Tag: gabriel webber

The last November Chanukkah was in the 19th century, so for those who don’t remember that, this year’s early festive approach might have caught you unawares. If so, you’ll appreciate this opportunity to buy some seasonal gifts at knock-down prices all the more.

On behalf of the entire editorial team of Gabrielquotes, I would like to wish all readers a refreshing and joyful Chanukkah. Those who will be in the Sussex area – Jewish or not – are encouraged to drop by the Meeting House at 4:30pm any day between 27 November and 4 December to see the candles being lit. Chag sameach!

Festival of religious freedom

The Telegraph ran an interesting story this week (now there’s a phrase you don’t hear so often):

Gosh, but doesn’t that sound unlikely. Jollies to the London Zoo or the local swimming pool are fun but surely bunking off isn’t an issue of racism!

But, it turns out that the school trip was to something dramatically described by the Telegraph as a “religious workshop about Islam” – which was actually an exhibition about Islam, hosted at Staffordshire University; so it was about as much a ‘religious workshop’ in the same way that a talk by the local police would be a criminal workshop.

One parent, shocked at being accused of racism, said: “To be told my kids have got to attend this workshop is disgusting. It’s not our religion. We should have a right to stop our children going.”

Well quite; it’s not our religion, why should we bother to learn anything about those bloody foreigners with weird hats? How could anyone describe this normal, mainstream view as racist?

Now of course the school chose the wrong tactic, in their quest to make Religious Education popular, by sending out threatening letters. No question. And of course Islam is a religion rather than a race.

And more to the point, labelling children as racist because of their parent’s decision to shelter them from people with a different skin colour seems very unfair: what sort of right-wing newspaper would characterise the son with the behaviour of the father?

But by portraying RE as a menace that our terrible liberal nanny state is forcing on impressionable children, isn’t the Telegraph encouraging people to be just like Stupid Parent Woman who I quoted above?

John Duffy and other animals

Sussex’s Registrar and Secretary has a much more interesting colleague. Paul Greatrix, registrar at the University of Nottingham, runs a splendid blog called Registrarism featuring a regular column, True Crime on Campus.

TCoC contains excerpts from the logbooks maintained by his security officers, who – unlike at Sussex – seem to spend their time not intimidating students who have the nerve to treat a university as a place encouraging the free exchange of ideas, but on rather more unusual pursuits. For example:

20:10—Report of a large number of students running around the Trent Building. Security Officers attended. The students explained that they were playing hide and seek. The Hide and Seek Society President was found by Officers and spoken to. Officers conducted a search of the building and located all the other hiding students. Officers declined their turn to go and hide.

23:10—Conference delegates contacted Security from Sherwood Hall to say they were too hot. Delegates were advised to open their windows.

07:55—A male contacted the Security control room stating that he had discovered the meaning of life and urgently needed to speak to a Professor in Physics.

…and so on. Check out the other stories of True Crime on Campus here!

People behaving irritatingly

Paul Greatrix’s security officers might be breathing a sigh of relief, because Parliament is currently considering a law which would allow anyone to obtain a court order (an Injunction to Prevent Nuisance or Disorder, or Ipna) against anyone else if that person has been displaying behaviour “capable of causing nuisance or annoyance.”

As Baroness Mallalieu said in a recent debate:

There is no human activity that does not annoy someone somewhere. This measure risks being used against every single one of us for something we do – protestors; people with noisy children playing outside; people preaching in the street; people canvassing; people ringing church bells; pet owners; carol singers; clay-pigeon shooters; and even nudists.

To this list one might add, blogs that criticise universities, blogs that criticise elected local policing bodies and people who have a pun for every situation. (Fortunately I’m protected against self-incrimination. For now.)

No doubt the government will pursue Ipnas against people who engage in such irritating behaviours as wilfully being foreign; claiming disability benefits in a built-up area; and, something which particularly irritates Iain Duncan Smith, expecting the state to save them from starvation while they await a tribunal decision on whether or not, erm, Iain Duncan Smith is allowed to withdraw their benefits.

And of course the most annoying behaviour of all: trying to criminalise annoying behaviour.

The hashtag is #feelfreetoannoyme

Five of the best

• The Guardian: What threat to law and order is an over-articulate history graduate? – but why not arrest them anyway, eh.
• Buzzfeed: 13 problems you often encounter in Waitrose – the only place where cambozola cheese feels entitled to the label ‘essential’.
• BBC iPlayer: An Adventure in Space and Time (90-minute VIDEO) – a beautiful dramatised account of how two [Jewish] TV producers in 1963 battled apathy, low budgets and even the JFK assassination to introduce Doctor Who to our screens.
• Tumblr: Bad engagement photos – does what it says on the tin, very very well.
• The Jewish Chronicle: LibDem’s [sic] inaction over David Ward is contemptible – an interesting assertion that anti-Semitism is “now LibDem policy,” but sadly this ‘journalist’ has not come across Hanlon’s razor.

Who da man?

In tonight’s episode, Greek values were imposed on the Temple Jews by Helen Isation. Britain’s oil supply was kept open by Ameer Akkle. The House of Lords debate about annoyance was a dull, baron affair. And thank goodness there’s still one high street retailer with the guts never knowingly to undersell cambozola cheese. This was an Gabrielquotes production.

If you’re not Jewish or want to skip straight to the bit about the riot police, click here!

Pesach sameach from Gabrielquotes! I’ll be taking a bit of a holiday over the next week or two so enjoy it while you can…

Why not get comfortable and dunk an egg in salt-water while I pass over to the Biblical Broadcasting Corporation for a whole plateful of this year’s Pesach News:

Also in the news: could karpas represent the green shoots of economic recovery? (That’s absolutely enough of that. -Ed.)

Welcome aboard Sussex Airlines

(They say the old ones are the best…)

There’s a scene in the wonderful sitcom Party in which a group of students are trying to decide where their new party should sit on the political spectrum. Eventually they decide, “We won’t be left-wing or right-wing. We’ll be inside the ’plane.” I’ve spent much of this week inside the aeroplane that is Sussex, straddling the wings, and it still amazes me that I didn’t have more fellow passengers.

The Overture

Sussex hit the national headlines on Monday due to a ‘national demonstration’ against outsourcing for which protestors were bussed in from other universities around the country. The high point of this demonstration actually came a couple of days before, when the Lord High Registrar, John Duffy, complained about not being consulted by the students bringing “outsiders” onto campus.

I’m genuinely at a bit of a loss to know how to satirise that. I would probably have done something like…

…but unfortunately that wouldn’t be satire, it would be real life, because that’s exactly what he said. I’ve always felt that anyone without a sense of irony should be barred from holding public office, but I guess that would leave Sussex without any leadership. (Well, even more without any leadership than at the moment, that is.)

Act 1: It Kicks Off

So, the March 25th protest went ahead with its own hashtag and everything. It started peacefully, with the University shutting down half of campus [update April 2013: page now deleted by University – wonder why – but a copy is here] of their own accord to frustrate the demonstrators, which made things easier for the demonstrators, who aimed, erm, to shut down campus.

Around 1,000 miscellaneous people – very miscellaneous in some cases – turned up to Library Square at 1o’clock to hear some rousing speeches, including one by a supportive Labour MP who got heckled because Labour introduced tuition fees so they’re obviously all the enemy.

Observing this gathering of hundreds and hundreds of committed students, the President of the Sussex Conservative Society took the opportunity to claim that “the demo is having little impact” on the basis that – and I quote – “all the broadcasters there are using second-rate tripods.” Yes. That is a well-known scientific way of measuring the impact of a protest, and I’m sure that the BBC send out their very best tripods to cover TorySoc events such as the upcoming and sadly unironic Port & Policy.

But at this point the tables began to turn.

Act 2: Bringing the House Down

Sussex House is the management building where Michael Farthing and John Duffy work (in a broad sense of the word). On #Mar25, though, they gallantly buggered off home early and left the remainder of their staff literally locked inside. Many of these are quite junior staff, remember, the trade union members that the anti-outsourcing groups apparently seek to protect.

I guess it was pretty inevitable though, that a group of masked protestors would gather round Sussex House, smash their way past the assembled hordes of riot police and private security, start burning documents from Michael Farthing’s office (Wot no climate change? -Ed.) and leave the building a gaping husk of broken glass.

This divided opinion. The #Mar25 Twitter stream became a battle between those who insisted that “a few broken doors” is a minor sacrifice in the revolution (this camp produced comments such as, “Oooh, it’s so tragic, some poor paper got hurt!” and, “They were Barclays Bank documents therefore fair game for tinder,”) and those who felt that the anti-outsourcing campaign had just lost a huge amount of support by turning needlessly violent.

A couple of broken windows is a minor inconvenience compared to the loss of up to 235 jobs through privatisation, yes, obviously. But that still doesn’t explain how breaking them helped the cause in any way. Last week I criticised John Duffy for using unfair tactics to silence their opposition. Now I sadly have to say the same about the demonstrators.

And I still can’t quite believe the so-called person who said, “All arguments being levelled against #Mar25 protestors are the same as those levelled at the American civil rights movement,” – I mean, as far as I know, Rosa Parks only smashed her way into buildings and burnt documents when it was absolutely necessary.

Some of the more abashed demonstrators retreated to their Occupation to plot further strategy. There was a suggestion that they block off the A27 motorway that runs past campus. One person asked, “How would that prevent privatisation?” (how short-sighted they are!) and someone else replied, “Yolo!” That was another high point of the day actually.

Whatever happens I hope that John Duffy doesn’t call out private contractors to repair the day’s damage; that would be an irony overload.

Act 3: An Ode to the Conservative Party, in J-Major

Now it’s not for me to tell the Conservative Society its job, but if I were them I’d have capitalised on this moment of vulnerability and seized the chance to represent, for once, the silent majority on campus.

However, they nobly declined to take advantage of others’ weakness, and instead lurched way to the right and began calling, basically, for the death penalty to be extended to anyone not on their membership list.

Apparently the leaders of the Sussex anti-outsourcing movement should be “punished” immediately, without the hassle of gathering evidence against them, because the Sussex organisers “without a doubt had deliberate criminal intent.” (Remind me why we’re letting this party introduce secret courts?)

One TorySoc member, a former Vice-President, also proposed the establishment of a vigilante “Student Safety Society, that protects innocent law abiding students from the criminal activity occurring on our campus by standing around buildings preventing them from being vandalised.” Yes, those were the exact words used. Christ, this is Falmer village, not Gotham City! (See picture on far right.)

The Finale

The whole day was utterly appalling, and until then I had no idea that university students could actually be so dim, and that the aspiring politicians on both sides have such an outrageously poor grasp of how to behave in a civilised society.

The left took a good idea that united student opinion – not privatising the University – and they dragged it too far, going round and burning stuff.

And then the right failed to seize possibly the only moment in the history of Sussex when they could have had the backing of a majority of students – by criticising criminal damage – and instead took it too far the other way, wanting to lynch people and setting up some sort of wannabe stormtrooper force with a highly unfortunate acronym.

Meanwhile, the University has taken stern action against rising tide of students exercising their human rights, and obtained a sweepingly-drafted injunction which outlaws – and I quote – “any occupational or other protest,” ie. any protest, until the end of September. I bet Kim Jong-un wishes he could introduce a similar ban. (The University has repeatedly denied, almost to the point of imbecility, that the injunction bans peaceful protest, but I leave readers to their own interpretation. If you agree with mine then perhaps you could sign the petition here.)

So anyway, here I am, on-board the aeroplane, staring out at the wings slightly disbelievingly. Come join me…

Wednesday morning update: the full witness statement (“Dear sirs”) and Exhibits of the injunction have been released and can be found here. My blog gets a cameo appearance on p34 of Exhibit 1, and it’s also been observed that the University’s solicitor ticked the ‘no’ box in response to, “Does your claim [to restrict the right to protest] include any issues under the Human Rights Act?” Such fun!

The plague of wild beasts

One of my all-time favourite broadsheet headlines this week:

It seems that a surveyor found the discarded skin of a tarantula in a 19th-century house in the Welsh capital, and police are concerned that the animal – which could now be twice as large as the shed skin – may be covered in the same cancer-inducing asbestos that was found throughout the rest of the building.

And the tarantula’s still out there! I thought they’d stopped making Torchwood but apparently I was wrong. And I kind of had to make this…

You’ll like this bit, Lord Ahmed.

I hope if you’ve read this far you won’t accuse me of leading a dull life. But at the moment it’s especially undull because I’ve found myself appointed a UK delegate to the 14th Assembly of the World Jewish Congress, which will take place in Budapest in May.

I will be joined by other elected delegates from around the world, including some representing the Zimbabwe Jewish Board of Deputies. Hopefully they haven’t taken lessons on democracy either from Zimbabwe or from the Board of Deputies…

This is very exciting news, so I’ve booked myself a hotel room (“equipped with the new bedding,” which sounds absolutely lovely) and now all that’s left is for me to take up cigar smoking – see photo.

Expect an update in May!

Why is this blog unlike other blogs?

In tonight’s episode, the Israelites were redeemed from Egypt with a mighty arm and an outstretched hand. Sussex was defended from the dark elements of criminality by the Praetorian Guard. Cardiff was terrorised by a ludicrous made-up menace. This was an Gabrielquotes production.