Sunday, 27th January 2008
11:32pm
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column in the Daily Mail arguing against an automatic presumption that dead people should have their organs removed for transplant purposes, with an op-out for objectors. In the article, I said that organ donors were not actually dead when their organs were removed. Various people then expressed reactions ranging from bafflement to rage, on the basis that it was axiomatically the case that donors were dead before their organs were removed -- and anyway, how dare I argue against saving the lives of those who were given the transplanted organs.
I also received the following message from a reader which I reproduce here with her permission: Has Gordon Brown ever stood at his dying teenage son’s bedside and been asked to sign the form giving consent to using his son’s body for spare part surgery? I have. And I refused. That refusal caused considerable commotion and puzzlement, but four hours later it was decided to give my son Simon, aged 18, a chance. Even then, my husband and I were told we would only ever have ‘a vegetable.’
Simon’s injuries from his involvement in a car crash (in which he was an innocent back seat passenger) were mainly brain damage. He remained unconscious for four-and-a-half months and it was thanks to a brilliant consultant and brain surgeon that eventually he began to recover. At home, after six months in hospital, we all made him our priority. He had to learn to walk and talk again, and all this he did with an amazing sense of humour. My youngest son spent hours and hours pushing him round the garden in a wheelchair and later kicking a football for him to return, to encourage him to use his legs.
Simon did walk and did talk again. In fact, he had a job as a reporter on a Fleet Street national newspaper for more than 25-years. We had him for another 34 years in total, during which we holidayed to America four times and travelled all over Britain. He enjoyed a tremendous quality of life – and enriched the lives of anyone with whom he came into contact. Our doctor said Simon’s sudden death in 2002, aged 51, was as a result of lingering brain damage he suffered all those years ago. To lose a son is a tragedy but the memories of our happy times together give me so much to treasure. Your piece is to be applauded and please let me know how I can support any campaign against compulsory organ transplants.
As I wrote in my Mail article, I believe there is much that we don’t know about the brain. As a result, diagnoses that parts or all of the brain have been destroyed -- and that therefore there is no life in the body -- have on occasion turned out to be wrong. I also think that the definition of ‘brain death’ that enables organs to be removed from a body while the heart is still beating unassisted (the ventilator does not cause the heart to beat artificially, merely feeds it with oxygenated blood through the artificially sustained activity of the lungs — a crucial but often overlooked distinction which means that while some of the body’s tissues are functioning normally the patient cannot be dead) was devised to allow organs to be removed from a body that is sustaining them with the life that is essential if they are to be successfully transplanted.
That means donors are dying but not dead; and that means the removal of the organs kills them. And call me old-fashioned, but I happen to believe that killing sick patients is wrong.
Unfortunately, the moral confusion of our age means that absolute moral values have widely given way to utilitarian and consequentialist thinking, which means in essence that bad means are justified by good ends. That is ultimately the way to tyranny and mass murder. Lamentably, the leadership of our medical profession — whose ethics are supposed to make it the front line of defence of personal autonomy and the right to life —has substituted utilitarianism and consequentialism for the foundation ethical precept of medicine: ‘First do no harm’. This is why, as a story in the Sunday Telegraph reports, doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives. It’s all part of the moral brutalisation of a medical profession which now sees nothing wrong in killing unconscious patients by starving or dehydrating them to death, or using bits of discarded human embryos to create clones and even animal/human chimeras — all in the interests of furthering the happiness of the greatest number. Once human life becomes instrumentalised like this and used as a means to an end, the veneer of civilised values starts to peel away.
We are now sliding down that slippery slope very fast.
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Thursday, 24th January 2008
4:06pm
It seems that Hamas didn’t just switch off the lights when there was no need to do so—they made a theatrical production of it. Khaled Abu Toameh reports in the Jerusalem Post:
On at least two occasions this week, Hamas staged scenes of darkness as part of its campaign to end the political and economic sanctions against the Gaza Strip, Palestinian journalists said Wednesday. In the first case, journalists who were invited to cover the Hamas government meeting were surprised to see Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and his ministers sitting around a table with burning candles. In the second case on Tuesday, journalists noticed that Hamas legislators who were meeting in Gaza City also sat in front of burning candles. But some of the journalists noticed that there was actually no need for the candles because both meetings were being held in daylight. ‘They had closed the curtains in the rooms to create the impression that Hamas leaders were also suffering as a result of the power stoppage,’ one journalist told The Jerusalem Post. ‘It was obvious that the whole thing was staged.’
From the staged ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah, to Hezbollah’s ‘fauxtographic’ staged Israeli ‘atrocities’ during the Lebanon war, to the staged candlelit theatrics in Gaza, there is clearly no end to the am dram talents of the Palestinians in acting out make-believe and presenting it as fact.
Maybe this is what Arafat actually meant by his ‘strategy of stages’. It certainly is a true theatre of war.
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10:13pm
Once again, the shrewd strategists of Hamas have played a blinder in the past few days, managing to wrong-foot the governments of both Israel and Egypt and manipulate the ever-obliging western media. First, Hamas bombards southern Israel with rockets and shells -- 220 in four days, the latest volley in the 4000-plus such rocket attacks since Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005. Then, when Israel closes Gaza’s supply route from Israel in a desperate attempt to stop this relentless onslaught, Hamas shuts off Gaza’s electricity, claims that Israel is thus killing its old and sick and organises a candle-lit demonstration whose poignant images of winsome young faces illuminated in deep shadow are broadcast round the world, packing the emotional punch of an electronic Rembrandt. The resulting outcry by a so-called civilised world community that has resolutely refused even to report the rocket barrages (does anyone imagine that if any of those countries had been hit by 4000 rockets in two and a half years they would not have simply flattened the attackers making war upon them?) forces Israel to beat a hasty retreat and re-open the supply route.
Israel: nil, Hamas: one.
Yet even while Israel is being excoriated for ‘laying brutal siege’ to Gaza and inflicting ‘collective punishment’ upon the Palestinians in their ‘open prison’, the said Palestinians suddenly breach a hole in the wall with Egypt and pour through. What’s this – a ‘Berlin wall’ that the
Telegraph and others have suddenly discovered Egypt operates to keep the Palestinians in Gaza and out of Egypt? Just like Israel has done? Isn’t Egypt’s wall therefore also an ‘apartheid wall' -- or is it only the Jews who do apartheid? And what’s this – a supply route into Gaza controlled by Egypt, not Israel? So how can this have been Israel’s ‘brutal siege’? Hasn’t Egypt equally been laying ‘brutal siege’ to the Gazans, also enforcing upon them ‘collective punishment’ and also forcing them to live in an ‘open prison’? Or is it only the Jews who can ever be guilty of such heinous acts? Clearly this is so for Tim Butcher of the Telegraph, for whom breaching the Egyptian wall ended
Israel's swingeing blockade
.And what’s this? Khaled Abu Toameh reports in the
Jerusalem Post: At least 90 Gazans, most of them women, were wounded by Egyptian border guards using tear gas, clubs, water cannons and live ammunition to disperse the demonstrators, who were protesting against the continued closure of the border crossing
That’s protesting against the closure of
Egypt’s border crossing. If Israel had wounded 90 Palestinians using tear gas, clubs, water cannons and live ammunition, there would have been hysterical claims of a massacre and genocide. Yet when the Egyptians do it, the British media scarcely even report it.
The astounding distortion of the media’s coverage of the Middle East means that most people are unaware of the extreme lengths to which Egypt routinely goes to keep the Palestinians out. That is in large measure because Egypt’s President Mubarak is fighting to prevent the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is an important terrorist branch) from taking over his country. Gaza is thus a nightmare for him. Fighting to contain the Brotherhood within, he now has them on his doorstep in Hamastan. Unable or unwilling to act against them himself, he relies on Israel to do it for him in killing Hamas terrorists, and has been happy to co-operate with Israel in operating a barrier against them.
But now Hamas has breached that barrier. According to a scoop in today’s Times, far from the naïve stories that the wall was breached by opportunist gangs of ‘masked men’ this was an operation carefully planned and executed by Hamas. As the
Times reports, Hamas had been secretly cutting the border with Egypt for months.
Hamas, which took control of the coastal territory last June after a stand-off with Fatah, has denied that its men set off the explosions that brought down as much as two-thirds of the 12-km wall in the early hours. But a Hamas border guard interviewed by The Times at the border today admitted that the Islamist group was responsible and had been involved for months in slicing through the heavy metal wall using oxy-acetylene cutting torches…
The guard, Lieutenant Abu Usama of the Palestinian National Security, said of the cutting operation: ‘I've seen this happening over the last few months. It happened in the daytime but was covered up so that nobody would see.’ Asked whether he had reported it to the government, he replied: ‘It was the government that was doing this. Who would I report it to?’
Priceless. Egypt: nil; Hamas: two.
If Hamas were ever to come to power in the West Bank – which would almost certainly happen if Israel were to withdraw -- and in Egypt, Islamism would be well on the way to sweeping through the entire region, and the rest of the world would be in even more danger than it is now. The gullible stupidity of the western intelligentsia, in sanitising Hamas and mindlessly reproducing its propaganda lies as facts, is thus helping deliver further victory to the very people who are pledged to destroy the free world. But blinded by their prejudice against the Jewish state, this is the last thing the useful idiots of the west will ever see.
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Wednesday, 23rd January 2008
4:49pm
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Further to my post below, I’m still none the wiser about what Cameron actually said about playing the church school system. On his blog, Ben Brogan reports:
Raised eyebrows in Camp Cameron this morning at the way his views on parents and faith schools were presented this morning by the Times. They assure me he does not condone parents who lied about their faith to get their children into religious schools. The key line is ‘I don't blame anyone who tries to get their children into a good school,’ but presumably he would blame those who can be shown to have exaggerated their religious enthusiasm.
The key issue here is: what was the question by the Times interviewers that elicited this ‘key line’? If their question was: ‘What do you think of parents who play the system by getting their children into church schools?’, the answer would have acknowledged middle-class elbow power but not condoned dishonesty. If, however, their question was: ‘What do you think of parents who pretend to be Christians when they are not in order to get their children into a church school?’ his answer would have condoned dishonesty. The implication of Camp Cameron’s elevated eyebrows is that the former was the case and not the latter. If so, the Times would itself be guilty of outrageously dishonest journalism. In such a case, one would expect Camp Cameron not to be elevating their eyebrows but hitting the roof. Instead, they don’t seem to be very sure what their man did actually say. According to the
Mail: Tory officials said they thought he had been slightly misquoted and were today checking the tape of the interview. ‘I don't think he said he approved of cheating,’ said an aide.
So what
did he actually say? The problem is that the remark itself doesn’t even seem to appear in the interview, only in the related story, let alone the question to which it was apparently the answer.
I think we should be told.
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9:16am
If the claim in the Times is true, David Cameron has made a serious mistake. According to its story, he has refused to criticise parents who pretend to be Christians in order to win places in church schools.
The Tory leader refuses to criticise the ‘middle-class parents with sharp elbows’. Asked for his views on the families accused of playing the system, he says: ‘I think it’s good for parents who want the best for their kids. I don’t blame anyone who tries to get their children into a good school. Most people are doing so because it has an ethos and culture. I believe in active citizens.’
Mr Cameron will learn this year whether his own daughter has won a place at a state-funded Church of England school in Kensington, West London.
I say ‘if’ it is true because, although there is a summary reference to this in the paper’s report of the actual interview with Cameron, it does not actually appear -- in the on-line version, at least -- and therefore I cannot see what Cameron actually said. But if he did endorse parents who cheat, that’s pretty appalling. Yes, it is a widespread practice for parents to use church schools as a principal means of getting their children into schools with higher standards; and yes, many of those parents are not Christians but pretend to be so in order to get their children in. But for a politician who aspires to lead his country to endorse lying and cheating is to give the public the message that he himself is not to be trusted. The implication that ‘active citizenship’ means securing advantage by not telling the truth is deplorable. It is possible to acknowledge the fact that so many parents are driven to play the system in this way by the appalling standards in our schools, and to decry the pressures that drive them to do this, without endorsing systematic deception. If Cameron has indeed crossed that line, this will be held against him by a public which already suspects that he is not a man of principle, and taken as proof that their instincts are correct.
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Tuesday, 22nd January 2008
12:11am
When Gaza was plunged into darkness, the western media knew who was to blame.
The Guardian: Besieged civilians pay the price for Israel's hardline response to rocket attacks.
The Independent:
Israeli blockade forces Gaza's only power plant to shut.
The Times:
Darkness falls on Gaza as Israel takes revenge for rocket attacks.
One small problem with this version of events. It wasn’t Israel that shut down Gaza’s electricity supply. It was Hamas. What Israel did was
close its border crossings to all goods (eased yesterday) in response to intensive Qassam rocket attacks on the western Negev – 220 rockets fired in four days. Hamas promptly plunged Gaza into darkness, knowing that the west would uncritically swallow its claim that Israel was to blame for the distressing accounts that would follow of a humanitarian crisis. Naturally they did -- just as they continue to pretend that Hamas has only the one border with Israel through which it can obtain supplies, and therefore it is Israel which always 'blockades' it; whereas of course Gaza has a second border with Egypt through which it could certainly receive a flow of goods and fuel – especially since it continues to receive through it an uninterrupted flow of weapons with which to attack and kill innocent Israelis. Indeed, the border with Egypt means that the idea that Israel can ever 'cut off' Gaza or that it has turned it into a sealed 'prison' is entirely false.
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, normally so slow to defend its own actions, is on this occasion clearly incandescent at the gross unfairness of the coverage and has issued this furious statement:
The supply of electricity to Gaza from the Israel and the Egyptian power grids (124 Megawatts and 17 Megawatts respectively) has continued uninterrupted. These 141 Megawatts of power represents about three quarters of Gaza's electricity needs. While the fuel supply from Israel into Gaza has indeed been reduced, due to the Hamas rocket attacks, the diversion of this fuel from domestic power generators to other uses is wholly a Hamas decision - apparently taken due to media and propaganda considerations. Noteworthy is the fact that while the Gaza population remains in the dark, the fuel generating power to the Hamas rocket manufacturing industry continues to flow unabated. The Hamas claim of humanitarian crisis in Gaza is also greatly exaggerated. There is no shortage of basic foodstuffs, and Gaza patients who need treatment in Israeli hospitals continue to travel into Israel for care.
Far from Israel imposing ‘collective punishment’ or taking ‘revenge’ upon Gaza, as the EU, UNWRA and the media have claimed, it is almost certainly the only country on the planet which continues to provide fuel and other supplies to people who use them to continue to wage war upon it.
But then, people in the west don’t know about those 220 rocket attacks in four days because the western media simply refuse to report them. Instead they only report Israel’s attempts to defend itself which are thus represented as ‘revenge’, ‘punishment’ or simple aggression. Vile. As usual.
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Sunday, 20th January 2008
10:57pm
The
Independent on Sunday reports the first signs of the long-expected rearguard action by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs against the government’s stated intention to reclassify cannabis back up to class B. Gordon Brown has apparently realised the catastrophic error of downgrading it to class C, and the lethal signal this sent out that the law was now winking at cannabis use. The full extent of this disaster is becoming plainer by the day, with the evidence of the huge rise in psychotic mental illness and associated crimes -- including incidents of deanged violence -- resulting from its use now so widespread as to be undeniable. Except, of course, for the covert decriminalisers/legalisers of the ACMD who supported reclassification and would go further down this road -- and who, as the government’s supposedly expert advisers on drugs policy, have therefore done untold damage to the nation’s youth and general well-being. In anticipation of the inevitable fight and political dangers this would pose, the government recently let it be known that it would reclassify cannabis regardless of what the ACMD might say. The ACMD has now fired back:
Ignoring a directive not to speak to journalists about reports that the Government has already made its mind up, ACMD member Professor Les Iversen, a pharmacologist at Oxford University, said: ‘I was not pleased to read what appears to be a deliberate leak about the government's alleged intention to reclassify, regardless of advice received. If ACMD were to recommend no change and this were to happen, I believe it would be the first time that any Home Secretary acted against the recommendations offered and it would call into question the whole function and future of this group.’
…But one former member of the influential council last night claimed the ACMD was totally opposed to the Government's stance. ‘There is no way that the ACMD would support any reclassification of cannabis, unless there were some political shenanigans going on,’ said the Reverend Martin Blakeborough. Rev Blakeborough, who runs the Kaleidoscope drug abuse charity, said: ‘There is no significantly new evidence to suggest that cannabis is any more harmful than in the last review we did 18 months ago.’
But there was plenty of evidence then of the terrible harm that cannabis does to the brain; the committee simply ignored it. The ACMD’s position has to be seen in the context of a billion-dollar backed, global campaign to overturn the UN drugs conventions aimed at eradicating drug use and replacing them with leglisation of all drugs under cover of the benevolent-sounding policy of ‘harm reduction’. It is a campaign which has long had its claws deeply dug into the British government and establishment; it has ensured that the debate over drug policy has long been poisoned by disinformation, sophistry, intellectual confusion and outright lies.
It’s war over the weed; and Brown must win it.
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10:48pm
Tawfiq Hamid is a courageous Muslim who has understood and renounced his own extremist history. In
this reprint of an essay he wrote last year, he describes what makes a man turn into a jihadi. He describes his dilemma when, having come under the sway of al Qaeda’s number two Ayman al Zawahiri (pictured) he came eventually to reject jihadi precepts and yet could not accept that a peaceful interpretation of his religion could be theologically grounded. Eventually, he says he managed to square the circle:
By immersing myself in Salafi ideology, I was better able to judge the impact of its violent tenets on the minds of its followers. Among the more appalling notions it supports are the enslavement and rape of female war prisoners and the beating of women to discipline them. It permits polygamy and pedophilia. It refers to Jews as ‘pigs and monkeys’ and exhorts believers to kill them before the end of days: Say: ‘Shall I tell you who, in the sight of God, deserves a yet worse retribution than these? Those [the Jews] whom God has rejected and whom He has condemned, and whom He has turned into monkeys and pigs because they worshiped the powers of evil: these are yet worse in station, and farther astray from the right path [than the mockers]’. (Koran 5:60). Homosexuals are to be killed as well; to cite one of many examples, on July 19, 2000, two gay teenagers were hanged in Iran for no other crime than being gay.
These doctrines are not taken out of context, as many apologists for Islamism argue: They are central to the faith and ethics of millions of Muslims, and are currently being taught as part of the standard curriculum in many Islamic educational systems in the Middle East as well in the West. Moreover, there is no single approved Islamic textbook that contradicts or provides an alternative to the passages I have cited. It has thus become clear to me that Salafi ideology is what is largely responsible for the so-called ‘clash of civilizations.’ Consequently, I have chosen to combat Salafism by exposing it and by providing an alternative, peaceful and theologically rigorous interpretation of the Koran.
He therefore does not sanitise what is happening as ‘un-Islamic’; but at the same time he believes in a theologically grounded interpretation of his religion that would enable it to promote peace rather than war. He runs a terrible risk in promoting reform in this way. He deserves every encouragement. And his writing should be sent to every member of our political and security establishment, so many of whom deny the reality he has so painfully realised.
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10:39pm
Saudi Prince Turki al Faisal has sent a message to Israel that if Israel leaves ‘Arab’ land, it can join the Arab world. Here is a message to Prince Turki al Faisal: that if the Arabs stop trying to occupy Jewish land and attack the west, they can join the civilised world.
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10:19pm
Once again, Britain’s ‘moderate’ Muslim community is upping the ante against the British society in which it resides. The
Sunday Telegraph reports that senior Muslims are pushing to integrate sharia law into English law. Dr Suhaib Hasan who, we learn, has been presiding over sharia courts in Britain for more than 25 years, is anxious to dispel any idea that sharia means flogging, stoning or amputations. Good grief no, perish the thought apparently it’s ‘only’ about family law.
Uh huh. But as Baroness Cox points out in this story, sharia family law is utterly inimical to English law and British values, based as it is on the subjugation of women and the negation of individual freedom. Moreover, a few paragraphs on it turns out that Dr Hasan actually thinks that stoning adulterers and cutting off thieves hands is an absolutely splendid idea for reducing Britain’s crime rate! Who could object?!
And to back up his whole sinister proposal, he makes the utterly false analogy with Jewish religious law. We are told that he argues that
British law would benefit from integrating aspects of Islamic personal law into the civil system, so that divorces could be rubber-stamped in the same way, for example, that Jewish couples who go to the Beth Din court have their divorce recognised in secular courts.
This is rubbish. Jewish couples who divorce have to do so under English law for their divorce to be recognised by the state. The separate Jewish religious divorce (which incidentally causes much distress to women in certain circumstances to whom it does not grant a divorce, precisely because it does not correspond to English law) is just that, an entirely separate and culturally private matter. Although there are Jewish religious courts giving judgments over a wide range of issues, the whole point is that they have the status of informal arbitration and do not impinge at all upon the laws or customs of the country. They are based on the acknowledgement that, where Jewish religious law conflicts with English law, Jewish law gives way. Wherever they have settled over the centuries, Jews have always accepted that, as citizens of that country, they are bound by its laws. They have never required the host country to change its laws or customs to accommodate them; nor do they set their own religious laws above those of their country.
It is very important that people realise the crucial difference between allowing a minority the right to practise its own precepts while fitting in with the law of the land, and allowing members of a minority to force the law of the land to fit in with them. It is very important that people understand that the pressure to sharia-ise Britain is far more dangerous even than terrorism because – see the government’s embrace of ‘sharia finance’ – its implications simply aren’t understood and it is likely therefore to be accepted. Salami-slice by salami slice, this is how British society will be dismembered.
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