Summing up for a legal lynching

10:02pm

Remember Judge Bathurst Norman, who summed up for the jury that went on to acquit the seven defendants who had attacked a Brighton factory that sold armaments to Israel by commenting that

‘you may well think that hell on earth would not be an understatement of what the Gazans suffered in that time’.

Well, Jonathan Hoffman has obtained the 87-page transcript of that summing up – and it’s far, far more extraordinary and appalling even than the remark above suggested. Here is a flavour of what he has posted up from it on the Cifwatch blog, with his own gloss (the judge’s comments are set here in bold type):

Democracy would not exist unless there were reporters and members of the public who were prepared to stand up for what they believe to be right, and sometimes, as in the case of the suffragettes, even to go to prison for their beliefs. As Edmund Burke says: “For injustice to flourish, all that is needed is for good men to do nothing.” Indeed, people like Mr Osmond [Christopher Osmond, the leader of the seven who admitted causing £187,000 of damage to the EDO factory] who put themselves in harm’s way to protect others may, in fact – there may be much to be admired about people like that. Perhaps if he had done it in this country in the last war he would probably have received a George Medal.

... Page 67: He [Osmond] knew of the Philadelphi corridor, the corridor made around the boundaries of Gaza by the illegal demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israeli army, during which Rachel Corrie, one of the International Solidarity Volunteers bravely stood in front of a bulldozer which was being driven by an Israeli soldier and was effectively murdered when he drove the bulldozer over her in 2003.

Now for the truth. Corrie was not “murdered”. The IDF investigation concluded that the driver of the bulldozer could not see her and that her death was an unfortunate accident. The IDF Judge Advocate’s Office concluded:

The driver at no point saw or heard Corrie. She was standing behind debris which obstructed the view of the driver and the driver had a very limited field of vision due to the protective cage he was working in.

An autopsy revealed that the bulldozer never rolled over Corrie: she was killed when debris dislodged by the bulldozer struck her head.

Page 14: I am going to start with the background relating to Israel and Palestine and to the evidence which points to the war crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza, an area over which Israel has imposed a blockade. The evidence shows that those war crimes are committed against the civilian population of Gaza and against the property of its residents, including the United Nations by the Israeli Forces.

This is pure demonisation of Israel to the Jury. There is no evidence that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. Israel did pay the UN compensation for UN properties in Gaza that were damaged but what Bathurst-Norman failed to tell the Jury was that Hamas terrorists deliberately hid among civilians and in the vicinity of UN installations. There is no such country as “Palestine” – surely a Judge briefing a Jury has an obligation to be accurate about such things?

 Page 14: Now you have to look at the evidence coldly and dispassionately. It may be as you went through what I can only describe as horrific scenes, scenes of devastation to civilian population, scenes which one would rather have hoped to have disappeared with the Nazi regimes of the last war, you may have felt anger and been absolutely appalled by them, but you must put that emotion aside.

Good grief. The judge even compared the Israelis to the Nazis – all because they defended themselves against attack by the direct heirs to those who were actually in alliance with the Nazis in pursuit of the annihilation of the Jews during World War Two. This is of course the most offensive and grotesque collective libel, which demonises Israel wholly unjustly and, indeed, in the most cretinous way -- and by implication also downgrades the Nazi genocide.

When this kind of rank bigotry flows from rogue politicians or far-left journalists or academics, that’s bad enough. But for a judge to abuse the task of summing up evidence to a jury by turning it into a platform for his own personal prejudice is startling even by the standards of Britain’s degraded and vicious Judeophobic public discourse.

This was a summing-up for a legal lynching. If the senior judiciary does not institute action against this judge for such a gross abuse of his position, we shall have to conclude that they too see nothing wrong with it -- and thus have abandoned all claim to objectivity, fairness or due process in the justice system. We shall have to conclude that, for the English judiciary, there is now one law for the gentiles and another law for the Jews.

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Paul Berman rides into battle

11:13pm

I have recently finished reading Paul Berman’s latest book, ‘The Flight of the Intellectuals’. It’s terrific. The first part is an evisceration of that Islamist in westernised clothing, Tariq Ramadan. By the time Berman has finished with him, there’s not much left of his reputation as the western establishment’s poster-boy for modernised Islam. The second part is an evisceration of two prominent western intellectuals who fell for Ramadan’s propaganda, Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash. There’s not much left of them either.

What Berman shows up so brutally about Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al Banna, is that he is the direct heir – both familially and intellectually – not only to the ideologues of jihadi Islamism but also to the axis of European fascism. Drawing on accounts already published of the alliance between the Brotherhood and the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s -- an alliance centred in the person of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini -- Berman emphasises the shared aim of both the Nazis and the Brotherhood of destroying the Jews. While a number of Arabs and Muslims condemned the Axis and even fought on the side of the Allies, Hassan al Banna supported the Mufti, calling upon the Arab League in 1946 to welcome the Mufti’s escape from his enemies in Europe as having a divine purpose – namely to defeat ‘Zionism’ just as Hitler had attempted to do.

And as Berman points out, whereas in other parts of the world the supporters of the Axis went down to defeat after World War Two, the Arab zone

ended up as the only region in the entire planet in which a criminal on the fascist side of the war, and a major ideologue to boot, returned home in glory instead of disgrace.  In that one region of the world, the old categories of supernatural phantasmagory about Jews and conspiracies continued to reign over the political imagination of huge and powerful political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, and other movements as well.

Yet as Berman goes on to show, Tariq Ramadan fails totally to repudiate this aspect of his grandfather’s history. Quoting Caroline Fourest, he dwells on her disclosure that Ramadan actively misleads by omitting to mention al Banna’s admiration for Mussolini or invocation of the German Reich. He goes on to emphasise how Ramadan also supports the supporters of mass murder of Jews and others – venerating the ‘spiritual leader’ of the Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who has boasted that he is

‘the enemy of Israel and the Mufti of martyrdom operations’

and that he will

‘shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews’.

Devastatingly, Berman concludes about Ramadan’s prevarications and obfuscations over terrorist violence:

The whole problem lies in the terrible fact that his personal milieu – his grandfather and his father, his family contacts, his intellectual tradition – is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theory of religious suicide-terror.

...Ramadan’s final message, therefore...is a message in four parts. To wit: 1) Ramadan condemns terrorism. 2) he wants to understand terrorism, though not to justify it. 3) He understands terrorism so tenderly that he ends up justifying it. 4) He justifies it so thoroughly that he ends up defending it.

And then just as devastatingly, Berman shows in unsparing detail

how systematically Ramadan’s avoidances are themselves avoided in the friendly publicity that comes his way

by the useful idiots of the western intelligentsia who have fawned at the feet of this most manipulative of Islamists.

This book should be compulsory reading, not only for British politicians but for the security establishment which has also been bewitched by the talented Mr Ramadan, to such disastrous effect.

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Sweeping up for the enemy

11:19am

One of the many flawed assumptions beneath the managerialist approach to government – aka Titanic, rearrangement of deckchairs on -- is that standards in public services can be effectively policed by regulators. Hence the creation of quangos such as the Office for Standards in Education or the Inspectorate of Probation. But what happens when these regulators themselves become part of the problem?

Yesterday brought us the eye-rubbing remarks to the Sunday Times (£) by Ofsted’s departing chairman, Zenna Atkins:

‘It’s about learning how to identify good role models. One really good thing about primary school is that every kid learns how to deal with a really s*** teacher. In the private sector, as a rule, you need to performance manage 10% of people out of the business. But I don’t think that should be the case in teaching — schools need to reflect society.

‘I would not remove every single useless teacher because every grown-up in a workplace needs to learn to deal with the moron who sits four desks down without lamping them and to deal with authority that’s useless. I’d like to keep the number low, but if every primary school has one pretty naff teacher, this helps kids realise that even if you know the quality of authority is not good, you have to learn how to play it.’

Doubtless after someone in government hit the roof, she then went on to say the precise opposite to the BBC:

She added she believed it was the responsibility of each school to weed out bad teachers. ‘As a leader you need to be making sure that these people are performing as well as they can, and if, frankly as well as they can isn't good enough, then you have to have the courage of your convictions and get rid of them’, she said. ‘At a very young age, really poor teaching can be very damaging’.

And yet she also told the BBC that

'If kids can manage to cope with one bad teacher that'll be a good learning lesson for them in life - it is not necessarily an absolute disaster.

Well which is it? Can this woman think at all? What, indeed, were her qualifications for this post? The Times told us back in 2007 that she was

...illiterate at the age of 11, expelled from school and to have failed English O level – totally flunked it, with an unclassified ‘U’. Three times. Ms Atkins’s academic career is marvellously inglorious – she left school with an O level in biology – for the woman now in charge of the nation’s educational standards.

Today the Telegraph brings us similarly heartwarming remarks by the Chief Inspector of Probation, Andrew Bridges:

Murders and other serious crimes committed by prisoners released early from jail may have to be ‘accepted’ by the public as part of attempts to keep down the cost of the criminal justice system, the probation watchdog suggested.

Andrew Bridges questioned whether it was worth keeping thousands of violent and dangerous offenders locked up for longer than the minimum jail term set by a court just to stop a few of them committing new crimes.

Some reoffending — even if it involved “serious” new crimes — could be the price that society had to pay for trying to cut down on the huge cost of the country’s rising prison population, said Mr Bridges, the chief inspector of probation. While acknowledging that prison reduced crime, he described it as a ‘rather drastic form of crime prevention’ and said it was time to consider dealing with more offenders in the community.

 He claimed that the public could never be perfectly protected and that the cost of a ‘small amount’ of reoffending could be outweighed by the ‘benefit’ of financial savings to the public purse made from having less prisoners locked up.

So Britain has an education regulator who believes that every pupil needs a useless teacher, and a probation regulator who believes the public will just have to get used to being murdered, attacked or burgled.

How did such people get appointed in the first place? By officials who have been acting as fifth colunmists in the culture wars these past several decades.

Thus the establishment, which has long been subverted by ideas which are antithetical to Britain’s integrity and identity as a nation, ensures that the bodies established to disinfect the public services of destructive ideology are instead sweeping up for the enemy.

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Gove on the rack -- but who put him there?

11:28pm

Reading today’s Sunday Telegraph claim that the new Education Secretary Michael Gove was to blame for the débâcle over the misleading details of the cuts in the school rebuilding programme put me in mind of comments I recorded in my 1996 book about education, All Must Have Prizes. Ruminating upon the never-ending war of ideological attrition being waged by the education establishment upon the very concept of a liberal education -- and consequently upon the life chances of countless thousands of British schoolchildren – I wrote:

Evidence abounds, however, that some officials at the Education Department, motivated both by ideology and by a bureaucratic desire for control, played a crucial role in sabotaging the government’s education reforms. ‘I have never known any other civil servants quite like these in the Education Department with such a view that they were as important as the policy-makers,’ said one political insider. ‘There was a real climate of fear; more junior civil servants were intimidated by their superiors’, said another.

It is currently unclear quite who was responsible for Gove inadvertently giving false information to the Commons about 700 schools which were to have their rebuilding projects axed. His list contained at least 25 errors, and a firestorm promptly broke about his head. Gove issued a grovelling apology (twice) and a blame game is now under way. The fact that he had been given a dud list prompted immediate claims by his ‘allies’ that his civil servants were grossly incompetent. The Telegraph however claims that he ignored officials’ advice not to announce the list to Parliament on the grounds that it was unreliable, and went ahead and did just that.

Hmmn.

If the list was so unreliable, why was it given to the Secretary of State at all? Is it really likely, if he was indeed warned in terms that the information it contained was likely to be wrong, that he would have presented it to the Commons regardless? And most crucially of all, from where did the Telegraph get the allegation about his allegedly reckless behaviour? That information must have originated from within government. In other words, education officials already appear to be briefing against their Secretary of State.

Gove had made it crystal clear that he thought the quango in charge of the rebuilding programme, Partnerships for Schools, was deeply incompetent. And although I personally suspect that his radical ‘free schools’ proposal isn’t really all that radical at all,  the fact is that Gove has arrived at the Department of Education breathing fire and brimstone about the immolation of the British education system on the altar of destructive and subversive ideology, and his determination to put a stop to it.

Good for him – but the department he now heads, as insiders observed in astonishment and horror all those years ago, has always been without rival in its determination to implement that ideology, and in its mastery of the black arts to destroy any minister or official who dares to challenge it.

Looks like someone somewhere within that education establishment, either in the PfS quango or the Department of Education itself, has already started trying to bring Gove down. He should take such a strike as the greatest possible compliment. But he’ll have his work cut out to defeat it.

 

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Camels were never this vicious

12:44pm

No sooner is one smacked smartly on the butt and disappears into the desert than another one comes ambling across the sand. The gushing effusions by Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, about the spiritual godfather of Hezbollah which as I wrote below she posted on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office site, have been excised from that site. But now it turns out that Britain’s ambassador to Jordan, James Watt is even worse, as ‘Bialik’, a reader on the Harry’s Place blog, has pointed out.

For on his own FCO blog, Watt makes it clear he doesn’t think Israel has an overwhelming historic claim to its existence, thinks the Palestinian Arabs were indigenous to the land and that the idea that Israel was the Jews’ national home thousands of years ago is fanciful.

Here he denies Jewish national self-determination:

No one outside Israel is prepared – or very few – to take Zionist arguments at their face value any longer.

Here he denies Jewish and Middle Eastern history:

Completely non-factual assertions - for example that a Jewish people was building Jerusalem 5,000 years ago - only serve to emphasise the absence of real content or reasoning. The strange thing is how long Western audiences tolerated such claims without challenging them: I think because they were hoping that a reasonable settlement with the indigenous Palestinian population would emerge in the course of things (and with some diplomatic heavy lifting).

Here he denies Jewish history and national self-determination and descends into rank bigotry:

The origin of the problem – the arrival of the Zionists in Palestine, with their commitment to avoiding any kind of integration into existing society, and their policy of importing their co-religionists from cultural and social backgrounds alien to Palestine, changed everything.

Here he is peddling the Big Lie by Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO that misrepresents Israeli defence as aggression and describes all Arabs killed by Israel as civilians whereas in fact most are terrorists:

Few observers would disagree with Hirst that Israel has long committed itself to a policy of massive military deterrence, which is now becoming progressively more violent - and, by the account of its own officials, more ready to inflict civilian casualties on a large scale in pursuit of its political goals. Gaza showed that progression: more remote shelling and rocketing by the Israeli forces, with minimum risk to its own soldiers: ten lost their lives, and three Israeli civilians, while 1,330 Gazans (most of them civilians and 410 of them children) lost theirs.  Compare that to the 43 Israeli civilians who died under Hizbullah rocket fire in July-August 2006, and 119 Israeli soldiers in the fighting, against over a thousand Lebanese civilians (one third of them children) and an unknown number of Lebanese combatants.

Here he is sympathising with the Turkish terrorists who were killed on the Mavi Marmara when they tried to lynch the boarding Israeli soldiers, and claiming that Israel’s reason for restricting the flow of goods into Gaza, that it is to prevent arms smuggling and weaken the grip of Hamas, is a lie:

I offer my condolences to the families of those who were killed, in what should have been an entirely avoidable tragedy... the entire world has had enough of the blockade of Gaza - a blockade which Israel should have long ago lifted under the terms of UN Security Resolution 1801, as well as other international law.  And the world has had enough of the pretexts Israel uses to continue it.

It is an old cliché that diplomats are sent abroad to lie for their country. But one inevitable effect of Watt’s demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel through such distortions and bigotry is to whip up yet more genocidal hatred throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

The British Government says it is committed to a two-state solution. Why is its Ambassador to Jordan suggesting that the state that already exists is illegitimate? Is this the British Government’s position? If not, why is it allowing its Ambassador to Jordan to represent such an obnoxious view? Will Foreign Secretary William Hague repudiate these distortions and the vicious hostility Watt displays towards Britain’s ally? Or are we to conclude that these are beliefs that he himself shares?

 

 

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Britain's ambassador gushes admiration for a godfather of terror

8:14pm

Frances Guy is the British ambassador to Lebanon. On her blog on the website of Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, she wrote this about Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, head of the Shia clergy in Lebanon who died of old age a few days ago (hat tip: Elder of Ziyon):

One of the privileges of being a diplomat is the people you meet; great and small, passionate and furious.  People in Lebanon like to ask me which politician I admire most.  It is an unfair question, obviously, and many are seeking to make a political response of their own.  I usually avoid answering by referring to those I enjoy meeting the most and those that impress me the most.  Until yesterday my preferred answer was to refer to Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, head of the Shia clergy in Lebanon and much admired leader of many Shia muslims throughout the world.  When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person.  That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith.  Sheikh Fadlallah passed away yesterday.  Lebanon is a lesser place the day after but his absence will be felt well beyond Lebanon's shores.  I remember well when I was nominated ambassador to Beirut, a muslim acquaintance sought me out to tell me how lucky I was because I would get a chance to meet Sheikh Fadlallah. Truly he was right.  If I was sad to hear the news I know other peoples' lives will be truly blighted.  The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints.  May he rest in peace.

Sheikh Fadlallah was a wicked enemy of civilisation, life and liberty. He was the ‘spiritual’ leader of the genocidal terrorist organisation Hezbollah, and was classified by the US State Department as a terrorist. As Con Coughlin wrote in the Daily Telegraph:

One of Fadlallah’s last acts before he died was to issue a fatwa authorising the use of suicide bomb attacks. The mystery here is why he waited so long. For as a founder member of Hizbollah – he sat on the organisation’s ruling council – Fadlallah gave his personal approval to the massive suicide truck bomb attacks that levelled the American Embassy and Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, killing more than 300 people, including the then CIA station chief. Fadlallah gave his personal blessing to the suicide bombers before they left for their deadly mission.

Hezbollah constitute Iran’s unofficial terror army around the world. Thousands of its rockets are pointed at Israel, against whose citizens and soldiers it has mounted countless rocket assaults, bombing and kidnap attacks. Its operatives are positioned around the world in ‘sleeper’ cells, waiting for a future signal from Iran to attack American, Jewish and other western interests.

CNN have just sacked their Middle East editor Octavia Nasr after she tweeted that she ‘respected’ Fadlallah. Idiots and moral cretins may have written up Fadlallah as ‘progressive’ or (my favourite) ‘complex’, for heaven’s sake, because he supported Muslim women’s rights and abortion. But how can Britain employ an ambassador to Lebanon who gushes her devotion to a spiritual godfather of global terror, jihad and Jew-hatred?

For good measure, here is Guy -- formerly head of the Engaging with the Islamic World Department at the FCO --  blaming Israel’s behaviour as a ‘real grievance’ which helped provoke British Muslims to carry out the 2005 London tube and bus bombings (approx 43 minutes in); taking the side of the Arab and Muslim world over ‘Palestine’ against Israel; justifying HMG’s policy of talking to fanatics of the Muslim Brotherhood such as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who endorses the murder of Israelis and the killing of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; and regretting that Britain is not talking to Hamas and Hezbollah, while stating that it is ‘looking for a way to formalise’ the contact made by HMG with Hamas over the kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnson in Gaza because ‘it was recognised there were benefits to that exchange’.

Just whose side is Britain now on in the war to defend civilisation?

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The British Broadcasting Collaboration

7:19pm

Tory MP David Tredinnick has accused the BBC of spreading Taleban propaganda of defeatism.

Fancy!

‘Many years ago during the Gulf War, I accused the BBC of being the Baghdad broadcasting corporation,’ he told MPs. ‘I am very concerned that there is now a similar situation with the Taliban, in that they are getting far too high a profile... "We need a much blunter, more realistic assessment. Churchill would never have put up with this kind of propaganda in a wartime situation.

... My worry is that our enemies are being given a disproportionate platform in the British media and the British media are in danger of losing the sight of the fact they are our enemies.’

Ah, but then we’re not at war, see. They are at war with us, for sure; but we are not with them.  We call it something else, like ‘conflict’. Which is really not much more than an argument, is it. That means we don’t have to kill anyone in Afghanistan, just build roads and hospitals while they kill us.

And if the BBC had been broadcasting in World War Two in the way that it has been doing in the current war to defend civilisation, Hitler would have won.

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The coalition's frivolous atrocity

11:06am

In the Daily Telegraph today, Simon Heffer has written a blistering column which perfectly expresses why the coalition’s whole constitutional bag of tricks – fixed term Parliaments, AV, constituency carve-up – is a frivolous atrocity and should be fought tooth and nail by anyone who cares about democracy and the integrity of the British constitution. Here’s a sample:

Fixed-term parliaments are profoundly undemocratic and an abomination in the context of our constitution. They would ensure that a useless government stayed there.. The idea that people want 50 fewer MPs is a fetish of the elite. Voters would certainly like there to be fewer departments of state and fewer ministers, so why not start there? And what about the alternative vote? Given that we are in a parlous financial predicament, and are fighting an overseas war, and our public services are failing across the board, and we have (according to the Prime Minister) a "broken society", what is the Government playing at having this expensive diversion, this minority sport at the taxpayer’s expense?

... Nor do I believe that anyone who thinks himself – or herself – a Tory can support fixed-term parliaments, rigged votes on dissolutions, or anything else that not only compromises the prerogative powers of the Sovereign but also the rest of the constitution. If the party's leader is happy to destroy the perfectly good system of governance our country has enjoyed since the Reform Acts, the party certainly should not be, and its constituents should sharpen up and tell it so. The changes being proposed do a massive favour to the Lib Dems and to the executive; they do nothing for democracy or the Tory party. Serious Tories had better dig the last ditch and be prepared to fight in it.

Read it all.

 

 

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A realignment of British politics?

11:45am

Reports that Labour MPs are joining forces with Tory ‘right-wingers’ to fight the Coalition’s proposal to gerrymander Britain’s voting system into favouring the LibDems merely adds to the sense that politics in Britain has been turned upside down.

I am very struck by the suggestion floated by Lord Tebbit and expanded by Fraser Nelson that David Cameron may be moving towards an outright merger with the LibDems. This clearly wasn’t part of some long-gestated strategic plan; I gather that on the morning after the general election which Cameron failed to win, he was totally undecided about his best course of action. But clearly he saw no overriding problem with the non-negotiable condition laid down by Nick Clegg for joining the coalition, that there had to be a move towards some kind of proportional representation system -- albeit the most watered-down form in the shape of AV.

Even though AV might be supposed to be anathema to Conservatives, Cameron appears to have no problem with holding a referendum on AV -- which, with the country in its current mood, may well produce a yes vote. I believe the reason is that the passion that consumes Cameron and dictates his every move is the passion to win. He will do virtually anything to gain and to keep power. Everything else is subordinate to that goal.

In addition, precisely because he has no passions born of deep, visceral principle he is content to go with the easy-going flow, the path of least resistance, to inhabit that comfortable territory where one can bask in the approval of the left – where the fetish that the right makes of liberty makes such convenient but destructive common cause with the hedonistic libertinism of the left to create what is so misleadingly called ‘the centre ground’. So Cameron, who will never fight the culture war to defend the norms of western civilisation, is perfectly comfortable with much LibDem dogma that seeks to undermine it.

One can see therefore how Liberal Conservatism may be about to be born. It is possible that the knitted yoghurt wing of the LibDems will become so upset about public spending cuts that they could peel off and join the Miliband of brothers in the Labour party, while the Lib-Dem ‘Orange Book’ tendency would have no problem merging with the liberty-loving Cameroons. Yes, the EU might be a problem – but I guess that Cameron isn’t going to rock the EU to its foundations, and so the LibDems will find they can live with him on that too.

It’s wonderful, after all, what the experience of getting those feet under that Cabinet table does to engender harmony between erstwhile foes, as we can all, to our wonderment, see. So maybe we might end up witnessing a grand realignment of British politics -- by accident, as it were.

Or maybe, if the despised and dumped Conservative ‘right’ ever decide they are men and not mice and resolve to fight to defend the historic values of this country and prevent their party from turning into an organic blancmange, not.

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The hellish histrionics of Hove Propaganda Court

1:28pm

Under the combined weight of ideology and bigotry, the rule of law itself seems to be breaking down in Britain. For the second time, a jury has acquitted people charged with criminal acts because it appears to sympathise with their cause.

In September 2008, a jury decided that it was ok to break the law and cause more than £35,000 criminal damage to a coal-fired power station because of the threat of man-made global warming.

In the latest case, seven activists who caused £180,000 damage to an arms factory have been acquitted after they argued they were seeking to prevent ‘Israeli war crimes’. The Guardian reported yesterday, after the acquittals of the first five:

They believed that EDO MBM, the firm that owns the factory, was breaking export regulations by manufacturing and selling to the Israelis military equipment which would be used in the occupied territories. They wanted to slow down the manufacture of these components, and impede what they believed were war crimes being committed by Israel against the Palestinians.

... Hove crown court heard the activists had broken into the factory in the night. They had video-taped interviews beforehand outlining their intention to cause damage and, in the words of prosecutor Stephen Shay, ‘smash-up’ the factory.

As Robin Shepherd observes in horror, it seems that in bigoted Britain all you have to do these days to be acquitted of a crime is to act against Israeli interests. But what really jumps out from this story is the direction the jury received from the judge in the case:

In his summing up, Judge George Bathurst-Norman suggested to the jury that ‘you may well think that hell on earth would not be an understatement of what the Gazans suffered in that time’.

Let’s get our heads round this, folks: an English judge in an English court of law effectively directed a jury to acquit people of criminally smashing up a factory, because he chose to believe Hamas propaganda about the suffering of people in Gaza during a war about which he presumably has no knowledge whatever apart from what he has read or seen in the media – a war, moreover, launched solely to prevent Gazans from aggressively firing rockets into Israel in order to murder its civilians, during the course of which war Israel went to heroic lengths to avoid hurting Gazan civilians who were being put in harm’s way by Hamas, the true cause of Gaza's 'hell on earth'.

Quite apart from the ignorance and bigotry of Judge George Bathurst-Norman, what on earth is a judge doing imposing his political prejudices upon a jury and thus taking the side of the defendants in the case he is trying – with the result that he effectively directed the jury to acquit them of a crime?

Ironically enough, given the way he has now brought the justice system into disrepute, he declared indignantly on a previous occasion -- using his own tough record to rebut criticisms by the Home Secretary of the day of allegedly ‘soft’ sentencing by the courts:

‘The trouble is, if you go on for political reasons undermining the public's faith in the judiciary, sooner or later you are heading for anarchy and... in due course for the equivalent of a police state.’

No bleeding-heart liberal is Judge George Bathurst-Norman, it seems. Here he is jailing Paul Kelleher for three months for beheading a statue of Margaret Thatcher, saying that

although many people sympathised with him, smashing up property deserved a custodial sentence.

Really? So how come this apparent law’n’order zealot gave the people who smashed up this factory a free pass in this way? Could this – as the veteran anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein exults -- be the explanation? (Hat tip: Yisroel Medad)

Perhaps the fact that His Honour was born in the Arab town of Jaffa opposite Tel Aviv might have something to do with it!

Well, just fancy that. And here is yet another lenient sentence passed by this law’n’order judge –

Abu Bakr Siddiqui, a procurement agent for the A. Q. Khan network, receives what an individual familiar with the case describes as a “remarkably lenient” sentence for assistance he gave the network [through smuggling a shipment of special aluminium to the AQ Khan nuclear programme in Pakistan]. The judge, George Bathurst-Norman, acknowledges that the crimes Siddiqui committed (see August 29, 2001) would usually carry a “very substantial” prison term, but says that there are “exceptional circumstances,” claiming that Siddiqui had been too trusting and had been “blinded” to facts that were “absolutely staring [him] in the face.” Siddiqui gets a twelve-month suspended sentence and a fine of £6,000 (about $10,000). Authors David Armstrong and Joe Trento will comment, “In a scenario eerily reminiscent of earlier nuclear smuggling cases in the United States and Canada, Siddiqui walked out of court essentially a free man.” They will also offer an explanation for the volte-face between conviction and sentencing, pointing out that there was a key event in the interim: due to the 9/11 attacks “Pakistan was once again a vital British and American ally. And, as in the past, it became imperative that Islamabad not be embarrassed over its nuclear program for fear of losing its cooperation….”

Anyone spot a connecting thread here?

Greenstein also helpfully notes about the Hove travesty that

Judge George Bathurst-Norman was brought out of retirement to hear the case.

Really? Why? And just who decided to do that?

What in judicial hell on earth's name is going on here?

 

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