Tag Archives: British government

Is Israel exempt from international law?

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This week has seen a startling series of events redefine the way the UK acts on international law, and the way British governments understand the power of the courts. Under the principal of Universal Jurisdiction, an arrest warrant was issued by Westminster magistrates court for former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, accused of war crimes during the most recent invasion of Gaza. As soon as this information reached the Israel, its government reacted furiously (which was to be expected). Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Ron Prosor, said in a statement:

“The current situation is absurd and unacceptable in equal measure. Israelis cannot continually be held hostage by fringe groups of anti-Israel extremists, preventing politicians, businessmen and officers from visiting the UK.”

While Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu described the situation as an “absurdity”.

What happened next was that the British government leaped into action, apologising to Israel and promising to better control the way international law is applied to Israeli officials in Britain. Gordon Brown and David Miliband both rushed to condemn the warrant, assuring Israel that it’ll never happen again.

So why is it that a senior Israeli politician can’t be arrested in the UK for alleged war crimes? The answer, as usual, is that British government ministers have acted entirely out of personal self interest. The precedent that would be set by arresting Livni would make it far more likely that British officials could be arrested for their own war crimes. And that just wouldn’t do.

The way international law is applied currently suggests that the only people who can ever face it are either (a) a few of the operators in the Yugoslavian war of the 90s and (b) Africans. Israeli and British and other ‘western’ government officers are effectively exempt not because of any weakness in the law, but because every single time an arrest warrant is issued, or an arrest is attempted, the move will be swiftly quashed by politicians. Who aren’t supposed to have that much sway when it comes to the courts.

One of Livni’s statements was particularly telling:

“I have no problem with the world wanting to judge Israel. A problem arises the moment [Israeli Defence Forces] soldiers are compared to terrorists.”

By ‘terrorists’, she’s obviously referring to Hamas (the political organisation of which, the UK does not designate to be a terrorist group). Well I don’t have such a problem with that comparison, Ms. Livni. But it seems that as ever, uniformed soldiers are seen by Britain as being naturally better than rag-tag freedom fighters. Unless they’re our rag-tag freedom fighters, of course.

Shock, horror: UK government uses state broadcaster to broadcast propaganda

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This story, which The Guardian broke yesterday, whill no doubt fill all freedom lovers with fear. Could it really be true that the British government, the PM of which has openly called for more resources to be dedicated to ‘propaganda’ in the media, the same government which sacked the entire board of directors of the BBC after the Corporation had the temerity to suggest they’d misled the public, would really use the state broadcasting service to broadcast specifically anti-Al Qaeda propaganda? Surely not!?!

As any fule know, the BBC has been used for this purpose for decades (since forever, basically). In many ways, there’s not much wrong with it: anti-Al Qaeda messages are hardly harmful. But intentionally misleading people (like when they promoted the idea of Al Qaeda as some sort of cogent, identifiable enemy), is.

The BBC deny that this edition of Analysis was influenced by the government. So where, exactly, does ‘security correspondent’ Frank Gardner get his information from? I bet you a tenner that when he’s talking about people as difficult to meet and assess as Al Qaeda, his mates at SIS or FCO give him a pretty good briefing. And why not? It’s not like he’s going to go to Waziristan himself to ask Osama if he’s on hist last legs.

But it’s not just the ‘war on terror’ which the British government operates via the BBC. Most official foreign policy positions are mirrored in BBC coverage. While it is fashionable to call the BBC ‘biased’ (normally because they report the deaths of Palestininan women and children, the bloody Trots!), in fact the Corporation is inherently tied to the establishment, and particularly when it comes to foreign policy. This is why the headline on Radio 4’s PM programme yesterday wasn’t “Is Russia redrawing the world map?” but “Russia redraws the world map” – exactly the UK’s official line, and a far stronger headline than employed by The Guardian or Channel 4.

That anyone at the BBC or the UK government would try to deny what is an obvious, even understandable, state of affairs is hilarious. Almost as much as anyone thinking this is news.

‘Islamism’ in Swansea University

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The Guardian reports today that many universities across the UK house extremist and Islamist groups which ‘pose a threat to national security’. Swansea University is listed as one of the institutions where Islamist groups have been found to operate by professor Anthony Glees, head of Brunel University’s centre for intelligence and security studies.

While I haven’t been a student at Swansea for some time now, it’s true that there was a fair degree of student activism on campus. I took part in campaigns for the abolishment of university tuition fees, to prevent the closure of university departments and on behalf of the Socialist Workers’ Party against the war in Afghanistan.

At around the same time, a motion was put before the student union council to boycott Israeli academics and institutions because of acts being committed by the Israeli state against Palestinians. These were the days of Ramallah and Jenin where crimes against humanity were carried out by the Israeli army.

The main critics of the motion to boycott Israeli academics and institutions were American and Jewish students, understandably fearful that the left wing of the student body were turning to an anti-Semitic position. A synagogue was damaged in an attack in 2002 – and though it was never proven that this was connected with Muslim or socialist students – the suggestion was that the socialists had helped to create a culture of hatred in the town.

Naturally, I think that this was the wrong conclusion. At a time when the BNP were trying to claw their way into local politics, race riots were taking place in Bradford and Leeds, the US had started its racist war against Muslims in Asia, there were a lot of violent and malicious incidents occurring. I believe that the intellectual boycott brought about by the student union was one of the best considered political acts I have witnessed. It was absolutely not anti-Semitic, and I find it personally insulting that whenever there is any discussion of the wrongs that have been committed on either side of the Palestinian conflict, accusations to that effect will be made.

The reason I have brought this up is that I have a sneaking suspicion that Swansea’s ‘extremism’ and ‘Islamic’ will be found to be intrinsically linked with the boycott of Israeli academics and institutions – which just isn’t the truth. As ought to be expected in the climate of fear that the British government is doing its best to create, any free thinking or direct action is automatically challenged as a threat to security.

Anyone familiar with Swansea university, Swansea City Council and the Swansea Police’s attitude towards leftist student activism will already be aware of the attempts made to silence lecturers, terrorise students and prevent demonstrations. It seems that the next attempt might be to refer to Muslim student activists as ‘terrorists’. This is exactly the sort of thing warned about before, throughout and after my brief time in Swansea.

The defamation of any politicised student or worker body has reached such a degree of acceptance in the UK that we may well have gone beyond the point of no return. It’s imperative that anyone who can, speaks out against this attitude.