Adloyada

Oliver Miles: ex-Ambassador Arab Lobbyist who wants no Jews on the Iraq Enquiry

Stephen Pollard, Harry's Place and Normblog have all drawn attention to a blatantly anti-semitic article by a former Ambassador in today's Independent which objects to the presence of two of the distinguished historians on the panel of the Iraq Enquiry on the grounds that they are Jews. And that's taken by the writer, Oliver Miles, as of itself proof that the panel is unbalanced. Presumably Miles thinks all Jews, and especially all zionists, think alike, and in ways not congenial to him.  Here's what he has to say about it:

Rather less attention has been paid to the curious appointment of two historians (which seems a lot, out of a total of five), both strong supporters of Tony Blair and/or the Iraq war. In December 2004 Sir Martin Gilbert, while pointing out that the "war on terror" was not a third world war, wrote that Bush and Blair "may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill" – an eccentric opinion that would se em to rule him out as a member of the committee. Sir Lawrence Freedman is the reputed architect of the "Blair doctrine" of humanitarian intervention, which was invoked in Kosovo and Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism. Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media, but The Jewish Chronicle and the Israeli media have no such inhibitions, and the Arabic media both in London and in the region are usually not far behind.

All five members have outstanding reputations and records, but it is a pity that, if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available. Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced.

Oliver Miles is Chairman of MEC International, a lobbying group which is mainly focused on lobbying on behalf of Arab and other Middle Eastern regimes and of companies which seek to do business with them. Inter alia it offers the services of a group of ambassadors:

MEC International therefore offers a holistic response to these challenges with an Ambassadorial Service run by senior Ambassadors and those with many years of experience in the region. Risk related questions receive a rapid response from a specially selected MEC task force headed in each case by a consultant ambassador. 

This service offers a complete tailored response supported by MEC publications, its Analytical Group services and consultancy advice available through a hot line and through a team of selected senior consultants. 

The Brief 

The first step is for a company to prepare a brief of its requirements to which an initial written response is prepared by MEC offering both the scope of the service and the personnel involved. For example, one company may wish to track key developments and build in risk protection across its operations in the Middle East to include Central Asia and Iran, Turkey, Israel, the Levant, the Gulf and the Maghreb. The MEC ambassadorial response may not be restricted to the company ’s main business sectors but will also look at wider but related developments including politics, economics, energy and technology which will impact the company’s level of political risk and future stability and development of the region. 

The ambassadorial service seeks to identify important underlying developments and provide concise analytical insights to allow forward planning. The focus will vary from week to week changing with the issues of the day.

As one example of this "ambassadorial service", Miles organized from an internet cafe in Tripoli the well remembered letter to Tony Blair signed by 52 ex-ambassadors, urging him to change his policies on Palestine and Iraq. In other words, Oliver Miles is the leader of the "Camel Corps" of bought and paid for former Foreign Office Arab lobbyists. What's the betting that he and his lobbying group gave substantial help to Peter Oborne for the recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme that UK politicians and media were bullied and controlled by a secretive lobby of Israeli government and associated British zionist businessmen? 

 Just for starters, that programme starred Sir Richard Dalton, the former Director General, now Director of the Libyan British Business Council. The Deputy Chairman of the Libyan British Business Council is none other than Oliver Miles whose MEC has played a major role in setting up and developing the lucrative business contracts that were finally put on offer once Britain agreed to release Abdelbasset El Megrahi to the Libyan regime.

The YouTube clip shows Oliver Miles shilling as a Libyan mouthpiece on the Iranian regime's propaganda channel Press TV, on a panel chaired by Yvonne Ridlley, suggesting that the evidence pointed away from Libya being the organizers of the PanAm 103 bombing.

Much more importantly, Oliver Miles and his MEC consulting lobbyist firm played a major role in setting up a very rosy and enticing portrayal of the trade opportunities in Libya offered to EU businesses. It was a report on the new opportunities following the co-operation contracts finally signed by the Libyans on the release of Megrahi to Libya  by the UK. You can download and read the final draft report here. All the facts and data about Libya were supplied by the entirely trustworthy Libyan one-man dictatorship regime and its various wholly controlled agencies. Which means they are as likely to be reliable as were statistics of tractor production in the Urals in the Soviet Union under Stalin. As it was jointly sponsored by the EU, the creators of the report were obliged to consult Libyan "stakeholders". We're not given a very clear picture of how that was done, but back at page 92 of the report, following a good few pages of stupefying macroeconomic modelling equations, we can see a few squeaks of opposition from some brave souls who complained that the proposed Libyan plans would destroy the environment and further impoverish the poorest Libyans. With typical Civil Service finesse, the comments were simply marked "noted" and the report left intact.

What all this suggests is not so much that Miles is an anti-semite, but that he is a paid lobbyist mouthpiece for regimes which subscribe to and propagate anti-semitic conspiracy theories. And that the British government and the EU are partners with the Libyan dictatorship regime, whilst publicly taking a sniffy high moral stance about human rights and the like. In other words, it's evidence for a much more rational and low key version of the grossly exaggerated Eurabia thesis. It's not that Europe is becoming Islamised, as that the EU and member states like the UK trim their morals and their stances on Middle East issues to ensure that lucrative trade deals stay onside.

Meanwhile, both the Independent and the Guardian regularly publish this Arab regime lobbyist's articles, including those which express hostility to Jews, Israel and zionists, as if they were entirely bona fide disinterested analyses written by a man whose only interests have been representing the UK government.

Quite a few ex-Ambassadors take up part time consultancy for dubious regimes after they leave their posts. In most cases, they are awarded knighthoods or at least a certain amount of commemorative regalia. Why has Oliver Miles never been awarded such honours? Or is he just hiding the honours under a bushel?

UKIP's still stupid, but Farage has played a blinder on challenging Speaker Bercow

Separated at birth or previous incarnation? The wooden puppet at the centre of this image went under the name of Archie Andrews during the 1950s. He looks uncannily like a younger incarnation of Nigel Farage, Leader of the UK Independence Party

Regular readers of Adloyada will know that, to put it mildly, I am no fan of UKIP or its way of doing politics. But for anyone who hasn't twigged my views on UKIP and their leader, Nigel Farage, I loathe both of them with a passion. We'll get on to the serious politics in a minute, but whenever I've seen pictures or videos of Farage, into my head has popped the name and image of Archie Andrews, one of the regular Sunday lunch listening experiences of my 1950s childhood. And it's always seemed to me that his political brain was likely to have been made of the same material as Archie Andrews'.

However, fair is fair, and credit where credit is due.

I think Nigel Farage's decision to stand against Speaker John Bercow at the next election is a move of real political brilliance, through which he's seized the initiative and wrong-footed all the main political parties. It's almost the ultimate in decapitation strategies for a party trying to build its base on opposition to the traditional political establishment, and particularly on opposition to the cosy agreements by all the main political parties known as "behind the Speaker's chair".

You see, the tradition is that no political party stands against the Speaker, who stands as "Mr Speaker standing for re-election"-- a platform in which he avers all political affiliation and claims to represent the House of Commons as a whole. And what is the collective public view of the House of Commons' members as a whole? And the fact that Speaker John Bercow presides over the Committees which make the rules on and manage MPs' expenses?

Wonder how Bercow will defend presiding over raising MPs' monthly chit-free expenses from £250 to £400 p/m once he got voted in? And how about the fact that helping him do that on the Committee was the entirely beloved Tory superstar Alan Duncan, he of the garden and now living on slightly larger rations than he was before the two of them, Martin-defender Sir Stuart Bell and H.Harman joined him in voting in this change once he became Speaker and just before Parliament went into recess?

David Cameron's failure to go for a total sweep of troughers will come back to haunt him on this. He has now to choose between either standing a Tory to help Bercow and keep UKIP out or standing down and helping UKIP win. 

Labour's also hoist with its own petard in having ensured that nominally Tory but actually Labour-leaning John Bercow got voted in to the Speaker's chair over Tory opposition

You can see the combination of utter dismay and huffing and puffing at the Tory fan site Conservativehome (admirably designed and managed by the very savvy Tim Mongtomerie). Almost all the commentary from the punters (as does Cameron) seriously underestimates the way the public feels and will go on feeling as long as the main political parties try to draw a line under the expenses scandal.

All Farage has to do is just keep publicising the huge hike from £250-£400 per month free of chits to win the fight. He's unanswerable on that one and I would love to see Bercow keep having to try and defend it, especially as he'll have to either defend himself as the apolitical rep of the whole Parliament (main evidence the monthly expenses hike), or he'll have to present himself as Mr Nice Guy opposed to nasty old political meddler. 

He comes over slightly better than Alan Duncan in the Mr Nice Guy role but not that much--another man deeply in love with himself and who has the greatest difficulty in projecting humility other than in relation to his height. Expect lots of use of his excellent work for disabled children, based on his having a disabled child and pictures of him with lovable kids in his Speaker role (they're already up on his website). The BBC and The Guardian will go into total-worship overdrive to support him and present Farage as the Devil Incarnate. Will that be enough to overcome the "Hiked expenses free rides up from £250 to £400." Which way would you vote?

And, by the way, who will be bankrolling and paying for Mr Bercow's election expenses and publicity? That's a nice one.

Farage has also brilliantly put himself in a position where he will get endless publicity for himself and his party beyond anything his backers could dream of bankrolling. It will be one of the highest profile contests throughout the election, and UKIP will be able to take on the mantle of being on the side of the taxpayers and British fair-mindedness in the face of all the vested interests. It should do quite a bit to boost the UKIP vote in other constituencies, and most particularly those with a trougher or otherwise Inglorious Basterd MP in the safest of safe Tory seats. 

Cameron can still outflank Farage by leaving Bercow to his fate and announcing a much more radical approach to his own troughers and troughers in general:

• primaries for all candidates before local constituencies are allowed to select
• nominate public hero no-expenses Tory MP Philip Hollobone onto the Expenses Committees 
• promises to bring in a "vote the rascal out" system which can lead to recall and fresh election at national and local level
• promise to rescind the free-monthly trough hand out and put it back to £250 with chits required.
• Introduction of 100% democracy-- all voters have to vote but have the freedom to write in candidates AND vote for "none of the above"
• Combine that plus "vote the rascal out" and the voters will feel at last that they can do something about parties and troughers who depend for their power base on otherwise impregnable seats.
• Plus it will give much more legitimacy for whoever gets elected.
• And it will send the most powerful of messages to those MPs who feel they're both safe for life and entitled. You know, like Alan Duncan and John Bercow.

Nothing less is going to impress the voters.

Unfortunately, there's not even the remotest chance in hell that the Labour Party will sign up to a programme like that.

And, given what I've said about my views of the nature of Farage's brain composition, I wonder which behind the scenes UKIP-supporting brilliant kid actually thought this one up?

But again, credit where credit is due. Farage deserves huge credit anyway (as I gnash my teeth) for seeing the political genius of it, picking it up and running with it.

The painful attempts of a Muslim to come to terms with Jewish history

Fiyaz Mughal of an organization called "Faith Matters" has written a very moving and interesting account of his visit to Poland, to learn about the Jewish community of the past and present, and of the history of the Holocaust. It has been posted on "Harry's Place" under the title "Most Roads Lead Back to Poland". This post started as a comment on his post, but it turned into an open letter to him:

Dear Fiyaz

Your post is a moving account of your experience. I'm touched that you were motivated to go, that you remain committed to finding out more about what happened to the Jews of Poland, and those of every Jewish community and that you wish to learn more. I'm very surprised, though, at your underplaying the role played by mainstream Poles--not just those you label "collaborators" and the actual minute numbers, by contrast of those Poles who did anything of any sort to help Jews, and the relatively tiny numbers who were saved were no more than a few thousand out of a nation of many millions. For every person who saves a life, it is as if they saved a whole world. So says the Jewish religious tradition. So each and every Pole who did try to help deserves honour and gratitude on the level as if they had indeed saved a whole world. Some paid for their humanity with their lives. That is why Yad Vashem has its "Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles" which commemorates those who did act in this way. I am very glad that they are honoured in this way. Yad Vashem, though, does not recognise as "Righteous Gentiles" those who saved or hid Jews or forged passports for them because they were given money to do so by the desperate Jews they helped. Sometimes the sums of money they were given were huge. Nevertheless, if they saved lives, I believe they earned a right to be recognised. And of course, many of them argued that they wanted the pay for risking their lives--and some of them did pay with their lives. Saving a life or many lives is always a very great achievement, even if it comes with exploitation of the potential victims who were saved. However, there are many, many historically reliable accounts that show that the number of Poles who took an active part in the roundups and the persecutions, or who actively celebrated and cheered when they saw the Jews persecuted beyond belief, slaughtered before their eyes, and taken away to the death that those Poles knew was coming to them when the Jews did not, is vast -- it is the majority of the Polish population. A huge number of these Poles simply looted the houses and such property of the Jews as was not taken by the Germans, and made them their own. When tiny numbers of those Jews who did survive tried to return to their homes, the overwhelming majority were driven away and threatened. There are numerous documented instances of these Jews then being murdered by the Poles who feared they might have to give back the looted homes. One of my cousins, a woman who had survived the camps, was murdered this way in Kanczuga in 1946. There were also those who took part in pogroms which murdered en masse Jews who returned to their villages. Many millions of Poles were terrified bystanders. They rightly feared for their lives. If they were caught helping Jews, they faced almost certain death or at the very least fearsome punishments, which would often include the murder or removal of their children. I can understand what make them bystanders. Who can be sure they would have not acted in the same way? I would like to think I would in such a position have done something. But I can't be sure because I've never had to face such a terror and I hope that none of us ever will. But at the end of the day, out of their very understandable fear, they stood by whilst their neighbours were persecuted, tortured, murdered and dispossessed. There are many people in Iran today who stand in such a position in relation to their neighbours, though they are of the same ethnic and religious group. They of all the people in the world today are closest to those of the Poles in Poland. An act of support or knowing concealing a person who has done no crime other than raising an entirely peaceful voice against a most brutal, lying and ruthless regime can result in hideous torture, death and the dispossession and arrest of their entire families. I wonder if you recognise the parallels. What you have given here, Fiyaz, is a grossly distorted view of the role of the vast majority of the Poles in relation to the Jews under the German occupation. I would like to think that this is the result of historical ignorance, and that for some reason you have not read the main historically reliable histories of what happened and what the Poles did, as opposed to selective accounts written by apologists for the role of the Poles, the Soviet Union and even the Germans. You also owe it to yourself if you are going to be committed to exploring the history of Poland in relation to its former Jewish population to exploring the history of Polish anti-semitism in all its depth, as well as such historical evidence as can be found for relationships of tolerance, as well as the rare evidence of genuine and warm appreciation historically by Poles for Jews and particularly for Jews, Judaism and Jewish culture. The role of the Polish Church in all this is something that will reward study. However, before you do that, and in relation to the rosy picture of many, many Poles resisting the persecution of the Jews and of their being a small minority of collaborators, you will need, if you have not already done so to read the history of democratic Polish politics before World War II, when the newly restored nation first voted for its own representative parliament. You will need to look at the record of democratically elected majority parties which either had or voted for anti-semitic policies which pauperized religious Jews by insisting that all businesses had to open on Saturdays or Jewish religious holidays or close down. You will need to read how the Polish post Word War I democratically elected government refused to carry out the obligation laid on them to provide the full range of political rights and faciiities promised to the linguistic, religious and ethnic minorities of what became Poland, of which Yiddish-speaking Jews and Ukrainians were the main groups failed by the Poles. You will also need to read the history of the Polish legislation, passed by the democratically elected parties of the Polish people in 1938 that proposed to strip Poles living for extended periods abroad of their Polish nationality. The vast majority of the Poles thus affected were Yiddish-speaking Jews, and it was done for the express purpose of ridding themselves of Yiddish speakers, as the debates and justifications of this law analysed by historians will show.

The notorious mass deportation by the Nazis of the Polish Jews of Germany which took place at the end of October 1938 was an action taken by the Nazis to ensure that they were not left with hundreds of thousands of hated stateless Polish Jews. My grandfather and uncle were amongst those taken--they were rounded up by the Gestapo in their Berlin home at 3:00am. My father escaped being rounded up by sheer luck and chance but had to spend the rest of his six months in Berlin in hiding. And what did the Poles do about all these terrified and destitute Jews dumped by the Germans at their border? Why, their new law had come into force. They refused to take them in. They were left in a miserable camp in the no-man's land between the borders. Did these Jews threaten them in any way or say that they wanted to drive the Poles out of Poland and make a Jewish state in Poland? Of course not. But, unless they could find relatives or friends from amongst the Poles prepared to take them in, they were left in misery at the border camp--till the war came and they were taken off to their deaths? Are the Poles responsible for the evils the Nazis did? No. But they bear some responsibility for their attempts to strip the diaspora Polish-born Jews of their nationalities (my grandfather and uncle had proudly chosen Polish nationality after WWI, although they lived in Berlin--they could have taken Austrian or German nationality.) They were both very proud to be Polish Jews. But in October 1938 it was only because they had cousins in Krakow who came out to help them that they were able to get away from the misery of the camp and live in the cousins' house in Krakow. The action of the Poles in leaving in misery, destitution and terror those Polish Jews who had become stateless through Polish legislation which was aimed at getting rid of them is an abiding shame, and absolutely inexcusable.

It comes out of a very long history of Polish anti-semitism besides which the help given to Jews by a tiny but noble minority ceases to have all but token significance. The Poles still have some difficulty in dealing with this dreadful history. I hope you do not. So, Fiyaz, it seems that you do have much further learning to do.But perhaps it is wiser to make sure you are better informed before you post an article which seems so historically under-informed that one could suspect it's biased in favour of a rosy view of the Poles. And lastly, you conclude in your last sentence with the formula "as a Muslim", which seems gratuitously introduced, and with no further explanation. You may not be aware that on Harry's Place and other internet forums, Jews have come to recognise that this "As A" is a marker of false authenticity or representativeness which is not merited by the quaifications it would need to be representative. I am a Jew. As it happens I am a proud Galitzianer (southern Polish) Jew whose father was born and lived till he was 22 in a shtetl there. As you may imagine, I have many, many relatives who were murdered (not perished, as if they were so much old rubber) by the German Nazis with the assistance of enthusiastic allies. 

I know also that many innocent Poles were persecuted, starved and murdered too. Some had their children stolen. But a great many of those Poles were not innocent in relation to the persecution of the Jews. There are very large numbers, historically authenticated, who betrayed Jews to the Nazi regime. They sadly vastly outnumber those who helped the Jews. 

In fact a number of bands of Jews were murdered by Polish Resistance fighters, and the majority of Polish resistance fighters did not help the Jews. That's why the heroic fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto had only tiny numbers of arms at their disposal. The Poles who rose against the Nazis when duped by Stalin and the Soviets into doing so had many, many more arms. There was one specific Polish gentile organization for the aid of the Jews. It included many women amongst its numbers. It is rightly remembered by love and gratitude by Jewish people for its heroic and selfless acts. But they were but a tiny minority who had to do as much to hide their acts from their fellow Poles as they did from the Germans. But if I wrote "as a Jew" it would not give me authority. Nor would my murdered relatives. I will therefore never use the phrase "as a Jew", because it smacks of claiming something beyond being one individual who should not be taken to be in any way informative about Jewish opinion at large. I could write "as one, possibly unrepresentative Jew". Or I could write, because I think I can demonstrate it beyond doubt, "like most Jews who know their own history and religious tradition". I write because I have taken the trouble to spend a great deal of time researching this history. That's why I claim the authority to write in as challenging a spirit as I have of what you write here. And I currently do my best to learn of the range and the dominant and minority trends in Muslim opinion in this country and elsewhere. If you care to look up my Twitterfeed "judyk113' you will see that I have greened my portrait. That of itself did not give me authority to write what I did above about the people of Iran, but I did feel that doing my best to follow both the official and the unofficial accounts of what came out of Iran after the election gives me at least the basis on which to claim some reliability for what I wrote. So, Fiyaz, I'm just as suspicious and sceptical about anyone using the formulation "as a Muslim" as I am of someone saying "as a Jew". It has all to often been a marker of quite a different agenda, and one based on attempts to pass off unrepresentative views as typical or as having an importance beyond their own speaker's presence. And one other piece of history intervenes in my response to your post. It is the history of the PLO under Arafat setting up some sort of ceremony where they would go and place wreaths at either Auschwitz or the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in mourning for the victims of the Holocaust. It was done at the time when they insisted that they had been made the victims of European guilt for the Holocaust, that European Jews have no connection to Israel or to Jerusalem. I am glad they did not as far as I am aware, invoke Islam in this ceremony, which utterly disgusted me, and I believe the vast majority of the Jews of the world. Of course they had and continue to have a retinue of some thousands of Jews (who would invariably invoke the As A Jew formula) who supported and continue to support those of them who wish to see an end to the State of Israel, and who wish to see all Jews removed from living in the occupied territories. I hope, Fiyaz, you are sincere in your learning. But for the Jews of Islamic lands, most roads do not lead back to Poland. They lead back to the history of Jewish settlement and migration in those lands and in Israel, going back centuries. And although their relations with their Muslim neighbours were often cordial and rich, and were incomparably greater than those of Jews with the Christians of Europe, they nevertheless faced institutionalized discrimination and humiliation, and sometimes forcible exclusion expulsion and murderous attacks imposed by the Islamic laws under which they lived. Never forget, indeed. It would be helpful to ensure first that we know every relevant thing we need to remember.

with best wishes

Judy

Exclusive: exciting new biblical discoveries confirm historical evidence

One of the discoveries has been published here.

Now Adloyada is proud to publish the first full text of the second, which is believed to predate the first by some years.

The Book of Old Guardian Chronicles Chapter 1 And was it not told, that in the days of the mighty CyrusPScott, he that succoured those of the Exile of the Tribe of Judah that sojourned in the City of Man-chesta in the land of the Mighty Imperial Empire of the Guardian, that he chose as a wise counsellor the Man of Scientific Renown and Learning, the sage Counsellor of the Hebrews of Man-chesta, Chaim ben Weitzman?

And did he not procure a meeting with the troubled King George the Fifth and his ministers and generals, of the land of England, which paid tribute to the Mighty Imperial Empire of the Guardian, saying, Lo, I have heard that ye lack the precious oil of acetone, without which your brave warriors die day upon day in the Wars of the European Nations, even unto the last man?

Now, lo, here is a mighty and wise man of the tribe of the Hebrews, named Chaim ben Weitzman. If it pleaseth the King, send for him, for surely he will give the King and his household true counsel even in the matter of the precious oil of acetone, which no man hath yet found a way to procure, except by the arts of the cursed Germanim with whom ye are at war?

And King George and his counsellors sent for Chaim ben Weitzman, and spake unto him, saying, our brave warriors die day upon day on the battlefield, for we have no precious oil of acetone to make mighty thunder against the war engines of the Germanim.

And Chaim ben Weitzman said unto them: I am the King's true servant, and also the Lord has spoken through the Emperor CyrusPScott, who hath sent me to you in your time of need, because he is the Guardian of Israel and knoweth that the hearts of we of the Tribe of Hebrews yearn to return to our Promised Land, which is Israel, and not Palestine.

And I will depart and return unto your King's majesty when I have taken counsel of the Lord and made through His guidance precious oil of acetone which needeth not the arts of the Germanim.

And lo! He returned many months later to the Emperor CyrusPScott, and said, the Lord hath blessed my endeavours and I have cruses without number of the precious oil of acetone which I will give to King George. And now, will not the Guardian put in a word for us with the King that he vouchsafe his help unto us in the matter of making a decree that the Hebrews and all the children of Israel that are scattered to all corners of the earth be gathered back into Israel?

For is not the Sultan of the Turkish Lands not now vanquished in battle by the mighty warrior Al-Enby of the Brits of King George who hath taken Jerusalem and standeth at the walls of Zion?

And the Emperor CyrusPScott spake and said, the matter that thou saidest is good. And I shall write letters unto the King and his Counsellors and speak with all who may aid ye in this endeavour, for the Guardian labours to see ye and all of the Tribe of Hebrews return rejoicing to the land of Israel and not Palestine.

For of this, will come good for the Empire of the Guardian, which will wax mightily, and make good profits, and who knows that we might not yet become the Guardian of the Land of England, even in London, and our Chronicles be read by all the sages and wise men, and the soothsayers of the whole land?

And lo, he wrote letters and spake with the counsellors of the wise King. And Chaim ben Weitzman came to London and presented the King with the cruses of precious oil of acetone. And so the warriors of the King went out and with mighty weapons and a strong arm smote the Germanim. And they were sore defeated.

And the Guardian of Israel and the Emperor CyrusPScott and all the people rejoiced.

And King George spake with his counsellors and said, how may we reward this Chaim ben Weitzman, for he hath aided us mightily in this war, and saved the lives of multitudes of our brave warriors. And the Emperor CyrusPScott hath counselled us that Chaim be Weitzman now wisheth with his people of the Tribe of Hebrews to return unto the Land of Israel not Palestine. And mayhap we have made promises to the Tribe of Ishmael and Abdullah, that cometh from the land of Arabia, but yet wisheth for the Land which they call the Land of the Arabs. But are we not minded to give a decree that permitteth this Chaim ben Weitzman and his Tribe of Hebrews also to return to the Land of Israel not Palestine?

And King George had mighty counsellors, wise in the ways of forking the tongue and doubling the cross, and they said unto him, mighty King, may we not send a letter unto the greatest merchant of the Tribe of the Hebrews with words of favour and blessing for the return of them unto the Land of Israel not Palestine and yet also make promises unto Abdullah and Faisal that also they shall have the Land of the Arabs? For are we of the Empire not wise in the ways of making promises that bind all unto us, but delivering them into strife amongst themselves that enables us to extract their precious oils and much else that doeth good unto us?

And the King saw that their words were wise. And lo! A letter was sent unto the great Prince Rothschild, the mighty merchant of the Tribe of the Hebrews that set out what the counsellors had said, and is it not known unto this day as the great Letter of Balfour, which is read with great rejoicing by the Hebrews of the Land of Israel not Palestine, and cursed by the Land of the Arabs, and the Tribe of the Palestinians, and all that are of their camp?


Chapter 2

And after many years and sore troubles, there arose new Emperors at the Guardian that knew not the heart and mind of Emperor CyrusPScott albeit they knew his name, and spoke of being his true inheritors, though in truth they were sworn in heart and mind unto the Empire of the Marxistim, the Sovietim and the Egyptians and all that paid the Sovietim tribute. And of these Emperors, are not the deeds of the Emperor Pet-er-Preston and his counsellors told in the Second Book of the Chronicles of the Guardian?

And now arose the Emperor Rus-Bridga who spoke with careful counsel of great craft, but knew the Guardian of the Sovietim sent out mighty tributes of gold which were sent out to counsellors and scribes, even unto counsellors that were of the Scribes of the Guardian of London, that they might win the hearts of the people of the Kingdom of the Wise Queen Elizabeth unto the cause of the Palestinians not Arabs, for there was much oil to be gained for the Sovietim and also influence on the hearts of the peoples of the world.

And the Emperor Rus-Bridga said, our conscience troubleth us sadly. For do we not feel that we have made this sad thing come to pass, that the Letter of Balfour was given unto the Hebrews through the counsel of the old Emperor CyrusPScott, and we are cursed sorely for it by the Sovietim and all that follow the God of the Marxistim, the BaalMarx?

Now let us therefore deal wisely with these Hebrews that say they are of the Land of Israel, and let us seek the favour of the Marxistim and the losers of the vanquished tribe of Marxistim, for the tributes of the land of the Sovietim are passed, but there is much tribute and may good things that come from the new Empires of the Arabs and of the Tribe of Ishmael.

And he took Seamus, and Ben Whitaker and many others that were skilled at selecting very craftily and with twisted intent from the Chronicles and they and their scribes wrote much evil about the Land of Israel. And the Guardian of London began to prosper with the tribes of the Marxistim and the Princes of the Funds of the Sovereign Wealth were mightily pleased.

But the Tribe of Hebrews in the Land of Israel were sore vexed, and sent many letters and sent scribes that wrote, behold, in the Chronicles is not the truth written of this matter? And lo, you cause our name to stink amongst the Nations of the World. And thou surely knowest that thou publishest vile lies that cause the name of the Guardian, which was once proud, to stink in the land with the curse of anti-semitism?

And the Emperor Rus-bridga and all his scribes said unto the Tribe of Hebrews, now surely we are not cursed with anti-semitism, which is a fearful curse. For we speak only of the evils of the accursed zionism which is not anti-semitism. And lo, have we not appointed the Hebrew Jonathan ben Freedland, the son of a scribe of the Jewish Chronicles, who led the Habonim in his youth, who is a prophet who knoweth and proclaimeth his own genius, and sayeth that our Chronicle of the Guardian publisheth not anti-semitism? And hath not he proclaimed freely that the Guardian is not anti-semitic?

And all of the Guardian were of that counsel, and the hearts of much of the Hebrews of the Kingdom of the Wise Queen Elizabeth, and of the Land of Israel were mightily troubled, and said, what may we do against these slanders and evil decrees that are written against us by these false scribes of the Guardian of London?

Yet, mayhap, there were amongst the Hebrews them that had followed the ways of the Soviets and bowed before the BaalMarx, and some who had received gold, rich praise, chairs in the great academies of renown, and fine robes from the Marxistim, and the coffers of the Arabs and the Marxistim-Palestinian Warriors and their allied warriors of the Marxistim-ANC, even their mighty heroes Man-Dela and Joe, son of Slovo, of the warriors of Unkonto na Sizwe.

And there were also some of them that believed that they had mighty consciences, and were seers, some had not not got over the days of their bar-mitzvah celebrations, and some saw themselves as courageous speakers and warriors, lone voices crying in the wilderness, even though they stood verily amongst thousands that daily uttered the same words in their mouths and wrote them in their letters, which had been written for them first by the Soviets in the Chronicles of the accursed Emperor Stalin and the exiled Prince Trot-ski and their fathers, even unto the days of the Huntsmen of the Okhrana, even the AsAJews of Old of the Band of Yevsekstia and the Bundistim.

And these Hebrews formed Tribes, and they called it them the Tribe of the AsAJews, the Tribe of Jay-Street and the Guardians of the Conscience of the Jews of Independent Voices. And there was a very small tribe that called themselves Neturei Karta, that were but a few hundred in number, that said, all these Hebrews of the Land of Israel are not Jews, but we alone are the true Jews

But in truth, the numbers of all the AsAJews were sore small, and most that were of the Tribe of AsAJews were also enrolled on the list of the Tribe of Jay-Street, and the Guardians of the Conscience of the Jews of Independent Voices. 

And they spoke mightily and often in the halls of the Nations and their scribes wrote weekly and even daily in the Chronicle of the Guardian, proclaiming, Lo As A Jew, I say that the Land of Israel is not a true Land of the Hebrews but a Land of Zionists, and it is a thing of the Imperialists, and it hath done and doeth daily vile evil unto the Palestinians, who sit in peace under their fig trees, and trouble the Hebrews not.

And the doings of the Zionists are evil, even as the ways of the accursed Nazim and the dogs of Botha, of the vanquished tribe of the Apartheidites. And, lo, the Land of Israel must be wiped from the map of the nations, and he that sayeth not so shall be accursed.

And the hearts of the many true Hebrews that knew the truth were troubled, and they knew not what to do.

Plan for top level changes in NHS management denied by top Executive

The Duke of Omnium has denied top level NHS management changes are imminent on the day a shocking report has been published about National HaulAir Services flight provision for the elderly. 

Omnium is the National HaulAir Service's Second Chief Executive, Executive for Servicing Passsengers, Director of Passenger Announcements, Chief of Grooming Facilities, Director of Public Airport Customer Relations,  Master of In-Flight Entertainment, Head of Chief Executive Management, Manager of Aircraft Trading and Director of After-Dark Arts Programmes. 

He was interviewed this morning, responding to previous speculation about his repeated flights to Flying Boats based in Corfu owned by Derria Spivchap, the Chief Executive of the Russian Executive Flying Boat Service.

 

He has angrily denied that he is seeking to obtain Flying Boat privileges from Mr Spivchap for the Executive Board of the National Haulair Service and related secret negotiations about joint Flying Boat privileges for the executives of the Eton Touring Company and the exclusive Bullingdon Flying Company subsidiary, the Bullingdon Very Private Flying Club.

"Mr Spivchap and I share a long-standing common interest in collecting old brass, he said, which we discovered during the time when he was seeking entry for his Russian Private Executive Flight Service to the United European Air Service Brokerage market during the time when I was Commissioning Executive for Trans-European Air Flights. 

"While, in line with current flight standards for our passengers, we no longer install brass in our latest National Haulair Service passenger aircraft, the very best old brass in the International Air Haul market is that to be seen in Flying Boats, of which Mr Spivchap has a remarkable collection. We even have a friendly rivalry in presenting brassneck displays. 

"Mr Matt Richkid, who has one of the largest collections of family old brass in the world, and has added several outstanding examples of Flying Boats through his shrewd Private Haul Air deals always meets up with us on Spivchap's Corfu Flying Boat to compare and swap our old brass collections. 

"He happens to be an old school chum of George Newborn, Finance Executive of the Bullingdon Flying Company, who has a growing interest in collecting and managing old brass and joins us when Mr Richkid visits. But frankly, he's not in our league. And he ruffled a lot of feathers last year by misquoting my praise of Gordon Macavity as "an incomparable flightmaster" to the press as "an incomparable disaster".

The Duke has also brushed aside the speculation that has resulted from his recent move from the Senior Executive Suite in the VIP Arrival Lounge of Heathrow Airport, where he has been sited during the relatively short time since he was granted his Dukedom, to the Senior Executive Suite in the VIP Departure Lounge. 

He dismissed speculation that provisions in the new Executive guidelines for members of the VIP lounge to be allowed to renounce their membership of the Lounge and move into the Senior Executive Suites in the Security Lounges are of any significance.

"I have no intention whatsoever of becoming Chief Executive of the National Haulair Service, he said. I am devoting myself in my current roles to improving the flying experiences of hard working passengers, supporting our outstanding Chief Executive Gordon Macavity and making sure the planes fly on time. 

Our National Haulair Service is the envy of the world. 

We have met our target, a record for the National Haulair Service, of holding fatal air crashes down to just  five percent of the total. Our thoughts of course are with the families, and we are constantly setting up new enquiries to identify ways to improve our service. The number of passenger infections arising from inadequately serviced plane seats and undercooked in-flight meals is now below that of any Third World Haul Air Service. The recent survey of disappointing results from our special free flights programme for the elderly has spurred us to improve further. We are today setting up an urgent enquiry which is expected to report in three years' time. We do not rest on our laurels. Our record is the envy of the world.

"Flights are always free from the point of the Passengers' Departure Lounge, and no-one will ever be asked to pay for a ticket at the point of boarding the plane.

"Gordon Macavity is doing a superb job, constantly investing in our National Haulair Service by printing money to buy more planes, employ more pilots and flight attendants and cut down waiting times for free flights.

 

"Donald Poltroon and his Eton Touring Club Company and their pathetic and privileged premium class passenger cartel at the Bullingdon Flying Company have no alternatives to offer whatsoever, and are trying to keep their plan to make 20% cuts in free flights carefully hidden from passengers. But our passengers aren't taken in by their ruses. And they know that the number of fatal crashes would soar if they were to succeed in securing the new contract for the National Haulair Service. 

"We are not surprised that the Eton Touring Club Company's Strasbourg Executive Mr Hardman, who constantly carps about our low 5% fatal crash record, has turned out to be a admirer of discredited West Midlands Conservative Air Race Executive, the late Mr Egot Badsmell, on the very day that another scurrilous report has come out which seeks to smear the proud record of our much-loved National Haul Air Service.

"The continuing huge enthusiasm for our Twitter Microflights  #welovethenhs free mini-flights service proves that our passengers know that we at HardLabour are the natural Executive of the National Haulair Service."

Exclusive: Gordon breaks silence on Libyan transfer issue

Gordon Macavity, leader of the UK National Haulair Service has at last broken his surprising silence on the Libyan transfer issue.

"The decision to upgrade Mr Al-Legman onto an exclusive private jet flight commissioned by the Libyan Al Jamahirya Air Service run by its owner Captain Muamar Al-CrimeLord was the responsibility of the Scottish Haulair Service", he said. 

"The decision will have been made by the Scottish Haulair Service in line with their local Primary Charter Tariff guidelines. You will know that the Primary Charter Tariff Director Mr MacPoorskill has identified compassionate grounds on which Libyan passengers found guilty of sabotaging flights, leading to unfortunate fatal plane crashes may be upgraded onto exclusive private jet flights commissioned by Captain Al-CrimeLord.

"This is a matter for the Scottish Haulair Service. I have no further comments to make."

Questioned by hordes of reporters on the significance for Mr Al-Legman's upgrade of the exclusive Flight Passenger Exchange Provision Contract between the UK National Haul Air Service-Libyan Al Jamahirya Air Service for private jet flight upgrades for passengers found guilty of sabotaging flights, Mr Macavity stated, "The decision to upgrade Mr Al-Legman onto an exclusive private jet flight commissioned by the Libyan Al Jamahirya Air Service run by its owner Captain Muamar Al-CrimeLord was the responsibility of the Scottish Haulair Service. It was a decision made by the Scottish Haulair Service. I have no further comments to make."

Pressed further by reporters on the fact that the exclusive UK-Libyan Flight Passenger Exchange Provision Contract is one which covers the Scottish Haulair Service, which is in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of the UK National Haulair Service, so must have involved Mr Macavity in agreeing the upgrade under its terms, Macavity said, "It was a decision made by the Scottish Haulair Service. It falls within their area of responsibility. I have no further comments to make." 

Questioned on whether the decision to upgrade Mr Al-Legman had been influenced by the recently signed Aircraft Fuel Contract signed by the UK National Haulair Service with the Libyan Aircraft Fuelwell service owned by Captain Muamar Al-CrimeLord, Mr Macavity said, "That is a most deplorable suggestion. The decision to upgrade Mr Al-Legman was a matter for the Scottish Haulair Service.

"The Aircraft Fuel Contract will enable us to continue to offer all our UK passengers flights which are free at the point of boarding the plane. Our National Haulair Service is the envy of the world. Our passengers will never be asked to pay for a flight at the door of a plane. We have improved our service enormously through huge investment. Flight waiting times are now down to a maximum of eighteen weeks. The emergency air flight service has improved even more. Passengers now have a maximum waiting time of five hours before they board an emergency flight. We have reduced the number of flights which result in fatal crashes to just five per cent, a reduction of seventeen percent since 1997. Our hearts go out to the families. We are working very hard to reduce that further.

"The recent US controversies about the Obama Flight Plan service have resulted in a huge outpouring of spontaneous support from thousands of our passengers, organised by Mrs Macavity, who have taken up the #welovethenhs campaign. So huge has been this spontaneously organized campaign that it even led to an unfortunate fatal crash in the Twitter Microflight Service a week ago. Our hearts go out to the families.  However, our passengers continue to flood the Twitter Microflight Service, now back to normal service levels, with their #welovethenhs mini-flights. I have spent many hours with Mrs Macavity reading through the ecstatic comments of the #welovethenhs passengers. Here's an example from a Mrs Trellis of South Wales. It says, "I had a free flight to Paris. My elderly dad is just back from a free flight to Oslo. #welovethenhs." And I can tell you that's absolutely typical of our passengers. We in the UK love our National Haulair Service, financed by careful but ever-increasing spending from our equitably priced progressive direct and indirect tax budget. Even the very poorest in the land will never have to wait more than eighteen weeks for a long-haul flight. Every single flight is free at the point of boarding the plane.

"By contrast, passengers in the US have to pay out in full for tickets before they can board a plane. They will not even be allowed onto an emergency flight unless they can show they have paid in full for a ticket. Families can find themselves faced with bills of thousands of pounds for routine overseas flights. Can you imagine that? What's more they have to choose between dozens of different Haulair Services without knowing that they have a National Haulair Service to fall back on which will never charge for a flight at the plane door. No wonder millions of Americans have never made an overseas flight."

Mr Macavity announced that he would today be meeting Captain Notknowyou, head of the Israel Haulair Service, in a bid to help negotiations over the long standing flight slot disputes between the IHS and the newly formed Palestinian Radical HostAir Service. Despite the continuing internal splits between the RadicalMarxistArmedStruggle and the RadicalIslamistHostageandBomb executive wings of the emerging Palestinian Radical HostAir Service, we are confident that a future flight management plan can be agreed. However, the IHS must first agree to stop taking flight slots which we consider have been internationally allocated to the Palestinian Radical HostAir Service. We are also aware of Captain Notknowyou's concerns about the regrettable threats of the Iranian Islamic PeacefulNuclear Haul Air Service to close down the Israel Haulair Service. However, we insist that this is not a reason for considering a pre-emptive closedown by the Israel Haulair Service of the Iranian Islamic PeacefulNuclear Haul Air Service.

By working together in the International Haulair Quartet, we are working on solving these problems under the inspirational leadership of Obama Flight Plan President Barak Obama and myself. I shall be getting on with the job. I know that hard-working families going through difficult times expect nothing less than that"

Mr Donald Poltroon, the fresh-faced and eager candidate to replace Mr Macavity when the five year contract renewal comes up next year said, "The decision to upgrade Mr Al-Legman was a disgrace. It should not have been done. 

"The National Haulair Service is absolutely safe with us. We shall spend just as much money as Mr Macavity and his executives. We will find ways to ensure that we reduce the number of fatal crashes below five percent. And passengers will never have to pay for a ticket at the door of the plane. Our National Haulair Service is a great national treasure which we all love. 

"I am confident but not complacent that our Eton Touring Company and its subsidiary Bullingdon Private Touring Flights will be selected by the passengers of the UK when the National Haulair Service contract comes up for renewal. Passengers everywhere have realised that the HardLabour Air Plan has failed miserably and that Mr Macavity has lost the confidence of the nation. 

"That is why he has been skulking in the Security Class Lounge of the Kirkaldy Airport for the last four weeks."

Why is the Obama administration playing up to Scottish posturing on Megrahi?

I'm fascinated by the way in which the Obama administration is playing up to the "Nation on the March--Scotland puts two fingers up to USA" narrative. They have been seeming to seek to outdo each other in expressing various levels of rage and disgust addressed solely at the Scottish administration, as if they really thought that Alex Salmond, MacAskill and the others really were solely responsible for the release of Megrahi and his repatriation to LIbya.

As I've demonstrated irrefutably in my previous post, the repatriation of Megrahi could not possibly have taken place without the express consent of the UK government. That's because it's explicitly required as a provision of the Treaty which enabled the transfer of prisoners between the UK and Libya, a Treaty signed by Gordon Brown's UK government in November 2008 and ratified by Gordon Brown's UK government in May 2009. There was at that time only one Libyan prisoner in any jail in the UK. Now that Megrahi has returned to Libya, there are none

I've been discussing this point on several heated blog posts centred on the supposed ways in which Salmond, MaAskill and Co exercised their supposed power of transfer. One of the most excited posters (he has a book about to come out) pointed out that the preamble of the Treaty stated that the Scottish government is responsible for the transfer of prisoners in Scotland.  

Alas. A preamble in a Treaty has no  force whatsoever. Only the specific provisions in the Treaty itself have legal force. A preamble is a political gloss, a statement of intent. And in the world of Treaty-making, it is usually put there to satisfy the political needs of the constituency or constituencies. It is more or less the political equivalent of stating" We believe in Motherhood and Apple Pie.

Whatever the preamble said, the relevant provision required the express agreement of the UK government, and thus Gordon Brown to agree the return of Megrahi.

The Obama administration are not of course either fools or naives. That Obama himself should be unaware of the real powers of a provincial administration and the requirements of Treaties when he's the former editor of the Harvard Law Review and a law professor at the University of Chicago streches credibility beyond belief. Hillary Clinton is equally a woman with a stellar record at Harvard Law School, besides having spent many years as a Senate Legislator.

So why have they not condemned and deplored Gordon Brown's central and decisive role part in a transfer Treaty that only applied to Megrahi? Why have they overlooked the key clause in the Treaty which shows the UK had to agree to the transfer. After all, even if we care to accept the ludicrous notion that the Salmond administration could decided to release Megrahi against the wishes of the UK government, Brown had the power under the Treaty to refuse to agree to Megrahi being repatriated. He could have, for example, insisted that Megrahi was transferred to a UK hospital where he would be kept in secure conditions equivalent to jailing, as was done in the case of such notorious prisoners as Ian Brady, Myra Hindley and the Yorkshire Ripper.

Why has the Obama administration not fulminated against Brown's failure to do this?

Why have they been venting their fury at the dancing monkeys on the organ of Mr Gordon "Macavity" Brown, who's so very conveninently away on his longest holiday ever, and remaining silent about the organ grinder who presided over the made-to-measure for Megrahi Treaty, ratified it and agreed to the transfer provided for in it?

Is this some mysterious form of conspiracy designed to protect Brown? Some unknown quid pro quo involving a chunk of the oil and gas contracts just signed with British companies? I very much doubt it, though such things are not unknown.

But look at the politics of Obama's image, and his administration's image. His carefully constructed halo as the defender of the oppressed. And of course the Head of State of the largest group of the bereaved families and loved ones of the terorist\s victims, the great majority of whom are known to have been bitter opponents of Megrahi's release. The leader of the nation that suffered the murderous attacks of the terrorists crashing planes who killed more than ten times the toll of Lockerbie has been seen to demand justice for victims of terrorism without actually directing his wrath at either the true enabler.  Gordon Brown, or the original man who ordered Megrahi to do his disgusting, murderous work.

Sometimes politics is the discourse designed to divert from certain unpalatable and incompatible-with-your-USP self-branding.

In this case Obama sustains his crown as the eloquent-in-righteous anger leader of his people, the proclaimer of the delivery of justice. He diverts attention conveniently not just from a major ally in the current Afghan conflict, but from the fact that he has also studiously refrained from even the tiniest reflection on the fact that Megrahi was the terrorist hit man, but Gaddafi, who sent him, with or without the involvement of other pariah states, has never paid for his role as the instigator, financier and begetter of this horrendous crime. The worst he's got out of all this is a public deploring of the hero's welcome he carefully prepared for Megrahi. That's been called "disgusting". But then how can that be squared with the matching total silence on Gaddafi's role in ordering and setting up the crime in the first place?

Crocodiles everywhere may well be envious of the weeping abilities of Obama and his fellow administration senior media superstars over this tragic and disgusting business.

As for Salmond, MacAskill and the Scottish nationalists, perhaps one could think of what it's like to be a quiet little blogger who's used to around a hundred hits a day. Suddenly, they get an Instalanche and the hit rates go up to 5,000 a day. Then the rest of the internet takes them on, and suddlenly the hits are in the millions. Yes, that's just a tiny glimpse of what it's like to be mice on the political stage who the greatest power in the world chooses to express apparently impotent rage at doings for which you did not actually exercise the real decisions, anyway. 

Wonderful.

Lockerbie bomber release: the evidence proving a Gordon Brown set-up

It seemed to start with some normally astute UK political journos and commentators appearing baffled. Paul Waugh of the Evening Standard, one of the sharpest of all, was of all a-Twitter last week about it's being bizarre that the British government chose to deplore the hero's welcome the Libyan government gave to returning released convict Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, whilst remaining silent on the fact that the Scottish government released him to be repatriated in the first place. 

Alex Massie, the equally astute Spectator CoffeeHouse resident blogger had run a couple of posts over the previous week in "calm down, dear" mode, ridiculing a range of articles and blogger posts suggesting that the real reason for the release has been the result of the machinations of the UK government, including Lord Mandelson. He has been emphatic that the Scottish government alone had the power to take any decision about releasing Megrahi.

Both the Guardian and The Telegraph ran headlines on 21st August based stating that David Milliband denied that the UK government had been involved in the decision to release Megrahi. Actually, he did no such thing. He said the accusation was "a slur". A slur is actually an accusation of a discreditable or disreputable act. It does not itself make any judgement as to whether the slur is true or not.

Most of the London press this week and weekend has been huffing and puffing at the posturing (or alternatively the moral deficiency) of the Scottish government, as if it had really been able to make the decision on its very own, regardless of whether the UK government agreed or not.

This is absolute nonsense.

For the transfer to happen, there had to be a Treaty between the two national states where the prisoners are incarcerated in place to enable any prisoner to be transferred.

Scotland is a devolved regional government. But it is not an independent nation. It is an internally governing province of the United Kingdom, with the equivalent status of Bavaria in Germany. It does not have a Foreign Minister, even if it does have independent courts, as it had long before the devolved Scottish Parliament came into being. It has no power to make Treaties or agree provisions which are assigned to the nation states which sign them.  In other words, it is more of a jumped up Local Authority than a nation-state, however much the titles of First Minister and the posturing about Scotland's quasi independence are played to the galleries on both sides of the border.

So where is the Treaty that allowed Megrahi to be freed and returned to Libya?

It was signed between the UK and Libyan governments on 17th November 2008. Is the number of British prisoners in Libya and the number of Libyan prisoners in Britain so significant as to justify the processes of negotiation and bureaucracy which setting up such a Treaty between states with such radically different conceptions of justice, due process and government must involve? I think not. 

Via the link, you can read the Treaty in full on the Foreign and Colonial Office web site. Here's what might be called "the money quote":

A transfer requires the consent of the both States.

The treaty was therefore agreed by the UK government, and the transfer of Megrahi, on the basis of its provisions could only have taken place with the UK government's agreement. It is inconceivable that Gordon Brown would not have been centrally involved in making this decision. He had it in his power to refuse to make the transfer, even if the Scottish Minister agreed to release Megrahi.

Indeed Megrahi's own lawyer is now arguing that it would have been more compassionate, if compassion was the issue, to release him to a hospital facility in the UK, whilst retaining him in custody. This has been done in the past with such high-profile prisoners as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. As several commentators have pointed out, would the Scottish Justice Minister have been so ready to release the Dunblane murderer, Thomas Watt Hamilton, had he not committed suicide and survived to become terminally ill with cancer. I rather doubt it.

What's more, the Treaty did not come into force until it was ratified. This was a process controlled and completed entirely by the UK government. It was ratified by Jack Straw in May 2009.

And we now know that Ian Lewis, a junior minister wrote early in August to the Scottish administration to ask for Megrahi to be released. If you're really into deep Brownian machinations, you might even think it possible that this hapless man, previously sacked by Brown for harassing a civil servant just when he was faiing to show the required loyalty, could be the required sacrificial goat, with Brown denying that he knew of the letter.

There are those who suggest that  Blair set it all up back on his lengthy visit to Libya back in 2004. But Brown has never hesitated to overturn Blair decisions where he felt like doing so, including during the time when Blair was still serving as Prime Minister. And all three of the above key decisions, which were really the ones that freed Megrahi, were his responsibility. It is inconceivable that David Milliband or anyone else could have foisted such a decision on him. And we know that he held a substantial meeting with Gaddafi at the G8 Conference. Which happened to be just around the time the Treaty was signed.

Why did the Scottish government play ball? Apart from the fact that they didn't have much choice, why would such a self-aggrandising peacock as Alex Salmond want to pass up the chance to pose as a world statesman? To have gullible or lazy journalists gasp in awe as he postured at putting two fingers up at the USA claiming its legal system allowed for compassion where the US one did not? To save money on keeping Megrahi incarcerated? What was not to like? Unlike Gordon Brown, they may have been too full of the anticipated glory of it to anticipate a backlash that could turn nastier than they anticipated.

For Gordon Brown, it's seemed to be a win-win situation. He gets the lucrative British comanies' oil and gas contracts signed with Libya. Any flak is currently being fired at Salmond and his Justice Minister MacAskill. A typically satisfactory Macavity solution for which Brown is so renowned. 

And is it merely coincidental that the release and the resultant flak has started flying just when he has been on his most extended vacation yet? Or could this be yet another manifestation of the Macavity tactic?

Ultimately, as the papers suggest, it could lead to the downfall of Salmond's government  In the long term, it will make full Scottish independence more likely. Certainly more was done to present the illusion as reality this week and Salmond and MacAskill played it for all the drama they could wring out of it. MacAskill's speech was read as if he had spent weeks watching YouTube clips of particularly cliff-hanging Oscar awards announcements.

But Brown's potentially got quite an interest in building up an independent Scotland. Tom Bower's scathing and revelatory biography presents him as having a deeply embedded, unshakeable commitment to his native Scotland, and a dislike and distrust of England and London in particular. 

He is not so self-deluded as to be convinced that he will still be in power after the next election. It could suit a triumphant Tory party quite well to cut Scotland loose and get rid of a satisfyingly large number of historically Labour and Liberal Democrat seats. One of the highly convenient ways to lose the 10% of seats Cameron has promised to get rid of.

With an independent Scotland and a discredited SNP--even with a coalition of SNP and Labour, what would please the anti-monarchist Brown better than to become the first President of an independent Scotland?

I just hope every politician in Scotland has taken the trouble to read Bower's biography of Gordon Brown very, very attentively.

UPDATE: Reflections on the Obama administration's playing to the Scottish posturing whilst remaining virutally silent on the role of Brown and the specific responsibility of Gaddafii as the organizer and real source of the Lockerbie bombing here.

Guardian publishes Zizek's anti-semitic lies

British journalist and peace activist Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of former British premier Tony Blair who is now an international Middle East peace envoy, shops at a grocery store in Gaza City on September 3, 2008. 

Slavoj Zizek is a world-renowned intellectual. He is the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of the Humanities. He was a candidate for and came close to being elected President of Slovenia. Here's the potted bio (I presume it's self-penned) which appears on their web site:

World-renowned public intellectual Professor Slavoj Zizek has published over 50 books (translated into 20 languages) on topics ranging from philosophy and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to theology, film, opera and politics, including Lacan in Hollywood and The Fragile Absolute. He was a candidate for, and nearly won, the Presidency of his native Slovenia in the first democratic elections after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1990. Although courted by many universities in the US, he resisted offers until the International Directorship of Birkbeck's Centre came up. Believing that 'Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians', Zizek aims to promote the role of the public intellectual, to be intellectually active and to address the larger public.

Today, Zizek has published a post on the Guardian's Comment is Free site on the subject of the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The opinions he expresses include anti-semitic lies and recycling of various tropes and evasions routinely used in anti-semitic (as opposed to anti-zionist) discourse on Israel.

Here's the most significant quote which demonstrates the sophisticated way in which he does this:

Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as "the greatest concentration camp in the world".camp in the world". However, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract "prayers for peace" obscene and hypocritical. The state of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact.

He begins apparently innocuously by citing Palestinian references to the Gaza Strip as "the greatest concentration camp in the world" as "a problematic cliche". Zizek's statement can appear to the casual reader to be a rejection of the truth of the term. But of course a "cliche" is not as such a lie. A cliche is usually a particularly hackneyed way of expressing a truth. As such, it is an evasive way of evoking the designation whilst appearing to distance himself from it.

But then look at the next sentence: "in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth".

This statement is a lie. And it is an anti-semitic lie.

Routinely, the words "concentration camp" refer to the concentration camps run by the Nazis either directly or indirectly for the purpose of imprisoning and either preparing for or directly exterminating the Jews and the other designated groups the Nazis set out to murder or otherwise do to death.

Perhaps Professor Zizek meant to say that he is only referring to such concentration camps as are in operation today, such as those of North Korea? He offers no such qualifications or clarifications, but even if he did, it would be a lie even to claim that it is dangerously close to the truth to say that Gaza is a concentration camp of any sort, let alone the greatest in the world.

For a start, let's consider Wikipedia's listing of the characteristics of various forms of Nazi concentration camp:

• Labour camps: concentration camps where interned inmates had to do hard physical labour under inhuman conditions and cruel treatment. Some of these camps were sub-camps of bigger camps, or "operational camps", established for a temporary need.
• Transit and collection camps: camps where inmates were collected and routed to main camps, or temporarily held.
• POW camps: concentration camps where prisoners of war were held after capture. These POW's endured torture and liquidation on a large scale.
• Camps for rehabilitation and re-education of Poles: Camps where the intelligentsia of the ethnic Poles were held, and "re-educated" in light of German-Nazi values as slaves.
• Hostage camps: camps where hostages were held and killed as reprisals.

• Extermination camps: These camps differed from the rest, since not all of them were also concentration-camps. Although none of the categories is independent, and each camp could be classified as a mixture of several of the above, and all camps had some of the elements of an extermination camp, still systematic extermination of new-arrivals occurred in very specific camps. Of these, three were extermination camps, where all new-arrivals were simply killed -- The "Reinhardt Aktion" camps. Three others were concentration and extermination camps altogether. Others were at times classified as "minor extermination camps.   

Now, here's Wikipedia's summary of wider definitions of concentration camps past and present:

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. defines concentration camp as: a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45.

Similar camps existed earlier, such as in the United States (concentration camps for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s), inCuba (1868–78) and in the Philippines (1898–1901) by Spain under the Restoration and the US respectively^[5]. The term finds its roots in the "reconcentration camps" set up in Cuba by Valeriano Weyler in 1897 to quell opposition to Spanish rule in Cuba. During the Second Boer War(1899-1902), the term "concentration camp" was used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa.^[6] Ostensibly conceived as a form of humanitarian aid to the families whose farms had been destroyed in the fighting, the camps were used to confine and control large numbers of civilians as part of a scorched earth tactic.

Polish historian Władysław Konopczyński has suggested the first concentration camps were actually created in the 18th century, during Bar Confederation, when Russians organized 3 concentration camps in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for Polish rebel captives, where internees awaited deportation on to Siberia. ^[7]

Use of the word concentration comes from the idea of concentrating a group of people who are in some way undesirable in one place, where they can be watched by those who incarcerated them. For example, in a time of insurgency, potential supporters of the insurgents are placed where they cannot provide them with supplies or information.

 

Now, by no stretch of the imagination can Gaza be said to be "dangerously close" to being any sort of concentration camp.  Nor even could it be said to be even remotely close to such a designation being legitimate.

For a start, no concentration camp anywhere, ever, at any time has had inmates who are armed with military hardware. Let alone armed with machine guns, grenade launchers and rockets. Let alone regularly having an organised externally independently financed regime which has forces which use those arms to launch attacks on the nation supposedly imprisoning them, as well as on their own opponents. Here's an image taken yesterday of members of the ruling Gazan Hamas regime's fighters engaged in the process of eliminating a rival group of Islamists in Gaza City:

Neither has any concentration camp anywhere in the world ever had a border with another state which includes gates which it is free to open at will. In the case of Gaza, it has a border with Egypt, which it has chosen to either open or shut independently of Israel. On such occasions, Gazans have freely streamed out of Gaza and gone to trade in Egypt.

In any case, it stretches the imagination beyond the credible to suggest that Professor Zizek might have been thinking of the British concentration camps of the Boer War (where women and children starved to death in huge numbers by failures to provide them with food) or any other concentration camp of the past or the present.

Because Professor Zizek then goes on to state that, by what he claims are processes of stealth, the West Bank (not, you note, Gaza) "will become Palestinian-frei". What is this German-derived neologism but an unmistakable analogy to the Nazi policy of eliminating in its entirety the Jewish presence in any area it controlled, which it termed making it "Judenfrei" or "Judenrein"?

Any use of Nazi analogies in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is wholly unjustifiable. Are there any possible circumstances under which the Guardian condones the expression of such views as legitimate or acceptable? Incidentally, I equally deplore and consider unacceptable the use of Nazi analogies and transferred terminology of this kind by either citizens or supporters of Israel or anyone else. That includes the use of the term "Auschwitz borders" in the context of either the 1949 or 1967 borders of Israel (or any other international borders anywhere) and the all too common use of the word "Judenrein" in the context of critiquing Palestinian, Arab and Islamist demands about Jewish residence anywhere in the Middle East. However, one could at least argue that such discourse, deplorable as it is, can be related to explicitly exterminationist/expulsionist discourse as can readily found in the history of certain Palestinian, Arab and Islamist polemics and political programmes about the Jews of Israel or the occupied territories or indeed the wider Middle East. But such advocacy of exterminationism or proposed total ethnic group expulsion is quite appalling enough in its own right not to need the addition of Nazi-specific exterminationist/expulsionist terminology to justify exposing them for what they are.

Accompanying the history of real concentration camps of the past and present is not only unarmed and prisoner status but extreme physical deprivation resulting in huge numbers of deaths through starvation or murder. The image at the head of this post of Lauren Booth, another invoker of the designation of Gaza as a "concentration camp" visiting a very well stocked Gazan shop, staffed by visibly well fed people is just one of a whole series of such images previously featured in this post at Harry's Place.

There are of course many, many other reasons why there is not even remote comparability between Gaza and its continuingly increasing population and the reality of concentration camps, particularly those of the Nazis, but what I've set out so far should be quite enough to demonstrate that the effect of Professor Zizek's discourse is to create a "dangerously close" near equivalence between the policies and practices of the Jewish state of Israel and the Nazi regime which sought to exterminate every last Jew without exception. 

Professor Zizek seems to have some form in the matter of using anti-semitic discourse around debates on the Holocaust and Jews as well as on the subject of Israel. In this Guardian post, he appears to have produced a piece of writing which is a disgrace to any academic, let alone a Professor of philosophy proudly claiming "to promote the role of the public intellectual".

The Guardian's guidelines are published here. 

Given Israel's unique status as the only Jewish state in the world, and as the home of over forty percent of the world's Jews, and the history of the deliberate mass extermination of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, how can the Guardian have passed for publication a post which so clearly violates these three of its own guidelines?

3. We understand that people often feel strongly about issues debated on the site, but we will consider removing any content that others might find extremely offensive or threatening. Please respect other people's views and beliefs and consider your impact on others when making your contribution.

4. We reserve the right to redirect or curtail conversations which descend into flame-wars based on ingrained partisanship or generalisations. We don't want to stop people discussing topics they are enthusiastic about, but we do ask users to find ways of sharing their views that do not feel divisive, threatening or toxic to others.

5. We will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of hate-speech, or contributions that could be interpreted as such.We recognise the difference between criticising a particular government, organisation, community or belief and attacking people on the basis of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

Don't miss this evocation of the fantasies of the sexual revolutionary left

This morning I revelled in listening to an almost totally deadpan documentary in the BBCR4 "In Living Memory" series-- on the origins of the Section 28 legislation in the furore over the publication of "Jenny Lives with Eric & Martin". This hilarious bit of  tendenz literatur was read aloud, complete with the bit where nice, liberal Mr Jones transformed the homophobia of his wife, grumpy Mrs Jones, to the gay male couple with daughter living next door by the simple expedient of explaining to her that he had once loved a man, but decided that he loved her better and married her. Don't try that one at home, folks.

Lots of choice little voiceovers from the veterans of the then Haringey Lesbian & Gay Unit, staffed by some of the most grotesque sexual revolutionaries of my then acquaintance,

a couple of whom appear in the equally wonderful documentary on the seventies/early eighties Angry Wimmin of the clip above.

Today's programme included a priceless soundbite from one of the more plausible of them, who got herself elected as a councillor in charge of running (and presumably playing some role in recruiting the staff of) the Lesbian & Gay Unit. She proclaimed that the opposition to the circulation of propaganda books about happy gay male couples bringing up daughters represented anxiety that if knowledge of gayness as a valid lifestyle became widespread, it would threaten the continuation of capitalism.....

These days she's Professor of Law & Social Theory at the Univ of Kent, publishing with CUP:  

Tory grandees and foamers at the mouth were also given lots of past & present soundbites, the latter mostly shamefacedly recanting of their then attitudes. 

You should be able to catch it up here

The Palestinian Authority: farce rewritten as tragedy

It's no joke living under a corrupt and sometimes murderous regime, and one can only feel compassion for those who have to. However, even in the worst days of the Soviet regime, its millions of citizens sustained themselves with sardonic humour and self-mockery, through jokes and satirical songs.

 

Reading this account of the doings of the Palestinian authority one response is to feel horrified. But the sheer grotesquery in this account of what's going on, particularly the elaborately absurd subterfuges by which the Fatah and Hamas regimes handle the shared adminstration they're forced to engage in, reminds me of the Keystone Cops films. 

There's that old quote from Marx about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Only here, I think it's the other way round. The farcical setup which allowed an openly terrorist group, Hamas, to stand for election in a supposed democracy, alongside a nominally democratic group, Fatah, which kept a semi-detached force of terrorists in case of need, seems to have produced a situation like this:

A close friend who recently moved from Gaza City to Ramallah with his wife and two young children told me that the cost of each passport for a Gazan citizen is almost NIS 1,200, as opposed to NIS 235 prior to the Hamas takeover - just one of the consequences of the political disputes between the governments of Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in Ramallah.

After the takeover, several administrative offices had been formed in Gaza whose duties included the distribution of passports to civilians. I can't fathom how these offices transfer the passport requests from Gaza to Ramallah. I do not rule out the possibility that they are in fact smuggled through the tunnels and sent via Egyptian mail to Ramallah.

Today there is a serious passport shortage in the Gaza Strip. The PA, to help remedy that problem, is supposed to pass out about 5,000 new passports every month to citizens in the Gaza Strip. Hamas uses passports by selectively distributing them to the people within its government instead of making them available to anyone applying for them. The lack of passports in Gaza has brought a major increase in demand and even 10,000 new passports issued a month would not be enough to relieve the deficit.

But here's where the farce descends into near slapstick. For the article from which the extract was taken was written by the brother of one of the PA's ministers.  He's the long-serving head of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitorying Group, which investigates and documents Human Rights abuses by both the Palestinian and the Israeli authorities. And here's his take on his brother's experience at the hands of the government in which he's a minister:

My brother, Hatem Abdulqader, was appointed 40 days ago to be the Minister of Jerusalem Affairs in the Salaam Fayad government. However, his new employer wasn't able to provide him with an office. No one in the government was able to tell my brother to his face that every minister needs a chair, a table and coffee utensils to serve the people who come to his office to congratulate him. When I heard about this, I lent my brother NIS 10,000 to find an office.

Eventually, he had to build one for himself. He had approached the Ministry of Finance many times requesting an office, a chair and a desk, but was told time again that the PA's cash register was empty.

This episode enraged me. Why is it necessity to appoint so many ministers to form a government? Why is the PA in need of $100 million each month for salaries? Where does all this money go? What do all these ministers do for their people?

In the television broadcast showing my brother being sworn in as minister, he raised his hand and swore by the Koran to be loyal to his people and country. If I were him, I would refuse to take this vow in front of Abbas or Fayad. I would be willing to take the oath only when the people standing in front of me are responsible enough to uphold this vow themselves.

The Fayad government actually wanted to use my brother to commit perjury, to swear in front of the entire Palestinian nation in the name of a useless government.

Well, yes, where does the money go? The US and EU may be withholding aid from the Hamas regime, but they're certainly pouring it into the PA's coffers.

But back to tragedy rather than farce. If you fall foul of either the PA or Hamas, you're much more likely to end up with a bullet in your back or blown to pieces in a car bomb than you are with a custard pie in your face.

Iranian regime goes after Arash, just like he said they would

The Iranian regime has announced that it's using its police apparatus and Interpol to go after Dr Arash Hejazi. 

Why? 

He spoke out on the BBC about his experience of witnessing the murder of Neda Aga-Soltan at close quarters, and trying in vain to use his medical skills to save her. What's more he spoke of seeing the outraged crowd of protesters capture the Basiji thug who fired the shot, the Basiji's cries that he "didn't mean to kill her", and the crowd's having disarmed him and let him go.

Arash Hejazi's dramatic interview includes his fears of how the Iranian regime will respond to his testimony. "They will put all sorts of things on me," he says--it's about seven minutes into this clip. He knows he is now a marked man.

Of course, there are at least two versions of every story, so let's look at today's line from Iran's Chief of Police, helpfully and uncritically reported in The Guardian:

Iran's police chief, Brigadier General Ismail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, said 1,032 people had been arrested since the 12 June election, but he claimed that most had since been released.
"Those who are still in detention were referred to the public and revolutionary courts in Tehran," Fars News Agency quoted him as saying, according to Reuters.
Ahmadi-Moghaddam said 20 "rioters" had been killed during the unrest and more than 500 police had been injured.
He also asked Interpol to arrest Arash Hejazi, the doctor who was filmed coming to the aid of Neda Soltan after she was shot in the widely seen video of her death.

Hejazi fled to London after the incident and suggested that a Basij militiaman on a motorbike was responsible for her killing.
"Her killing was a planned scenario and had no relation with the riots in Tehran," Ahmadi-Moghaddam said.

You don't have to look far to work out what story the Iranian regime is going to try and lay on Arash Hejazi. Here's Ahmadinejad's version of what happened as put out on the Iranian propaganda tool, Press TV:

The massive propaganda of the foreign media, as well as other evidence, proves the interference of the enemies of the Iranian nation who want to take political advantage and darken the pure face of the Islamic republic," he said in a letter to Shahroudi, according to the news agency.

The letter comes a day after Iran's government-backed Press TV said Agha-Soltan did not die the way the opposition claims.

Two people told Press TV there were no security forces in the area when she was killed. 
And the network said the type of bullet that killed her is not used by Iranian security forces.

A man who told the network that he had helped take her to a hospital said, "There were no security forces or any member of the Basij" paramilitary present when she was killed.

The Guardian's version makes it look as if Dr Arash Hejazi ran away. In fact, Arash Hejazi is currently based in England in order to pursue a postgraduate degree at the Oxford Brookes University in publishing; he was on a visit to Tehran when, like Neda Soltan, he landed up on the scene of the shooting during the course of one of the biggest street protests against the declaration of the faked results of the Iranian election.

The Guardian also fails to tell its readers about Arash Hejazi's background as an award-winning writer and publisher. I would have linked you to his excellent website, which documents his own writings and his publication of democracy activists both in and beyond Iran. But it was based on an Iranian ISP, and in the last few days, it's been taken down. What a surprise.

But you can still find a good account of Arash's extraordinary and impressive achievements on his Wikipedia page.  There's a telling account by him of the impact of the Iranian regime's censorship methods here.

It's a shame that the Wikipedia page doesn't carry the information which was on his now vanished website about the last time he was in trouble with the Iranian regime. One of his publishing ventures was shut down after he published a story by Primo Levi. Now, I wonder why the Iranian regime would have wanted to do that?

I hope that Interpol and the British government will respond with the contempt the Iranian regime deserves to any requests to turn over Arash Hejazi to them.

Twittering the Iranian uprising resistance

At the height of the pouring out of mass demonstrations on the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities, I started writing the post which is appended to this one.

But I hadn't finished it when tonight, one of the key Twitterers from inside Iran came back after a silence of several days. Over the last hour or two, he's been running a series of tweets telling the story of what happened to some of his fellow Tehran university protesters as they got rounded up by the security apparatus of the Iranian regime.

So I'm editing together the series of tweets to form this continuous post. I don't know if it's safe to give his Twitter name. I want to pay tribute again as I did repeatedly on Twitter, and as I did in the original draft below, to his honesty, his courage and his unfailing commitment to bear witness to what's going on in this uprising.

The tweets from him presented here run backwards--latest first (it came up four minutes ago), down to the first of the series, which he put up about an hour ago. I'll keep updating them as long as he's able to go on telling this story of what's been happening to the arrested protesters.

It's classic police state stuff.

May the Almighty protect him and his fellow protesters, strengthen them and keep them safe.

the biggest help: spread the news & don't desert us! it may take some time but we will take what is rightfully ours!8 minutes ago from web

1. why BBC & CNN reporting things like it's all over now? how can it be over after what gov done to us?3 minutes ago from web
2. the numbers of protectors were far more than 5000! the entire district was full of people

1. this is going to happen on every national occasion & gov has no excuse to stop us!13 minutes ago from web
2. Karoubi was there in person & Mousavi said he was stuck in traffic but we heard him through his cellphone & loudspeakers15 minutes ago from web
3. it may work on a short period of time, but they can't stop what is already started, today's rally was a clear proof18 minutes ago from web
4. Gov is working hard on State TV trying to depress people & stop them from fighting back20 minutes ago from web

1. we passed a letter to Karoubi today describing everything we know about various students conditionsless than a minute ago from web 
2.   
3.   
4.  the student community will stand to the very end! we won't forget what they have done to us!
5. 3 minutes ago from web in reply to TheVitmo
6. and I don't want to put him in more pressure of any kind right now6 minutes ago from web
7. I skipped some of the incidents as Reza requested. he's very weak both mentally & physically7 minutes ago from web

1. Reza had no idea why they suddenly released him & some of his inmates1 minute ago from web
2. at night around 10PM they Released Reza & his family instantly moved him to a hospital for internal bleeding4 minutes ago from web
3. he promised if one of them confess in front of camera he will free them all & they will blur his face & nothing to worry!9 minutes ago from web

in morning a man introduced him self as Intelligent (intelligence?) came saying he will record their confections (confessions?) with camera1 minute ago from web

1. they prevented them from sleeping by kept them standing all the nightless than 20 seconds ago from web
2. according to Reza some students from Polytechnic university were also there5 minutes ago from web
3. and after they knew Reza is a student they moved him to a more harsh environment with some other people6 minutes ago from web

1. the man promised Reza's family they will release him if he's really innocent1 minute ago from web
2. unfortunately Reza's mother told everything she knows over the phone to a man calling from Evin3 minutes ago from web

in last days Reza said it looked they get a little more organized and start searching for any special case in arrested people

less than 20 seconds ago from web

they ran another confession show at Evin,this time with promise of instant freedom & new accusations

3 minutes ago from web

1. a man came and say they will be released today and an hour later another came & say they will be in prison for 10year!2 minutes ago from web
2. Reza said it looked like they have no idea what should they do with so much people4 minutes ago from web
3. all types of gov agents came & go in the next couple of days, moving people, forcing them to walk or just stand for a long time6 minutes ago from web
4. according to Reza some of the injured people already passed out and a taxi driver looked like dead by that time10 minutes ago from web

1. In first day at Evin prison staff started searching for severely injured people & gave them some first aid4 minutes ago from web
2. and another hour passed just standing in the row at the entrance of prison & filling out forms8 minutes ago from web
3. it took near 3 hours to get to the prison, Reza said the driver seemed enjoys wandering in the streets11 minutes ago from web
4. Reza had no idea why they select some of the people and where they moved the others16 minutes ago from web
5. apparently they released some people on that night & move Reza & some of the selected people to Evin17 minutes ago from web
6. around 3am day 2 they started moving people in vans, Reza said a driver was talking to a Basiji about Evin prison is full and what shoul ...20 minutes ago from web
7. Reza said some people sign them & some other just faked their signs & names, there were not enough confession papers for all people24 minutes ago from web
8. and they paid to go to streets and say things & they know they have violated national security & Islam26 minutes ago from web
9. the papers were prewritten confessions all in different hand writings saying the signer is a member of organization by mousavi27 minutes ago from web
10. He said in the second day some pain cloth people came with papers forcing people to sign them32 minutes ago from web
11. there was also a awful problem of only one toilet for all people in there and a impossible time limit of around 1min for each person34 minutes ago from web
12. Reza said the only exception was they didn't hit arrested people directly in the face39 minutes ago from web
13. they didn't open the plastic handcuffs for a day & half, & randomly beat up people in there44 minutes ago from web
14. Reza estimated around 200 people were in each room and there were not enough space to even sit on the groundabout 1 hour ago from web
15. he said all sort of people were there & some of them were just unlucky people just walking in streets and captured for no reasonabout 1 hour ago from web
16. he spent his first 48h of arrest at level -4 of ministry of interior building without food or waterabout 1 hour ago from web
17. my connection is very poor & I don't know how long I will be able to sustain itabout 1 hour ago from web
18. Reza released from Hospital yesterday he is banned from university and now is a stared [marked by gov] studentabout 1 hour ago from web
19. 1:17AM finally managed to load twitter! HTTPS protocol is still blocked by some ISP & no chance getting to twitter with apps

Drafted on 16th June:

I'm keeping up with what's going on in Iran via this Tweetgrid link, which shows the tweets of protesters in Iran alongside a flood of messages from commenters across the world.

It was Twitter that alerted me to what was beginning to roll on Sunday. I picked up a couple of Tweeter names from my usual followees which were putting out angry protest messages in some contrast to what was running on the MSM-- who were running Ahmadinejad's contemptuous dismissal of the protesters as a variant on disappointed football team losers. 

The BBC was running headlines about Mousavi as "the loser", as if to imply that there was certainly no question of doubt about Ahmadinejad's victory.

Then I began reading the tweets of two Iranian students, one obviously under siege in the University of Tehran, the other seeming to have a broader set of contacts across Iran. Then there were the tweets coming from non-Iranians picking up messages and videos coming out of Iran.

I sat up till 3:00am on Sunday night following the tweets from the students besieged in Tehran University. By Monday morning, I emailed my daughter and son-in-law the Tweetgrid link and urged them to follow it.

One of the things that most impressed me and convinced me of the potential power of this movement was the way in which one of the besieged student tweeters sent message after message where he acknowledged his own fear-- he described himself as shaking and sweating with fear-- as he saw the security forces attacking the adjoining building and sought help for a severely wounded friend. He also felt fear at the thought of what might happen at the demo called for the next day. I saw the tweets reporting government threats that the proposed demo must not go ahead because it had been declared illegal, and that protesters would be met by live bullets. He wasn't sure whether to go or not--it was clear that disinformation was being spread fast.

He went offline for almost a day but by that time it was clear 

Stupid UKIP, stop picking on Churchill

I've never been in the least tempted to vote for UKIP-- the one-issue political party whose sole raison d'etre is to campaign against membership of the European Union. But I've been gobsmacked by the sight of this UKIP election poster plastered here and there in odd corners I've passed in my car driving across London. 

So there's Churchill, proudly invoking victory in his Homburg (hello--a European hat style) as their poster boy. 

They could hardly have chosen a more inappropriate front man. 

Does UKIP not know one of Churchill's most famous post-war speeches was the one where he advocated not just a European common market (as was being discussed at that time)-- but a federal United States of Europe, way beyond anything the current EU has proposed? 

Here's some extracts from what he was saying back in 1946:

If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance, there would be no limit to the happiness, to the prosperity and the glory which its three or four million people would enjoy..... 

Yet all the while there is a remedy which, if it were generally and spontaneously adopted by the great majority of people in many lands, would as if by a miracle transform the whole scene, and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and as happy as Switzerland is to-day. What is this sovereign remedy? It is to re-create the European Family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. In this way only will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living. The process is simple. All that is needed is the resolve of hundreds of millions of men and women to do right instead of wrong and to gain as their reward blessing instead of cursing.....

Our constant aim must be to build and fortify the strength of the United Nations Organization. Under and within that world concept we must re-create the European Family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe. And the first practical step would be to form a Council of Europe. If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join the Union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.

Of course, at that time, Churchill spoke of Britain as if it was somehow not really part of Europe. But his vision was of Britain as head of the Commonwealth. That's pointed out by some of the defenders of this campaign in the comments here.  However, a key feature of the Commonwealth he advocated was one in which all of its citizens had unlimited right of immigration to Britain. It was the Conservative governments of his time and subsequently which turned to mass immigration from Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent as the answer to Britain's postwar labour shortages. Churchill did express reservations about the policy in racist terms--but it can hardly be UKIP's case that they stand behind Churchill's suggestion, towards the end of the time when he was barely able to function as a politician, that a Conservative Party slogan should be "Keep Britain White"?

So, if UKIP is going to invoke Churchill, are they going to support substituting membership of the EU with that of a Commonwealth of unlimited rights of immigration? Or are they hinting at support for Churchill's sometimes-expressed white supremacist attitudes?

The UKIP grandees like Campbell Bannerman, who picked Churchill as their poster boy, seem to have arrested their awareness of his historical role at Dunkirk, the biggest military defeat in British history, in which his role was primarily to inspire and commit Britain to fighting Nazism and totalitarianism.

David Campbell Bannerman commenting on the launch said:  "Sir Winston is an ideal icon for our campaign because it is high time that Britain found that old Dunkirk spirit again and learned to fight its corner in adversity.  We've accepted far too much nonsense from Brussels over the years and it is time to say NO MORE!  The only way to do that at this election is to vote UKIP, as none of the old parties have anything to offer other than more Europe.
 

UKIP's barely concealed agenda is a decidedly Little England one. No, they're not fascists in smart suits, like the BNP. But their view of politics is simplistic, ignorant and ultimately a prescription for economic dead-endery.

They would hardly stand a chance in next Thursday's election were it not for the disastrous failure of the UK's three main political parties to confront and put a rapid and decisive end to the cosy, all-in-it-together morass of self-serving corruption through our own Parliament's expenses rackets.

There's of course no shortage of corruption in the EU's own Parliamentary arrangements. But the answer isn't to walk away, any more than it is to walk away from the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

I'm probably going to vote for Libertas in the EU elections, because I think trans-EU parties with a focus on accountability and a combination of commitment and scepticism are the least worst choice.

The local UK elections are more problematic. Any temptation I was beginning to have to vote Tory in protest at Gordon Brown's handling of just about any policy or crisis you care to mention has been laid to rest by David Cameron's shying away from dealing with (and sometimes open support of)  those expenses miscreants of his own party he happens to be most sympathetic to.

In the past, I've resorted to voting for the Green and Liberal parties when protesting against the worst excesses of the former ultra-left Hackney Labour Council in its heyday. Looking at the policies of the Green and Liberals today, their policies seem to me a lot more disastrous than those of Labour and their politicians no more trustworthy.

I'll be looking at the other minority parties over the next few days to see if there's one I can square my conscience on registering my vote with.

Into my mailbox pops a breathless little communication from Teachers' TV telling me it's Behaviour Management week. Well, so it is. I hope the voters get their sanctions and rewards right and our politicians decide to change their ways.

Now I know the Pope is not infallible

No, not that Pope.

I'm talking about Oliver Kamm, one of my very favourite bloggers, and now a Times columnist and leader writer. He's been called the Pope by some of his detractors, probably because of his tendency to pronounce on various matters with a degree of assertiveness that might suggest he thinks he's infallible.

On such subjects as the intellectual quality of Noam Chomsky's political writings and the history of the US' use of the first atom bomb, he's impeccably detailed, authoritative and impressively referenced.

However, even Kamm has his limits, and today's Sunday Times shows him making one of his worst misjudgements ever.

Here's his recommendation for a replacement Speaker for the appalling and irredeemably tarnished Michael Martin:

Oliver Kamm, leader writer and former investment banker, nominates Gerald Kaufman
He understands the business of government while upholding the rights and prerogatives of backbenchers. And he is genuinely witty.

And here, published in some detail, is a slice of the track record of Sir Gerald Kaufman, showing his wit in defence of what he's seen as his rights and prerogatives as a bankbencher making absolutely gross claims for expenses. A particularly telling demonstration of someone who " understands the business."...

The former environment minister was asked to attend a meeting with officials from the parliamentary fees office to discuss details of another claim relating to £28,834 of work on the kitchen and bathroom at his London flat.

He told them that the work was necessary because he was “living in a slum”, though his second home, off Regent’s Park, is in one of the most fashionable areas of the capital. He was eventually reimbursed for £15,329.

On one occasion he asked a civil servant “why are you querying these expenses?” and on another threatened to make a complaint unless a dispute was settled by noon on the day in question. In one document, an official in the fees office noted that invoices Sir Gerald had submitted took him to “within 6p” of his annual limit. He also claimed £1,262 for a gas bill that was £1,055 in credit.

Between 2001 and 2008 the Manchester Gorton MP, one of the Labour party’s longest-serving members, claimed a total of £115,109 in additional costs allowances on his London flat, which he owns outright. In June 2006, he submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen Beovision 40in LCD television. The maximum amount MPs are allowed to claim for TVs is £750.

On July 7, 2006 the fees office wrote to Sir Gerald to say: “I regret to inform you that this item falls within the not allowable category of luxurious furnishings, and as such has been rejected.”

He was paid £750.

In March 2007 Sir Gerald submitted a claim for £1,461.83 for a “second-hand rug replacing 24-year-old carpet”, with an additional £389.91 for “customs duty on rug”, which was paid. The receipt showed that Sir Gerald bought the rug from the Showplace Antique Centre on West 25th Street in Manhattan for $2,750. The Green Book strictly forbids “antique, luxury or premium grade” furnishings.

Later that year, on Dec 29, Sir Gerald, who was knighted in 2004, submitted an invoice from ABC Carpets in Harrods for £598, which was also paid.

A note of a telephone conversation between Sir Gerald, 78, and an official in the fees office, states that his reasons for claiming £28,834 for home improvements between 2005 and 2007 were: “Old flat, facilities out of date, decrepit, health reasons, update, living in slum.” Sir Gerald added that he had “not carried out any repairs/maintenance for 32 years”.

Sir Gerald was also challenged over regular claims for “odd jobs” which he submitted without receipts at a rate of £245 every month — £5 below the then limit for unreceipted expenses. He replied: “Why are you querying these expenses?”

On May 18, a senior official in the fees office noted details of another conversation about the kitchen and bathroom, saying: “MP believes that I have seen a detailed breakdown of the £12,416.51 claim he has submitted [for that financial year]… MP is becoming agitated and will be making an official complaint against me, if this matter is not resolved by 12 noon today.” When detailed invoices were submitted, they included £575 for undertile heating in the shower room and £2,695 for Bosch and Miele kitchen appliances. Sir Gerald was asked to attend a meeting with officials on the matter and the fees office eventually agreed to pay him £15,329 of the £28,834. Sir Gerald accepted, saying that he wanted to “draw a line under the issue”.

In June last year Sir Gerald submitted a £1,262 claim for his gas bill, covering the period March 2006 to May 2008. The fees office pointed out that his gas account was £1,055.60 in credit, and only agreed to pay £122.46.

A note in the file on July 10, 2008 quotes Sir Gerald as saying: “I received a letter from [official] saying not pay as is credit. I paid £1,252 THIS year so want reimbursing!!!”

The fees office wrote to him on July 14 to say: “You might wish to ask British Gas to repay you the credit.”

Sir Gerald’s claims between 2004 and June 2008 also included £19,200 for food — close to the maximum — and £4,692 for cleaning.

Last night Sir Gerald offered to repay the money for the rug and admitted that his claim for the £8,000 television was “a bit daft”.

He said that his flat had been in need of complete refurbishment because he had “neglected” it over the years and he had overclaimed for the gas bill because he “misunderstood” the invoice.

He said that his odd jobs bill was actually more than £245 a month, so he had claimed close to the limit. His food claim was “appropriate” because his job meant he often had to “spend a lot of money” eating out, he added.

As for Oliver Kamm's claim about his wit in general, I recently featured a post with a clip of Sir Gerald Kaufman in full flow from the Labour backbenches making a long speech read straight off a script equating the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza with those of the Nazis against the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Maybe Kamm was just trying to be tongue-in-cheek witty with his nomination of this man as the replacement speaker for Michael Martin?  If he was, he's in danger of being seen as less of a Pope than a Lord of Misrule.

Incidentally, from the picture in the Telegraph article on Kaufman's claims about the "slum" he's been living in, it's not just "near" Regent's Park, it's in a prime block directly overlooking the park, with fabulous views over one of the finest parks in the world, complete with exotic glimpses of the giraffes and the other wild life in the London Zoo, just down the road.

The reason I know that is ironic. I grew up in a real slum-- a small, damp house in the bomb-cratered streets between the Commercial Road and Cable Street, in post-war Stepney. There was an outdoor toilet and no bathroom or hot water. It had already been marked for demolition as unfit for human habitation when my parents moved in in the late forties. My parents were confident that this was a good move, as they would eventually get a council flat when it was demolished. They weren't aware at the time that the LCC excluded non British nationals from rehousing in council flats. But they got British nationality and waited patiently. We were eventually rehoused-- in 1962. And the landlord of the little house was a Mr Simmons, who lived in the very same grand Regent's Park block that Sir Gerald now describes as inflicting "slum" conditions on him.

When Parliament's corruption is the issue, this is not how to fight the BNP

It's not often you see my favourite UK left of centre blog, Harry's Place, put up posts praising the Tories, but here's David T positively gushing over the newly established anti-BNP site established by Tim Montgomerie's ConservativeHome group and allies. Much as I would love to see this campaign succeed, and much as I admire the fact that people like Tim Montgomerie have been able to galvanise Tories & others to support this campaign, I think the first video is pretty dismal. It offers an image of a sweet-looking Afro-Caribbean boy to counter the BNP's propaganda that our troubles are caused by supposedly unlimited immigration and their taking of our resources by people who shouldn't have the right to them. Behind the BNP's racist message is also the conviction that shadowy and corrupt Hidden Hands (yes, that's Jews like me) are behind all of this. I don't think this approach is going to persuade a single potential BNP voter to cast their vote differently. 

For a start, it insults the intelligence of the target audience, something I'd have thought media-savvy people like Tim Montgomerie are intensely aware of.

Non racist potential BNP protest voters are perfectly aware that there are very likeable people amongst the ethnic groups that are its targets. Doesn't stop them from voting for the BNP as a protest against the perceived corruption of mainstream parliamentarians, or as a protest against particular forms of maximalist minority group critiques of mainstream society (as promoted by the Hizb and the Saviour Sect).

Back in the days preceding the Nazi success in the German elections, the angry non-fascists who voted for them in 1933 mostly knew quite a few cuddly Jewish children, or dedicated Jewish doctors and the like. Some of them had close Jewish friends. All this didn't prevent them from voting against the existing traditional parties, because they thought drastic action was needed, and they didn't see anything wrong with being against Jews as a whole whilst simultaneously being very fond of the odd Jew. Many otherwise sane and reasonable Palestinians voted for the atrocious Hamas and their exterminationist propaganda as a protest against the corruption of Fatah. They were perfectly well aware of what Hamas stood for, and they supported the two state solution, but their anger with Fatah overcame their real political convictions, because they felt they had to "do something" and bring the corruption to an end. Non-racists who consider voting for BNP as a protest also know that if they send a few BNP MEPs to the EU Parliament and elect a few BNP councils, they will never have the power to affect the actual lives and conditions of ethnic minorities in this country. So they feel they can safely use the BNP to register a protest, or, as with non-ideology driven Palestinian Hamas voters, to take action against corruption whilst forgetting all about the baggage that comes with the protest party. So what sort of video message might help persuade decent, ordinary people not to cast a protest vote for the BNP? Maybe something that recognises the justice of widespread public anger-- and then puts across the message that the answer to corruption isn't to cast a vote for racism, anymore than a vote for out-and-out terrorism was the answer to Fatah's corruption. Maybe it should be a "your vote matters" video. Maybe it should show what happens to countries and peoples who cast despair votes for totalitarian and racist parties, and then contrast that with countries where the electorate took some action that voted the corrupt out (Japan?).

And on the new anti-BNP website is what seems to me the germ of a much more effective approach, which highlights the appalling track record of convictions for serious violence, rape and corruption amongst BNP members and even some of their candidates and councillors.

A video which put across the message "when you want to stop corruption, don't vote for violent criminals" would enlighten the many potential voters who don't know about the BNP's track record of convictions for appalling offences. Most of all, all of us who are committed to the mainstream left and right parties need to put all the pressure we can on our party leaderships to come to terms with what we the people feel, and make really radical moves now that will begin to shift the public's perceptions. Sadly, there's too much evidence that Brown and his circle, even the ministers who despair of him, are virtually incapable of radically changing their direction and stopping the corruption--and its leaders in the form of the guardians of the parliamentary expenses system right now. Cameron made something of a move, and it has had an impact, but it's nothing like enough. Listening to Hague on BBC R4 Today programme, it's clear that the Tory hierarchy still haven't got it. He's just pushing the latest Tory line of chipping away at the bits that suit them (like the communication allowance) whilst claiming the public don't really care about the Speaker and the corrupt Parliamentary apparatus that enabled the MPs and the Lords build up their sense of entitlement to be above the laws that the rest of us live by, and line their pockets accordingly, whilst chorusing "it's all within the rules". If you don't want people to vote BNP: Ensure that the Speaker of Parliament resigns immediately by organizing a whipped vote of no confidence. Sack all the members of the Parliamentary Privileges Committee and the senior staff of the Fees Office. Only MPs with impeccable expenses claims records to sit on the Committee in future. All MPs to place itemised expenses claims on their web sites every three months. All claims going back to 2005 to be scrutinised by senior HM Revenue & Customs to check that they meet the test of "wholly, necessarily and exclusively" for use in their job as MPs. Claims that don't meet the test to be paid back in full and with penalty fines and interest. Commit to prosecuting all MPs who knowingly made false claims or submitted improper accounting. Commit to reducing the number of MPs by half in time for the next election. If practically impossible for boundary commission reasons, commit to having a second election as soon as possible after 2010 to elect the lower number of MPs All sitting MPs to face reselection meetings with their constituency parties within the next two weeks (ie ahead of the June elections) Legislation to be passed immediately to enable peers who breach laws on corruption to be stripped of their titles and rights to sit in the House of Lords. Any major party that committed to that could face down challenges from the BNP and other fringe parties. Anything else is tokenism and papering over the cracks. And it won't wash with the electorate. Those who are minded to vote BNP will still do so.

Oy, Karen, don't make trouble

Karen, who's currently simultaneously running her indispensible Tel Aviv Diary on two platforms, gives a glimpse of what it's like to have a desert sandstorm envelop your beautiful corner of the great Bauhaus city on the Mediterranean:

Early in the morning, when I left home, the hot, dusty wind gave me a shock. My eyes were smarting, and my car was covered. My neighbor had just put her wipers on, and the dust had turned to mud, so i wiped off the car before I washed the windows. By the time I left work, the wind had died down, and you could see the skyline, but the car was covered again. Just a little reminder from the desert.

You know all that stuff comes from Tunisia, Libya and other Arab countries. We’re lucky they don’t ask for the sand back.

Oy, Karen, don't make trouble. It's not enough for you to be blamed for stealing land, mass ethnic cleansing and genocide, controlling US banks, industries, news media, Presidents and foreign policy? So now, you're revealing the Jews are also responsible for the desertification of the Maghreb.....?

Orwell's "1984" as farce: Gordon Brown "re-educates" Hazel Blears

Hazel Blears, Labour government Cabinet member, writing in the Observer for Sunday, 3rd May:

All too often we announce new strategies or five-year plans, or launch new documents – often with colossal price tags attached – that are received by the public with incredulity at best and, at worst, with hostility. Whatever the problems of the recession, the answer is not more government documents or big speeches.

People want to look their politicians in the eyes and get their anger off their chests. We need a ministerial "masochism strategy", where ministers engage directly and hear the anger first-hand. I'm not against new media. YouTube if you want to. But it's no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre.

Third, we need to have a relationship with the voters based on shared instincts and emotions. We need to start showing we understand the instincts, fears, hopes and emotions of the broad mass of British people. We approached the Gurkha issue purely rationally and were mown down by a wave of emotion in support of these brave, loyal fighters. We put ourselves on the wrong side of the British sense of fair play, and no political party can stay there for long without dire consequences. So we need to plug ourselves back into people's emotions and instincts and sound a little less ministerial and a little more human.

Nice one, Hazel, using "we" and "ministers", when the references were so obviously to the actions of Gordon Brown, without benefit of consulting his government colleagues. But the "YouTube if you want to," with its jibe at his notorious video, expressed in an unmistakeable echo of Margaret Thatcher's famous and derisive comment on her pusillanimous colleagues "You turn if you want to. The Lady's not for turning" must have enraged Gordon Brown beyond belief. 

And, according to the Daily Telegraph, within an hour of the article being made public, Hazel Blears

issued a statement backing Mr Brown and seeking to "clarify" her position.

"I want to make it clear that the Prime Minister enjoys my 100 per cent support. Any suggestion that I intended what I wrote as criticism of him or his leadership is completely wrong," her statement said.
"I fully support the collective decisions we take as a Government. My article simply calls for the Labour Party to hit the streets campaigning against the Tories in the forthcoming local and European elections."

Mmm, yes, Hazel. How could anyone possibly have taken your article as criticism of Gordon Brown or his leadership?

Do they have some terrifying version of Room 101 at No 10 Downing Street these days? But even O'Brien, the mastermind torturer of "1984", took more than an hour to get his victims to acknowledge their thoughtcrimes and make statements declaring they loved Big Brother.

Perhaps the threat of instantly losing a Cabinet seat was more effective? But surely she realised what the result of her article might be? Or has the Brown entourage got some highly embarrassing stuff on her that they could threaten to release? 

Perish the thought. 

But, by being shown to have been forced to churn out this preposterous denial, she might still have done for him.

"Not just lip service": boycott leader's hypocrisy is old news

The Jewish Chronicle and some blogs, including the usually very savvy Normblog, have been running the story of Israel boycott leader Omar Barghout's hypocrisy as if it was news that he'd enrolled as a PhD student at Tel-Aviv University, and had done so recently.

I posted about Barghouti's PhD enrolment back in March 2006, when I showed he was closely linked to the magazine Dance Europe's decision to ban reviews of an Israeli dance company as part of the pro-Palestinian cultural boycott of all Israel academics and cultural events.

I also linked to an article by Barghouti in the notorious Counterpunch, written in 2002. 

It showed that he was listing his ongoing PhD studies at Tel-Aviv University way back then. Yes, in 2002.

Now, I'm a never-completed-my-PhD veteran myself. But seven years .... well, it's certainly a bit late in the day to be reporting his enrolment as news.

Barghouti is one of the leaders of the present Fatah Palestinian faction-led boycott movement, started in 2004, when he was already at least two years into his PhD studies. Whilst it calls for a complete boycott of all Israeli academic institutions, except for the purpose of meetings to campaign against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, Barghouti ignores the boycott when it comes to his own self-improvement.

What is news is that there is a petition to get Tel-Aviv University to expel him, and those who've supported it have given the fact of his PhD enrolment there wider publicity.

Tel-Aviv University has commendably shown its own opposition to boycotts and sanctions by refusing to eject Barghouti because of his political stance, even though that stance is designed to damage the University and Israeli academia in general. But are they up to the academic mark in allowing a PhD student to stay on the roll quite so long without delivering?

You can see Barghouti in full flow in the clip above, delivering standard Fatah Stalinist-style denunciations of Israeli "genocide", "apartheid" etc in the smoothest and coolest of tones. 

There are so many ironies here that it's difficult to pick out which to focus on.

The richest is perhaps Barghouti calling in the clip in late 2008 for "an end to lip service" on the importance of the EU taking boycott measures against Israel, whilst now stating that it's "a personal matter" that he's continuing his seven years of PhD studies at Tel-Aviv University and refusing to discuss that any further.

UPDATE: You can never be ironic enough. Here's the one of the  Hamas and Islamic Jihad clerics bitterly condemning Palestinian dance troupes like the one Barghouti leads, who have just taken part in a festival of Palestinian dance in Ramallah:

Sheikh Hassan al-Jouju, head of Gaza's Sharia courts, said that the Palestinians reject with disgust the use of Jerusalem's name as part of "this lawless festival".

 

"Jerusalem is sacred and pure, and its status is derived from what Allah has given to it, and it does not need this nonsense. It needs courageous national standings which will thwart the Judaization schemes and the digging under the al-Aqsa Mosque."

 

He went on to ask, "Why didn't we hear the voice of the mufti and the head of the Sharia courts in the West Bank in light of these actions?

,,,,those who approved this event, who let these groups dance on the wounds of our people, on our suffering and the cries of pain of the al-Aqsa Mosque, those who approved this event are not Palestinians.

And in case you think that these clerics do not represent the view of Hamas, who Clare Short and her friends in Conflicts Forum are so keen for the British government to talk to, here's the view of a senior Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council:

Senior Hamas member Hamed Bitawi, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, said that "this festival contradicts Islamic law. The Palestinian nation is a nation of jihad and resistance, and this festival damages its image and the memory of the martyrs and their blood. Shame will follow those who approved these cheap festivals."

So it seems the regime in Gaza are firm in their dedication to boycott not just the leader of the supposedly national Palestinian boycott-Israel campaign, but the very cultural activities he and the Palestinian Authority are so keen to promote. 

I suspect that they're also less than impressed by his seven year continuing PhD study marathon at Tel-Aviv University.

BBC presents Holocaust denier without telling you that's what she is

The World at One is usually one of the less contentious of BBC Radio 4's news programmes. It does offer the standard BBC world view of most matters but as far as I'm aware has rarely featured on blog sites as a source of some of the most outrageous examples of media bias presented as impartial reporting.

On Wednesday 25th February, however, its reporting of the arrival in Britain of "Bishop" Richard Williamson was astounding in the way it presented a  notorious anti-semite and Holocaust denier activist Michele Renouf as no more than "a woman supporting Williamson". 

It did so on its web page and at the beginning and end of the five minute respectful interview it offered her, handing her an extended opportunity to put over her polemics at length. She was also referred to as in the course of the interview  as "Lady Renouf, a supporter of the Bishop who is assembling a legal team in case he is extradited to Germany". Nowhere in the interview or the related World at One web page was any hint given of her extremist racist activism. It is as if Nick Griffin, leader of the racist British National Party had been introduced as "a politician". Not that the BBC would be at all likely to offer Griffin five minutes gently managed airtime to put his views on a self-acknowledged Holocaust denier across.

Michele Renouf is not just any old anti-semite and Holocaust denier. She is a leading activist who tirelessly organizes and propagates the cause of such front line convicted Holocaust denial historical fraudsters as Ernst Zundel, Robert Faurisson and David Irving. She raises money to bankroll convicted British racists to try their luck at seeking asylum from British justice in California. She runs a web site and produces DVDs in their various causes. The web site is also extensively devoted to representing "the Zionist lobby and its allies" as a sinister controlling group, and to representing mainstream Jewish and non-Jewish political commentators and leaders as engaged in related conspiracies to suppress and twist the truth about their sinister machinations.

All this is presented by her as being campaigning in favour of human rights and free speech. It's the same grotesque inversion adopted by President Ahmadinejad and his regime, who defended his Tehran conference to "investigate whether the Holocaust happened" in the name of open-minded enquiry. So it's hardly surprising that Renouf herself was one of the people who took part in that conference.

The point about why debate with Holocaust deniers is inappropriate is not because there is any attempt to suppress genuine historical enquiry, let alone conceal truths about what the Nazi regime did to Jews and its other enemies. Nor is it,as is often represented, out of a wish to avoid giving offence, whether to the surviving victims of the Holocaust or to the dead and their families. 

It is inappropriate because all Holocaust denial is invariably based on deliberate historical fraud. It cannot be otherwise, because the evidence that the Holocaust took place as an act of deliberate Nazi policy is so vast, so readily validated by innumerable incontrovertible evidence sources.

The reason Zundel, Faurrisson, David Irving and other Holocaust deniers like them have been convicted is because their supposed evidence has been based on fraudulent and falsified documentation, well established in trial after trial in courts across the world. Any "debates" the Holocaust deniers seek to invoke are invariably founded on the same recycling of fraudulent evidence and falsified historical data, as has been most devastatingly documented in the work of Professor Richard Evans, and in the judgement against David Irving given by Mr Justice Gray in April 2000.

You can hear the interview presenter Sean Ley of the World at One gave her by accessing the Wednesday edition here. It'll be available until 2:00pm GMT on Wednesday 4th March. It starts at around 23 minutes into the 31 minute clip. Ley begins by detailing the reasons for Williamson's notoriety, through the interviews he's given in which he called the Holocaust "lies, lies, lies",  his repeated assertions that no gas chambers were used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews, and that at the most some hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazis in other ways.

Lady Renouf is a supporter of the Bishop who is assembling a legal team in case he is extradited to Germany. She told me he should not be called a Holocaust denier.

It's an absurd propaganda term and in any case no-one denies anything....If there's any denial going on, it's debate denial that goes on, and that should be objected to by all of us because the concept that we cannot debate and that there is no respect for debate flies in the face of our own civilization.

Isn't it that the debate he chooses to conduct in denying the existence of the gas chambers that killed so many Jews is one that causes profound offence to many people, Jewish or otherwise?

Well, I don't think offence should be part of an investigation into history. I think that is emotional blackmail that has nothing to do with an investigation.If for example your child was murdered and you didn't want to hear about it, you cannot debate whether there should be any investigation or court cases about that. You may not want to read about it, but you cannot say that there may be no investigation because your sensibilities will be hurt. That is an absurd situation.

Let me ask you about the Bishop's position now. His excommunication was lifted by the Vatican but the Vatican has now demanded that he should retract the views he expressed in that television interview and the Catholic Church in England and Wales has said he cannot be in full Communion with the Church until he does so. Is he prepared to do so?

There is something extraordinary going on. The idea of the Holocaust as some sort of thing that [if] one speaks about it and commits some sort of blasphemy in whole or part is the UN resolution. You may not query the Holocaust legend in whole or part. There is no such situation in normal historical debate and rational argument in any other field, and it should be normal for a review of history without exception and I think when the Bishop was asked by the Swedish TV,it was actually to stitch him up because it was later used to try and undermine the idea of this reconciliation with the pre-Vatican II society. And so I think it's actually aimed at preventing the priests who query the Vatican II from their being allowed back into the body of the Vatican.

This grotesque view of Holocaust denial as the attempt to restore suppressed normal historical debate to an area from which it is said to have been excluded went unchallenged by Sean Ley. He did not pick up on her definition of the Holocaust as "legend", despite the fact that she claims to be speaking for open enquiry and rational argument and that she proclaims herself on her web site to be an "actress and model" with no academic background in historical research. 

Part of the reason for this is that Ley himself confined the issue of historical denial to the giving of offence and did not concern himself with the evidence of Holocaust denial being based on fraud, suppression of mountains of evidence or both, demonstrated in trials and judgements against all the leading Holocaust deniers. 

The only riposte to Renouf's proclamation of the Holocaust as "legend" came from a subsequent telephone interview with Lord Janner, presumably on the grounds of his being Chairman of the Holocaust Trust, who also proceeded to discuss Holocaust denial primarily in terms of its offensiveness to survivors and to assert that he knew the Holocaust had happened because members of his own family had been murdered. Lord Janner has a long and mostly distinguished history on representing various Jewish community concerns, but he is not now at the centre of dealing with Holocaust denial propagandists. His answer here was utterly inadequate. 

Why did the World at One team choose to give such a front line Holocaust denier as Michele Renouf a platform? Why did they choose to conceal her background and activism in this field and in promoting anti-semitism?

Who on the World at One team decided that the issue of Williamson's Holocaust denial was to be handled as one of actual or potential offence? Why did they not call one of the impeccably reputed historians who would have been able to show that her claims that the Holocaust is "legend" and that Williamson seeks "debate" are pernicious nonsense?

Quite apart from the outrageousness of giving a platform for Holocaust denial, this particular news treatment is most concerning because it suggests that truth of the Holocaust is coming to be relativised in public debate by being seen as one related to "offence", for the reason that it is seen as needing to be treated as an analogue of Muslim offence over portrayals of Mohammed and of Islam in general. It is another instance of something in British political discourse relating to Jews, and particularly to anti-semitism and Israel needing by definition to be "balanced" by being analogised explicitly or inexplicitly to Muslim concerns. Indeed, one of the reports in the Daily Telegraph to which I've linked refers to "Bishop" Williamson and his fellow Holocaust sceptics, an apparently innocuous terminological shift which reduces the reality of the most documented events in history to a matter of political opinion, analogous with membership of the European Community.

It's interesting that "Bishop" Williamson himself has now issued an apology for "offending" people by his stance on the Holocaust. But as has been widely recognised, not least by the Vatican, this does not deal with his actual denial that Jews were gassed by the Nazi, or that more than two or three hundred thousand were actually murdered.

The image above appeared in this week's edition of "The Jewish Chronicle". It shows a Mardi Gras carnival float in Germany last week. It's a particularly vivid representation of how today's Germany may understand much more acutely that "Bishop" Williamson may represent not just some bizarre sideshow of the backwoods of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but shaking hands with the devil of anti-semitism.

Will the World at One team recognise they've gone beyond shaking hands with the devil when, without acknowledgement, they put the voice of Holocaust denial in front of the microphone to send its message to the worldwide BBC audience?