New article published

My first professional article has been posted today on The Local. It's about how in Sweden undocumented migrants, ie. failed asylum seekers or others living in hiding, should try very hard not to get ill.

Bit of a step up from blogging: you need quotes and you have to make sure it's accurate - not just rant!

It's been a long time.

Why my name is no longer on the Stockholm Spectator Stambord

Shocked to see the worst of the Mohammed cartoons with my name next to it yesterday, I asked the editor of the Stockholm Spectator Stambord blog to do something about it: remove either my name or the cartoon from the front page; or let me explain my opinion. My name and all my previous articles are now gone from the site. But he has promised to let people read my explanation.

I have spent the past week telling people that to me it is not a free speech issue. It is about communicating between cultures. It is about decency and manners. It is about trying to find solutions or to at least take a more hopeful and constructive path.

One of the things that annoys me most about this sordid cartoon issue, is the way the bigots on both sides are the only winners. With lightening speed, two camps have been created; both of them extreme. And the globalised nature of news and information has, in a flash, sucked people from the middle ground into the respective camps.

Hey, if you are not with us, then you are with them! Do you want them executed, stoned to death, blown up. So, support us, print the images!

No, I'm not with those who would impose Sharia law on us all and kill and maim without a second thought. But, I don't inhabit an ivory tower of white male bloggers where any anti-islamic wisecrack is guaranteed a guffaw. I do not want my name next to a cartoon that, if it doesn't offend, will be seen as an attempt to humiliate, by ordinary, democratic people with Islamic backgrounds. No way. Take that with your swastikas - and your holocaust denial rubbish, for that matter - and keep it in your own bedrooms. Out in the real world, people have to try and get on. If a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu and an atheist live in the same town, what are they going to do? Build walls? Say the other person's totally non-scientific, irrational belief is barmy and dangerous, whereas as mine is obviously completely correct? Or are they going to do what makes them feel good, keeps them in touch with family, traditions and cultures? And then, cooperate with each other on all the common needs: schools, hospitals, playing fields, shops and all that community stuff?

I think the latter makes more sense. And whether you are behind a wall in Northern Ireland, Israel, Kosovo or the Green Zone, it's where you should be going.

The patronising, un-self-aware boors running that Danish newspaper and the same country's government have forgotten that.

No, Michael, I do not want to associate myself with fermenting hatred and misunderstanding and conflict. As for the Swedish government and their security police closing down the website of an anti-immigrant political party, that's another issue. I think their lawyers will have plenty of chance to deal with that, and yes I do think they should be able to print what they want. But, I'm not having my name next to such vicious crap. Waving the Tin-Tin villain-looking hook-nosed Mohammed with a smouldering old-skool cartoon bomb as a turban, is designed purely to cause conflict. And to hurt those they have no feelings for.

And as for what you said about how you "do not suspect [I]would object to blasphemous images of Jesus on the website". Well, I could tell you that the first letter (of very few) I sent to a newspaper was about anti-Catholicism in the UK. I was appalled at Julie Burchill writing in The Guardian that the Catholic church had altar boys in order to provide a stock of abuse victims for its priests. Lots of titters in the "liberal" WASP intelligentsia of England, no doubt. But, like the Mohammed cartoon you posted, gratuitous in its indiscriminate targeting. Many people follow religions that appear preposterous from the outside. Many religions contain manipulative abusers of power. Hurting those whose motives are honest and decent does not build a better world.

Note: The "your swastikas" and "your holocaust denial rubbish" was meant to be a general you/your, as used in Britain. It was not a You meaning Michael Moynihan. I did not intend to imply that he or the Spectator were fascists or anti-Semitic. I should have written something a bit clearer, like the Mohammed cartoons belong in the same place as the aforementioned.

Georgie

George Best "performs brilliantly on a mudheap with a ball that won't bend while being kicked to perdition with official acquiescence".

As David Lacey said in today's Guardian when trying to compare modern players with the legend.

I'm sitting here listening to live coverage of his funeral on Five Live. I've definitely been affected by his death, as have so many others. Quite amazing really. Has there been a funeral quite like this since Diana's?

Five Live keep asking people why. The most common explanation seems to be that he was honest, human and everyone knew his faults; and then that he was arguably the best player in the world. And that he added colour and joy to a black-and-white world.

I've felt nostalgic and homesick at times over the past week. It was something this morning that moved me most however. In the midst of interviews with mourners and locals and old players, five Live suddenly threw in an old commentary.

What commentary could send a tremor ripping down my spine and push tears out in the other direction? I don't know what goal it was, but it was the man "with tear ducts in his larynx", David Coleman. It went something like this:

And Best is through. He's through. He's through on goal. He's THROUGH! (then Coleman's voice becomes ecstatic) What a goal! What a goal! Who else but George Best, has the speed, the balance and the belief, to take it on, and on, and ON?

The cortege is carrying the coffin from his father's home now.

And on a wider note, after hearing of the day he scored 12 goals for his schoolboy team; with his left foot, after his manager had told him it was weak. Does being the best give you the confidence to get better and go on to excel? Or is it right to keep pushing people who are the best into higher levels and age groups to give them more challenges? This crosses my mind as my son is now playing with kids a year and two years older than him. No, no need to worry.

And now the pipes are playing. A son and his grandfather saying goodbye to their father and son.

A short interlude from the silence

All this talk of late about the US using white phosphorous as a weapon in Iraq. Admittedly, I've been out of the office in terms of the old angry political blogging I once dabbled in, but it isn't new.

As a desperate attempt to reinstate myself in the blogosphere, I will mention that I referred to WP in the Stockholm Spectator last November; after reading Daily Kos.

It seems Boing Boing also wrote about it on the same day as Kos; and they referred to a Jeremy Paxman book, strangely enough.

12 months ago it was basically ignored, perhaps as mere anti-American, pro-terrorist hysteria. But now WP has made the front pages.

The always worth-reading Riverbend this week went as far as wondering whether the dramatic discovery of Iraqi government supervised torture chambers was rushed through to distract from the WP admissions. She cynically suggests the US has long known of such torture and extermination camps. Tut tut, that will annoy the thinning ranks of pro-war-ites.

Bitter? How did that advert go again?

Those mid-Cheshire bullets again

This article by Johann Hari, first published in yesterday's Independent, reminded me of a line from an old Clash song:

In a war-torn swamp stop any mercenary,
And check the British bullets in his armoury

Johann Hari confines his comments to British-made and -sold weapons being used in 10 out of the 14 current war zones in Africa. Whereas Joe Strummer was primarily talking about "Washington bullets" and decided to throw in an early reference to the trans-Atlantic military alliance.

Of particular note to me, in the Hari article, was the "stray bullet" Amnesty International found in Uganda and traced back to Cheshire.



Was it from here, I wonder? The BAE Systems small arms and ordinance factory in Crewe.

Latest information from Captain Darling

While disaffected British citizens planned suicide bomb carnage, were the government already planning policy on the back of beer mats? Or did they start afterwards? At least today they scrapped the preposterous "glorifying terror" proposal and will now re-word it to something more practical about "inciting terror".

Meanwhile, is it the same intelligence service that scared us with WMDs in 45 minutes, that now says Iran is arming the insurgence in southern Iraq? A plot emerges. This time the US will go into Iran purely to support loyal ally, Britain.

And doesn't this (from the Guardian article above):

The insurgent has to be able to see the British vehicle coming. If he or she was to set the infra-red beam too soon, the victims could be Iraqi civilians rather than British troops. Recently, British forces have tried to circumvent this by sticking nose to tail with Iraqi vehicles. This can work in busy, urban centres like Basra but is more difficult in the wide, nearly empty deserts that make up much of the south of the country.

sound a bit like a "human shields" strategy?

Lost in the translation and the www submission

Couldn't submit comment to Manchester paper yeserday. Then I couldn't post on Blogger later. I'll try again now.
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Lost in the translation

Or so went today's Manchester Evening News report on the "Queiroz calls Utd fans stupid" story.

Being a United fan who should really have a job hanging out with Ronaldo and Queiroz for vast sums of money as I speak Portuguese (well, kind of) and like football, I attempted to add my two-penneth worth. The internet submitting function doesn't seem to have worked, yet, so I'm putting it here in the hope my Lisboa-based source of street-Portuguese insight and grassroots-football wisdom sees it and sorts out this controversy once and for all.

This is what I attempted to send to MEN: (now updated to what I sent today - but I think that might have failed too, though I'll probably see 15 identical posts there in an hour or so):

"Thank you Pro-Rata, at last someone who wants to actually check what was said. Right, I'm a Utd fan who used to live in Portugal for a few years. I've found the original comment, here and well, it's ambiguous enough for it to be almost impossible to say for certain what he meant without him doing a lie detector.

However, my interpretation is that he implied the Utd fans were stupid for chanting "4-4-2" in the Blackburn match, when he claims, Utd were already playing 4-4-2. I didn't see the game, but if he's right, then he does have a point, I have to say. Anyway, he says nothing more critical than that - which is less than Roy Keane has said about fans in the past, and not in the same category as what Shepherd said about Newcastle fans.

For what it's worth, here's my translation - I've tried to keep it literal-ish, if you try and change it too much to sound like authentic UK football manager speak, you really would have to impose meaning on what was a very vague comment indeed:

"We don't play with one, or even two forwards, but with three! On top of that, and you see what football's like, in this last game with Blackburn, we played 4-4-2 for the first time and the fans (people on the terraces/in the stadium) screamed out, demanding: "4-4-2"! For the first time, we this system that the fans have been asking for so much, and .... we lose. That's why football is a game where imagination and, very often, stupidity, have no limits."