Unparliamentary language

Blogger Israel Matzav has picked up an address delivered by George Galloway MP in Amman, Jordan which was shown on al Jazeera on May 15. In it, Galloway expresses admiration of Saddam Hussein and Gamal Abd al Nasser, refers to George Bush and Tony Blair as ‘dogs’ and accuses Blair of dripping with the blood of the people of Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. However, that was just the warm-up. The more notable passage is this:

All my life I believed that Palestine could be liberated by the Kalashnikov and the armed struggle alone. This was a mistake. We need the Kalashnikov. We need the armed struggle. This is the hammer. But we need also an anvil. The hammer is necessary to defend yourself, to strike your enemy. You must never let it down, never let it fall from your

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A reckless and cynical move

Yesterday’s Times published a cryptic but nevertheless alarming story:

Scotland Yard’s anti-terror unit has been stripped of its control over covert surveillance teams in an attempt to ward off further criticism over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, The Times has learnt. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, ordered the overhaul of undercover policing, despite stiff opposition from inside the force. Senior sources are concerned that the loss of dedicated counter-terrorism surveillance units, which can be deployed anywhere in the country, might undermine future security operations.

You bet it would. Hiving off control over surveillance on terrorist suspects from the unit gathering intelligence on those suspects is a sure-fire recipe for a total breakdown in communication and accountability – the very thing which led to the mistaken shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes. That fiasco...

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Brr! The climate cools for reality-deniers

I have previously written about the work of Lawrence Solomon for Canada’s National Post. He has been regularly charting in his column the ever-increasing number of climate scientists around the world who have been either crying foul about the man-made global warming scam or, having initially signed up to it, have been having second thoughts about it. This was a journey of discovery for him, to put it mildly; he had previously been inclined to believe the claims that ‘deniers’ were oil industry stooges, since he himself had worked for an anti-nuclear energy group and so was duly cynical about the way that industry’s scientists could twist the truth to suit their paymasters. But then to his astonishment he discovered that, when it came to MMGW, the scientists who were corrupt weren’t pushing the boat out for big business but for its holier-than-thou...

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Motes and beams

I never had sex with that woman! said President Clinton about Monica Lewinsky.

I never said I would talk to terrorists! protested presidential hopeful Barack Obama, after President Bush said in his address to Israel’s Knesset:

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

How dare he! shrieked the Obamanables, who for some reason seemed to think that a course of action which they...

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The fault line on the left

In the New Statesman, Martin Bright asks the big question: why do liberals hate Israel so much?

 

The Israel issue has become a terrible fault line on the British left…The internet has flushed out a whole subculture of left-wing hostility to Israel that should make even Marqusee uncomfortable. This has a regular and willing outlet on the Guardian's Comment is Free website and the New Statesman also suffers from it whenever we publish articles on Israel. Postings on our blog casually link Zionism to fascism or South African apartheid. The language is so unpleasant that it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that many of the comments are driven by anti-Semitism.

…For a long time Israel has been accused of crying wolf over surrounding countries that want to ‘drive it into the sea’. Now it has a neighbour whose

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The betrayal of Lebanon

The most important global event in the past week has been the attempted Hezbollah putsch in Lebanon. Accordingly it has received next to no coverage in Britain, where as the citizenry so insightfully informed the world in 2006: ‘We are all Hezbollah now’. Those who rant obsessively about Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the disputed territories are completely silent about Hezbollah’s invasion of Lebanon, its creeping state-within-a-state and its near-annihilation of Lebanon’s government which tried to stop the putsch and failed — despite that government being backed, as Walid Phares points out here, by an overwhelming sector of the public including most of the Sunnis, Christians and Druze plus a minority among the Shia, two thirds of the Lebanese Army, and a majority in Parliament.

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