Blog Page 1821
Blagging the news: The Iran-Israel covert war
Mrs Jones: Surely the latest attempts on diplomatic lives in Thailand, Georgia and India are linked to the nuclear issue; such semi-covert attacks are an extension of the bitter diplomatic struggle that has been central to Iranian foreign policy for years.
Mr Jones: Indeed my dear, the recent attempt on the lives of Israeli officials is hardly surprising to those of us who have been following the development of Iran’s nuclear program.
The Iran-Israel covert war
What:
Staff at Israeli embassies in India, Georgia and now Bangkok have been targeted by bomb attacks in the last week, with four people injured.
In a move that shocked nobody, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran of masterminding them. This comes after an Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated by a magnetic bomb attached to his car by two men on motorbikes (a technique widely attributed to the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad). It was the fourth such attack on Iranian scientists in two years, and strikingly similar to an attack in 2010 on the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency. Add to that the Stuxnet computer virus that damaged Iran’s centrifuges in 2009, and it’s all looking a bit well-organised. Many experts believe this is the latest in a string of tit-for-tat state-sponsored assassinations stretching back decades.
Why:
Iranian President Ahmadinejad claims the country’s nuclear program is for entirely peaceful, energy-generation purposes. The West, especially Israel and the USA, are convinced the real aim is to produce a nuclear weapon, and Ahmadinejad has previously spoken of “wiping Israel off the map”, so the Israelis are understandably worried. Across the pond, Republican Presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have both said they’d support covert operations against Iran to prevent them acquiring a nuclear capacity. Seeing as no country has admitted to any of these attacks, it would hardly be surprising if there are more reprisals against either Iranian or Israeli targets. Or both. This isn’t over.
Soundbites to wow with:
“The escalation in violence between the Iranian and Israeli intelligence agencies can only harm the already-sour relations between the two countries.”
“With President Ahmadinejad bent on a nuclear Iran, I can only foresee more violence between the two countries.”
Don’t say:
“Why don’t we just invade Iran and sort this out once and for all?”
Interview: The Awkward Silence
If you are bored of the Burton Taylor then 6th week has something quite unique in store: a radio play. It sounds a little bit like something your dad listens to on a Sunday afternoon but I am assured by The Awkward Silence that this could not be further from the truth. Assisted by Adam Lebovits, Max Fletcher and Liam Shaw, they promise to bring their audience at The Port Mahon, a taste of their unbelievably tense detective narrative, with ‘guns and shit’. ‘It’s the first half-hour episode in a detective-comedy series of ours called ‘Shrapnel and Fogg’. Set in East Putney in 1910, it follows Detectives Shrapnel and Fogg as they are introduced to one another and begin a partnership of solving grisly crimes. The first revolves around an evil criminal called The Salamander. He’s a bloody weirdo, and leaves dead salamanders at the scene of every crime he perpetrates. Can you imagine that? The guy needs help.’
For a comedy duo who usually write for the stage, I am told that working on a radio play has been ‘a lovely change’ but it has also been a deeply challenging one. ‘You haven’t got the opportunity for any visual gags, any real nods to the audience. In other ways however, it has been a more convenient change because so many of the verbal jokes work for radio but would struggle on stage. What’s interesting, but perhaps obvious, is that so far we’ve got no idea about how it will be received, as we’ve never really done radio stuff; and for half an hour of material, that uncertainty’s a bit stronger compared to just testing out a couple of new sketches’
Their tactic to make us part with our well earned cash then? ‘Cramming in as many nutters with weird voices as possible, and having lots of fun with jokes revolving around wordplay and verbal misunderstandings.’ He chuckles, ‘I’m a big fan of language so hamming up that side of things – and twisting clichés, playing with turns of phrase, etc. – is great. For this specific project it’s also been nice, and of course fairly easy, messing with the detective format. I’d say that one of the reasons we’re dipping our toes into radio is that it’s a very viable and appealing form in which to showcase comedy and develop a reputation. And there’s a lot to be said for the fact that it doesn’t involve getting the train to Camden and doing a gig to two people…not that that’s ever happened’.
‘The Awkward Silence’ will be performing at The Port Mahon on Friday 24th Feb, followed by stand up from Paul Fung, George Chopping, Rory and Time and Liam Shaw. Tickets are £5.00 (or £4.50 if you whisper the code ‘There’s some salmon in my knickers…’)
5 Minute Tute: Falkand Islands
Why do Argentina and the UK disagree over the Falkland Islands?
Argentina thinks that the Falkland Islands (or The Malvinas, as they know them) are their own territory because they are only 200 miles off the Argentinian coast. As far as they are concerned this is the single most important and emotional issue of foreign policy. Britain claims that the islands have been a legal colony for nearly 200 years, although shortly before the 1982 war, the Thatcher government was trying to shed this responsibility. They had a long term proposal for joint custody for 50 years followed by a transfer into Argentinian control. But the islanders themselves were adamant that they wanted British rule, as the Argentine Junta in the 1970s had been a vicious dictatorship. When we tried to save money by withdrawing our patrol ships, the Argentinians thought we were no longer concerned, and mounted an invasion. Faced with this, British forces were sent to recover the islands from 8000 miles away, which they achieved in less than three months of brief and bitter conflict.
Why, after almost 30 years, has the dispute been brought back to international attention?
The Argentines, despite losing the war, never gave up their claim to the Malvinas, and continued to say “The Malvinas are Argentinian”. Now that Argentina has overcome terrible economic problems, the islands have come back to the top of their list of issues. Their glamorous female president has started blowing the Malvinas trumpet knowing she will gain huge popularity for it. Whereas in ‘82 the Argentinian regime was despicable and despotic, they can now claim to be an effective democracy. The Argentinians are not suggesting they’re going to invade, but are claiming that Britain is “militarising” the South Atlantic by sending a new warship to conduct an offshore patrol, though it is actually replacing an older one. There is known to be oil in the offshore waters, which raises the stakes, though it may be difficult and damaging to extract it. The UN retains its policy of decolonisation and self-determination, but the islanders themselves are not interested, and their views have to be taken into account.
Will the Falklands remain British?
By invading in 1982, the Argentinians turned the Falklands into a much more important issue than it had previously been for Britain. After fighting for the Islands and losing over 250 lives, it is difficult to negotiate them away. For as long as Mrs Thatcher remains alive, and for as long as there is a Conservative government in power they will stay British, and Labour won’t give them up soon either. In the long term we might prefer to be rid of them, but now we’ve fought over the islands that is much more difficult.
What is the future of the Falklands dispute?
The Argentinians will always want the Malvinas and they will never be happy until they own them. Argentina should be a close ally and important trading partner. They had been very pro-British before the war, and in 1982 many of their weapons were British and they even had two modern British warships. The irony is that if the Argentines had not invaded we might have agreed a handover timetable by now; but equally it was the trauma of the war that has created a functioning democracy which was not there before. They now seek a political resolution and are pressurising Britain through the UN and other South American countries. There is no question of a war: the islands are much more strongly defended today than they were in 1982, but the question is how long we want to maintain this expensive level of defence, in the face of possible international disapproval.
Rupert Nichol is a retired naval officer who served in HMS Hermes during the Falklands conflict in 1982, and was liaison officer with embarked media teams from the BBC and ITN
No to Norrington
After the recent announcement of Keble’s collections reform, I am convinced that the Norrington Table should be scrapped.
This ridiculous rankings chart, which will inevitably fluctuate every year on the basis of just a handful of results, does not do students justice. A quick glance at the Table since 2000 demonstrates how inconsistent college rankings are.
I write not as a Keble student, but as a Mansfielder. Mansfield college illustrates these fluctuation very well. Until last year, it was known to some as the college that was 29th out of 30 in the Norrington Table. This year, however, the college came 12th. I was very pleased with this achievement; but the reality, especially in a small college like Mansfield, is probably that two or three extra students got firsts than in the previous year.
Given this variation in the table, I was surprised to learn that in a recent meeting, tutors raised the question of how students could be made to work hard enough to ensure their college was near the top of the Norrington Table.
This is an astonishing attitude on a number of levels. For one, students don’t need to be ‘made to work hard’ for their finals – we know full well that these degrees are our future and that, without 2.1s in them, entering employment will be considerably more difficult. One only needs to walk through any library in Oxford in the middle of Trinity to witness how hard finalists work. Furthermore, the difference between a 2.1 (three points in the Norrington) and a First (five points) amounts to more than just working harder – in arts subjects at least. Some students will work incredibly hard and miss out on the First, whilst others will do the same amount of work (or even less) but get the right exam questions.
Ultimately, the question raised in this meeting encapsulates everything that is wrong with the Table. No tutor should be asking what is necessary to boost their college’s place in a set of rankings. Rather, tutors should be asking how they can most effectively help students fulfil their potential, guide them through what is actually an immensely stressful process and best prepare them for their future.
We didn’t go through the lengthy application process, work on countless essays or problem sheets and accumulate thousands of pounds of debt in the process, to be statistics for a table. We deserve to be seen as thinking people who need to gain the best education possible in order to be helpful, responsible and intelligent citizens. If the Norrington Table is abolished, perhaps this will once again be the focus of tutors.
The Final Stages: Mephisto
After seven weeks of work Mephisto is nearing completion; we have moved from a disparate group of acquaintances to a cast, and our characters have become friends, enemies, family, and lovers – and for some of us, all of the above at pretty much the same time. We have mapped out fights, choreographed dances, and have been forced to make good on all the little white-lies we told about our musical abilities when we auditioned. Above all though, we hope we have created a performance that respects and honours its source material.
With any show there is an obligation to ‘do justice’ to the writer’s work, the issues it seeks to explore and to the character you have been asked to play, however in Mephisto this sense of duty has been far greater. At every stage of the rehearsal process we have been reminded that Mephisto narrative is a true one, that it is composed of genuine experiences, and that our characters represent real individuals.
The idea of transforming these experiences into a ‘performance’ runs the risk of seeming disingenuous and opportunistic – the theatrical equivalent of the ‘Tragic Life Stories’ section of a high-street bookshop. However, through our research and discussions it has become apparent that the only way to do justice to the suffering experienced by those to whom the play is dedicated, is by doing justice to the vibrancy and vitality with which these individuals opposed and subverted the forces that sought to silence them.
The Germany of the Weimar Republic was a place of unprecedented cultural, scientific, and social progress, and some of the most ebullient scenes in Mephisto are the performances that take place in the Peppermill – the Bolshevik Kabarett (the ‘k’ and the two ‘t’s denoting its political intent, as opposed to the sexual burlesque of a ‘cabaret’) that was run in real-life by Klaus Mann and his sister Erika. These scenes depict a satire of malign bureaucracy and institutionalised bigotry that still feels fresh and exciting. Given the energy and inventiveness of those who inspired the play, to perform Mephisto as a dour sob-story would be the most self-indulgent thing we could do.
For my part, I have been given the task of exploring why Nazism proved so appealing to so many. My character Hans Miklas is a disenfranchised young man who experiences the deprivation and poverty of his life in inflation-crippled Hamburg as a symbol of the betrayal of Germany by its bourgeois leaders. However, while it is easy to give these sorts of intellectually rationalised explanations for his actions, far harder is the task of emotionally engaging with the liberating pleasure human beings can derive from legitimised hatred.
One of the stranger intellectual processes acting requires of you is resisting the temptation to pass judgement on your character in performance. It would be easy for the other actors playing National Socialists and I to manifest our disgust at the things we have to say and do, but it would also cause our performances to become muddy and half-hearted. The challenge we face in portraying those involved with the machinery of Nazism is discovering how to enjoy espousing such abhorrent values… before coming off-stage on Saturday night and washing our mouths out with bleach.
Any discussion of ‘the theatre’ (Darling!) and the process of play-making is apt to sound self-congratulatory, but the down-to-earth atmosphere that our director Milja has fostered in the rehearsal-room has meant that ego-stroking has never threatened to obscure the reasons we feel Mephisto’s story ought to be told. In the end, so long as we can convey those reasons to the audience the whole process will have been worthwhile.
‘We never broke any rules’
Paul Kenyon is not an ordinary journalist. His CV reads like a mixture of James Bond and Punked; he has sleuthed his way around some of the most violent dictatorships on the planet, and was the first person to film Iran’s secret nuclear facilities. He has tracked migrants across the Sahara along a trail of dead bodies and discarded water bottles, gate-crashed a wedding to expose it as a visa scam, and even faked his own death.
Kenyon is a fairly chipper character, perhaps surprisingly given the bleak material he deals with first hand. Smiling, he recounts his run-in with Iran’s security services after filming a documentary on the country’s nuclear facilities. “They ran up to us shouting BBC! BBC! as we got to the airport, then dragged us to a side room and went through our luggage till they found the tapes. It was the most terrifying experience of my life.”
Eventually, the crew were allowed to return to the UK, once they had been relieved of their more sensitive recordings and been persuaded never to go back to Iran. Luckily, they had sent the cameraman back a day early with another copy, and he’d managed to slip past the guards.
I ask where he picked up the kind of skills needed to sneak past security agents quite accustomed to beating people until they do what they want to film a facility kept secret from even the UN. In part, he says, the job is self-selecting. “Most investigative journalists I know are rule-breakers and have a problem with authority, and through school, through university, you develop tactics to get around those rules. It’s instinctive; if someone says this is the room that you’re not allowed to go into, that’s the room you want to go into.” Even so, that taste for rule-breaking takes honing. “I’ve had loads of training from ex-police officers, learning how to avoid getting detected, how to trail a car in traffic, how to follow someone without being noticed.”
Kenyon rarely reports from the UK, instead working mainly in Africa and the Middle East. I ask what draws him to foreign reporting. “In Britain we can be quite blinkered, only interested in our own lives. I suppose it’s slightly idealistic, but I think that it’s important for people to be able to put their own lives into context and see how fortunate we are, which is a bit of a cliché but its true.’ As much as anything, though, it’s about the desire for a good story. He tells of “rich seams of corruption, there for the taking”, with an oddly bittersweet eagerness that I suspect you need in order to be willing to report from some of the grimmest parts of the world.
He seems a little embarrassed about his early work. He made a name for himself in his first show, Kenyon Confronts, with a program that exposed a life insurance scam in Haiti. Not beating about the about the bush by questioning the scammers, he simply faked his own death and filmed the funeral that they arranged for him, which came complete with a service and a band to play a requiem. He even got a shot of himself mourning his own tragic demise in the back of the church. That, he says now, was “a bit sensationalist”.
His recent documentaries, made mainly for Panorama, are far broader in scope than exposés of individual cases of wrongdoing. He spent weeks following a group of African migrants along the trail from Ghana to the southern coast of the Mediterranean. His aim now is to give airtime to the voices of the people often hidden from the West, rather than just the wrongdoings that go on outside of Europe. “It annoys me when people in the Daily Mail or whatever claim that African migrants are only in the UK so they can get their hands on benefits. They don’t; they come to work, because they don’t even know what benefits are.”
He tells of the respect the migrants receive in their hometowns. “These men are viewed as heroes in their village; their families save up to pay for their travel, so that they can send money back to the village from Europe”. Some make the journey several times, only to be deported home from Libya or Italy to wait for another chance to make the journey.
The migrants he tracked are not motivated solely by money. They have a sense of their place in the world’s history and politics that rarely makes it into discussions of migrants, idiosyncratic as their beliefs are. “One man told me that there was nothing wrong with going to Europe for money, since the Europeans had been taking what they wanted from Africa for centuries; he was even convinced that there are huge vaults under London and New York containing preserved trees to guarantee the first world’s wood supply.”
He laughs about the twists and turns of getting permission to film in Libya, where he investigated the trafficking of African migrants, as well as covering the civil war. “We’d try every contact we had in the government there and get no response for months. Then, in the end we got a call in the middle of the night saying that we could come, telling us even what flights we had to be on. They were all mad.”
Are British minds starting to broaden in step with globalisation, I ask. Kenyon is optimistic, “Over the last ten to fifteen years and very much in the last five, there has been a real change. People are starting to think about the stuff we have taken for granted, that we import very cheap T-shirts from Cambodia, coffee and chocolate from Mexico and Africa. You’ve got to ask yourself why they’re so cheap, and they’re so cheap because they don’t have the same standards of labour as we do, because there’s huge exploitation in those countries, in some cases even slave labour.” Paul tracked a group of child slaves from the families from which they had been taken to cocoa farms in Ghana, and eventually freed several with the help of Ghana’s police (who then claimed all the credit).
I ask how he feels about the backlash against aggressive journalistic techniques that erupted after the News of the World was shut down, and whether he feels that his own methods have much in common with the nastier end of what went on at the tabloids. He laughs, “The tabloids crossed a line that we don’t go near; phone hacking is, obviously, completely illegal. Of course, investigative journalists might hire private detectives, but then whether you want to call them a private detective or call them a freelance journalist doesn’t really make a lot of difference. I don’t even know what the difference is.”
I ask about blagging, one of the methods singled out in the coalition’s Leveson inquiry as an example of unethical tabloid tactics. He hesitates, “Well, of course, when you’re working undercover you are pretending not to be a journalist, but there is a difference. Everything we went undercover to expose was serious crime, or failing that, the next level below, which has to be pretty serious anti-social behaviour. We didn’t just go after celebrities.” Kenyon is a staunch believer in the right to deceive in the name of the public interest, however much that term may have been stretched by the tabloids. “Yes there are similarities, but we never broke the rules.”
Paul Kenyon spoke at the Oxford Media Society last week
Lovely Bones: Behind-the-scenes video
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Video by Nikos Sarikakis, assisted by Natalia Davies
Photography by AERYNN
Jewellery by SweetDelirium
Makeup and hair by Gemma Sutton, assisted by Victoria Poland
Model – Verity Whiter
www.aerynn.co.uk
www.gemmasutton.com
SweetDelirium online store
Culture Vulture
Romance of the
Middle Ages
Bodleian Exhibition Room, open now
This exhibition aims to demonstrate the influence that medieval romance literature has had on culture over the last thousand years.
Free admission, ordinary opening hours.
Romance of the Middle Ages
Bodleian Exhibition Room, open now
This exhibition aims to demonstrate the influence that medieval romance literature has had on culture over the last thousand years.
Free admission, ordinary opening hours.
No One is Here Except All of Us
Available now
In her hotly ancipated debut novel, Ramona Ausebel delivers a muted and fable-like account of a young woman’s struggle to survive Nazi-dominated Europe.
We Were Here
19th Feb. Magdalen Film Society
As part of LGBTQ month, Magdalen Film Society are showing this 2011 documentary on the San Francisco AIDS crisis.
Doors 7.30pm, tickets £3 non-members.
For more LGBTQ month news, see our spread on pages 24-25 of the paper, or the Culture section on Cherwell.org.
Oxford Film Festival
20th-24th February
Oxford’s active film community unites in 6th week to take over the city with five days of events, screenings and premieres. See the latest films by Oxford film-makers and hear from professionals in the industry.
Tickets £2/£4 on the door (members/non-members), £3/£6 for the week
Echo-Nomix + RAW CUTS
The Cellar, 21st February
Oxide Radio’s pioneering new music shows bring you a night of contemporary classical and underground electronica.
Tickets £3/4, doors 10pm.
Mephisto
The Oxford Playhouse, 22nd-25th February
Based on the Klaus Mann novel, Mephisto tells the story of a revolutionary theatre group against the backdrop of Hitler’s rise to power.
Doors 2.30/7.30pm, Tickets £15/£12/£10
Street Photography
Competition deadline 1st March 2012
The London Festival of Photography is hosting its annual student award; finalists can win a day’s shooting with celebrated photographer Peter Dench and their photos displayed in a Bloomsbury gallery, with £1,000 for the overall winner. The perfect opportunity for all student photographers.
For more details, visit http://www.lfph.org/awards
Ten torturous years and counting
In November 2001, Mohamedou Ould Slahi was detained by Mauritanian police. After being held for a week without trial, he was told that he would be sent to Jordan. Naturally shocked, he asked why. The Mauritanians told him that they were acting under American orders. ‘Why weren’t they protecting his rights?’, he asked. ‘Because the Americans said they will punish us if we don’t turn you over,’ was the reply. So he was sent to Jordan; imprisoned; interrogated; and denied access to the Red Cross. Soon he was transferred again. This time to Bagram, an American base, where he was threatened with torture. And then, of course, he was sent to Guantanamo. He is still there, untried and mistreated.
How do we react to this story? The leader of the free world is implicated in arbitrary detention, torture, and shocking disregard for international law. But we’ve heard this all before. Everyone knows about Guantanamo: practically everyone in the UK has condemned it, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail. Repetition acts as a narcotic: can we still be shocked by Guantanamo’s tales of abuse after ten long years?
The answer is that we must be. We must remind ourselves of these crimes and continue to be outraged by this expression of contempt for human rights. We must remember the story of Binyam Mohamed. The judge who presided over his case noted, “Binyam Mohamed’s trauma lasted for two long years. During that time, he was physically and psychologically tortured. His genitals were mutilated. He was deprived of sleep and food … Captors held him in stress positions for days at a time. He was forced to listen to piercingly loud music and the screams of other prisoners while locked in a pitch-black cell.”
And let’s consider the treatment of Mohamed al-Qahtani. He was forced to wear a bra and had a thong placed on his head. He was tied by a leash, led around the room and made to perform dog tricks. He was sexually humiliated, forced to listen to loud music for hours, deprived of sleep, and exposed to extremes of heat and cold. Dogs were used to mock him, “brought into the interrogation room and directed to growl, bark, and show [their] teeth” at the detainee. It’s appropriate that dogs played a role in his torture, stripped of humanity as he was. His dignity is nonexistent.
In 1911, the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on torture proclaimed that “the whole subject is now only of historical interest as far as Europe is concerned”. It is the sort of thing that “was frequently inflicted by the Greek despots”, but is now considered barbaric by all civilised countries. After the first half of the twentieth century this judgement appeared sadly premature. It was to ensure that the horrific war crimes of the Second World War did not happen again that America played a leading role in establishing the codes of international law which safeguard human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. This was taken almost verbatim from the US Constitution, which declares that “cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted.” This same constitution grants the right to a fair trial. It was to circumvent such laws that the Bush administration opened Guantanamo, an off-shore military base where “enemy detainees” could be kept indefinitely. A Bush memo in 2002 declared that detainees were “not legally entitled” to humane care. Detainees are also not entitled to a trial. Dick Cheney elaborated upon America’s interrogations in Guantanamo: “American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information.” “An elaborate legal proceeding”, of course, means the due process of law.
Things have improved under Obama, but not enough. Torture has stopped, but there has been no attempt to mete out justice upon those who inflicted it. Detainees remain stranded in this legal no-man’s land. The administration tried to close the camp, but this goal seems to have been abandoned. The reason for this failure, according to Obama, was the difficult “politics” of the issue, and Attorney General Eric Holder attacked Congress for opposing the move. This seems convincing until we remember that nation states may not claim political controversy as an excuse for systematically violating international law.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration appears indifferent to the human rights disgrace that is Guantanamo. When it does speak out against it, it uses purely pragmatic arguments: ‘The detainee camp helps our enemies and is counter-productive’. Few would dispute that: even Bush has conceded that the camp is “a propaganda tool for our enemies”. But to argue this is to believe that human rights can be suspended, anywhere, anytime, if there is any reason to suspect that it might be useful to do so. Sadly, this view won support in the aftermath of 9/11. Nonetheless, it is morally unacceptable, and Amnesty International is opposed to any attempt to subordinate human rights to political expediency. It is long past time for America to reclaim its Enlightenment legacy and remember Benjamin Franklin’s adage that “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”. If the American government heeds this advice and shuts down Guantanamo, it will not only improve America’s global image, it will strike a much needed blow for human dignity around the world.
