Terror in academia

3:02pm

 

Three years ago, I published claims by a student in the International Politics department at Aberystwyth university that it was fomenting a climate of hatred of Israel, claims that were heatedly denied at the time.

I have now received a message from another student in the same department. He claims that students studying the ‘Understanding Terror: Perspectives on Terrorism’ module are being forced, on pain of being marked down, to reproduce distorted and bigoted opinions about America and Israel. He refers to an email sent by the convenor of this module, Dr Marie Breen Smyth, who was commenting in turn on remarks made by the author of one of the set texts recommended in the handbook for this course, Dr Richard Jackson. Both the handbook’s guidance and associated reading list are skewed...

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The weakest link

10:06pm

In Londonistan, the appeasement of radical Islamism is lurching ever more giddily into the realm of the surreal. Hard on the heels of the Appeal Court ruling that abu Qatada, bin Laden’s right hand man and the most important al Qaeda operative in Europe, cannot be deported to Jordan under human rights law because witnesses in any future prosecution of him might themselves have been tortured by the Jordanians, the Sunday Times reported yesterday:

The Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights. Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain. The Foreign Office has advised

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The UN's Special Fruitcake

5:37pm

It appears that Richard Falk, the new UN ‘Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories’ whose vile prejudice against Israel I wrote about here, believes the ‘neo-cons’ were, er, behind 9/11. Yup, he's a 'truther' -- someone who believes the US government carried out the attacks. The New York Sun reports:

On March 24 in an interview with a radio host and former University of Wisconsin instructor, Kevin Barrett, Mr. Falk said, ‘It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don't think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can

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Winning an asymmetric war

4:56pm

The belief that asymmetric warfare, in which conventional armies are forced to fight ostensibly weaker terrorists who don’t fight by the rules, can only be won by political rather than military means and that therefore states must talk to terrorists, currently commands enormous political support in the west and is to a large extent responsible for the mood of defeatism and appeasement that currently grips its elites. All the more bracing, therefore, to read this fine analysis by Maj-Gen Yaakov Amidror of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which magisterially refutes this counsel of despair. An asymmetric war is certainly winnable against terrorist insurgents, he says, provided certain principles are followed. Unfortunately, this is far from the case at present, not least in Israel, but that’s another matter. Amidror lays down six basic conditions for...

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The Iranian chess game

11:28pm

 

In the Washington Post David Ignatius observes that, in their testimony to the Senate on the war in Iraq, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker portrayed the malign and nefarious influence of Iran as lying at the very core of the ongoing difficulties in Iraq. Ignatius makes two very important points:

Iran's covert campaign to reshape Iraq has been clear since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Iranian intelligence officers prepared lists of Iraqis for assassination in the weeks and months after the war began; they sent Iranian-trained mullahs to take over the Shiite mosques of central and southern Iraq that had been smashed by Saddam Hussein; they pumped an estimated $12 million a week in covert financial support to their allies as the January 2005 election approached; they infiltrated all the major Shiite political

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An emerging truth

4:58pm

 

[UPDATE: A technical glitch meant that this article was originally posted twice. The duplicate has now been deleted and all the comments made on it transferred to this thread. The transferred comments are time-stamped from between 9:16am and 9:31am, 10th April]

There is now unequivocal evidence that the temperature of the planet is dropping like a stone. As the DailyTech site reports:

All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASAGISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. A compiled list of all the sources can be seen...The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years.

Here’s some other data you may not have...

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