Thursday, 29th May 2008
11:23pm
Gordon Brown continues to stagger punch drunk round the ring, blows still raining down. Today’s round brought a Guardian story that only five weeks are left before Brown and other Labour apparatchiki are personally bankrupted by the party’s unpaid loans. House prices are continuing to crash through the floor, exceeded in velocity only by Brown’s continuing plunge in the opinion polls -- the latest from You/Gov appears to show the Tories on course for a majority of several trillion seats; newspapers bring breathless dispatches every day from the Commons tea-room about which of Brown’s loyal ministers is now selflessly preparing to step up to the plate should a desperate nation beg him or her to stand, before concluding that none of these pygmies is up to it and then starting the whole exercise all over again. We can carry on like this until 2010 and may well do so (groan). Brown may stagger on because of the absence of any plausible contender; or he may be carted out/cart himself out of Number Ten. Who knows.
However this particular tragic farce ends, though, we are surely seeing the playing out of something rather bigger. It is no accident that Brown’s agony uncannily mirrors the situation of John Major, who also took over mid-term from a Prime Minister who had been shafted and then brought his party crashing down around him. True, Major actually won the election after he took over from Mrs Thatcher, but that was almost certainly only because Labour’s then leader Neil Kinnock was simply unelectable. There was, to coin a phrase, no alternative.
The real similarity is that in both instances, the Conservative and Labour parties had destroyed their sitting leader and Prime Minister – in both cases, bringing down an icon. The Tories came near to destroying themselves as a result, not only losing three general elections but losing altogether any sense of what they were about – and it is far from clear whether they have yet found it. The Labour party is coming close to forcing out not one but two sitting Prime Ministers; wise heads within it are warning that if it does so it will also be in the wilderness for several terms; some are even suggesting that Labour would finally implode altogether.
Although the ‘end of Labour’ has been foretold before, just as the ‘end of Conservatism’ has also been confidently predicted in the past, this is not an altogether fanciful thought. Why, after all, did the Tories fall apart after the defenestration of Mrs Thatcher – and why are Labour in such a terrible state now? I think it’s because Britain itself has been falling apart for the past half century, a fact briefly disguised by the fizzing stars of a couple of Prime Ministers who in their very different ways seemed to offer the prospect of turning that trajectory round. Mrs Thatcher took the country by the scruff of its neck, shook it until its teeth rattled and said: ‘You WILL be great again.’ As a result, she gave the Tories a coherent cause to fight for and a story about what Conservatism was. Tony Blair came along and said: ‘I will lay my hands on the country’s wounds and heal them’; the country felt better about itself for at least five minutes and the Labour party swallowed its distaste for this non-comrade and went along with it while Tony kept winning elections.
But the astounding political success of both these iconic leaders and their tremendous impact masked the fact that behind them their parties had become Potemkin parties, standing for nothing. New Labour was a spirited attempt to construct a fresh purpose for the Labour party after the collapse of socialism, by grafting a kind of Gladstonian liberalism (Blair) onto statist social engineering (the rest of the party). The resulting incoherence finally brought the NewLab ‘Project’ to a sputtering halt; when Blair was finally turfed out, there was nothing left except, er, class war.
In turn, the collapse of socialism meant that the Conservatives no longer knew what they were for because they thought there was no longer anything for them to be against. Obsessed by ‘the market’ and thinking only in terms of economics (aka money) they were altogether oblivious to Gramsci’s ‘long march through the institutions’, which steadily achieved its ends over four decades and which was (and is) what conservatism should be against. (Mrs T herself, who was not quite the seer that her quivering disciples thought she was, delivered one of many death blows to British greatness and indeed to British anything at all when she was bamboozled into signing Britain up to the Single European Act.) So when they pushed out their Iron Lady, the Tories no longer had any coherent purpose in life; nothing to be against, nothing to be for.
It is now increasingly obvious that both Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair, in their very different ways, were the only things standing between their parties and the edge of the cliff. The way back from that precipice is to analyse the state of the country correctly, thus overturning several decades of the soggy, soppy consensus of civilisational decline and decay, and have the courage and vision to start putting it right.
Simple, really.
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Wednesday, 28th May 2008
11:23am
Today, the Universities and Colleges Union is discussing whether universities should single out Israeli and Jewish scholars for active discrimination.
Yes, you read that correctly. The UCU is debating a motion which not only raises the spectre yet again of an academic boycott of Israel but demands of Jewish and Israeli academics that they explain their politics as a pre-condition to normal academic contact. The motion asks colleagues
to consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions, and to discuss the occupation with individuals and institutions concerned, including Israeli colleagues with whom they are collaborating... the testimonies will be used to promote a wide discussion by colleagues of the appropriateness of continued educational links with Israeli academic institutions... Ariel College, an explicitly colonising institution in the West Bank, be investigated under the formal Greylisting Procedure.
The implication is that, if they don’t condemn Israel for the ‘occupation’, or practising ‘apartheid’, ‘genocide’ or any of the other manufactured crimes laid at Israel’s door by the Palestinian/Islamist/neonazi/leftwing axis, they won’t be able to work. Their continued employment will depend on their holding views which are permitted. The views they are being bludgeoned into expressing as a condition of their employment are based on lies, distortion, propaganda, gross historical ignorance, blood libels and prejudice. And this in the universities, supposedly the custodians of free thought and inquiry in the service of dispassionate scholarship.
What makes it all the more appalling is that it is Israelis and Jews alone who are being singled out for this treatment. No other group is to be barred from academic activity unless they hold ‘approved’ views; no state-run educational institution controlled by any of the world’s numerous tyrannies is to be ‘grey-listed’. The UCU’s own rules state that it
actively opposes all forms of harassment, prejudice and unfair discrimination.
Well, various Jewish groups in the Stop the Boycott campaign have obtained a legal opinion from two QCs which states that today’s motion constitutes harassment, prejudice and unfair discrimination on grounds of race or nationality. It says:
If the Motion is passed it would expose Jewish members of the Union to indirect discrimination... Additionally, the Union faces potential liability for acts of harassment on grounds of race or nationality. The substance of the Motion may also involve the Union in becoming accessories to acts of discrimination in an employment context against Israeli academics...No doubt, if such Israeli academics speak in favour of the Palestinian viewpoint they will be immune from further action; if they are against it or possibly even non-committal they and their institutions are to be considered potentially unsuitable subjects for continued association...
The Union will accordingly be adopting a provision, criterion or practice which will put Jewish members at a particular disadvantage compared to non-Jewish members. That is because Jewish members are much more likely to have links with Israeli academics and institutions than non -Jewish members. To require Jewish members to act consistently with the Motion (if passed) would be to impose a professional detriment upon them as Union members which is based on their race. If they acted inconsistently with the Motion, we infer that they would also be subject to disadvantage or sanction under the Union rules or practices -- an alternative detriment. We do not see how any such detriment would be justified as pursuing a legitimate aim. No proper Union purpose is promoted by imposing this detriment on certain members. Thus the Motion will have the effect of indirectly -- and unlawfully -- against Jewish Members of the Union.
The opinion is thus unequivocal. Today’s motion breaks the law; it breaks the UCU’s own rules; it is prejudiced, discriminatory and unjust towards Israelis and Jews. But the motion also notes
legal attempts to prevent UCU debating boycott of Israeli academic institutions; and legal advice that such debates are lawful
In other words, two fingers to the Jews. Such is the disgusting and terrifying state to which Britain’s intelligentsia has now descended.
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12:50am
The New Republic has published an article by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank which claims that al Qaeda is unravelling because former supporters are turning against it, and that as a result Muslim moderates are on the march against the jihadis. While there is undoubtedly some truth in their argument, in that – as we can see in Iraq – the mass killings of Muslims by al Qaeda are clearly turning increasing numbers of Muslims against it, the authors’ apparent naivety and ignorance have nevertheless led them to some dangerously wrong conclusions, particularly in their analysis of what is happening in Britain.
They have fallen into the trap of believing that the only extremists are al Qaeda and others who support terrorism in Britain. They thus extol as moderates those who oppose al Qaeda and terrorism in Britain. But this view – which is shared by many in British security circles, alas -- presents an entirely false and indeed lethal dichotomy. For there are Islamists who oppose al Qaeda and terrorist action in the UK as a tactical mistake but nevertheless subscribe to the same strategic goal – to restore the medieval Caliphate, overturn British and western society and institute the rule of Islam instead.
This is because there are two arms to the jihadi pincer: terrorist attack and cultural attack; and the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists use either or both depending on circumstances and upon differing strategic points of view between groups under the same jihadi umbrella. There are also some who, after the London Tube and bus bombings, the subsequent Islamic terrorist trials and the resulting hardening of public opinion, decided to moderate their previously hard-line position and profess reformist opinions as a tactic to lull the British into lowering their guard.
None of this appears to have occurred to the authors of this article. They have instead listened uncritically and uninformedly to certain individuals in Britain’s security establishment who so lamentably fail to grasp the nature and extent of the jihad, as well as to manipulative Islamists who have played the authors (along with that security establishment) like fish on a line. As a result they make gross errors of judgment in hailing certain individuals as moderate when they are anything but. For example, they write:
Kamal el Helbawy, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who helped bring in moderates at the Finsbury Park mosque in London...
This shows a truly lamentable ignorance. After the removal of the notorious abu Hamza from Finsbury Park, the police did not broker the arrival of a moderate regime at the mosque. They brokered instead a new administration dominated by the Muslim Association of Britain, the British arm of the Muslim Brotherhood whose aim is to Islamise Britain and the west, and whose chief spokesman is Dr Azzam Tammimi, the Hamas acolyte who has publicly supported human bomb terrorism in Israel. As for Kamal el Helbawy, who the authors clearly think is the acme of moderation, he is the main Brotherhood man in Britain and Europe -- and thus central to the whole strategy of indoctrination and radicalisation of Britain’s Muslims and the demoralisation with menaces of the indigenous community, which is putting this country at such risk. Because it’s not just terrorism that creates the danger – it’s the ideas that drive the terror.
In the House of Commons in 2003 the MP Louise Ellman said:
It is time that the spotlight fell on the Muslim Association of Britain, particularly the key figures, such as Azzam Tamimi, Kamal el Helbawy, Anas Al-Tikriti and Mohammed Sawalha. All of them are connected to the terrorist organisation Hamas. The Muslim Association of Britain itself is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood -- an extremist fundamentalist organization founded in Egypt in 1928, and the spiritual ideologue of all Islamic terror organizations. It is militantly antisemitic and always has been.
Yet the NR authors present the MAB as the antidote to the jihad!
Then there is Usama Hassan, an imam at the Masjid-al-Tawhid mosque in Leyton, east London, a former jihadi who is now openly critical of al Qaeda and therefore, in the authors’ star-struck eyes, a born-again moderate. Certainly, Hassan has drawn considerable fire from other Muslims for taking positions such as opposing the death penalty for apostasy, and has gone out of his way to present a reformist approach to Islam. However, questions remain.
For a start, both the mosque and its senior imam, Hassan’s own father Sheikh Suhaib Hassan, featured in the Chanel Four Dispatches investigation into radical mosques. As this
article reported, the programme recorded him
predicting the establishment of an Islamic state under Sharia law and detailing some of the extreme punishments, such as flogging of drunkards, that would be carried out in such a state. Shaykh Hassan says, however, that his remarks were taken out of context, and that he has never said Sharia law would be appropriate for Britain.
Two weeks ago, Dispatches won an unprecedented libel action against the police and crown prosecutors who had falsely accused the programme of selective editing and distortion.
Then there is this rather troubling
letter written by Usama Hassan. In response to his Muslim critics who accuse him of selling out, he says:
...I, of course, support a just Caliphate based on the Prophetic model...
He also attempts to refute his critics’ claim that he wants to separate Islam from secular government, saying he supports the position taken by Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia. This surely should also cause concern. For Ceric himself is a dissembler who is keen to tell westerners what they want to hear – that Muslims present no threat to the west -- and who believes accordingly that Muslims living in the west should do nothing to alienate the indigenous society, but should impose sharia by a process akin to the Trotskyite long march through the institutions.
That is indeed what is happening in Britain. It’s why Tariq Ramadan is so lionised here; it’s why Brotherhood radicals are acting as government advisers on combating Islamic radicalism; it’s why the police are tied up in such lethal knots. The idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is a counter-radicalisation movement is simply ludicrous. But it is one that the British establishment -- whose knowledge of Islam appears to consist largely of the sanitised vapidities of the likes of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito -- have eagerly embraced. And now this absurd article in New Republic is spreading the confusion yet further across the Atlantic too.
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Monday, 26th May 2008
3:11pm
The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali has been getting some stick for suggesting that Christians should evangelise British Muslims. Dr Nazir-Ali, who previously received death threats for suggesting there were Muslim no-go areas in Britain, has been outstanding as a rare voice within the Church of England speaking out against the erosion of Britain’s Christian culture and traditions under the cultural onslaught from radical Islam. But now his concerns are echoed in a striking cri-de-coeur by the Church of England newspaper. In its editorial, it writes:
At all levels of national life Islam has gained state funding, protection from any criticism, and the insertion of advisors and experts in government departs national and local. A Muslim Home Office adviser, for example, was responsible for Baroness Scotland’s aborting of the legislation against honour killings, arguing that informal methods would be better. In the police we hear of girls under police protection having the addresses of their safe houses disclosed to their parents by Muslim officers who think they are doing their religious duty.
While men-only gentlemen’s clubs are now being dubbed unlawful, we hear of municipal swimming baths encouraging ‘Muslim women only’ sessions and in Dewsbury Hospitals staff waste time by turning beds to face Mecca five times a day — a Monty Pythonesque scenario of lunacy, but astonishingly true. Prisons are replete with imams who are keen to inculcate conservative Islam in any inmates who are deemed to be culturally ‘Muslim’: the Prison service in effect treats such prisoners as a cultural block to be preached to by imams at will. Would the Prison service send all those with ‘C of E’ on their papers to confirmation classes with the chaplain?! We could go on. The point is that Islam is being institutionalised, incarnated, into national structures amazingly fast, at the same time as demography is showing very high birthrates.
Indeed. Britain is being steadily Islamised – and hardly a word is being breathed about it.
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3:04pm
Good to see that the Telegraph today picks up on developments I wrote about here in the US, where a head of official steam is building behind the perception that there is a troubling relationship between certain childhood vaccines, including MMR, and autistic symptoms and other damage in a small subset of particularly vulnerable children. As I have written, this has been prompted by recent US cases in which multiple vaccinations have aggravated an underlying mitochondrial weakness to produce catastrophic effects, leading Dr Bernardine Healy, the former head of the National Institute of Health, to tell CBS News:
I think that the public health officials have been too quick to dismiss the [autism link to vaccination] hypothesis as irrational.
In addition, the Telegraph reported this:
The vaccine hypothesis was bolstered recently by a five-year study in monkeys who were given the same vaccinations that American children are routinely given. Last week, Dr Laura Hewitson, a specialist in obstetrics, gynaecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, told the International Meeting for Autism Research in London that in the double-blind placebo-controlled study, 13 vaccinated animals showed increased aggression, impaired cognitive skills and developmental delay. The three unvaccinated animals in the study developed normally.
‘There was a significant difference between the two groups,’ said Hewitson. ‘The vaccinated group had trouble developing reflexes?… They also became more insular and more aggressive. There was an increase in aggressive behaviour after they had their MMR vaccines, and they stopped exploring their surroundings as much.’ Abnormal brain activity was found in the monkeys, and higher sensitivity to a naturally occurring brain chemical linked to sleeplessness, hallucinations, lack of social skills and a high pain threshold - all symptoms found in children on the autistic spectrum. The monkeys also exhibited abnormalities of the amygdala, the part of the brain which regulates emotions. ’We can’t conclude that vaccines cause autism from this study,’ said Hewitson, ‘What we can conclude is that the vaccinated monkeys showed significant negative behavioural differences before and after the MMR.’
This research, carried out at five US research centres, including The Uiversity of California, Washington National Primate Research Centre, Seattle, The University of Kentucky and the Thoughtful House Centre for Children, Texas (founded by the man at the eye of this storm, Andrew Wakefield) has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Some suspicious minds may think (however unfairly) that Wakefield’s involvement taints it. And it must be stressed that the other American developments involve certain differences from the British childhood vaccination regime, including multiple jabs in the course of one day and the use of mercury-based preservatives. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the suspicion gathering momentum in the US, that a vaccine schedule including MMR may trigger a catastrophic reaction in both brain and gut among a small proportion of children who are in some way vulnerable, is almost exactly the claim made by Wakefield, now fighting for his professional life before the GMC for making it -- in the teeth of a medical establishment in Britain which states categorically there is no truth in it whatsoever.
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Sunday, 25th May 2008
11:39pm
In the Sunday Times, India Knight writes:
The fact of the matter is that the binge-drinking problem is largely an underclass problem. Teen pregnancies are largely an underclass problem. Teenage crime is largely an underclass problem. Child neglect – we live in a country where a little girl allegedly starved to death in her own home last week – is largely an underclass problem. Our collective problems are largely underclass problems.
Absolutely untrue. All these problems, experienced disproportionately by those at the bottom of the heap, were foisted upon them by the overclass of which India Knight is a member. It was the champagne socialist intelligentsia which destroyed the traditional family, demonised men, incentivised mass fatherlessness and declared never-married motherhood an inalienable human right, emptied education of content and cut off the escape routes out of disadvantage by withering the grammar schools, declared morality to be a dirty word, paralysed the police through political correctness, enslaved the poor through dependency on the state and then finally destroyed their brains by telling them to eat cannabis cake while themselves showing the way by snorting cocaine on the Square Mile or in recording studios, or getting legless on Crackdaddy cocktails at Boujis nightclub.
Culture is transmitted top-down, not bottom up. It is the supercilious overclass, with its self-obsessed nihilism and the money to get itself out of trouble, which is responsible for our social degradation and collapse -- and it is odious in the extreme to blame those whose lives and prospects it has so irresponsibly and irrevocably destroyed.
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10:28pm
The would–be Exeter nail bomber was apparently a mentally ill Muslim convert who was preyed upon and radicalised by Islamists. The Sunday Times reports:
MI5 and police say the case of Nicky Reilly, who is being held over a nailbomb attack last week in Exeter, may indicate a new strategy of targeting vulnerable people with mental health problems to carry out attacks.
A new strategy, eh? Well, fancy that!
Security officials say Al-Qaeda appears to have exported the tactic from Iraq, where disabled ‘foot soldiers’ have been used to devastating effect.
Of course, Islamic terror godfathers have used precisely this same tactic around the world for years -- but who could have expected the British to think it could happen here too? After all, according to the British politico-security establishment, the thousands of M***** terrorism suspects they are monitoring in the UK aren’t involved in I****** terrorism at all. Just crime.We learn that Reilly had been
manipulated by a ‘charismatic’ al-Qaeda recruiter.
We also learn that he received a text message of support before he carried out the attack. From whom might that have been, we wonder? Not an Asperger’s support group member, for sure.
The president of Plymouth university’s Islamic Society said he could not believe that Reilly had been radicalised in the city. Good heavens, no. Who knew? Not the Security Service, it appears:
Security officials admitted that MI5 had been aware of Reilly but that he had not been under surveillance.
Of course not. Why break a great tradition?
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8:00pm
Recently it was claimed that schoolchildren were being driven to nervous breakdowns and education emptied of content altogether through the diabolical pressure from the SATs (school tests which are actually supposed to test not pupils but their teachers in a vain attempt to stem the catastrophic haemorrhage of education standards in British schools). Today’s Sunday Telegraph reveals the awesomely challenging nature of a science SAT for 14 year-olds, which makes teachers feel obliged to ‘teach to the test’ to ensure that their pupils achieve this truly demanding level of knowledge:
1(i) Give one way a mole, pictured on the right, is suited for digging through soil.
(ii) Where does the energy come from for a solar-powered mole-scarer?
2 Sharon, pictured on the left, is riding her horse. She is wearing a riding hat. Give the name of one organ the riding hat protects.
3 In very cold weather a mixture of salt and sand is spread on roads. Why are salt and sand used? (Tick two correct answers)
(a) salt makes the road white
(b) salt makes the water freeze
(c) salt makes the ice melt
(d) sand dissolves in water
(e) sand increases the friction between car tyres and the road
(f) sand makes the water freeze.
As the Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry oberved:
Even though this paper covers a range of abilities, bearing in mind some of the pupils taking the paper will be going on to university, I do find it extraordinary that at 14, pupils are being given an exam like this.
Not to worry: who cares about chemistry when a GCSE media studies exam will
test pupils on their analysis of an extract from an action adventure film, such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, released last week. Parool Patel, OCR head of GCSE projects, said: ‘Films in the Indiana Jones series are great examples of the genre. Students can familiarise themselves with genre conventions, the use and creation of dramatic effects and representation of characters and themes.’
And universities themselves are thoughtfully ensuring that candidates who have mastered these Olympian heights will feel perfectly comnfortable in the graves of academe, as the Sunday Times reports:
Britain's leading universities have overhauled their admissions procedures in an attempt to socially engineer their intake by favouring students with lower exam grades if they come from poor families. Admissions staff have been instructed to give extra points to candidates whose parents did not go to university and to favour talented applicants if they attended poorly performing comprehensives... All applicants for the most popular courses are given a score based on their GCSE grades and predicted A-levels, or their Scottish equivalents. Any candidate considered disadvantaged is awarded extra points – someone who would be the first in their family to attend university, for example, gets two. There is also a sliding scale of points to compensate those who attended poorly performing schools (up to six points) and another to help those from comprehensives in the surrounding area (up to two points).
Goodbye meritocracy (and Britain's future); hello class war.
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Thursday, 22nd May 2008
10:57pm
It looks like a war of attrition is currently being waged within Whitehall over British drug policy. As has been widely reported, the government has decided to face down its own advisory body, the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, over the proposed upward re-classification of cannabis, to which the ACMD – which is packed with would-be drug legalisers and allied useful idiots all parroting the legalisers’ cover story of ‘harm reduction’ -- is resolutely opposed.
The government rightly calculates that acting tough over drugs plays well with the public. All the more baffling therefore that it has appointed as the new chairman of the ACMD Professor David Nutt -- a man who is unlikely to take the committee in that direction.
In 2006, Prof Nutt said that LSD and Ecstasy
probably shouldn't be class A.
Last November, it was revealed that the ACMD was quietly reviewing the classification of Ecstasy and that senior members wanted it downgraded. Since the new ACMD chairman apparently comes to this review with his mind already made up, it’s a fair bet that the committee will recommend that Ecstasy be downgraded. In other words, just when the government has shut down one front in the legalisation war with the decision to upgrade the classification of cannabis, another one is being opened – and with it a whole new opportunity to propagandise that the whole concept of drug law and its enforcement is ridiculous, which will encourage yet more young people to take Ecstasy and other drugs having been further bamboozled into thinking that any harm comes not from drugs but from the law. As a result, more of them will die.
Nutt is also on record as wanting to completely overhaul the whole system of drug classification which he says doesn’t deter anyone from taking drugs. While there is room for criticism of that system, the fact is that abolishing it is on the agenda of the legalisation lobby which wants to end not just the way illegal drugs are classified but the very idea of classifying them as illegal at all – the ultimate aim being to overturn the UN drug conventions which commit the world to the aim of eradicating drug use.
No wonder the legalisers are purring at the appointment of Professor Nutt.
So why has the government done so, and created for itself yet another headache? One theory doing the rounds is that it thinks Nutt is better off in the Whitehall tent than out. I find that unconvincing. In my view, his appointment indicates that the fifth column of covert drug legalisers that has wormed its way into Whitehall is still firmly entrenched.
Just look at the ACMD’s proceedings on February 19. Its open meeting was followed by a closed session to hear evidence from the UK Drug Policy Commission. Why was this session closed? The UKDPC is a group of self-appointed busybodies of no status or authority whatever, but who are intent on bringing about the legalisation of drugs (although they will not admit it).
According to sources who were at the open session, when asked why the subsequent meeting with the UKDPC was closed to the public the ACMD chairman Professor Michael Rawlins said it was because it was
doing work we are interested in
– but he didn’t say what that was or why it had to be kept secret. The ACMD is a public body. Why is it refusing to say what this work is that it is so interested in? Why is that work not being opened up to public scrutiny like other research? What is the ACMD trying to hide?
Next, the committee was asked why Professor Simon Lenton from Australia had been invited to give two presentations at its meeting earlier that month where the cannabis classification had been discussed. Lenton is a direct opponent of the government’s support for the UN drug conventions. Who had paid his fare? the committee was asked.
Rawlins responded that Lenton had been invited because the committee wanted to hear from him – and the Home Office had paid his fare. Why is the British taxpayer funding someone who is working to end the UN conventions which proscribe drug use -- thus paving the way for drug legalisation -- to bring his subversive propaganda to Whitehall?
The suspicion has to be that the ACMD is – despite its setback over cannabis – running rings round the Home Office which, with legalisers on all sides, is finding it very difficult to escape their clutches. Indeed, Britain is a veritable hub of the international attempt to subvert the UN drug laws. Over the years, I have attended a number of high-powered international discussions about drug policy under the auspices of the British government, where leading apostles of drug legalisation have rubbed shoulders with all-too amenable British civil servants who lap up their every word – to the amazement and horror of the foreign government representatives present. A few years ago, I exposed the activities of Mike Trace, a self-designated ‘fifth columnist’ who was running an international operation working to overturn the UN drug conventions – from his position at the very heart of British government drug policy as the deputy drug ‘czar’.
Trace may have gone from Whitehall – but the grip of the manipulative, subversive and lethally dangerous clique of which he was a leading member is still locked firmly on the windpipe of the nation.
Update: The UK Drugs Policy Commission responds to this post here.
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Wednesday, 21st May 2008
7:42pm
Great news from Paris, where the appeal court has today thrown out the libel action against Philippe Karsenty brought by the France 2 TV station for claiming that the ‘killing’ by the Israelis of the Palestinian child Mohammed al Dura, the iconic images of which France 2 transmitted and which incited the second intifada and countless jihadi murders around the world, was a staged and fabricated event and that the child was not killed at all. I have written about this civilisational scandal here and on several other occasions.
The
Jerusalem Post is running a bare bones story; the court’s written judgment has not yet been released. But the implications of this victory are enormous. At the very least it means that it is no longer libellous in France to say what is plain to all who have studied this case and, most particularly, seen the footage that France 2 did not transmit and which it fought hard to prevent from ever seeing the light of day.
This was a blood libel which gave modern life to the ancient calumny that the Jews murder children, and which itself directly led to the murder of countless innocents. I shall be writing much more about this, particularly for the second issue of the new magazine Standpoint which launches next week.
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