Friday, 29th February 2008
2:27pm
Ye gods. The BBC has put out this story:
Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust’
Israeli leaders are warning of an imminent conflagration in Gaza after Palestinian militants aimed rockets at the southern city of Ashkelon. The deputy defence minister said the stepped-up rocket fire would trigger what he called a ‘bigger holocaust’ in the Hamas-controlled coastal strip.
This reported remark by deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai caused widespread shock and absolute horror. For an Israeli minister to use the word ‘holocaust’ to describe a limited war of Israeli self-defence, when for Jews of all people the ‘Holocaust’ means one thing: genocide — and this at a time when the calumny of the ‘Jews as Nazis’ is rampant around the world, putting Israel and the Jewish people at risk — was simply beyond belief.
It was indeed without any credibility — because Vilnai never said it. It was an appalling mistranslation by Reuters, the source of the BBC story. Vilnai said:
‘The more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger “shoah” because we will use all our might to defend ourselves'.
Reuters translated the Hebrew word ‘shoah’ as ‘holocaust’. But ‘shoah’ merely means disaster. In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is
never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance. The word ‘Hashoah’ alone means ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘retzach am’ means ‘genocide’. The well-known Hebrew construction used by Vilnai used merely means ‘bringing disaster on themselves’.
As a subsequent Reuter’s story reported,
Vilnai's spokesman said: ‘Mr. Vilnai was meaning “disaster”. He did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide.’ Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Arye Mekel, added: ‘Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai used the Hebrew phrase that included the term 'shoah' in Hebrew in the sense of a disaster or a catastrophe, and not in the sense of a holocaust.’
But this grotesque mistranslation has given Hamas a propaganda gift which they lost no time exploiting:
Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said of Vilnai's comments: ‘We are facing new Nazis who want to kill and burn the Palestinian people.’
At a time when the rockets continue to rain down on the southern Negev and Israel is being forced to contemplate stepping up its incursions into Gaza because of the truly genocidal assault upon its citizens by Hamas, such a mistranslation is more than an unfortunate slip. In the present explosive atmosphere, it can lead directly to an enormous escalation of violence by the Palestinians.
It is not enough for Reuters to try to cover its backside in subsequent stories. It must issue an explicit retraction, and so must the BBC. Instantly.
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1:50am
While Britain prattles on about Prince Harry and Andrew Lansley, there is a serious escalation of violence from Gaza into southern Israel. On Wednesday Roni Yehiah, a 47-year-old father of four, was killed by a rocket attack on a college in Sderot and four others injured. Yesterday as the rockets continued to rain down on Sderot,
Grad missiles were fired at Ashkelon — according to Haaretz, having been smuggled through Sinai from Iran. In strikes aimed at killing terrorists, Israel killed 20 Palestinians including five children. Meanwhile the Jerusalem Post reports that in an interview Mahmoud Abbas gave to a Jordanian newspaper, this statesmanlike man of peace (cf George W Bush) said he did not rule out returning to the path of armed ‘resistance’ against Israel. But an unnamed Israel official said these comments were aimed at Abbas's domestic audience and that Abbas should be judged by his deeds - a willingness to negotiate peace - rather than by statements "meant for internal consumption.
So that’s all right then. Once again, Israel hands Abbas his get-out-of-jail-free card and thus perpetuates the grotesque fiction peddled by the western world that Israel's mortal enemy is actually its partner in a 'peace process'.
In an interview with Al-Dustur, Abbas also took pride that he had been the first to fire a bullet on Israel in 1965 and that his organization, Fatah, had trained Hizbullah. ‘At this present juncture, I am opposed to armed struggle because we cannot succeed in it, but maybe in the future things will be different’, he said.
This is the person the world expects Israel to offer territory to so that he can better continue his armed struggle against it if he should so decide -- a decision the world will support because he is a statesman committed to peace.
Meanwhile, a 17-year-old Arab girl from Jerusalem is under arrest for allegedly offering to carry out a suicide bombing in the city.
The would-be bomber, a resident of the east Jerusalem neighborhood of A-Tur who was apprehended three weeks ago in a joint Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency)-police operation, suggested to Islamic Jihad operatives in the West Bank that they use her to carry out a terror attack due to her hatred of Jews and ‘personal family problems,’ Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.
Who cares? Who outside Israel even notices?
So yet again Israel is between the sharpest of rocks and the most unforgiving of hard places. If it goes into Gaza, it will sustain a loss of its soldiers’ lives that it will find unbearable, and when it comes out again Hamas will merely regroup. The world’s media has so far failed to report the vast majority of the thousands of rocket attacks on the southern Negev, since Jews targeted for murder don’t surface on their radar; doubtless the fate of the five Palestinian children killed unintentionally in Israel’s attempt to defend its people from the rocket bombardment will get the full outraged works. Clearly Israel has to do something to stop the rockets. Ha’aretz is calling for action that is both daring and level-headed. One does hope that the mere soldiery of Israel will match up to the exacting standards of a paper that has done so much to sap the morale and fighting spirit of Israel over the years. But one also has to wonder why in heaven’s name Israel has never provided a missile defence shield for the southern Negev.
Already the ineffable Condoleezza Rice is warning it to exercise restraint. What restraint would America exercise, one wonders, if it were being bombarded by dozens of rockets every day by the proxies of Iran? Rice on one side, Ha’aretz on the other, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in the north, can't go in, can't stay out, the western media sharpening their verbal knives for the bloodsport of Sticking it to the Scapegoat.
And meanwhile, as ever, all roads lead back to Iran.
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Thursday, 28th February 2008
11:42pm
The new government drugs strategy seems to me to be just more of the same old same old. It makes the three crucial mistakes which underpin the failure of drug strategy over the past few years (I don’t know how they arrive at these figures of falling drug use but I simply don’t believe them:
1) The strategy eschews drug use eradication for harm reduction. It tacitly accepts drug use as a given and concentrates instead on reducing its harmful effects through treatment, instead of enforcing the law to reduce the use of drugs themselves.
2) It concentrates law enforcement instead on drug dealers while regarding users as their victims who have to be treated rather than punished. This false dichotomy between users and dealers ignores the fact that many users are dealers.
3) Both of these errors compound the most important problem of all, that the messages our society is giving about the use of drugs are equivocal and inconsistent. It doesn’t matter how many threats are being ‘considered’(and will almost certainly never materialise) to withhold welfare benefits if drug users don’t present themselves for treatment; nor how many five years-olds are to be taught that drugs are nasty (but of course it will be their choice as autonomous and empowered five year-olds whether to do them); nor how many grandparents will be encouraged to care for the offspring of their drug-addicted children (don’t all rush).
The message has to be unequivocal that no drug use will be tolerated, full stop. That means choking off demand as well as supply; it means criminalising drug use as well as possession and dealing, along with vigorous enforcement and treatment; and it means an end to the distinction between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ drugs. The message should be loud and clear that all drug use is such a danger to society that it simply will not be tolerated. Those societies that deliver such a message — Sweden, China, Singapore — have little or no drug problem. Those that do not and have gone down the ‘harm reduction’ (aka drift towards decriminalisation) road instead — the UK, the Netherlands — have a major problem.
Everything else is just so much garbage.
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Wednesday, 27th February 2008
2:17pm
Americans were apparently shocked — shocked! — when Barack Obama failed unequivocally to repudiate the support expressed for his candidacy by the black power, Islamist, racist antisemite Louis Farrakhan. Byron York reports:
The question stemmed from Obama’s initial answer when NBC’s Tim Russert asked, ‘Do you accept the support of Louis Farrakhan?’ Obama might have said, ‘No.’ But instead, he seemed to go out of his way to denounce some of Farrakhan’s statements while not taking on Farrakhan himself (and even using Farrakhan’s preferred honorific in the process). ‘You know, I have been very clear in my denunciation of Minister Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic comments,’ Obama said. ‘I think that they are unacceptable and reprehensible. I did not solicit this support. He expressed pride in an African-American who seems to be bringing the country together. I obviously can’t censor him, but it is not support that I sought. And we’re not doing anything, I assure you, formally or informally, with Minister Farrakhan.’
…After his answer, Russert asked again, just as directly, ‘Do you reject his support?’ Obama might have answered, ‘Yes,’ but instead tried his best to stay away from anything so definitive. ‘Well, Tim, you know, I can’t say to somebody that he can’t say that he thinks I’m a good guy. You know, I — you know, I — I have been very clear in my denunciations of him and his past statements, and I think that indicates to the American people what my stance is on those comments.’
… Russert pressed a bit more, bringing up Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s long-time pastor, whose magazine last year said that Farrakhan ‘truly epitomized greatness.’.. ‘Tim, I have to say I don’t see a difference between denouncing and rejecting,’ Obama said. ‘If the word “reject” Sen. Clinton feels is stronger than the word “denounce,” then I’m happy to concede the point, and I would reject and denounce.’
Such patent equivocation is of course absolutely telling -- and, if America were not currently in a state of mass-induced hysteria through the cult of Princess Obama, it would be lethal. Anyone who agreed that Farrakhan was totally beyond the pale would have repudiated his endorsement with undiluted horror. Obama conspicuously refused to do so and used weaselly language instead.
But why the shock? As I wrote here, the church to which Obama belongs is a racist, black power church led by a pastor who venerates Farrakhan. If you belong to a church, it is a reasonable assumption that -- guess what! -- you do not find its values objectionable and most probably you actively support them. Duh!
When is the shoe going to drop?
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Tuesday, 26th February 2008
11:40pm
As we all know, the world is about to end because of global warming. Temperatures are soaring, ice is melting, glaciers are retreating, seas are rising, and we’re all gonna fry. Pretty damn terrifying. We’re all up to here with worry about it. The Royal Society says there’s no longer any room for scientific doubt about it. Britain’s Chief Scientist says it’s a bigger threat than global terrorism. Every global warming sceptic is denounced as clinically insane. Every developed nation wags its finger at every other (well, ok then, at America) and tells it to Emit Less. Every politician and B-list celebrity now anxiously measures his or her carbon footprint. Every British schoolchild is now drilled to believe that man-made global warming is a Fact along with poverty and the existence of Belgium. It’s a wonder any of us has any incentive to get up in the morning.
So you might think that the news that the world isn’t frying after all would be all over the media. World saved! That’s a helluva story, surely. Imagine the relief as a weeping nation storms its corner newsagents or rushes to switch on the Today programme to learn that it is not, after all, doomed! Or alternatively, if apocalyptic millenarianism is something you just can't live without, that we are all about to freeze to death in a new ice age!
Here, then, are the glad tidings. The
Telegraph has reported that, although during January Europe, northern Asia and most of Australia experienced above average temperatures, large parts of the globe had their coldest winter for decades:
According to the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the average temperature of the global land surface in January 2008 was below the 20th century mean (-0.02°F/-0.01°C) for the first time since 1982. Temperatures were also colder than average across large swathes of central Asia, the Middle East, the western US, western Alaska and south-eastern China. The NCDC reported that the cold conditions were associated with ‘the largest January snow cover extent on record for the Eurasian continent and for the Northern Hemisphere’. In some parts of China and central Asia, snow fell for the first time in living memory, the NCDC noted.’For the contiguous United States, the average temperature was 30.5°F (-0.83°C) for January, which was 0.3°F (0.2°C) below the 20th century mean and the 49th coolest January on record, based on preliminary data’.
Much of North America was also hit by the heaviest snowfall since the 1960s. Meanwhile, the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre found the January 2008 Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent, while below the 1979-2000 mean, was greater than the previous four years. And the January 2008 Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent was significantly above the 1979-2000 mean, ranking as the largest sea ice extent in January over the 30-year historical period.
Fancy!
Elsewhere, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that
almost all the allegedly ‘lost’ ice has come back. A NOAA report shows that ice levels which had shrunk from 5 million square miles in January 2007 to just 1.5 million square miles in October, are almost back to their original levels (my emphasis).
And so now those poor confused polar bears face a new horror: starvation because there’s now
too much sea ice.
Fancy!
While on Daily Tech, Michael Asher notes:
Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years [my emphasis]. All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Fancy!!
Meanwhile Professor Philip Stott, a consistent voice of scientific sanity from the very start of the MMGW madness,
points out that global warming seems to have, er, stopped:
Of course, little can be gleaned from such a short data run of only 10-years [“‘Global warmers’ also please note, thank you”], but the temperature anomaly has clearly dipped, and then flat-lined below its 1998 anomaly peak - and for nine years now.
In other words, since 1998 there has been no global warming [not even any ‘global warming’]. Yet, atmospheric CO2 has continued to rise, from c. 368 ppmv in 1998 to c. 384 ppmv in November, 2007 [
see: ‘CO2 Signals From The Past’, February 1]. Moreover, politicians persist in claiming that temperature is rising faster than at any other time in the history of the whole Earth..... but then, we always believe our politicians, don’t we?
So, does this mean to say that other factors may actually be driving climate and temperature? Oh me, Oh my! What a shock! Perhaps with all those shredders in our offices and homes, there are just too many tiny bits and bobs of credit cards floating up into the air and cooling the atmosphere? Or, weddings may have increased in number, and particulate confetti is having an unknown effect? Or, then again, the rise out of the ‘Little Ice Age’, which ended c. 1880, might just be stuttering a tad? Who knows?
Who indeed? Not the public, for sure — because here’s the strangest thing. Apart from a couple of lonely newspaper pieces, virtually none of this dramatic news has been reported. The world has no idea that it is no longer doomed to fry but maybe should invest instead in some thermals and start emitting more heat. The Chief Scientist has not said anything about it. The Royal Society has not said anything about it. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and Sir John Houghton and Sir Jonathan Porritt and the Today programme have not been heard to say anything about it.
I wonder why?
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3:25pm
People of a sensitive disposition have been reacting with appropriate expressions of horror and disgust at the appearance of a picture on the Drudge website of Barack Obama dressed as a Somali elder — while on a visit to Somali-dominated north-eastern Kenya in 2006 — on the grounds that this is a distasteful dirty trick by the Clintonistas. Whether or not they are responsible, we do not know. Either way it rebounds on Hillary since it is widely assumed to be so, and thus reinforces the belief that she is an example of a discredited kind of dirty politics of which Obama is the repudiation incarnate.
The Obama camp claims that he was simply wearing local dress on this visit as a matter of courtesy. But the real significance of the picture is surely that it renews concern about Obama’s involvement in Kenyan politics — in particular, his apparent support for the Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga, who signed a memorandum of understanding with Kenyan Muslims to turn Kenya into an Islamic state governed by sharia law. I raised these concerns
here when, after the Kenyan election last December whose result he refused to accept, Odinga’s supporters ran riot and torched a number of Christian churches.
Obama was reportedly so concerned about the violence in Kenya last December that he was in constant touch about it. The question therefore that has been prompted once again by this picture is just what is the connection between Obama and Kenya — and why is he apparently on the wrong side?
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Sunday, 24th February 2008
11:38pm
The decision by Britain, America and certain other European countries to recognise Kosovo as an independent state is mind-blowingly stupid and suicidal and of a piece with their obvious determination to capitulate in the war for civilisation. It is a rotten decision for the following reasons:
1) It endorses a breach of a country's right to maintain its own integrity. Serbia is a properly constituted democratic country. To recognise the validity of such a secession is to undermine the principle of a country's right to determine its own composition. It puts up two fingers to international law, which explicitly recognises Serbian authority over Kosovo and upholds a state’s right to its own sovereignty. It opens the way for any other breakaway movement to do the same, both in the Balkans and around the world. So Tamils can now claim a precedent for seceding from Sri Lanka, Corsicans from France, Basques from Spain. And after Kosovo, can Scotland be far behind?
2) It asserts that religion matters more than nationality. This is multiculturalism taken to its lunatic natural conclusion. It says in effect that nationality is not the glue that must bind people of different creeds together, but religion or ethnicity can be allowed to break the nation apart. Every nation with restive ethnic minorities will now be undermined by this endorsement of illegal Balkanisation. Serbians will now find themselves foreigners in their own country. And as Eldad Beck applies the same thinking to Israel -- whose kamikaze government is said to be ‘thinking about’ recognising Kosovo too -- a horrific potential scenario presents itself:
In contradiction to all the pessimistic predictions, Israel and the Palestinians are able to successfully conclude negotiations on a final-status agreement, among other things based to incentives provided by the European Union. In the final stages of negotiations, Israeli representatives cave in to international pressure and waive the demand to recognize Israel’s unique Jewish character.
A short while after the agreement is signed, an uprising breaks out in the Galilee, in the Triangle area, and in the southern Negev desert, with Arab Israelis demanding a cultural and political autonomy that would enable them to manage their own lives while disconnecting from the State of Israel’s ‘Jewish’ institutions.
The bloody clashes between the sides prompt the United Nations to call on Israel to restrain itself and consider the deployment of multinational forces to serve as a buffer. The European Union threatens to renounce Israel’s special status if it fails to act immediately in order to meet the demands of the minority living within it. Israel’s dependence on the EU is so great that it is forced to capitulate and turn into a ‘greater Tel Aviv’ shtetl.
3) It gives victory to the forces of ethnic cleansing. Although the Serbs under Milosevic committed atrocities, the Kosovars started the killing in their revolt against a sovereign country and drove out between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs. In the past eight years 1,248 non-Albanians have been killed, with many more kidnapped, now presumed dead. 151 spiritual and cultural monuments in Kosovo have been destroyed by Albanians and 213 mosques built with money from Saudi Arabia. Eighty per cent of graveyards have been destroyed or desecrated, with no response from the international community. The Albanians have turned Christian graveyards into car parks, playgrounds and rubbish dumps. Anything relating to Serbia or Christianity libraries, public records, books, names of places and even towns have been wiped out.
4) Most important of all, an independent Muslim Kosovo is a beachhead for radical Islam in Europe. Al Qaeda has been operating in Kosovo since the early 1990s. Jihadis from Yemen and Chechnya have been fighting with the Kosovo Liberation Army and Saudi is pouring money into the Kosovo mosques thus turning them into Wahhabi hotbeds of radicalism. Caroline Glick notes in the Jerusalem Post:
In 2006, John Gizzi reported in Human Events that the German intelligence service BND had confirmed that the 2005 terrorist bombings in Britain and the 2004 bombings in Spain were organized in Kosovo. Furthermore, ‘The man at the center of the provision of the explosives in both instances was an Albanian, operating mostly out of Kosovo... who is the second ranking leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Niam Behzloulzi.’
It was at the Battle of Kosovo
in 1389 that some 70,000 died to keep the Islamic Ottoman Empire from advancing further into Europe. What is the point of fighting the jihad in Iraq when we are cheerfully opening the door to it
in that very same place?
Russia’s President Putin has warned that recognising Kosovo will rebound very badly upon the countries who have blundered into endorsing it. The fact that this outcome is merely the inevitable consequence of the war so unwisely prosecuted by those countries against Serbia does not soften its deeply alarming implications. Putin is warning only too correctly of the dangers to the west of this development and the supreme folly of endorsing it.
For once, Putin is on the right side and Britain and America are utterly wrong. That is the measure of this debacle.
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Tuesday, 26th February 2008
9:13am
When the great controversy erupted over the ‘bugging’ of MP Sadiq Khan when he visited his friend and constituent Babar Ahmad in Woodhill prison, where he is fighting extradition to the US on charges that he ran a website raising funds for Taliban and Chechen terrorists, I wrote here and here that this was an artificially whipped-up storm. The claims that the bugging breached the Wilson doctrine that MPs should not be bugged and that Sadiq Khan MP had been targeted because he was both a Muslim and a thorn in the official side were wide of the mark because a) the Wilson Doctrine didn’t apply in this case since it only applies to surveillance requiring a Home Secretary’s warrant which is not needed for bugging; and b) it seemed that it was not Sadiq Khan who was the target of the bugging but Babar Ahmad.
Yesterday, the Home Secretary made a
statement to the Commons on the inquiry into this affair by the surveillance commissioner, Sir Christopher Rose. Sir Christopher had concluded that a) the Wilson doctrine did not apply to the bugging, only to surveillance which required a ministerial warrant, and b):
It is absolutely clear from Sir Christopher’s report that my hon. Friend was not the target of that surveillance.
Moreover, the police didn’t even know that Sadiq Khan was an MP. Can there be any greater ignominy?
However, having squashed every accusation flat the Home Secretary then put her gears into screaming reverse and said that, as Sir Christopher had pointed to a degree of unclarity in this area she would be issuing revised guidance that any conversations between MPs and their constituents would be treated as ‘confidential information’ and protected from covert surveillance.
This is yet another bad capitulation on the security front. Hallowed as the relationship between MPs and their constituents may be, we are living in a time of unprecedented threat to this nation. If any MPs have been consorting with members of jihadi networks, the security service jolly well should be listening to what they are saying. The extent to which this government is going to undermine its ability to defend this country against the threat that it faces is simply astounding.
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Thursday, 21st February 2008
5:27pm
The Guardian was wetting itself this morning over its ‘exclusive’ that
The Foreign Office successfully fought to keep secret any mention of Israel contained on the first draft of the controversial, now discredited Iraq weapons dossier.
This ‘mention of Israel’ consisted of the single word ‘Israel’ which was
written in the margin by someone commenting on the opening paragraph of the Williams draft. It was written against the claim that ‘no other country [apart from Iraq] has flouted the United Nations’ authority so brazenly in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction’. In statement to the tribunal, Neil Wigan, head of the FO's Arab, Israel and North Africa Group, said he did not know who had referred to Israel in the margin. He went on: ‘I interpret this note to indicate that the person who wrote it believes that Israel has flouted the United Nations' authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.’
The FO was worried that the revelation of this annotation would cause a crisis in relations with Israel which would take it as further evidence of FO bias against Israel. The Guardian, it is safe to assume, takes the contrary view that the annotation proves that an inconvenient truth about Israel was covered up: that truth being that Israel had ‘flouted the United Nations’ authority so brazenly in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction’. But that is not so. For twelve years, Iraq flouted UN resolutions instructing it to stop production of its nuclear weapons programme and to prove it had done so, as the condition for the ceasefire of the 1991 war. The only thing the UN asked Israel to do about its own nuclear programme was to open it up to IAEA inspection (which it refused to do). To say that it therefore Israel had ‘flouted the United Nations' authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein’ is absurd and odious. What this annotation merely shows is that someone inside the Foreign Office had a venomously distorted opinion of Israel. Big deal.
Now look at what neither the Guardian nor any other part of the British media has considered interesting or important enough to report. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has in recent days called
Israel a
‘filthy bacteria’
and also
declared that
World powers have created a black and dirty microbe named the Zionist regime and have unleashed it like a savage animal on the nations of the region.’
In addition, the leader of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, Muhammad Ali Jafari, has written to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah:
The cancerous growth Israel will soon disappear... I am convinced that with every passing day Hizbullah's might is increasing and in the near future, we will witness the disappearance of this cancerous growth Israel by means of the Hizbullah fighters' radiation [therapy].
Not to be outdone, Iranian Armed Forces chief Maj.-Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi also wrote to Nasrallah saying that
Lebanese and Palestinian combatants... [will] continue the struggle until the complete destruction of the Zionist regime and the liberation of the entire land of Palestine.
while Iranian Parliament Speaker Gholam Hadad has warned that thecountdown to Israel's destruction has begun.
This repeated announcement of Iran’s impending annihilation of Israel, which has reached a crescendo since the killing of the Hezbollah arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, has not been reported at all by the British media. From the way Iran has behaved in the past, it will almost certainly seek to take revenge for such a blow by attempting to murder Jews around the world – and it will use Hezbollah to do it. A propos of which, here is another story that the British media has totally ignored, published in Italy’s Libero on January 31. The French security service in Paris intercepted what appears to have been a Hezbollah plot to kidnap major figures in France, Germany, Italy and Britain. The police broke into an apartment in Paris and seized six Arabs, including two Lebanese and one Syrian who held diplomatic passports.
The agents proceeded to seize several documents and opened a diplomatic bag containing tourist maps of Paris, London, Madrid, Berlin, and Rome, with red highlighter marks showing routes, addresses, car parks, and ‘truck stopping points’ ...which seems to connect with the very confidential information that reached the DGSE from Beirut last week.
It said that Hasan al-Nasrallah, leader of the pro-Iranian Hizballah -- whose slogan is ‘we love death as much as Westerners love life’ -- convened a meeting of members of the Hizballah militias at a secret location in Lebanon, ordering them to activate all their cells in Europe to organize kidnappings of major figures.
Hasan al-Nasrallah is a not insignificant leader. He is the ‘spiritual son’ of Hasan al-Masri, very powerful leader of the Shiite Amal movement, which during the years of the Lebanese civil war kidnapped dozens of Western citizens, including numerous Frenchmen, a bishop of the Anglican Church, Rev Terry Waite, and an Italian, Alberto Molinari, who worked for Ferrero. DGSE agents are very well acquainted with al-Nasrallah and do not underestimate the danger posed by Hizballah, which has a logistical support network in all the European capitals. The British, Spanish, German, and Italian secret services have been notified.
So here we have Iran, using Nazi-style language to repeat in hysterical terms its genocidal intention to wipe Israel off the map, having activated its undoubtedly numerous Hezbollah cells in European countries in order to kidnap major figures in Britain and elsewhere as part of its open war against the west – and the British media reports not a word of any of it, hyping up instead some piece of venom against Israel. And they call this journalism.
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9:50am
Daniel Pipes records how a united display of public condemnation and opprobrium forced Islamist organisations in America to back down over the refusal by Muslim cab drivers to transport blind passengers accompanied by their guide dogs. Faced with a united approach by police, courts and public opinion which resulted in such cab-drivers admonished, fined, re-educated, warned, or even jailed, the Council on American Islamic Relations finally backed down. Pipes concludes:
When Westerners broadly agree on rejecting a specific Islamic law or tradition and unite against it, Western Islamists must adjust to the majority's will. Guide dogs for the blind represent just one of many such consensus issues; others tend to involve women, such as
husbands beating wives, the
burqa head coverings,
female genital mutilation, and ‘honor’ killings. Western unity can also compel Islamists to denounce their preferred positions in areas such as
slavery and Shar‘i-compliant finances.
Just so. And what path are we taking in Britain?
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