Mediocrates
04-22-2009, 09:34 AM
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3704977,00.html
In Israel, Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor criticized the planned session. "It is regrettably ironic that a man who could never receive an entry visa to Britain because he is considered a terrorist would have the privilege to address MPs in parliament, thanks to new technologies," Palmor said.
Britain's main opposition Conservative Party said it has complained that Parliamentary facilities were being used for the talk.
"We are seriously concerned at the proposed event," said David Lidington, a main opposition Conservative party lawmaker and spokesman on foreign affairs. "Hamas remains a proscribed terrorist organization under UK law."
Well not for long, soon they will be guests of the UK and perhaps some kind of outpost for the Hamas government in exile.
Anyway this presentation by your soon to be Sharia overlords is open to all.
http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/04/21/come-meet-khalid-meshaal-at-the-house-of-lords/
Tomorrow’s “meeting” in the House of Lords with Khalid Meshaal is apparently not limited to “Parliamentarians”. Anybody can attend this meeting.
I very much hope that some of you will attend this public meeting, ask the questions that the Hamas supporters won’t be posing, and report back to us.
(I shall be going to watch “In The Loop” instead.)
Original article: 16.4.2008
I have received a nice invitation from Clare Short: JOHN, LORD ALDERDICE
extends an invitation to Parliamentarians
to
TALK WITH HAMAS
At 6.30pm on 22 April 2009
in the Grimond Room, Portcullis House
Most serious commentators now believe that there can be no peace in the Middle East without talking to Hamas. In addition, we may be facing the last chance for a two state solution.
In 2006, Hamas won more than 65.2 per cent of the vote in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Since then, Gaza has been besieged, boycotted and bombarded. There has been great human misery, but no progress and no improved security for anyone, including Israel, which is still the target of missiles.
Khalid Meshaal, Chief of the Political Bureau of Hamas will be available on a video link from Damascus. He will explain Hamas’s position and answer questions.
—————————————————————————–
RSVP:
Office of Clare Short MP
House of Commons: 020 7219 4264/4148
shortc@parliament.uk
The involvement of Lord Alderdice marks this out as a Conflicts Forum (http://conflictsforum.org/who-we-are/lord-alderdice/)event.
The purpose of Conflicts Forum is to rehabilitate Hamas. They recognise the enormity of the task. The major problem that Hamas faces is that:
(a) They are a genocidal racist terrorist organisation which seeks to impose a regime on the Middle East in which women and non muslims will be subjected to a constitutionally entrenched apartheid, in which gays and religious dissenters will be executed, in which democracy will be subverted by theocracy, and in which fundamental human rights will be destroyed.
(b) They insist on telling anybody who will listen that this is what they want to achieve.
So, obviously, Conflicts Forum has its work cut out. Who would support engagement with such an organisation?
Their solution is twofold:
(a) Rebrand this political programme as ‘Resistance (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Resistance-Islamist-Revolution-Alastair-Crooke/dp/0745328857)‘.
(b) Try to convince everybody who you can get to listen that Israel-Palestine is basically just like Northern Ireland, that Khalid Meshaal is Gerry Adams with a slightly thicker beard and accent, and that until the Good Friday Agreement, the IRA were working towards the creation of a Roman Catholic theocracy, complete with the Inquisition, and burnings at the stake, but we still managed to sort things out by compromising with them.
Here (http://www.hurryupharry.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/conflicts-forum-workshop-report-nov-07.pdf) is Conflicts Forum programme for changing public perceptions of Hamas. I don’t think I’ve put it up on Harry’s Place before, but I strongly recommend you download it and read it in full. You’ll see a very frank and open discussion of precisely what Conflicts Forum has been up to for the last few years. Most people I’ve shown it to have been pretty shocked at its… well… brazenness.
Here’s a taster:A subsidiary, but equally important, objective in seeking to invest Islamist concepts with a new significance and meaning was seen to be the shifting of Muslim discourse in the West from the defensive – arguing the right to wear hijab; or countering Islamophobia - to a positive assertion of values – albeit values expressed in words that will evoke recognition and a positive response from Western audiences.
Just as Sinn Fein in Ireland dropped the language of nationalist victim-hood in favour of formulations such as “Sinn Fein is in favour of peace … what’s wrong with that? And if you are in favour of peace too … what are you going to do about this?”; so, why not … “Islamists are in favour of reinstating the complete human being at the centre of society … what’s wrong with that? If you agree, what are you going to do about this?”; or… “Islamism seeks to place justice back on the political agenda … what’s wrong with that?”, etc.
Here is what Conflicts Forum is trying to do, in part by putting on this meeting at the Houses of Parliament.The aim of this project is to explore the possibility of a link-up between activist groups and mobilisers of opinion in order to shift the debate on Islamism from a predominantly defensive posture to a positive assertion of Islamist values and thinking. One aspect of this has been to develop ways to challenge the defamation and distortion of Islamist identity that has arisen as a result of framing the debate on Islamism in the West with the language of ‘terrorism’, ‘hostility towards modernity’, ‘cultural backwardness’ and ‘hatred of Western values’. Language has been deployed in this way not to inform or communicate. It is language misused as a tool of power and domination in order weaken Islamist identity and to present it as something repellent, irrational and threatening to the West.
The secondary purpose of the use of such language in the West is to erase the intellectual content of Islamist thinking in its challenges to modernism and contemporary Western society that has sought to provide another vision for the global future based on reason and the philosophical traditions of Islam.
Little of this Islamist intellectual challenge is heard in the West however as the public discourse suggests that there is no intellectual Islamist case to hear – Islamists are parodied as irrational luddites fighting against the inevitable march of progress and modernity, in a futile attempt to shape society in the mould of seventh century Arabia.
Secondly, the Islamist intellectual response is rarely heard in the West because its metaphors, its iconography and its category of reasoning, as presently formulated, find little resonance in secular societies. It simply does not generate the ‘oh, I get it now!’ response from audiences.
In Israel, Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor criticized the planned session. "It is regrettably ironic that a man who could never receive an entry visa to Britain because he is considered a terrorist would have the privilege to address MPs in parliament, thanks to new technologies," Palmor said.
Britain's main opposition Conservative Party said it has complained that Parliamentary facilities were being used for the talk.
"We are seriously concerned at the proposed event," said David Lidington, a main opposition Conservative party lawmaker and spokesman on foreign affairs. "Hamas remains a proscribed terrorist organization under UK law."
Well not for long, soon they will be guests of the UK and perhaps some kind of outpost for the Hamas government in exile.
Anyway this presentation by your soon to be Sharia overlords is open to all.
http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/04/21/come-meet-khalid-meshaal-at-the-house-of-lords/
Tomorrow’s “meeting” in the House of Lords with Khalid Meshaal is apparently not limited to “Parliamentarians”. Anybody can attend this meeting.
I very much hope that some of you will attend this public meeting, ask the questions that the Hamas supporters won’t be posing, and report back to us.
(I shall be going to watch “In The Loop” instead.)
Original article: 16.4.2008
I have received a nice invitation from Clare Short: JOHN, LORD ALDERDICE
extends an invitation to Parliamentarians
to
TALK WITH HAMAS
At 6.30pm on 22 April 2009
in the Grimond Room, Portcullis House
Most serious commentators now believe that there can be no peace in the Middle East without talking to Hamas. In addition, we may be facing the last chance for a two state solution.
In 2006, Hamas won more than 65.2 per cent of the vote in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Since then, Gaza has been besieged, boycotted and bombarded. There has been great human misery, but no progress and no improved security for anyone, including Israel, which is still the target of missiles.
Khalid Meshaal, Chief of the Political Bureau of Hamas will be available on a video link from Damascus. He will explain Hamas’s position and answer questions.
—————————————————————————–
RSVP:
Office of Clare Short MP
House of Commons: 020 7219 4264/4148
shortc@parliament.uk
The involvement of Lord Alderdice marks this out as a Conflicts Forum (http://conflictsforum.org/who-we-are/lord-alderdice/)event.
The purpose of Conflicts Forum is to rehabilitate Hamas. They recognise the enormity of the task. The major problem that Hamas faces is that:
(a) They are a genocidal racist terrorist organisation which seeks to impose a regime on the Middle East in which women and non muslims will be subjected to a constitutionally entrenched apartheid, in which gays and religious dissenters will be executed, in which democracy will be subverted by theocracy, and in which fundamental human rights will be destroyed.
(b) They insist on telling anybody who will listen that this is what they want to achieve.
So, obviously, Conflicts Forum has its work cut out. Who would support engagement with such an organisation?
Their solution is twofold:
(a) Rebrand this political programme as ‘Resistance (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Resistance-Islamist-Revolution-Alastair-Crooke/dp/0745328857)‘.
(b) Try to convince everybody who you can get to listen that Israel-Palestine is basically just like Northern Ireland, that Khalid Meshaal is Gerry Adams with a slightly thicker beard and accent, and that until the Good Friday Agreement, the IRA were working towards the creation of a Roman Catholic theocracy, complete with the Inquisition, and burnings at the stake, but we still managed to sort things out by compromising with them.
Here (http://www.hurryupharry.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/conflicts-forum-workshop-report-nov-07.pdf) is Conflicts Forum programme for changing public perceptions of Hamas. I don’t think I’ve put it up on Harry’s Place before, but I strongly recommend you download it and read it in full. You’ll see a very frank and open discussion of precisely what Conflicts Forum has been up to for the last few years. Most people I’ve shown it to have been pretty shocked at its… well… brazenness.
Here’s a taster:A subsidiary, but equally important, objective in seeking to invest Islamist concepts with a new significance and meaning was seen to be the shifting of Muslim discourse in the West from the defensive – arguing the right to wear hijab; or countering Islamophobia - to a positive assertion of values – albeit values expressed in words that will evoke recognition and a positive response from Western audiences.
Just as Sinn Fein in Ireland dropped the language of nationalist victim-hood in favour of formulations such as “Sinn Fein is in favour of peace … what’s wrong with that? And if you are in favour of peace too … what are you going to do about this?”; so, why not … “Islamists are in favour of reinstating the complete human being at the centre of society … what’s wrong with that? If you agree, what are you going to do about this?”; or… “Islamism seeks to place justice back on the political agenda … what’s wrong with that?”, etc.
Here is what Conflicts Forum is trying to do, in part by putting on this meeting at the Houses of Parliament.The aim of this project is to explore the possibility of a link-up between activist groups and mobilisers of opinion in order to shift the debate on Islamism from a predominantly defensive posture to a positive assertion of Islamist values and thinking. One aspect of this has been to develop ways to challenge the defamation and distortion of Islamist identity that has arisen as a result of framing the debate on Islamism in the West with the language of ‘terrorism’, ‘hostility towards modernity’, ‘cultural backwardness’ and ‘hatred of Western values’. Language has been deployed in this way not to inform or communicate. It is language misused as a tool of power and domination in order weaken Islamist identity and to present it as something repellent, irrational and threatening to the West.
The secondary purpose of the use of such language in the West is to erase the intellectual content of Islamist thinking in its challenges to modernism and contemporary Western society that has sought to provide another vision for the global future based on reason and the philosophical traditions of Islam.
Little of this Islamist intellectual challenge is heard in the West however as the public discourse suggests that there is no intellectual Islamist case to hear – Islamists are parodied as irrational luddites fighting against the inevitable march of progress and modernity, in a futile attempt to shape society in the mould of seventh century Arabia.
Secondly, the Islamist intellectual response is rarely heard in the West because its metaphors, its iconography and its category of reasoning, as presently formulated, find little resonance in secular societies. It simply does not generate the ‘oh, I get it now!’ response from audiences.