former communications director Andy Wigmore saying that Cambridge Analytica was “more than happy to help… we shared a lot of information”. The official Vote Leave campaign, fronted by Johnson, also spent most its online campaigning budget (including a late, unlawful overspend) through the Canadian agency AggregateIQ (AIQ), a spin-off business linked to SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, with AIQ managing Cambridge Analytica’s technology platform – Ripon – and its databases.
  • Cambridge Analytica and its parent company closed operations in May 2018, while Facebook was fined $5 billion by Federal Trade Commission in America over Cambridge Analytica’s use of unauthorised data, and £500,000 by the ICO (the maximum fine available).
Ed Webb

"We are looking at the biggest reconstruction story since World War II" | EBU - 0 views

  • A news organization’s climate journalism should be as all-pervasive as the consequences of the climate crisis itself are. It should be completely normal to have a paragraph on climate impacts in, let’s say, a sports story or a story about company earnings.
  • There is not a single area of journalism that will not be transformed either directly by climate impacts or by humanity's efforts to mitigate climate change or adapt to it.
  • First, free climate journalism from its organizational silo and make it all-pervasive. Second, localize it and bring it into the here and now as much as possible. Third, put it into context.
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  • climate change is a systemic challenge, but most news organizations are still treating it only as a topic
  • Public broadcasters in Europe have an unrivalled responsibility to get it right, because they are comparatively well-funded. In addition, they tend to be their country's most-trusted news organization. Especially when it comes to climate journalism, an audience’s trust in a news organization is a hugely important ingredient.  Sometimes I have been struck by the timidity of public service media. Yes, they are under growing political pressure in many countries. But to preemptively capitulate is not a strategy.
  • many editors think of climate journalism as crisis reporting.  And while it is important to cover extreme weather events, they are still only the breaking news surface of something much more profound and systemic
  • There are so many important and interesting stories just on climate adaptation alone that you would overlook as an editor when you reduce climate journalism only to breaking news and crisis reporting.      
  • It is always a good start to build a climate desk, and news organizations need climate specialists. But they are no substitute for increasing the climate literacy, or climate fluency, of all desks.
  • All it took for the last IPCC report to be washed out of the news cycle within hours was an actor misbehaving at the Oscars. It had taken seven years to produce that report.
  • energy literacy is a core aspect of climate journalism and it seems the war in Ukraine has also heightened the world’s awareness for just how integral energy is to our societies and economies. A next phase in this realization may be that the much-needed shift to renewable energies will come with its own new set of geopolitical dependencies
  • The location of the denial has shifted. It has shifted from denying climate science, and specifically that climate change since the pre-industrial age is human-made to denying how urgent our situation is and how little time we have left to avoid a much more dramatic course of events. The willingness to embrace the time pressure we are under is part of climate literacy. 
  • I have never heard a young journalist say ‘I am somehow glad I won’t live long enough to see the worst effects of climate change’ while I have seen quite a few older colleagues express such sentiments. Some of them were even middle-aged, which makes me think they never looked at an IPCC report.      
  • I have met the CEOs of very large global companies who had deep knowledge of the climate crisis while I have yet to meet just one chief editor with a similar degree of climate knowledge
  • It is the nature of the climate crisis, though, to move faster than most of us think. I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see a major news organization re-organize itself around the climate crisis as their organizational axis. 
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