In which Our Henry brings lumps of Islamic coal, while other reptiles are noted in passing ...

 

The pond should have braced for it, should have expected it.

The release of that interim report set the alarm bells ringing in the Australian Daily Zionist News, and any number of reptiles lined up to have their say.

Geoff chambered a round in ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Anthony Albanese can’t whitewash security failures exposed by Bell report
When the government looks for job cuts or lower spending, it should not only quarantine the national security agencies, it should keep their spending trajectory at a higher rate.

This is where having functioning interim archive is such a relief to the pond ... because over on the extreme far right, others clamoured to join Geoff ...

The cardinal questions not answered in interim report
Virginia Bell’s report findings a step in the right direction, but little has changed
The good and decent of this country embraced the Jewish community in our grief. But the good and decent have never been the problem.
By Alex Ryvchin

The pond hasn't the slightest interest, not while ethnic cleansing goes on in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and fanatics espouse it. (YouTube)

But correspondents should feel free to browse, so long as the intermittent archive stays working ...

Horrors of Bondi Beach massacre must instruct fight against terrorism
Despite post-9/11 counter-terrorism successes, a security expert warns the ‘unfortunate reality’ that violent ideologies endure.
By Levi West

And now the pond has to turn to the main Friday feature, Our Henry.

The pond had suggested as a teaser that he might be considered some kind of Santa Claus, but you can bet the hole in bucket man is the kind of Santa that has copious amounts of coal in his sack ...

The header: UN resolution on slavery falsifies history by ignoring Islamic world’s role; The UN has passed a resolution branding slavery a uniquely Western crime despite Islamic nations transporting more slaves than crossed the Atlantic.

The caption: The UN resolution on slavery has sparked debate over historical interpretation. Picture: Getty Images

So nothing really has changed. We're back to bashing Islamics, as Our Henry spends a good five minutes explaining how slavery should be pinned on Islamics.

To do this, he used standard tricks of the trade.

Here's the opening set up:

That the African slave trade was a monstrosity, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on millions of innocent victims, is beyond dispute. 

Opening apologetic and caveat done, then comes the billy goat butt ...

But the resolution the UN General Assembly passed two weeks ago, marking the trade’s commemoration, is nothing less than an appalling falsification of history.

Then comes another concession ...

Formally, the resolution condemns the African slave trade as a whole. 

Then comes another billy goat butt ...

Substantively, every concrete reference targets the transatlantic trade, fixating on a “racialised capitalist system” and its purported Western antecedents. The cumulative effect is unmistakeable: to brand the trade a distinctively Western crime. 

Oh yes, Our Henry is full of indignation that anyone should attempt to pin transAtlantic slavery on the West, or perhaps any form of slavery, even though the bible provides handy guidance from as early as Leviticus ... 

44 Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
45 Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
46 And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour. (More KJV here)

For a bigger range of quotes, see the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, which has a convenient summary, What the Bible says about... slavery ...

Sorry, the pond always gets entranced by the things that you're liable to read in the bible. 

On with the hole in bucket man, righteously indignant ...

To sustain that impression, the resolution parades a sequence of decrees, starting with the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455, which it casts as the founding charters of the enslavement and “structural racism” that still unjustly impoverishes Africa, thereby grounding a claim to substantial reparations.
Yet, having been forensically specific about blame, the text turns conspicuously evasive when it confronts the forces that brought the Atlantic trade to an end. The Enlightenment, the abolitionist movements, and the Western legal and political campaigns that culminated in the trade’s eventual demise are, it appears, unmentionable.
While the offending decrees are named, dated and indicted, the tide of opposition to slavery, which gathered momentum in the 17th century, is dismissed as “certain legal challenges and judicial developments in the 18th century” that “questioned the legality and morality of chattel enslavement”.
That descent into vagueness reflects a deliberate strategy: to particularise the guilt while diluting the credit. Merely cataloguing the misrepresentations, confusions and factual errors this strategy produces would require far more space than is available here. What is especially striking, however, are the omissions.
It is, for example, intellectually dishonest to invoke the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 while ignoring Pope Paul III’s bull of 1537, which denounced as an invention of the devil the idea that native peoples “should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service”, and affirmed “that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty”.
Paul III’s exhortations had limited immediate effect; so too did Cartwright’s Case (1569), which declared that England’s air was “too pure for slaves to dwell in”. What matters is what they reveal: an unceasing moral interrogation of slavery within the West itself – an interrogation that gave abolitionism the bedrock on which to build.

The pond should at this point note that for some strange reason the reptiles refused to provide Our Henry with historical snaps or illustrations, perhaps of devious Islamic overlords enslaving whole tribes (and yet there's a question to be asked about the likes of the Olympics movement, which condoned much enforced slavery in recent times. Is it Western or is it Islamic in origin?)

Our Henry's chagrin is inclined to purposeful selectivity:

Here, too, the resolution’s selectivity is purposeful. It allows it to avoid an obvious and crucial comparator: the long history of slavery under Islamic rule, which it ignores altogether. From the Arab conquests to the early 20th century, some 14 million black slaves were transported into the lands of Islam via the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes, with nearly a million more carried beyond the East African coast. Add to these more than a million white slaves, and the total comfortably exceeds the 10 million to 12 million who landed in the Americas.

Now the pond isn't going to go into bat for the Islamic slave trade, or all the other slave trades from ancient times, or those rife in modern times. Economic/wage slavery is in an epidemic state, whether in the Arab gulf states or in the fields of American farmers.

But it's surely the last refuge of the desperate when you start toting the totals on the tape ... that's not a genocide, you've only got 30 million, what about my genocide with fifty million?

Perhaps Our Henry realised this wasn't quite the way forward, so he resorted to a more typical routine. Those bloody Islamics were heathens and barbarians ...

Yet the numbers are not what is most significant. The salient fact is the absence of any sustained doctrinal or institutional challenge to the morality and legality of the slave trade within the Islamic world – even where it starkly contradicted the Koranic prohibition on enslaving Muslims. As Bruce Hall shows in his study of Saharan and Sahelian slavery, by the 19th century – when the West was vigorously suppressing chattel slavery – the operative presumption among Maliki jurists was that black Africans, routinely described as “savages”, were enslavable by default, whatever their faith.
There were individuals who objected strenuously to chattel slavery, such as Syrian reformer Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855-1902); but no Muslim opponent of slavery ever forged those concerns into a mass movement. Bernard Lewis’s verdict that “even the most radical Muslim modernists” fell well short of matching the fervour and effectiveness of Western abolitionists retains all its force.
It is therefore unsurprising that Islam’s leading theologians, far from championing abolition, actively resisted it – beginning with the infamous 1855 fatwa, issued with the full authority of Mecca’s Shaykh Jamal, which declared any prohibition of the slave trade “contrary to the holy law of Islam” and any official who attempted to enforce it “lawful to kill”.
Nor is it surprising that Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery only in 1962, the United Arab Emirates in 1964, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania – after repeated ineffectual measures – in 2007. Moreover, even where slavery was formally abolished, forms of vassalage have remained firmly in place: of the 10 countries with the highest incidence of “modern slavery”, eight are majority-Muslim.
But the resolution does not merely distort history by pretending Islamic slavery didn’t exist. It declares the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity ever committed. Although not explicitly stated, a central purpose of this travesty – which converts the horrors of the past into a “suffering Olympics” – is again transparent: to relativise the Holocaust.
It is frankly obscene to degrade moral evaluation into a body count, with medals of ignominy awarded by a show of hands. Yet even in so repulsive a spectacle, realities should have been allowed to intrude. Those realities are well known. Death rates in the Holocaust – whose unrelenting aim was the complete extermination of Jews – were close to or above 90 per cent. So complete was the indifference to fatalities that the German railways were paid whether the Jews being shipped by them lived or died during their transport – and the few who survived the journeys were killed, on average, within days of arrival.

Of course there's a sting in the tail here.

What's the point behind it all? Perhaps this is one indication...

...The Netherlands remains the only European country to have issued a formal apology for its role in slavery.
The resolution has come after the African ⁠Union last year set out to create a “unified vision” among its 55 ⁠member states about what reparations for slavery may look like.
It urges member states to engage in dialogue on reparations, including issuing formal apologies, returning stolen artefacts, providing financial compensation, and ensuring guarantees of non-repetition.
Despite the longstanding calls for reparations, there is also a growing backlash.
Several ⁠Western leaders have opposed even discussing the subject, with critics arguing that today’s states and institutions should not be held responsible for historical wrongs.
Both the EU and the US voiced concerns that the resolution could imply a hierarchy among crimes against humanity, ⁠treating some as more serious than others. (Al Jazeera, here)

Ah yes, what a nasty word: reparations.

No one likes that word, not if it means flinging a little cash from the coffers.

Perhaps Our Henry should have suggested that reparations should fall where they may ... but instead he tries the feeblest form of redemptions ...

In contrast, as investor Thomas Starke wrote to Captain James Westmore in 1700, “the whole benefit of the voyage lyes in your care of preserving negroes’ lives”. As a result, strenuous efforts were made to ensure slaves remained alive and saleable, including by granting handsome bonuses to captains for high survival rates and imposing stiff penalties for excess mortality.

Oh come on, one sensible economic rationalist doesn't make for a summer of slavery bliss, and Our Henry had to immediately offer an "although":

Although those efforts hardly eliminated the trade’s horrors, they did mean that by the late 18th century, death rates for black slaves on the “middle passage” had declined dramatically, to the point where they were only marginally greater than those for crews. To pretend otherwise is to erase the distinction between exploitation and extermination: for there was nothing in the slave trade even remotely comparable to the systematic mass murder at the heart of the Holocaust.
But to acknowledge those facts – which flatly contradict the assault on the standing of the Holocaust – might have eroded the overwhelming support the resolution secured. And the composition of that support says everything one needs to know about the resolution.

He does a nice job downplaying it, though some might think dragging in the Holocaust card is a bit like dragging in Adolf to win an argument, thereby provoking Godwin.

Is the only way to deal with atrocities to line them and rate them, and if you haven't got the right kill rate, you don't cut the mustard? 

And so to the final flourish:

Thus, every one of the 20 countries that have the highest incidence of modern slavery and forced labour cynically voted in its favour; so did all the authoritarian states that participated in the vote, with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and, again with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it received the active backing of every Muslim-majority country.
Yet that is not the real tragedy. Rather, it is that only three Western countries – the US, Israel and Argentina – had the decency to vote against the falsification of history, instead of abstaining, as Australia and the European Union did. Those three were willing to oppose this charade. Why weren’t we?

Um, perhaps because it's really is about keeping the loot, the ill-gotten gains? And the three cited are three rogue nations veering off into authoritarianism?

Perhaps this helps in reading Our Henry:

...The UK, one of the major powers involved in the transatlantic slave trade, said it recognised the untold harm and misery that had been caused to millions of people over many decades.
But its ambassador to the UN, James Kariuki, told the assembly in his speech that the resolution was problematic in terms of its wording and international law.
"No single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another," he said.
The US's ambassador to the UN made similar points during his speech, saying his country "does not recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred".
In addition, Dan Negrea said the US objected to the "cynical usage of historical wrongs as a leverage point to reallocate modern resources to people and nations who are distantly related to the historical victims". (Beeb)

There you go, off the hook ...

"No single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another"

Way to go when it comes to fire bombing Dresden.

Yes, you won't find the Poms or the Yanks wanting to admit any guilt or loosen the Treasury purse strings, and that's not about pinning the Islamic tail on the slavery donkey, that's entirely self-centred ...

The pond blames Our Henry for taking umbrage when he could have served up King Donald ...

Once again the reptiles have failed to celebrate all that's really happening in the world ...

Did Jim and the pond suddenly get exposed to prosecution by showing that image. Relax, as the DOJ has explained, it's a selective form of persecution ...

The American justice system in full King Donald mode...

Compelling, captivating ...

And domestically the reptiles have refused to feature Gina at the top of the page, no matter how much she tries to garner attention ...

Speaking of the filthy, undiscerning rich, the pond perhaps should note one attempt at radical socialism which somehow crept into the rag ...

Culture of hierarchy a dim view from the cheap seats
A family’s night at the ballet turns into a wider debate about fairness, empty seats and who gets to access Australia’s cultural institutions.
By Alex Reszelska

This was a story of how a man and his daughter eyed off some empty seats at the ballet with a better view. 

The sort of people who might be expected to try to score a seat in Qantas first class because no one was using it, and couldn't understand why the trolley dolly stood in their way.

This was the end of the story ...

...I’ve lived in London. As a student, I spent many nights at the Royal Opera House. There, you can queue for returns. You can buy standing tickets for the price of a sandwich and a cup of coffee. And, yes, people move into empty seats after the interval. Not chaotically, not disrespectfully, but with a shared understanding: empty seats are a failure of access.
In Warsaw, where I grew up, Polish National Opera has always preserved one idea: young people belong here. Students aren’t an inconvenience, they’re seen as the future the society needs to invest in. There, you can buy last-minute “entry” tickets on a first-come, first-served basis about an hour before the performance. They’re typically 35 zloty (about $13) for unfilled seats, compared to regular tickets ranging from 90 to 350 zł.
And then there is Vienna, consistently ranked among the world’s most liveable cities, and home to the Vienna State Opera. Every night, hundreds of standing tickets are sold cheaply for as little as €12 ($20). Opera, in Vienna, London and Warsaw, is still elite art – but not exclusively for elites.
Australia tells a different story. We talk a lot about fairness, egalitarianism and giving everyone a go, but those values start to feel more like branding than lived reality.
Young people are increasingly locked out of housing and stable work. And now they are being locked out of culture – through pricing, policy and a creeping social logic that says: if you didn’t pay top dollar, know your place.
What unsettled me most that night wasn’t being asked to move. It was the reasoning behind it. Someone saw an empty seat not as an opportunity for someone else to experience beauty, but as an infringement on their own purchase. As if joy were finite. It’s hard not to ask: Is this the kind of society we think people fought for? My daughter kept returning to it: “I would want someone to sit there,” she said. “If I wasn’t using it.”
There is a kind of moral clarity in children that sees through adult justifications. So here is a question – not just for the Sydney Opera House, but for the NSW government and for the Arts Minister. What is the purpose of our cultural institutions? To preserve hierarchy, or to expand access? Because right now, we seem to be choosing to leave seats empty rather than let more people in.

What a sorry, shocking story, and how weird that the reptiles would run it. 

What next? Someone from the peasants' lounge attempting to gate crash the Chairman's Lounge?

Mind you, the pond is all for it, and all for storming the bastions of the privileged elites. 

The pond routinely snuck into better seats at half time at the SSO, and didn't get pinged for it once.

Perhaps it's the ballet?

All the pond wants is someone willing to go bail money should a radicalised pond get pinged by the management ...

And so to close with the lizard Oz editorialist's suggestion for fixing the current and future energy crisis.

Make a wholehearted effort to get further and further away from oil and and economies based on fossil fuels?

Not on your nervous nelly ...

They've never got it, ain't for the gittin' of it, and never will get it.

Their fixated devotion to fossil fuels is admirable, in a kind of heroic Don Quixote way.

And so to close with a reminder to Our Henry that these days there are more subtle ways to keep unruly people in their place ...

Meanwhile, it gets even darker in the land of Vlad the sociopath ...