Friday, July 24, 2009

Tharrr she blows! Think! Think Ahoy!

OH MY GOD!!! It's here! "Understanding and Addressing the Nazi Card", a report prepared by the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism! Only ten months late, and at a cost of slightly more than £500 per page! And on a different subject from the one commissioned! Offering policy suggestions which nearly all pitch for more money for EISCA! "The research mostly involved a critical analysis of secondary sources"!

It really is a shockingly thin piece of work. It isn't clear whether this is the job done, or whether more reports will come out of the "research project" for which the twenty grand was stumped up. I very much hope the latter as this is borderline unacceptable.

Still, signs of life in the Potemkin Village of thinktanks. Let's hope that this is the stirring of a new beginning which will lead to a flood of new work from EISCA on this important issue. With luck, perhaps we will even see the now 112 days overdue Companies House return being filed!

11 comments:

  1. Goebbelsian bastards.

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  3. Do you think the title was changed last minute? It's called 'Understanding and addressing the Nazi card', which doesn't make a lot of sense, but in Shahid Malik's introduction, he twice (and only) refers to it as 'Playing the Nazi card'.

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  4. Man, that's thin.

    I particularly like the recommendation that the UCU (specifically) should be encouraged to discuss a definition of anti-semitism that includes

    "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of
    a State of Israel is a racist endeavour."

    ...or, in other words, explicitly defines anti-Zionism as anti-semitism. Good luck with that.

    Matthew - the PDF bookmarks are
    Playing the Nazi Card Cover
    Nazi Card Text
    Playing the Nazi Card Cover

    so I think you might be right.

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  5. Never seen a higher concentration of bullshit in my life; easily beats American AM talk-radio.

    This has gotta be some kind of record.

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  6. I was thinking that the final title might refer to something like this

    Anyway, getting back to the Christian roots of antisemitism, my working theory is that it might have something to do with all those fucking parables. I can see how they might drive someone to start considering genocide after a while.

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  7. Ironic, isn't it.

    The stuff like "Nazism is central to German identity", "...essential component of German identity", "...central to German identity" - wouldn't you expect to find it, word by word, in a whole bunch of Hitler's speeches?

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  8. Freshly Squeezed Cynic7/26/2009 04:02:00 AM

    Christ, that Advisory Board is a prize collection of utter cunts.

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  9. Yes, I noted that when it was set up. Douglas Murray is the only one of them that puts it in his CV though.

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  10. A working definition of hell; being stuck in a lift with the Advisory Board. Gove and Godson? MacShane, Charles Moore, and Malik at the same time? Warmongers, hacks, torture fans, trolls, and slimy careerists all.

    Also note the use of the word "intervening" in the subtitle. Dogwhistle: Iraq! Iraq! Iraq!

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  11. ...btw I realize it would have made a little more sense to say that the parables were likely to make people stop blaming the Jews and start wishing they'd been there themselves to pound in that first nail, but really I was more interested in making my own little parable, and, to quote a famous poem as best I remember it: "Do I contradict myself? Fuck off."

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