Thursday, 10th January 2008
10:35pm
Honest Reporting.com provides a vital service in documenting the lies and distortions about Israel in the western media which have so catastrophically poisoned public debate and blocked a proper understanding of the threat to the free world posed by Arab and Islamic radicalism. Here it provides evidence of the egregious bias against Israel by the BBC, which in my view is far and away the most important and influential source of this contagion, not just in Britain but around the world. HR notes, for example:
In 2007, there were almost 1,500 rocket and mortar attacks targeting Israeli civilian populations, resulting in on average, one strike every ten hours. The BBC chose to publish only six articles focused on the attacks during the entire year. During the same period, fifty-six articles…
In 63% of the stories about Israeli operations, Israel or the IDF were named directly. Typical headlines were: ‘Israelis kill militants in Gaza’ (The "militants" had been firing rockets into Israel), ‘Children killed in Israeli strike’ (the children were playing next to a rocket launcher), and ‘Israeli strike kills four in Gaza.’On the other hand, of the seven stories concerning Palestinian attacks, none were written in the same style. The headlines took the responsibility for the attacks away from those who instigated them. Rockets, explosions, and clashes became the culprits in typical headlines such as: ‘Rocket injures dozens in Israel,’ ‘Gaza explosion kills two children’ (compare with headline above), ‘Two killed in clash in Gaza Strip,’ and ‘West Bank clash leaves three dead.’ (This one was extremely egregious since it was describing the ambush and murder of Israeli hikers by Palestinian terrorists. Since terrorist groups took responsibility for the attacks, why weren't they named in the headline?)
BBC bigwigs dismiss such critiques as special pleading; they usually genuinely cannot recognise this prejudice, selective reporting and double standards for what it is -- because they too share the prejudice. As I have said before, the BBC is thus a totally closed thought system. It is however the most influential broadcasting organisation in the world, influencing media outlets in many other countries, because the BBC brand is (wrongly) believed to be a kitemark of objectivity and balance. The damage it has actually done to truth and justice in its reporting of the Middle East, and the part it has played in inflaming hatred of Israel and thus violence around the world, is incalculable.
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Wednesday, 9th January 2008
12:52pm
Great news just in from the British courts. Derek Pasquill, the Foreign Office civil servant who was accused of leaking documents about government policy towards Islamism, has been acquitted at the Old Bailey after Crown prosecutors dropped all six charges against him.
This was a prosecution that should never have been brought, and it is an absolute scandal that Pasquill was put through the mill in this way. The OSA is supposed to protect this country against its enemies; Pasquill’s whistle-blowing alerted the country to the danger into which it was being put by the government’s lethal embrace of Islamist radicals.
It was Pasquill who sent the New Statesman’s Martin Bright the amazing series of internal Foreign Office documents which he duly published, revealing the deeply alarming assumptions behind the government’s strategy for tackling racial Islamism in Britain and shedding light on the policy of extraordinary rendition. As Bright subsequently
wrote:
It is difficult to imagine a series of documents that could have been more in the public interest to disclose. Decisions being made in the Foreign Office, with a direct effect on the British people, were taking place with little or no consultation. In particular, the Foreign Office had embarked on a detailed strategy of engagement with Islamists at home and abroad without reference to Parliament or even, it seemed, the Prime Minister himself.
Pasquill’s documents, which were published in the New Statesman and Observer, and gave rise to a Channel Four documentary and a Policy Exchange pamphlet written by Bright which made waves around the world, were of extraordinary importance in helping open British eyes to the dangerous path the government was treading through its profoundly flawed analysis of the Islamist threat and the dangerously wrong-headed strategy of appeasement of the Muslim Brotherhood that followed. They simply transformed the national debate and shamed the government into a (partial) rethink of its policy of embracing Islamist radicals.
The real scandal of Pasquill’s prosecution, however, as Bright wrote
here, was that none of the documents passed to Bright was classified as ‘Top Secret’ or even ‘Secret’; indeed, none was classified any higher than ‘Confidential’. According to the Press Association report of today’s case:
Prosecutors told an Old Bailey judge that internal Foreign Office documents disclosed as part of the legal process would have undermined the prosecution case that the leaks were damaging. Julian Knowles, defending, told the court the documents should have been released earlier, saving Mr Pasquill the stress of a 20-month Special Branch investigation.
This prosecution was therefore truly iniquitous. A civil servant has been hung out to dry for 20 months, with the most serious criminal charges to do with compromising national security hanging over his head, over leaks which were
known not to have been damaging to national security – in a prosecution which was only halted, it seems, because a trial would have exposed the fact that the Foreign Office knew all along that the documents weren’t damaging.
It is not enough that Derek Pasquill has now finally been acquitted. The Attorney General must now explain precisely what public interest was served by this prosecution, and why it was allowed to drag on to its inevitable démarche -- thus paralysing further informed debate during that period, and ruining a man’s life for serving the public interest along the way.
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9:40am
So what happened? The
New York Times thinks it knows:
Several New Hampshire women, some of them undecided until Tuesday, said in interviews that a galvanizing moment in the race had been Mrs. Clinton’s unusual display of emotion on Monday when her eyes filled with tears and her voice cracked as she described the pressures of the race and her goals for the nation.’ As voters began to see the choice they have and heard Hillary speak from her heart, they came back to her,’ said Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist.
Well, if this is really true then the Dianafication of America that I wrote about below really has started to rot the US brain big-time. But maybe other factors were also at work in New Hampshire. Maybe the post-Iowa feeding frenzy over Obama made the NH voters look much harder at him and realise he was a dubious flake. Maybe the fact that Iowa voted through a non-secret ballot made a difference. Maybe the Clinton machine simply managed to mobilise its core vote. Many theories will now doubtless fill many pages. Who knows. The only thing we can be sure of is that anyone who predicts the outcome of this presidential race, including the pollsters, can safely be ignored.
But just watch Hillary now do empathy. She is being made over -- and Obama will find himself triangulated.
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Tuesday, 8th January 2008
8:51pm
Barack Obama belongs to the Trinity United Church in Chicago whose pastor is Rev Dr Jeremiah A Wright Jnr. Here is the church’s website. From it you will see that the church is committed to what looks suspiciously like black supremacism. Dr Wright promotes ‘black power’ and ‘black liberation theology’, under which adherents must have
a non-negotiable commitment to Africa
and to seeing the world through an African perspective. The church proclaims its commitment to a ‘Black Value System’ which, apart from a commitment to
Pledge Allegiance to All Black Leadership Who Espouse and Embrace the Black Value System
includes the
Disavowal of the Pursuit of ‘Middleclassness’
on the basis that those who are not middle-class are separated from other black people by
*Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another.
*Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.
In the current issue of the church’s magazine
The Trumpet, there is a star-struck endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, the racist, anti-white and anti-Jewish black supremacist Muslim demagogue. In her ‘
Empowerment Interview’ in the magazine, which claims that the leader of the Nation of Islam is a much misunderstood man, writer Rhoda McKinney-Jones gushes that Farrakhan
truly epitomised greatness…
Such fawning is hardly surprising given that Dr Wright himself -- who in his sermons and interviews has equated Zionism with racism and Israel with apartheid South Africa, who said on the Sunday after 9/11 that the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies, and who suggested four years later that 9/11 was retribution for America’s racism ( views from which Obama has distanced himself) – appears to enjoy a close relationship with Farrakhan. In the Trumpet feature article, Wright raves:
Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience...His integrity and honesty have secured him a place in history as one of the nation’s most powerful critics. His love for Africa and African American people has made him an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose.
And in this
story on NewsMax, Ronald Kessler reports:
Just before Obama’s nationally televised campaign kickoff rally last Feb. 10, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation. Wright explained: ‘When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli’ to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, ‘a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.’
Considering the fact that the very mention of George W Bush’s belief in God is enough to give Democrats an aneurysm, and that Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are currently being dismissed as religious nutjobs, isn’t the Democrat (and media) silence over Obama’s choice of a black power church which is more akin to a cult, and the obnoxious views of the pastor who he says brought him into Christianity in the first place, more than a little remarkable?
And how have the Democrats got themselves into a position where the choice they offer voters for the American presidency is between Hillary Clinton and this man?
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12:26pm
It appears that there was an al Qaeda plot to kill the Queen when she addressed the Ugandan parliament last November. Stephen Brown reports on FrontPageMagazine:
In a vastly under-reported story, the Ugandan newspaper, The Monitor, claims the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan Muslim terrorist organization connected with al-Qaeda, was planning to assassinate the British monarch at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting late last November in Kampala, Uganda’s capital. The paper relates the ADF planned to steal Uganda Broadcasting Corporation vans and use them as cover to gain access to one of the venues, possibly the Ugandan parliament, which the British royal addressed on November 22, for a bomb attack.
However, the two UBC vans scheduled to broadcast the Queen’s parliamentary address, the Monitor discovered, were that day under the watchful guard of an elite Ugandan military unit. As a result, Ugandans did not see the British queen make her historic speech to their national legislature. A UBC official later said there was no broadcast because there was no money and the UBC’s equipment would not work in the parliament (the British Broadcasting Corporation’s equipment, however, somehow functioned adequately at this venue).
Who knew? Not, it seems, the somnambulist British media.
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9:26am
Watching the cresting of the Obama tidal wave, it seems that the US is having its Princess Diana moment. Hillary Clinton, turning on the tears but only succeeding once again in thus underscoring her own cynical calculation, wails fruitlessly that Obama is all warm fuzzy feeling but no substance.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said, ‘what is the substance here? What, as famously was said years ago, where's the beef? You know, where is the reality?’
Welcome to Planet Diana. It was only with the death of the People’s Princess that the extent of Britain’s transformation from a country of reason, intelligence, stoicism, self-restraint and responsibility into a land of credulousness, emotional incontinence, sentimentality, irresponsibility and self-obsession became shatteringly apparent. Princess Diana was an icon of the new Britain because she embodied precisely those latter characteristics.
It became clear that politicians could score remarkable short-term success if they too got in touch with their inner trauma and felt everyone else’s pain. Bill Clinton (hideous irony for Hillary) was the first to realise this and made it his political signature. Tony Blair, whose lip periodically quivered with precision timing, had it in spades. David Cameron has it; so too does Obama.
The effect is electric, but short-lived. That is because Dianafication is essentially empty, amoral, untruthful and manipulative; eventually voters see through it and realise they have been played for suckers. But while it lasts -- and it creates presidents and prime ministers -- reason doesn’t get a look in. Warm fuzzy feelings win hands down because they anaesthetise reality and blank out altogether those difficult issues which require difficult decisions. Obama appears to be on the wrong side of just about every important issue going; indeed, were he to be elected president he would be a danger to the free world. But hey – the guy makes people feel good about themselves; he stands for hope, love, reconciliation, youthfulness and fairies at the bottom of the garden.
In Britain, we understand to our cost why that makes a politician a winner. In America, it’s something quite new because until this moment it wasn’t obvious that the rot that has degraded the British mind had also penetrated the American psyche. Now we know better.
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Monday, 7th January 2008
9:26pm
In the Telegraph,
Toby Harnden tells us that women are deserting Hillary in droves and are swooning over Obama instead. Poor old Hillary has made a major miscalculation. She assumed that because she was a woman – and a feminist to boot – she could take the women’s vote for granted. Stuck in the seventies mindset, she failed to realise that today men are the new women. Obama is far more ‘feminine’ than she is. That’s because he does open, warm, hopeful, sunny and casual whereas she does rational, shifty, stern, finger-wagging and uptight. Having doubtless spent her entire life as a feminist trying to erase all signs of femininity in order to be taken as seriously as any man, she now sees her lifelong ambition about to go down the tubes because her male rival exhibits what are assumed to be womanly ‘virtues’ whereas she embodies male ‘vices’.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
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3:57pm
Step by remorseless step, the free world continues in its trance-like state to attack, disable or paralyse its ability to defend itself against the global Islamic jihad. First, the ineffable UN has condemned not Islamic terrorism but the identification of and defence against it. As
Robert Spencer reports:
The Organization of the Islamic Conference, the largest voting bloc at the United Nations, has succeeded in pushing through the UN a resolution condemning the ‘defamation of religions.’ That’s ‘religions,’ not ‘religion’ – yet according to Cybercast News Service, ‘although the resolution refers to defamation of ‘religions,’ Islam is the only religion named in the text, which also takes a swipe at counter-terrorism security measures.’ …The resolution denounces ‘laws that stigmatize groups of people belonging to certain religions and faiths under a variety of pretexts relating to security and illegal immigration.’ Muslims, it says, have suffered from ‘ethnic and religious profiling...in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001.’ This is the fault, in part, of ‘the negative projection of Islam in the media.’ The UN voices its ‘deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.’
Perish the thought. Next, the western liberal mind now presents such a mortal threat to life and liberty that a group of anti-jihadi Muslims has been driven to denounce an American Reform rabbi, Rabbi Yoffie,for his sanitising of Islamic extremism and grotesque moral equivalence. In a column in
The Jewish Week, they said they viewed with dismay a ‘partnership’ between the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) which they said was not a legitimate representative of mainstream Islamic believers in the West.
Rabbi Yoffie was cited by the Post in a number of statements with which we disagree. He said, ‘As a once-persecuted minority in countries where antisemitism is still a force, we [Reform Jews] understand the plight of Muslims in North America today.’ We are Muslims concerned to protect the rights of our communities in non-Muslim societies, but we consider absurd any attempt to equate the situation of Muslims in Western Europe and North America today with historic anti-Jewish prejudice and oppression. Muslims in Western Europe and North America have not been subjected, in recent times, to wholesale denial of civil rights. Free discourse about Islam in the Western democracies is occasionally abrasive, but has never resembled the wholesale libels directed against Jews — including by latter-day Islamists — and has not been embraced by or institutionalized by any government in Western Europe or North America.
Rabbi Yoffie continued, ‘Islamic extremists constitute a profound threat. For some, this is a reason to flee from dialogue, but in fact the opposite is true.’ We do not understand the intent of this statement. It appears that Rabbi Yoffie believes dialogue is possible with extremists. We do not agree. We believe that dialogue between mainstream Muslims, Jews, and Christians is necessary, but that the defeat of Islamist extremists is necessary for such interfaith efforts to succeed. We do not support ‘dialogue’ with Islamist and other apologists for violence, or proponents of restrictions on freedom under the pretext of religion.
To which one can only say ‘Bravo’ to these courageous Muslims for reasserting truth and sanity in the face of a lethally deluded Jewish liberal.
Next, an intensely disturbing development in, of all places, the Pentagon. One expects the State Department to grovel to illegitimate force, but the Department of Defence has been assumed to be more robust. No longer. It has fired Stephen Coughlin, its most knowledgeable specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism -- because he committed the crime of identifying that extremism. The Washington Times reports that Hasham Islam, a key aide to the Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, tried to get Coughlin to soften his views about Islamic extremism.
Misguided Pentagon officials, including Mr. Islam and Mr. England, have initiated an aggressive ‘outreach’ program to U.S. Muslim groups that critics say is lending credibility to what has been identified as a budding support network for Islamist extremists, including front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
Mr. Coughlin wrote a memorandum several months ago based on documents made public in a federal trial in Dallas that revealed a covert plan by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-origin Islamist extremist group, to subvert the United States using front groups. Members of one of the identified front groups, the Islamic Society of North America, has been hosted by Mr. England at the Pentagon.
So much for America’s role on the battleground of ideas.
In Britain, one man does get it. The Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, himself the Pakistani son of a Muslim convert to Christianity, created a storm when he wrote in the
Sunday Telegraph that Islamic extremists have created ‘no-go’ areas across
Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter. Already separate communities, he says, have been turned into areas where adherence to this ideology has become a mark of acceptability.
Those of a different faith or race may find it difficult to live or work there because of hostility to them. In many ways, this is but the other side of the coin to far-Right intimidation. Attempts have been made to impose an ‘Islamic’ character on certain areas, for example, by insisting on artificial amplification for the Adhan, the call to prayer. Such amplification was, of course, unknown throughout most of history and its use raises all sorts of questions about noise levels and whether non-Muslims wish to be told the creed of a particular faith five times a day on the loudspeaker. This is happening here even though some Muslim-majority communities are trying to reduce noise levels from multiple mosques announcing this call, one after the other, over quite a small geographical area.
There is pressure already to relate aspects of the sharia to civil law in Britain. To some extent this is already true of arrangements for sharia-compliant banking but have the far-reaching implications of this been fully considered? It is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain.
For uttering these truths, the Bishop has been denounced by both Islamists (with the ever-more preposterous Inayat Bunglawala proving the Bishop’s point by asserting that church bells are just as much of a public nuisance in Britain as the muezzin’s call to prayer) and Nick Clegg, the new
centrist Gramscian leader of the more
mature infantile Liberal Democrats. Clegg
described the Bishop’s comments as
a gross caricature of reality.
Once again, however, it was a Muslim who showed up both the idiocy and the arrogance of the western liberal. Manzoor Moghal, chairman of the Muslim forum, wrote of the Bishop in the
Daily Mail:
He has been condemned for making 'inflammatory' remarks, distorting the truth about our inner cities and 'scaremongering' against the Muslim population. But, paradoxically, this reaction from the politically-correct establishment is an indicator of the weight of his case. If our ruling elite were not so worried that his views would strike a chord with the public, it would not have been so anxious to condemn him.
His statement about the dangers of the rise of radical Islam matches the reality of what people see in our cities and towns, where the influence of hardliners is undermining harmony and promoting segregation…However much his critics may sneer at his accusations, the fact is that the determination of some of my fellow Muslims to cling to certain lifestyles, customs, languages and practices has helped to create neighbourhoods where non-Muslims may feel uncomfortable, even intimidated.
Indeed.
It is encouraging that Muslim voices are now being heard more and more speaking up against Islamic extremism. Their task is made infinitely more difficult, however, by western liberals determined to do the extremists’ work for them.
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Sunday, 6th January 2008
11:52pm
The
Times tells us:
'An award-winning young artist has been told that her appearance in the Big Brother house can qualify for the Turner Prize as a study in endurance.'
I have to endure the fact that in return for my licence fee I am fed a diet of propaganda and voyeuristic tat. I think I therefore qualify for the Turner Prize as a study in performance–fatigue art.
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11:30pm
Also while I was away, I read some absolutely astounding news about Britain that shocked me to the core. The Telegraph reported:
Figures released yesterday by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) revealed that underage pregnancies rose by four per cent to total 7,462 in 2005 - the latest year for which data is available. This leaves England and Wales with the highest birth rates for under-16s in western Europe…Professor David Paton, an economist at the Nottingham University Business School, said…’There has been a tendency for the Government's teenage pregnancy strategy to focus on creating schemes where teenagers can get the morning after pill or other forms of family planning at school or clinics.The danger with this sort of approach is that it can lead to an increase in risky sexual behaviour amongst some young people.There is now overwhelming evidence that such schemes are simply not effective in cutting teenage pregnancy rates.’
The
Telegraph also reported an equally unbelievable revelation:
Gordon Brown's flagship tax credit policy is penalising working families while rewarding unemployed single parents, a leading Left-wing think tank claims…The report is scathing of Mr Brown's tax credits, saying they fail low-income families by punishing them financially if both parents work.
I’m glad I was sitting down when I read this.
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