6:52pm
A couple of mainstream media outlets have now acknowledged the fact that the study by the Institute for Defense Analyses based on 600,000 documents seized from Saddam’s Iraq and which was said to have shown ‘no tie’ between Saddam and al Qaeda in fact reveal a far greater involvement by Saddam with al Qaeda affiliates and other international terrorist groups threatening western interests than was ever suspected. The Wall Street Journal observed:
The redacted version of ‘Saddam and Terrorism’ is the most definitive public assessment to date from the Harmony program, the trove of ‘exploitable’ documents, audio and video records, and computer files captured in Iraq. On the basis of about 600,000 items, the report lays out Saddam's willingness to use terrorism against American and other international targets, as well as his larger state sponsorship of terror, which included harboring, training and equipping jihadis throughout the Middle East.
At the Weekly Standard Stephen Hayes, who has tirelessly revealed details of Saddam’s links to terrorism over the years, frets about the extraordinary failure not merely of the media to report these findings, instead representing the report misleadingly as claiming that there were no ‘direct’ Saddam/al Qaeda links, but also the inexplicable silence by the US government which has not mentioned them either.
What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself -- can convince them to re-examine their mistaken assumptions.
Bush administration officials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there. And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war, the most important decision of the Bush presidency.
To which might be added—too demoralised. On both sides of the pond, the fall-out from the flawed aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the subsequent mass re-writing of history and the mass hysteria and descent into irrationality which have ensued, not to mention the desire to avoid anything which might focus attention on the mistakes that were made (which were rather more devastating, if one takes the view that Saddam’s WMD did exist and are now in the hands of other rogue states, than anything dreamed up by the anti-war brigade) has meant that faced with any evidence that they were actually right to do what they did (if not the way in which they did it) the reaction of both the American and British governments is to put their heads under a pillow and hope it all just goes away.
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11:32pm
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The Archbishop of Canterbury continues to demonstrate his quite extraordinary moral obtuseness when it comes to the Middle East. Not for the first time, he proclaims a moral equivalence between the perpetrators of terror and their victims. In an article in the
Observer yesterday, he wrote this:
It doesn't take much imagination to see how internally divided societies find brief moments of unity when they have successfully identified some other group as the real source of their own insecurity. Look at any major conflict in the world at the moment and the mechanism is clear enough. Repressive and insecure states in the Islamic world demonise a mythical Christian 'West', and culturally confused, sceptical and frightened European and North American societies cling to the picture of a global militant Islam, determined to 'destroy our way of life.' Two fragile and intensely quarrelsome societies in the Holy Land find some security in at least knowing that there is an enemy they can all hate on the other side of the wall.
Thus to the leader of the Anglican church, the global jihad is merely a figment of the frightened imagination of a west projecting its own insecurity onto the Islamic world. Yet more stomach-churningly the Israelis are said to
find some security
in knowing there’s an enemy that is unremittingly attempting to murder them. What grotesque thinking.
But it is a Muslim, no less, who has delivered the most stinging rebuke so far to this most confused and dangerous prelate. In an article in the Arab liberal e-journal Elaph, Libyan-European liberal thinker and entrepreneur Muhammad 'Abd Al-Muttalib Al-Houni wrote that the recent statements by the Archbishop on implementing shari'a law in Britain constituted a dangerous encouragement to fundamentalists in their war against the Enlightenment.
Recognizing all, or [even] some, of these laws would take European societies back to the age before the Enlightenment and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a result, the West would revert to barbarism. While I maintain that the European countries will never accede to these catastrophic demands - for reasons more practical than humanist - the fact that they were proposed by the British archbishop sends the wrong message to the Islamic world. The gist of this message is that there is no contradiction between Islamic shari'a and Western civilization if [shari'a] applies [only] for Muslim citizens.
What is the Anglican Church trying to achieve, and what interest does it have in such cartoonish proclamations? I believe that it wants achieve the following goals: To absolve itself of responsibility in the eyes of fundamentalist Muslims, who will be persuaded [by the Church's statements] that the clash is not between Christians and their Church [on the one hand] and Muslims [on the other] but a clash between Muslims and secular states. This will create greater hostility among Muslim citizens of European countries to their [host] countries, and will lead to increased violence and terrorism in the future…
These statements [by the Archbishop of Canterbury] also mean that the Church - or at least part of it - still does not believe in human rights legislation, and takes every opportunity to cast doubt on the universality and comprehensiveness of the humanist principles [underlying] it. Lastly, it this means that the mosques that are controlled by extremist Muslims in Europe do not have a monopoly on fundamentalism and on preventing [Muslim] citizens from assimilating into public life. Rather, the Church itself has, through these statements, become a charter member in this dangerous game.
What people like in the west like the Archbishop fail to grasp is that their words can have lethal consequences. A report from
Harvard says that anti-war sentiments expressed in the US lead to more violence in Iraq: Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university's Kennedy School of Government… The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media… ‘We find that in periods immediately after a spike in anti-resolve statements, the level of insurgent attacks increases,’ says the study…
Words can kill. The west’s anti-war useful idiots have much to answer for.
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11:20pm
With the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel in the British media continuing unabated, it is sadly necessary to note that even this psychic onslaught pales beside the frenzied malice displayed by certain Israeli ‘intellectuals’ towards their own people and nation. Their natural home in the Israeli media is Ha’aretz, and one of their principal voices is the journalist Gideon Levy whose spitting hatred towards his country makes Jon Pilger look like John Bull. Today’s
rant is a typical example. Clearly driven completely wild by the spectacle of Germany’s Chancellor Merkel and US presidential candidate John McCain expressing warm, rational and decent support for Israel on their recent visits, Levy rages:
A state that imposes a siege that is almost unprecedented in the world today in terms of its cruelty, that adopts an official policy of assassination, is embraced by the family of nations, if we are to judge by the words of the many statesmen who cross our doorstep.
Truly, the ‘siege’ of Gaza is unprecedented in the way its ‘starving’ inhabitants are receiving an unstoppable supply of weapons and rockets to fire at Israel; or the unprecedented way its Israeli ‘beseigers’ who are also the victims of those weapons continue to supply it with electricity, food and fuel and treat its sick inhabitants, including those who have been wounded in the course of trying to murder Israelis, in Israeli hospitals; or the unprecedented way in which Israel targets individual terrorists for assassination, as opposed to other countries under similar attack which would have simply flattened the entire area; or the unprecedented way in which this siege is being reported as opposed to, say, the rather more sustained attacks by the Lebanese against Palestinian terror gangs in Lebanon, which have gone virtually unreported despite a heavy casualty rate. And so on.
With such facts apparently quite absent from Levy’s consciousness, he is most deeply and sincerely perplexed as to how it can possibly be that Merkel, McCain et al don’t hate his country like he does. And so he reaches into his distinctly limited cultural lexicon to arrive at the Holocaust, Sderot, Hamas and, er, ‘international Islamophobia’ to put this otherwise inexplicable support down to sentimentality and prejudice. Thus the greatest phenomenon on the planet today, the threat posed by global Islamism to the entire free world against which Israel is in the very front line, passes him by altogether.
It is no surprise, therefore, that this piece has been circulated today by the PLO Mission in Washington DC as yet another propaganda weapon handed to it by Israel’s fifth column to help it in its war against the Jews.
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11:09pm
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Al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al Zawahiri, has illustrated yet again how for the Islamists there is no meaningful distinction to be drawn between Israel, America and the Jews. As the Jerusalem Post reports, he called on Muslims to strike Israeli, Jewish and American interests in revenge for Israel's incursion into Gaza earlier this month.
‘Muslims, this is our day,’ Zawahiri said. ‘Strike the interests of Jews and Americans, and all those who wield aggression against the Muslims. Today no one can say that we are battling the Jews in Palestine alone.’
With the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah having threatened to take revenge for the killing last month of the arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus at the end of the ritual 40 days period of mourning (a killing which Nasrallah has laid at the door of Israel, which has denied it), and with security agencies agreed that on past form this is likely to target Jews in the diaspora rather than in Israel, the agenda becomes ever clearer for those who have eyes to see.
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12:00am
A propos the Wakefield affair discussed in my post below, a recent case in America should not pass without comment. In a landmark ruling, the US Court of Federal Claims, Office of the Special Master, under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme, conceded a vaccine injury to a child from Georgia who, having been developing normally until she received multiple vaccinations, subsequently developed serious brain and body disorders.
Nine year-old Hannah Poling, who at 18 months was recorded by paediatricians as meeting all her developmental milestones, was then given no fewer than five vaccinations in one day — DTaP, Hib, MMR, Varivax, and IPV. Id — following which she suffered a catastrophic breakdown in brain and bodily functions, regressing in language and social development and with persistent gut problems. The court ruled that
the vaccinations CHILD received on July 19, 2000 significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.
Writing in the
Atlanta Journal Constitution, journalist David Kirby goes further and says:
The November report said Hannah's vaccine reaction had ‘manifested’ as early-onset brain disease, with ‘features of autism spectrum disorder.’ But the February report is more blunt. It says that Hannah's vaccines ‘caused’ her ‘autistic’ brain disease.
This ruling is the first time a causal link has been established between childhood vaccines and autistic spectrum disorder. It is important to note straightaway an important point of difference from the MMR controversy in the UK. This child’s immune system collapsed not as a result of MMR alone but because she received multiple vaccinations in one day, including the MMR triple jab.
Precisely what caused Hannah Poling’s catastrophic reaction, therefore, cannot be established. We don't know whether it was one of these vaccines or the fact that they were in combination. Nevertheless, this case should not be dismissed as having no relevance. These vaccines did include MMR, and the symptoms she displayed bear remarkable similarities to those reported by countless parents in the MMR controversy. Despite the differences, the significance for the MMR controversy is that this ruling established for the first time that a hitherto unknown problem with a child’s cellular system caused a catastrophic reaction in that child to a vaccination schedule, including delivery of the already multiple MMR, that has produced no ill-effects in other children. This suggests that, in some children, multiple vaccines overload immune systems that are particularly vulnerable.
In America, the health authorities are dismissing this ruling as a one-off with no further significance. But surely it suggests instead that urgent questions now demonstrably need to be asked about both the safety of these these childhood vaccines in themselves and the policy, so dear to the medical establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, of multiplying the number of vaccines delivered simultaneously to small children?
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6:03pm
Americans are aghast at the spectre of Islamist violence in Europe. They had better look to their own. Debbie Schlussel reports that, earlier this week,
four to five Muslims viciously attacked Rabbi Uria Ohana in Brooklyn, New York, while shouting, ‘Allahu Akbar.’ Rabbi Ohana, assistant head rabbi of Chabad-Lubavitch of Massachusetts, was about to get on the F-Train at Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street in Brooklyn. The young Muslim assailants grabbed rabbi Ohana's yarmulke (skullcap), and when he went to them to get it back, they beat him and shouted, ‘Allahu Akbar.’
This attack on an orthodox Jew in the US follows the murderous onslaught on the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem. We now learn from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research that no fewer than 84 per cent of 1,270 Palestinians questioned in a survey said they supported the killings in the yeshiva. As the
New York Times reported, pollster Khalil Shikaki was shocked at the results, which also found 75 per cent support for scrapping Israeli-Palestinian talks and 64 per cent support for the thousands of recent rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip on Israeli towns. Shikaki, however, puts this appalling finding down to the recent Israeli action against terrorists in Gaza, an undercover operation in Bethlehem that killed four terrorists and the announced expansion of several West Bank settlements.
The distasteful sub-text —which echoes the comments of Israel-bashers in the western media, and was accordingly reproduced in the NYT story —is that the attitudes revealed in the survey illustrate not the mass depravity of the respondents but are all Israel’s fault for causing outrage by defending itself, and the Mercaz Harav yeshiva had it coming to it because, as the centre of religious Zionism (as we are unremittingly reminded) it is responsible for the ‘settlers’ in the disputed territories.
Now contrast that with what
Investor’s Business Daily says of this survey’s findings:
The message we get from this is very clear: The vast majority of Palestinians advocate such acts of terrorism against young innocents because the victims were Jews. Their version of the Final Solution may not entail gas chambers and concentration camps, as Germany's National Socialists did in the last century. But it does apparently include murdering, at random, Jews because they are Jews. Not to say that there was not a clear political purpose behind the choice of target. The Mercaz Harav yeshiva is considered the flagship of the religious Zionist movement, the roots of which date back to a century and a half ago. Religious Zionism holds that Jews have an inalienable and permanent right to the land of Israel because God bestowed the Holy Land upon the ancient Israelites… The Shikaki poll shows that nearly an entire people support the murder of innocent kids because they're religious Jews. The civilized nations once fought a world war to prevent the global dominance of that kind of hate.
To which one can only say (and not for the first time): in this degraded era, thank goodness for the decent, rational and robust Investor's Business Daily.
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12:00am
A couple of days ago, yet another
story appeared claiming that fresh research had shown that there was
no link
between the MMR vaccination and autism. This new research was said to have shown that, contrary to the claims made by Dr Andrew Wakefield, the surgeon at the centre of the MMR scare, there was no relationship between gut problems and autism, the core of his concerns.
It also claimed that the discovery furthermore damaged the related theory that a gluten-free diet could help children with autism. Dr Hilary Cass, from Great Ormond Street, said: ‘It is very distressing to have a diagnosis of autism, a lifelong condition.Many families are driven to try out interventions which currently have no scientific basis. For example, advocates of the leaky gut hypothesis offer children a casein and gluten-free diet which as yet lacks an evidence base.’
This particular observation is a telling indication that this study bears little relation to reality. For there are countless families whose autistic children’s suffering from gut problems has
only been eased, and their autistic symptoms improved, by the introduction of precisely such a diet. ‘No evidence base’? Tell that to those families. It is their lived experience.
This follows another study which claimed that there is no connection between autsim, enterocolitis and the MMR vaccine by Baird G. et al, published in the
Archive of Diseases in Childhood on February 5. That study drew the following response from Andrew Wakefield:
…The study is severely limited by case definition in the context of the crucial ‘possible enterocolitis’ group. For inclusion in this group they required the presence of two or more of the following five current gastrointestinal symptoms:
- current persistent diarrhea (defined as watery/loose stools three or more times per day >14 days),
- current persistent vomiting (occurring at least once per day, or more than five times per week),
- current weight loss,
- current persistent abdominal pain (3 or more episodes [frequency not specified by authors] severe enough to interfere with activity);
- current blood in stool;
plus:
- past persistent diarrhea >14 days’ duration, and excluding current constipation.
We have over the last 10 years evaluated several thousand children on the autistic spectrum who have significant gastrointestinal symptoms. Upper and lower endoscopy and surgical histology have identified mucosal inflammation in excess of 80% of these children. Almost none of these children with biopsy-proven enterocolitis would fit the criteria set out above. Firstly, these children rarely have vomiting, current weight loss (as opposed to failure to gain weight in an age-appropriate manner), or passage of blood per rectum. The requirement is thus narrowed to a child having two of two relevant symptoms – current persistent diarrhea and current abdominal pain according to their criteria, plus a past history of persistent diarrhea excluding current constipation.
The requirement for the current presence of these symptoms, for 14 or more days continuously, shows a singular lack of understanding of the episodic, fluctuating, and alternating (e.g. diarrhea/constipation) symptom profile experienced by these children. In our experience, ASD children with histologic enterocolitis typically have 1 to 2 unformed stools per day that are very malodorous and usually contain a variety of undigested foodstuffs. This pattern alternates with that of “constipation” in which the unformed stool is passed after many days of no bowel movements at all, and with excessive straining. This group is entirely overlooked by the arbitrary criteria set forth in their paper. With respect to diarrhea and constipation, a detailed discussion of stool pattern in these children is available1 which further highlights the shortcomings of the above criteria. Moreover, the interpretation of pain as a symptom in non-verbal children, as it often manifests as self injury, aggressive outbursts, sleep disturbances, and abnormal posturing, is notoriously difficult. This interpretation requires an insight based upon the correlation of symptoms, histological findings, and response of symptoms to anti-inflammatory treatment. There is no evidence in the Baird et al. paper that these crucial factors were taken into account. This study’s inappropriate symptom criteria would explain the discordance with other reports that have revealed a high prevalence of significant gastrointestinal symptoms in general autism populations2,3.
It is surprising that Dr Peter Sullivan, a co-author on the paper, who presumably provided the above gastroenterological criteria, was not aware of the aforementioned limitations. In his role as a Defendant’s expert in the UK MMR litigation, he will have had access to the clinical records of autistic children with the relevant intestinal symptoms and biopsy-proven intestinal inflammation.
We suggest that the authors might wish to reflect on the ethical implications of setting the bar too high for the investigation of such children by ileo-colonoscopy, with the attendant risk of missing symptomatic, treatable inflammation.
Since the relevant MMR/autism children are considered to be those with regression and significant gastrointestinal symptoms, the appropriate stratification for between-group analyses of measles virus antibody levels has not been conducted; therefore the paper is difficult to interpret, adding little if anything to the issue of causation. Moreover, it is a major error to have presumed that peripheral blood mononuclear cells are a valid ‘proxy’ for gut mucosal lymphoid tissues when searching for persistent viral genetic material.
A further major problem in this study is the number of children who dropped out or who were unable to provide adequate blood samples. We know nothing about either the 735 children who were lost at stage two, or the 100 children for whom blood samples were not available. At the very least, we should be told whether the children who dropped out were likely to be representative of those who stayed in, with regard to the key issues of interest.
For reasons that will emerge in the near future, it would be of interest to know whether siblings of autistic children were included in either of the two control groups. This information is not provided.
As a general observation, this paper contributes nothing to the issue of causation, one way or another. Case definition alone is likely to have obscured the relevant group of autistic children. The study tells us nothing about what actually happened to the children at the time of exposure. We are increasingly persuaded that measuring things in blood many years down the line tells us very little about the initiating events in what is, in effect, a static (non-progressive) encephalopathy unlike, for example, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is a progressive measles encephalopathy. The gut is a different matter, and analysis of mucosal tissues has been very informative, since here, in the relevant children, active ongoing, possibly progressive
[AV1]4, inflammation has been identified.
The press reports of these studies make no reference to other research which shows a higher rate of gastro-intestinal problems among children with autistic-spectrum symptoms. Both the Baird and Great Ormond Street studies are but the latest in a steady drip-feed of such items which appear to be part of a concerted campaign to ensure that the General Medical Council hearing into the conduct of Wakefield’s research, which is shortly due to resume, takes place in as prejudiced an atmosphere as possible. No stone is being left unturned by the medico-political establishment and its creatures in the media to ensure that this doctor is destroyed.
As I have repeatedly said, I have no idea whether Wakefield is correct or not in his concerns about the possible adverse effects of the MMR vaccine on a small sub-set of vaccinated children. Nor do I know whether any of the charges being levelled against him at the GMC has any legs. But I do believe — as I wrote in my series of articles on the subject for the Daily Mail in 2003 here, here and here — that many of the statements made by the Department of Health and medical establishment about the ‘proof’ of the vaccine’s unchallengeable safety are deeply misleading. And I also believe, having spoken to many parents of such children, that their experiences simply cannot be dismissed as they have been by the medical establishment. No-one has ever suggested that the MMR vaccine causes all or most of the incidence of autism. If Wakefield is correct, it is only a small proportion of children whose immune systems may be unable to cope, for whatever reason, which makes them particularly vulnerable to such ill-effects. And contrary to the message being pumped out by the medical establishment that the vaccine has been proved to be safe — by studies which are all either flawed, inadequate or irrelevant — the fairest and most accurate thing to say is that the jury is still out.
One of the most reprehensible weapons being wielded in the witch-hunt against Wakefield is the claim that anyone who gives any credence whatever to his concerns is responsible for the incidence of measles amongst children whose parents are as a result too frightened to give them the MMR vaccination. There are two obvious points to make in response to this piece of moral blackmail: 1) the whole panic could have been avoided by offering single measles, mumps and rubella jabs rather than the triple MMR, and 2) it is surely just as important as avoiding cases of measles mumps and rubella to avoid causing the kind of catastrophic damage to the brain and gut displayed by the children at the heart of this controversy.
And there is a further and quite appalling point to note. This whole saga started because parents of such children found that their family doctors were dismissing out of hand their children’s gut and brain problems, accordingly refusing to alleviate their suffering. Now, as a direct result of the animosity towards Wakefield that has been whipped up — and the fear that any doctor who suggests he might be right will similarly find him or herself at the receiving end of the medical establishment’s fist — children exhibiting this combination of gut and brain damage
are finding it difficult to obtain treatment.
Another letter to the Archive of Diseases in Childhood from John Stone, the parent of an autistic child, makes terrifying and distressing reading:
In this regard it is worth noting the recent warning of the National Autistic Society (NAS):
‘The National Autistic Society is keenly aware of the concerns of parents surrounding suggested links between autism and the MMR vaccine. The charity is concerned that the GMC hearing, and surrounding media coverage, will create further confusion and make it even more difficult for parents to access appropriate medical advice for their children. It is particularly important that this case is not allowed to increase the lack of sympathy that some parents of children with autism have encountered from health professionals, particularly on suspected gut and bowel problems. Parents have reported to the NAS that in some cases their concerns have been dismissed as hysteria following previous publicity around the MMR vaccine. It is crucial that health professionals listen to parents' concerns and respect their views as the experts on their individual children…’
The NAS warning relates to the GMC hearing involving doctors Wakefield, Walker-Smith and Murch which is set to resume on 25 March approaching. I do not think it is being unduly cynical to query the publication of this study at the present time as a media event, bearing in mind that it seems to have been carried out five or six years ago. Moreover, the study has once again been promoted as refuting the Wakefield hypothesis when it in fact tests for a possibility that had not been proposed. Meanwhile, the plight of autistic children with gastro- intestinal symptoms is excluded both from the study and public attention, as if they did not exist. The NAS statement warned of ‘creating further confusion’ and this is precisely what this study and its media exposure has done.
As the resumption of the GMC hearing draws nearer, one has to ask whether this will serve the cause of truth and justice and the relief of suffering — or is it instead merely a show trial which will bring about the precise opposite?
NB: This is a corrected version of my earlier post in which I said that the Great Ormond Street study was a rehash of the Baird study. I had been told that these studies were connected, but my source -- who could not be contacted over the holiday weekend --now accepts that he was mistaken. My apologies for the error, and thanks to the readers below who drew my attention to it.
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10:35pm
Via BizzyBlog which publishes a further selection of the outpourings of Jeremiah Wright, the black power, Louis Farrakhan groupie who is the church pastor, friend and mentor of Barack Obama who refuses to renounce him, comes the fresh revelation that Wright also has pro-Hamas sympathies. On July 22 2007, on the Pastor’s Page of the Trinity church bulletin, Wright reprinted an article by Mousa abu Marzook, described as deputy of the political bureau of Hamas, which had previously been published (to general outrage) in the Los Angeles Times and which Wright re-titled
A fresh view of the Palestinian struggle.
This odious piece sought to justify the genocidal Hamas charter as
an essentially revolutionary document born of the intolerable conditions under occupation more than 20 years ago.
Let us briefly remind ourselves of some of the ‘revolutionary’ sentiments of this document:
They [the Jews] stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destructive spying organizations. They also used the money to take over control of the Imperialist states and made them colonize many countries in order to exploit the wealth of those countries and spread their corruption therein. As regards local and world wars, it has come to pass and no one objects, that they stood behind World War I, so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate. They collected material gains and took control of many sources of wealth. They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations in order to rule the world by means of that organization. They also stood behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading with war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state. They inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary. There was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it…
The article also drew an analogy between the Hamas charter and the American Declaration of Independence as two foundational documents with
a good deal to answer for
since the American Declaration of Independence
did not countenance [equality] for the 700,000 African slaves at that time.
Did Obama, as a worshipper at the Trinity church, receive this bulletin through his letter-box? Did he read this article? Did he agree with it? How can he so brazenly continue to affirm his commitment to such a pastor and such a church?
How can the Democrats survive this? For away from the party's fawning, drooling, Dianafied cheerleaders in the media and elsewhere, middle America will be appalled.
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8:05pm
Let us first remind ourselves of some of the sayings and activities of Barack Obama’s pastor, friend, mentor and ‘sounding board’ Rev Jeremiah Wright, which have at last attracted the attention of the American media:
He said ‘God bless America’ should be replaced by ‘God damn America’.
He said 9/11 resulted from corrupt American foreign policy.
He blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president.
He is a friend and ally of the black power racist and Jew-hating demagogue Louis Farrakhan.
Under pressure, Obama in his make-or-break
speech today went further than before in denouncing Wright’s comments.
I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Rev. Wright that have caused such controversy…the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country -- a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America, a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Rev. Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems -- two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
Okaaay — but if he thinks Wright’s view were so appalling how come Obama was a member of a church where the pastor embodied such appalling views, and where Obama sat through such poisonous sermonising in services every week? For Wright’s comments weren’t just controversial. They were beyond the pale. There are many more of them than have been reported: the church is a black power church. How could Obama have remained in such a church unless he agreed with its basic black power philosophy? How come he was recruited into Christianity in the first place by such a man? The desperate attempts in the last few days to bat away such questions by suggesting that Obama didn’t really know about Wright’s attitudes are themselves blown away by Obama’s own comments today:
… But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than 20 years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor.
…And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Rev. Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions -- the good and the bad -- of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
Yes, Obama is a person who would trash his own grandmother to gain the American presidency!
After his declaration of love for the black power racist Pastor Wright, Obama then digs himself in deeper:
We can dismiss Rev. Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias. But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Rev. Wright made in his offending sermons about America -- to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
So if we dismiss Wright as a crank or demagogue we are supposedly dismissing the importance of race. So Wright supposedly speaks for all those who want to defeat racial prejudice. But the whole point about Wright is that he
embodies racial prejudice. Now look at how Obama turns this fact on its head:
But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow… This is the reality in which Rev. Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up.
Ah. So Wright’s racism against white people is all the fault of — white people! Warming to his theme, Obama then tells us that white people too have the same kind of ‘anger’ that fuels Pastor Wright’s hate-filled jeremiads.
Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
So the anger of these ‘conservatives’ at the inverse racism of political correctness and the systematic defamation and bullying of white people under its banner is as valid as Pastor Wright’s racism, his defamation of America and his bullying of white people.
Wow, this is really creative twisting!!
The profound mistake of Rev. Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country -- a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.
No. The profound mistake of Rev. Wright's sermons is that he is a bigot.
But hey, Obama doesn’t want us to talk about Wright’s sermons any more. He wants us to start swaying and clapping and chanting along with his hypnotic rhetoric, presumably so redolent of the cadences of Pastor Wright. Because Obama stands for change. And now we know what he wants to change. He wants to change the subject.
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10:02pm
The interview with Tony Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell on BBC TV’s Andrew Marr show this morning, like his interview in the Guardian yesterday, confirmed my suspicions of the amoral and dangerous arrogance at the top of the Whitehall machine. Boasting of the success of the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland which he claimed had drawn a line once and for all under the troubles in that province (ignoring the fact that parts of it have now been turned into a kind of mafia state, as the former paramilitaries have channelled their violence into protection rackets which they operate with impunity since the rule of law went down the pan along with the political centre ground as a result of this appeasement process) he went on to say that the success of talking to Northern Ireland’s terrorists suggested that we should now be talking to al Qaeda, the Taleban and Hamas.
This ignores a number of elementary points, which one might expect someone who once played such an exalted and crucial role in world events to grasp.
1) Whatever dim view one might have taken of it, and however abhorrent were the terrorists’ methods of bringing it about, the IRA’s aim of a united Ireland was a perfectly reasonable proposition. It was certainly something one could talk about. There are however certain propositions one cannot talk about. Hitler’s plan for world domination and the extermination of the Jews fell into that category. So does the very similar agenda currently advanced by al Qaeda, Hamas, the Taleban and Iran. One cannot and should not talk to them because there is, or should be, nothing to talk about. The very act of talking opens the possibility that their agenda will at some point be negotiable, which is half-way to surrender.
2) That is also why there is a huge difference between talking to ex-terrorists who have renounced violence for ever and terrorists who are continuing to murder and to terrorise. Since the latter is such a signal of weakness, it gives active terrorists every incentive to step up the violence. What Powell failed to acknowledge was that when the British government covertly contacted the IRA in the seventies and eighties, the terrorism worsened.
3) Perhaps the most important difference of all, however, is that — as Powell himself acknowledged this morning without following through his own point —the IRA themselves acknowledged that ‘the war is over’ because they realised they couldn’t win. They had effectively been beaten at least into a stalemate which they knew they couldn’t break. That is very different from al Qaeda, Hamas, the Taleban and Iran whose violent tails are still very much up. To negotiate with any or all of them would not merely strengthen them and recruit untold additional numbers to the cause, but it would cut the ground from under the feet of the more moderate Muslim states and Muslim reformers around the world and hand power to the extremists — just as Powell achieved in Northern Ireland, but with rather more dramatic global consequences.
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