Friday, 11th April 2008
5:37pm
It appears that Richard Falk, the new UN ‘Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories’ whose vile prejudice against Israel I wrote about here, believes the ‘neo-cons’ were, er, behind 9/11. Yup, he's a 'truther' -- someone who believes the US government carried out the attacks. The New York Sun reports:
On March 24 in an interview with a radio host and former University of Wisconsin instructor, Kevin Barrett, Mr. Falk said, ‘It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don't think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is there is a lot of grounds for suspicion, there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in and that the failure to do these things is cheating the American people and in some sense the people of the world of a greater confidence in what really happened than they presently possess.’
We knew the UN was corrupt. We knew the UN was bigoted. We knew the UN turned a blind eye to tyranny. But now we also know that it appoints officials whose beliefs are simply demented. The guy’s a fruitcake. What does that make the UN?
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4:56pm
The belief that asymmetric warfare, in which conventional armies are forced to fight ostensibly weaker terrorists who don’t fight by the rules, can only be won by political rather than military means and that therefore states must talk to terrorists, currently commands enormous political support in the west and is to a large extent responsible for the mood of defeatism and appeasement that currently grips its elites. All the more bracing, therefore, to read this fine analysis by Maj-Gen Yaakov Amidror of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which magisterially refutes this counsel of despair. An asymmetric war is certainly winnable against terrorist insurgents, he says, provided certain principles are followed. Unfortunately, this is far from the case at present, not least in Israel, but that’s another matter. Amidror lays down six basic conditions for victory of which the first is:
A political decision to defeat terrorism, stated explicitly and clearly to the security forces, and the willingness to bear the political cost of an offensive.
Victory, however, has to be reconceptualised as ‘sufficient victory’ which requires us to rethink our idea of surrender ceremonies, parades and ‘mission accomplished’ declarations. Instead, ‘sufficient victory’ involves a tapering-off of violence to a level with which people can live:
As such, terror is not completely destroyed but is contained at a minimal level, with constant investment of energy in order to prevent its eruption…
Amidror dismisses with contumely (and numerous examples) the assumption that terrorism can never be defeated by military means but only by changing the other side’s attitudes (the driving idea of ‘peace processes’). On the contrary, he says, it can
only be defeated by military means:
Success on the battlefield led to the destruction of Communist terror’s capability in Greece without a change in anyone’s cognizance. The same applies to the present situation in the West Bank. The current tranquillity was achieved not because someone changed his cognition about the other side, but because the IDF and the Israel Security Agency almost completely liquidated the terror organizations’ capacity for action.
‘Sufficient victory’ cannot be achieved, however — as Israel found to its enormous cost in Lebanon — if the objectives are unclear, contradictory or simply wrong. In Lebanon, says Amidror, the objective between 1985 and 2000 — dreamed up by the commander on the ground in the absence of any guidance from above (!) was to achieve quiet in the north of Israel; this was wrong because the objective should have been instead to smash Hezbollah.
Most controversially, he makes this point about proportionality
…generally speaking, a small country like Israel can deal with terrorism and guerrilla organizations only if its response is not proportional and is carried out in such a way as to convince the other side that it too has something to lose. A proportional response will drag Israel into a war of attrition whose rules will be determined by the terrorists, and which it will lose.
The most important point of all, though, is that asymmetric warfare can only be won if people actually
believe it can be won:
…the study warns that if the U.S., Israel, or their Western allies incorrectly conclude that they have no real military option against terrorist insurgencies – out of a fear that these conflicts inevitably result in an unwinnable quagmire – then the war on terrorism will be lost even before it is fully waged.
In Britain and Europe, that is certainly the case; and the US is wobbling.
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11:28pm
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In the
Washington Post David Ignatius observes that, in their testimony to the Senate on the war in Iraq, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker portrayed the malign and nefarious influence of Iran as lying at the very core of the ongoing difficulties in Iraq. Ignatius makes two very important points:
Iran's covert campaign to reshape Iraq has been clear since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Iranian intelligence officers prepared lists of Iraqis for assassination in the weeks and months after the war began; they sent Iranian-trained mullahs to take over the Shiite mosques of central and southern Iraq that had been smashed by
Saddam Hussein; they pumped an estimated $12 million a week in covert financial support to their allies as the January 2005 election approached; they infiltrated all the major Shiite political parties, and many of the Sunni ones, too.
The Iranians have fixed the political game. They are on all sides at once. They have links to Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki and his Dawa party; they funnel money to the Badr organization of Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, which is a key recruiting ground for the Iraqi army; they provide weapons, training and command and control for the most extreme factions of the
Mahdi Army.
Moqtada al-Sadr, the Mahdi Army's nominal leader, is actually living in the Iranian holy city of Qom…
The first point is that, although Petraeus implied that Iranian meddling in Iraq was a recent development, it was actually clear from the get-go. Yet although the Americans (and the British) knew full well that Iran was a key factor in stoking the fires of insurrection in Iraq, they chose to remain silent about it and went to enormous lengths to avoid acknowledging it, even to the extent of issuing rules of military engagement against hot pursuit over the Iranian border to catch Iranian terrorists responsible for attacking coalition forces (and who can forget Britain’s humiliation last year over Iran’s kidnap of the 15 British marines when Britain’s terms of engagement forbade any act of defence in case of ‘escalation’ into war with Iran). So why has it taken all this time to say what was plain from the start, that throughout this period Iran has been waging war on us?
The second point is a grim one. For all the apparent success of the surge, the reduction in violence in Iraq and the reported ‘awakening’ by the Sunni Iraqi sheikhs to the iniquity of al Qaeda, the fact is that Iraq is now a puppet state of Iran. As Ignatius observes, Iran has fixed the Iraqi government, the Iraqi army and the Iraqi insurrection. Even Ayatollah Sistani, once no friend to the Iranian Shia, has now buckled under. The purpose is strategic. Iran is the great chess player of the Muslim world and it is steadily moving its pieces into a checkmate position. It is now playing in Iraq a similar role to the one it is playing in Lebanon, where it controls the government and has an army, in the form of Hezbollah, poised to attack Israel (again), and which it is also developing in Gaza where it is aiding Hamas.
But it’s worse even than that. For Iran’s chessmen are now in position not just here and in several other trouble spots around the world but also in the west. While Britain, America and Europe have been (rightly) transfixed by Sunni terror in the form of al Qaeda and the allied cultural onslaught by the Muslim Brotherhood, they have totally overlooked the fact that an Iranian Shia terrorist infrastructure has been built in British, American and European cities. In Britain, for example, dozens of extremist Shia mosques have sprung up in London alone, some of which are serving as the base for unknown numbers of Hezbollah cells in the UK. We don’t know about them because, unlike al Qaeda, they are not announcing their presence through sporadic attacks. They are, instead, waiting.
What are they waiting for? A signal.
Here is the nightmare scenario. Iran is racing to develop the bomb (the picture above shows Ahmadinejad at Natanz) while the west obligingly provides it with the time to do so.
Le Monde, for example, has obtained documents showing that, contrary to the infamous American National Intelligence Estimate, Tehran was indeed pursuing a military nuclear program after 2003 (what a surprise). In response, President Bush may or may not attack Iran before he departs the White House. If he decides not to do this, history will record that he allowed this seismic threat to civilisation to realise its deadly ambition. But if he should decide to do it, the response is unlikely to take the form of rockets fired from Iran since it will very likely be paralysed by the US attack at an early stage. Instead it will unleash its sleeping weapon — its terrorist army around the world. Hezbollah will attack Israel from Lebanon, maybe along with Hamas from Gaza; in Iraq, it will attack US forces who will be sitting ducks; and Europe will be subjected to unquantifiable acts of terror.
When British officials are told about the threat from Shia radicals in their midst, they shrug it off. They believe that, since the British government will not join the Americans in a war against Iran, Britain will not be a target for retaliation. Once again, they could not be more wrong. To Iran, Britain and America are linked as the greater and lesser Satans; Britain indeed is seen as the very fount of historic western imperialism, particularly in the Middle East. So Britain would get hit regardless, even though there’s no longer any British spine to snap. And so probably would America.
The terrible thing is that we are have sleepwalked into this and are still in the same trance. Iran declared war upon the west in 1979 when Khomeini came to power. We ignored it. When Hezbollah attacked western interests in the decade that followed, we ignored it. When Hezbollah pointed thousands of rockets at Israel, we ignored it (and blamed Israel when it finally tried to fight it). And now that we have it in our own cities, we are doing nothing whatever about it. But we are thus ignoring an unconscionable threat, one that is within. We have been recklessly oblivious before, to the growth in our midst of al Qaeda. We are doing it again. Who can forget the placards on London’s streets waved by suicidally stupid British liberals during the Lebanon war proclaiming ‘We are all Hezbollah now’? That could soon be truer than anyone thought.
As I have said before, all roads lead to Iran. One way or another, the regime has to be taken out. It would be great if this could happen through the Iranians themselves rising up and overthrowing it. But how likely is this?
This is the decision President Bush is having to weigh. He is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. The consequences of war with Iran, along the lines sketched out above, would be dire and would extend way beyond the region. But the alternative may be war with a nuclear Iran, genocide or the nuclear blackmail and inevitable throttling of the west — or all three. It’s a hard decision, made harder because the dilemma is largely self-inflicted through almost thirty years of supine refusal to acknowledge reality. But ultimately, the self-delusion has to end. The only question is whether it will do so in time to avert catastrophe, or will dawn amongst the ashes.
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Thursday, 10th April 2008
4:58pm
[UPDATE: A technical glitch meant that this article was originally posted twice. The duplicate has now been deleted and all the comments made on it transferred to this thread. The transferred comments are time-stamped from between 9:16am and 9:31am, 10th April]
There is now unequivocal evidence that the temperature of the planet is dropping like a stone. As the DailyTech site reports:
All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASAGISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. A compiled list of all the sources can be seen...The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years.
Here’s some other data you may not have seen. The
troposphere hasn’t warmed for the past five years. And the oceans haven’t warmed for five years either, which has got this poor
NPR reporter scratching his head, poor chap:
Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them. This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
And
here is Ross McKittrick (who exposed the fundamental flaw in the research underpinning the whole of MMGW theory, the hockey-stick curve whose upward warming trend was achieved by omitting several hundred years of global climate history) revealing that there is an error in groundstation measurements such that past warming as measured by near-surface air
has been over-estimated by 100% for over 20 years to 2002 (since when there has been cooling). While at
Climate Audit, John Goetz says that the temperature record for 2005-2007 has actually been falsified to produce an upward trend. Crumbs!
Now look at this curious development. The British government, as we know,has swallowed the predictions of man-made global warming and is busily trying to persuade us that it is committed to reducing carbon emissions to counter the threat that we’re all about to fry. Yet HM Treasury has posted on its website a
paper about solar cycles, which says:
Based on solar maxima of approximately 50 for solar cycles 24 and 25, a global temperature decline of 1.5°C is predicted to 2020, equating to the experience of the Dalton Minimum.
And it also concludes:
A rural US temperature data set shows that recent and current temperatures remain below the average of the first half of the 20th century.
If the Treasury thinks it is worth putting up on its website a paper forecasting global cooling, why is the British government adopting policies, including green taxes and intrusive lifestyle prescriptiveness, to deal with precisely the opposite eventuality?
Now, you may not know about this sudden deadly chill in the MMGW atmosphere because the BBC hasn’t told you. To be more precise, it did try to report this — but then appears to have altered its report under pressure from a global warming activist. This
story by Roger Harrabin, headlined 'Global temperatures “to decrease,” ’ was captured a few hours after it appeared on the BBC website on April 4. Later that day, strange things happened to this story. The headline changed from ‘Global temperature “to decrease” ’ to ‘Global warming “dips this year”; so did the content; but then the headline changed back again to ‘Global temperature “to decrease” ’. Google searches from that day show the two titles with their different time references, although the article is thought to have retained the original time of release throughout on its webpage:
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Global temperatures 'to decrease' Global temperatures will drop slightly this year due to the effects of La Ninanews.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7329799.stm 17 hours ago - Similar pages
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature |
Global warming 'dips this year' Global temperatures will drop slightly this year due to the effects of La Nina, UN meteorologists say. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7329799. 6 hours ago - Similar pages stm
Baffled? Here's the explanation. This site proudly reproduced an email exchange between Harrabin and a global warming activist, Jo Abbess, who introduced it with these words:
Climate Changers,
Remember to challenge any piece of media that seems like it's been subject to spin or scepticism. Here's my go for today. The BBC actually changed an article I requested a correction for, but I'm not really sure if the result is that much better. Judge for yourselves...
As you will see from this remarkable exchange, Abbess demanded that Harrabin change his report because it would
play into the hands
of global warming sceptics. Harrabin rebuffed her on the grounds that
We can't ignore the fact that sceptics have jumped on the lack of increase since 1998. It is appearing regularly now in general media.
But when she told him there could be no debate about this because it was
an emerging truth
and threatened to circulate his remarks so that he
might appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics
he caved in and said
Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.
Appalling, no? But then, the headline mysteriously reverted to the original (although the altered text appears not to have done so). Might that have been because he realised to his horror that the email exchange was now in the public domain? (And how — it’s even hit the US in the
Glenn Beck show which seemed to show the BBC report had changed yet again from the revised version disclosed in the email exchange.)
It’s an emerging truth all right —but not quite the one Jo Abbess had in mind.
Update, April 10: A publicist for BBC News has asked me to post up the following statement: A minor change was made to the 'Global temperatures "to decrease'' ' piece on our website to better reflect the science. A few people including the report's authors, the World Meteorological Organisation, pointed out to us that the earlier version had been ambiguous.
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Wednesday, 9th April 2008
11:19am
The UN has appointed a man to investigate Israel’s behaviour who is incapable of telling the difference between genocide and the attempt to defend a people from becoming its victims, and accuses those defenders instead of being the perpetrators of genocide despite the demonstrable evidence to the contrary. Professor Richard Falk, the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories (whose remit, however, will not include reporting on the Palestinians!) has compared Israel’s behaviour in Gaza to the Nazis. He tells the BBC he is unrepentant about this comparison because he wanted to shake the American public from its torpor.
Isn’t it time the American public was shaken from its torpor over the fact that the UN now stands for the abandonment of free societies, the demonisation of their defenders and the extinction of truth and justice, and the endorsement, justification and incitement of terror, tyranny and hatred? The virulent malice towards Israel openly displayed by both the terms of Falk’s appointment and the prejudice of the man himself is but the latest illustration of the UN’s true character as a club of tyranny. Its amusingly named Human Rights Council, after all, was responsible for the frenzied hate-fest against Israel and the Jews in its grotesquely named World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance which it staged in Durban a few days before 9/11, and which demonised Israel as a Nazi and apartheid state, promoted Holocaust denial and used images of anti-Jewish hatred straight out of the Nazi lexicon (and is to have a threatened sequel, Durban II, next year to implement this vile agenda).
John McCain has it exactly right when he talks about replacing the UN by a union of democracies —a suggestion I have myself repeatedly made over the years. But in the meantime, questions should be asked in the US about this poisonous bigot Professor Falk — an emeritus Professor of International Law and Practice; a member of the Princeton faculty, with a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public International Affairs and the Department of Politics between 1961 and 2001; Visiting Professor, Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2001-2004; Chair of the Board, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation; an Honorary Member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and a Member of the Editorial Board of The Nation and The Progressive.
Isn’t about time America woke from its torpor about such a man whom it has honoured with such distinction?
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Tuesday, 8th April 2008
11:10am
As several have now pointed out, the most shocking aspect of the farcical progress of the Olympic torch through London and Paris was the presence and behaviour of the squad of blue-tracksuited Chinese goons who formed a menacing phalanx between the torch and the British police trotting alongside. Lord Coe has called them ‘thugs’ and Konnie Huq, who carried the torch, provided some vivid and alarming details:
Miss Huq, one of 80 torchbearers said: ‘The men in blue perplexed everyone. Nobody seemed to know who they were officially or what their title was. They were very robotic, very full on, and I noticed them having skirmishes with our own police and the Olympic authorities before our leg of the relay, which was confusing. ‘They were barking orders at me, like “Run! Stop!” and I was like, “Oh my gosh, who are these people?” They kept pushing my hand up higher when I was holding the torch, so they were...interesting.’
The big question is — who were they, and by whose authority were they given such a role in the procession? The
Times reported: The Metropolitan Police confirmed last night that the attendants had no executive powers while in Britain, meaning that they had no authority to keep order. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Chinese Embassy have refused to comment on the role and responsibility of the 14-strong squad. Pro-Tibet protesters claimed that the attendants were highly trained Chinese security forces.
Elsewhere, the Greater London council says security on the streets was organised by the British Olympic Committee, while the BOC says it was organised by the GLA.
The fact is that this was a perfectly legal demonstration of the kind that characterises Britain’s open society. The question remains — by whose authority were Chinese state thugs given a role in the policing of this demonstration on London’s streets?
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7:37am
In case anyone should be labouring under the delusion that al Qaeda’s murderous hatred of Jews is confined to Israel, its second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri has just helpfully issued this blood-curdling elaboration:
We promise our Muslim brothers that we will do the best we can to harm Jews in Israel and the world over, with Allah's help and according to his command,’ Zawahri said in an audiotape released online.
Another notable feature of this Nazi-style rant is the way he insists that al Qaeda doesn’t kill innocents. That’s because the people it does kill,
the Americans and Jews and their allies and agents
are by definition not innocent because they are
the senior criminals.
This definition is also used by Islamists in the west who, when asked to condemn terrorism, carefully condemn the killing of the innocent. Since they don’t regard the people killed as innocent because they follow Zawahiri’s definition, the condemnation is a sinister fraud.
Meanwhile Richard Landes reminds us how the ‘moderate’ Palestinian Authority behaves by contrast. Scroll down to the picture of the ‘moderate’ who lynched the Israeli solders — and then the picture after it that delivers the knock-out punch.
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Monday, 7th April 2008
10:53pm
Alex Alexiev on National Review Online sets out the reasons why sharia finance — described by Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi as ‘jihad with money’ — is a serious threat to the west:
The legitimization of sharia in the West and its gradual imposition in Muslim communities and beyond is a key objective of sharia finance, and there is no doubt it has already made huge strides. …
Notably, for those Muslims who cannot engage in physical jihad using force of arms, sharia requires that they support jihad financially. This is what sharia finance is all about.
Far from being a legitimate investment vehicle, sharia finance facilitates religiously sanctioned support for terrorist organizations — as well as providing radical Islamists with highly paid sinecures as sharia-finance board advisors in the sanctum sanctorum of capitalism, all the while that they are pursuing a subversive campaign to destroy it.
Predictably, none of this is even remotely disclosed by any of the dozens of Western banks promoting sharia finance today, which obviously exposes them to huge non-disclosure risks ranging from fraudulent misrepresentation, to material support for terrorism.
And not disclosed either by Gordon Brown, whose stated ambition is to make London the global centre of Islamic banking (reported to be yet another brilliant wheeze from Ed Balls). Of all the manifestations of the Islamisation of the west (see this piece by Dan Rabkin on the acceleration of Londonistan) sharia finance is perhaps the most deadly, because it effectively sells the west to Islam, and the most difficult to stop — because for the financiers and politicians in the west who are thus selling it, all they can see are the trillions of dollar and pound signs being dangled enticingly before their eyes.
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2:30pm
Last month, I wrote
here about this piece by James Hider in the Times which reported claims that Jewish settler groups are digging an extensive tunnel network under Muslim areas of Jerusalem’s Old City [from Silwan to the Western Wall] while building a ring of settlements around it to bolster their claim to the disputed city in any future peace deal.
I pointed out that the real story was the deliberate destruction by the Arabs, in the building of another mosque in Temple Mount, of countless priceless artefacts dating back to the time of the first Jewish Temple, in an attempt to destroy the evidence of the ancient Jewish claim to Jerusalem. But now read on
here…
Hussein Siyam, the Mukhtar of Silwan, is the tribal leader of the two largest clans in the valley to the east of Jerusalem’s Old City. He says that he has been involved in negotiations with Ir David since the beginning. ‘Anyone who tells you that there is new digging going on below the houses is lying,’ he said. ‘The dig existed already and they are just cleaning it out.’
He blames two entities for the disturbances. ‘The Committee for the Protection of Property in Silwan is a group that gets money from Arab states and the Palestinian Authority,’ said. ‘And so, it is interested in spending that money on conflict.’ The second source is more nefarious. ‘A German news company recruits activists here and gives them money to make problems in order to report on them,’ he claimed.
Since Hider quoted Israeli leftists, it would seem that anArab is prepared to tell the truth about Israel, while its own pilgerite Jews smear their country with hateful lies.
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2:23pm
The UN has once again negated any claim it can make to representing freedom and justice in the world and protecting human rights. Last week, the whimsically named UN Human Rights Council turned freedom of expression into its extinction and in so doing removed the last vestiges of its own credibility. As the International Herald Tribune reported, the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), a 57-member bloc of mainly African and Asian nations which effectively acts as a jihadi front and whose influence at the UN appears to be growing all the time, put forward a motion initiated by Egypt and Pakistan, which was passed 32-0, to get the UN’s expert on free speech police individuals and news media for negative comments on Islam and report to the council on all instances in which individuals ‘abuse’ their freedom of speech by giving expression to racial or religious bias. In short, the UN has now voted to force the official charged with protecting freedom of expression to suppress it instead.
The resolution adopted attempts to legitimize the criminalization of expression,’ said Warren W. Tichenor, the U.S. ambassador to the UN in Geneva.
As Reuters India reported:
Reporters Without Borders called the changes ‘dramatic’ and said the growing influence of the OIC in the Human Rights Council was ‘disturbing’. ‘…All of the council's decisions are nowadays determined by the interests of the Muslim countries or powerful states such as China or Russia that know how to surround themselves with allies,’ it said. The free speech non-governmental organization Article 19 joined with an Egypt-based rights group, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, in a joint statement saying the council process was being repeatedly misused ‘to push for an agenda that has nothing to do with strengthening human rights and everything to do with protecting autocracies and political point scoring.’ And the India and Britain-based International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) said the Council ‘stands exposed as no longer capable of fulfilling its central role: the promotion and protection of human rights.’
The Council kept firmly away from taking any action over China's handling of recent protests in Tibet, although there was some muted criticism from Western countries. It had earlier dropped special investigations into Cuba's rights record.
Well, there’s a surprise. The UN really is no more than a club of tyranny.
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