9. Racism, Service Apartments and King Kong

Great article here by Ken Livingston, the Mayor of London in the Guardian today.

Here are some excerpts...

"Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest crimes in history - the slave trade, the extermination of all original inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised" expression of racist barbarity.

Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz. That is why I detest racism."

And then some...

"To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.

Israel's expansion has included ethnic cleansing. Palestinians who had lived in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror aimed at ethnically cleansing what became a large part of the Israeli state. The methods of groups like the Irgun and the Stern gang were the same as those of the Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic: to drive out people by terror.

Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres."

And finally...

"Today the Israeli government is helping to promote a wholly distorted picture of racism and religious discrimination in Europe, implying that the most serious upsurge of hatred and discrimination is against Jews.

All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people, Asians and Muslims - and they are the primary targets of the extreme right. For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments - not on the absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral."

You can read the article in it's entirety here. Mr Livingstone has some pretty interesting views, and as you would expect, he's getting some pretty heavy stick from the Jewish community in the UK. Read his views and make up your own mind if he's an anti-semitic hack or someone with something important to say.

On the home front, these days, all talk is about deporting illegals, hence all the special ops going about. That's got me thinking...these guys come here, under perilous conditions one might add, to make a better life for themselves and we, of course, greet them with open arms. They build our service apartments and condos, our shopping malls and office buildings, they wash our cars, clean our houses, do our gardening, they mind our parking lots, they take care of our kids and they also provide horny lonely men with the means to satisfy themselves. All's fine and well, eh? But then, suddenly, someone notices that hmmmm, well, seems that there's an awful lot of them around suddenly, and that these days, rather than robbing and killing each other, they've gone on to robbing and killing us Malaysians too. And what of all the sex crimes and such? Well, it's surely their fault! Those pesky immigrants, those pesky illegal immigrants, let's get rid of the lot of them and all will be well with the world.

Kinda funny methinks, 'cause the only reason they're here in the first place is that us Malaysians are just too lazy to do the jobs they happily accept in the first place. Now then, with all these guys gone, just who the heck are gonna finish building our nice service apartments and condos that's popping up everywhere? The last thing anyone needs right now is the sight of loads of half-finished projects littering the KL landscape. We've got enough problems as it is with the encroachment on Taman Cahaya (speaking of that, are we all to believe, as the officials tell us, that there's nothing out of the ordinary happening there? Sure there's nothing happening there, sure. The trees just uprooted themselves and went for a quick walkabout eh, eh?). On the subject of service apartments, click here to get enlightened.

And finally, for something completely irrelevant, click here. Bring on Peter Jackson's Kong.