Was Qatar’s human rights record different a year ago?
Keir Starmer has announced that Labour is ‘boycotting’ the Qatar World Cup over that country’s human rights record – except he won’t really, because he said he’ll still be watching the event ‘from my sofa’.
But last year, when Qatar’s human rights record was no better than it is now, Starmer and general secretary David Evans were perfectly happy to accept a substantial corporate sponsorship from the Qatari-owned Canary Wharf for a conference fringe event in Brighton:
Starmer may wish to avoid going to Qatar because the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera would almost certainly pursue him constantly for comment on its landmark ‘Labour Files’ documentary series, which last month exposed rampant racism, smears, rigging and abuse by his right-wing faction and his own – at best – failure to take action against the perpetrators.
But based on his and his regime’s record, his ‘boycott’ has little or nothing to do with Qatar’s human rights record.
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Yes, Starmer’s ‘boycott’ is not a principled stance. It’s like everything else he does: the action of a self-interested coward who could never be true to any claimed principle or belief. He resigned during chicken coup (because others had), now he’s having his own private chicken run (because he’s a recreant). Lowest of the low.
Funny that Starmer’s LP should make such an announcement now, just a few weeks before the tournament begins, and not a month or two ago. AND just three weeks after Al Jazeera aired The Labour Files documentaries. And here’s a bunch of people – ie Starmer and Evans and Co – who have been abusing and purging left-wingers en masse, AND subverting Labour’s democratic processes and stitching up left-wing MPs etc AND dictating what members can and cannot discuss etc, etc, etc.
In a word, acting like a fascist dictator!
Off topic, but very interesting…..
The following document/cable was written in February 2008 by the then US Russian ambassador (and current CIA director) William Burns, and published by wikileaks. Note who it’s addressed to (at the top of the page), and please read the whole thing. Here’s a couple of excerpts from it:
Following a muted first reaction to
Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP)
at the Bucharest summit (ref A), Foreign Minister Lavrov and
other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition,
stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion
as a potential military threat.
Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch
a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about
the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does
Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine
Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears
unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would
seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us
that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions
in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the
ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a
major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In
that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to
intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html#efmBTnBfi
The New York Times is now promoting the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion:
https://fair.org/home/action-alert-nyt-celebrates-neo-nazi-azov-unit/
The New York Times is now promoting the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion:
Not all that surprising, I suppose, seeing as the eugenics movement in the USA was used as the blue print for the Nazis ‘racial purification’, while many of its corporations and businesses maintained economic ties with the regime before and during WW2. No doubt there’s still a strong following of such ideology there, even if its not apparent on the surface.
At least we know that he has watched it and can’t take action against AJ.
Whoops, apologies just posted this on the wrong page!
Off topic:
Excellent piece, as usual, from Jonathan Cook in Dorset Eye
Westerners are deluded if they believe they are the good guys
Stark contradictions in West’s treatment of the Ukraine war and the occupation and siege of Palestine should serve as a wake-up call.
No one took responsibility for the explosion over the weekend that ripped through a section of the Kerch Bridge that links Russia to Crimea and was built by Moscow after it annexed the peninsula back in 2014.
But it was not just Kyiv’s gleeful celebrations that indicated the main suspect. Within hours, the Ukrainian authorities had released a set of commemorative stamps depicting the destruction.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was under no illusions either. On Monday, he struck out with a torrent of missiles that hit major Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv and Lviv. It was a pale, Slavic echo of Israel’s intermittent bombardments of Gaza, which are expressly intended to send the Palestinian enclave “back to the Stone Age”.
If the scenes looked familiar – an attack by one party, followed by a massive retaliatory strike from the other – the mood and language that greeted the Ukrainian attack and the Russian counter-attack felt noticeably different from what passes for normal western commentary about Israel and Palestine.
https://dorseteye.com/westerners-are-deluded-if-they-believe-they-are-the-good-guys/
What we – on the left – have to bear in mind, is that the vast majority of people in Britain and the West don’t know about Nato’s expansion to the East during the past twenty-five years AND Russia’s opposition to it, and it’s precisely for that reason that Biden and the leaders of Nato states et al can dissemble the falsehood that the invasion of Ukraine is down to Putin’s imperialist ambitions when, in actual fact, it’s exactly the opposite. But for US ‘interests’ in Vietnam, for example, the Vietnam war would never have happened.
AND talking of the World Cup Football Tournament – which Russia hosted in 2018 (AND for the very fist time) – it’s totally absurd to think that Putin would have operatives carry out an assassination attempt just three months or so before the tournament begins, and just two days before the 100 days to go (before it starts) celebrations. But EXACTLY what your enemies would do!
And as I’ve said before, the chances of two people who had come into contact with a nerve agent several hours earlier becoming ill and incapacitated in exactly the same moment are absolute zero. Oh, right, and it’s just coincidence of course that the most senior nurse in the whole of the British army just happened to be walking past in that moment and come to their aid (the Skriipals, that is)!
And the chemical weapons experts only discovered the novichok on the front door handle three weeks later, after going in and out of Skripal’s house time and time again DURING those three weeks! Talk about a Farce!!
supposedly discovered, that is.
PS And I wonder why DS Nick Bailey and his two colleagues didn’t take the cat and the guinea pigs with them when they went to Skripal’s house on the Sunday evening (and arrange to have them checked over and taken care of). It is of course inconceivable that they wouldn’t have done!
Vet Howard Taylor, 56, said: “We phoned the police on day one to offer to help if they needed it.
“I thought it unlikely the police would have gone to the house and not done anything.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5833121/russian-sergei-skripals-pet-cat/
You are quite correct Alan the French presence in Vietnam would have faded away much like it did in its close neighbour Cambodia..We enjoy some of the French culture still here along with a few French.Theres no bitterness over the fact that Cambodia was a protectrate of france.although the drift to communism was feared by the French in Cambodia and Vietnam…..luckily the Veitnamese did not have a insane leader like pol pot..and his khmer rouge.
USA meddling in S.East Asia will be met with strong resistance from the new superpower China and of that theres no longer any doubt….The real danger is that Russia and many other countries feel threatened by this western expansion and I hope that China and Russia will not come together in much the same way as europe and the USA
…Mutual destruction is very much on the agenda with the manoeuvring of another western failed empire America…!
Why can’t you all see that the Labour Party as we know it has gone, for goodness sake Resign now and form a new left party, Labour is finished, if you vote for Labour you are voting for a mini Conservative party. LEAVE NOW AND START A NEW PARTY FOR GODS SAKE! Give us something to vote for!