Abu Qatada

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While this blog has supported the rights of British citizens to face justice in Britain there are some people who have a reputation for inciting hatred. One of these is Abu Qatada. It is difficult to conjure up much sympathy for his plight since today Theresa May has just announced his arrest and deportation to Jordan, where he has already been sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour for inciting terrorist attacks. My main reservation is that this sentence, passed in absentia, means Qatada did not present a defence, and while guarantees have been assured of a fair trial this time, as far as I can see there is nothing to stop them implementing the outstanding sentence. Qatada’s imprisonment in this country has been described as costly to the taxpayer.

So what is the difference between Qatada and Ahmed Chalabi? Chalabi is a proven war-criminal. He put together false evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which was used to take us into the illegal war which cost, and is costing, thousands of lives. Furthermore, he is wanted, in Jordan, for stealing investors’ money from the Petra Bank he set up there. So what is the difference between him and Abu Qatada? You don’t need to be on University Challenge to know the answer. The difference is Chalabi has money. Tories, Labour, Lib-Dems and other neo-cons court people with money, however they got their greedy hands on it. Perhaps we should lobby Theresa May to get Abu Qatada and Ahmed Chalabi both on the same plane!

Engendering sympathy for bankers

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In the last 24 hours it has emerged that a Russian banker, German Gorbuntsov, was shot at Canary Wharf four days ago, is in a coma and under armed guard. Four days is a long time for such news to emerge but that is not really what concerns me. My concern is my own lack of sympathy.

Although nobody wants to hear about shootings it is hard to arouse quite the same amount of sympathy for a banker as it is for an ordinary person, since the banker has spent a lifetime making money his or her God, or ripping-off the general hard-working populace. Bankers have a reputation for uncontrolled theft, legalised extortion and facelessness. In fact a banker ranks alongside the fictionalised portrayal of a lawyer of whom Mario Puzo in The Godfather wrote ‘with his briefcase can rob more than a hundred men with guns’. Not only does this faceless monster award himself, or herself, an outrageous annual bonus but knows that if anything goes wrong, as it did with Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland, that you and I will bail them out at no perceivable benefit to ourselves – in fact to our detriment.

Bankers are very often the personification of evil. Ahmed Chalabi, robbed the poor people of Jordan via his Petra Bank, fled with the money, was given sanctuary in the UK and US, and used his knowledge as an Iraqi to ‘manufacture’ non-existent evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, misinformation which enabled the US and UK to go to war with Iraq. This evil being is feted by all and sundry, the good and the great, while all the perfumes of Arabia would not be able to obscure the smell of blood on his hands. Back in 2003, naively trying to avert an unjust war, I wrote a piece about this ogre in my weekly Chimps.

Likewise the UK gives sanctuary to Jewish oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky about whom Paul Klebnikov wrote a scathing book Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia. The connection is tentative but Klebnikov would soon end up dead. Four years later and although an American citizen, Klebnikov was murdered in Moscow in July 2004 and his killers never found. That is not to say Berezovsky had any connection with Klebnikov's murder but he has connections with Russia at the very highest level, and has left behind there many thousands of small investors, who have not been offered sanctuary in the UK, and who have seen their personal wealth deteriorate drastically while the wealth of Berezovsky, in whose companies they invested, has increased exponentially. Call it what you want. I call it theft.

It is hard to engender sympathy for bankers and oligarchs, who rob small investors and use their personal wealth to destabilise economies. Pray for German Gorbuntsov's recovery.