Britannia Radio

Peace And Hate

SUNDAY, 11TH JANUARY 2009

Picture by Adrian Korsner.

Looks like there was a great pro-Israel demonstration today in London ( I am not there at present). The Times says that according to the organisers, about 15,000 people turned up. No doubt they were not just showing solidarity with Israel but demonstrating their determination to stand united in public disgust against the tidal wave of hatred and lies about Israel and sanitising of Islamic fascism in which the British media and much of its intellectual class are now drowning. And of course, by contrast with the thuggery and violence of the ‘we are all Hamas’ jihad rally yesterday, this one was entirely orderly.

As blogger Edgar Davidson says:

Today's rally will, of course, be given only a fraction of the media coverage of yesterday's pro-Hamas hatefest. But I'd like to think that anybody who witnessed both rallies will have been struck by the difference in the message today (Peace for Israel and Gaza by stopping Hamas terror) with that of yesterday (‘Peace for Palestine by destroying Israel’). Today: dignified with compassion for all victims. Yesterday: violent, with compassion and love for the terrorist perpetrators and hatred for the real victims.

Now look at this video posted up by Israel’s foreign ministry: it shows how Hamas booby-trapped a school and a zoo in Gaza by running a fuse all the way from the zoo to the school. And this one, it says, shows the Israel Air Force aborting a missile strike to protect Gazan civilians.

Meanwhile Professor Efraim Karsh wonders why,

With a unanimity that has become all too familiar, politicians, the media, NGOs, and church leaders across the globe took their cue to denounce Israel's legitimate act of self-defense against one of the world’s most extreme terror organizations

and even

enthusiastically embrace a radical Islamist group that not only seeks the destruction of a fellow democracy but is overtly committed to the substitution of a world-wide Islamic caliphate for the existing international order

while being almost totally indifferent to

far bloodier conflicts that have been going on around the world, from the long-running genocide in Darfur, with its estimated 400,000 dead and at least 2.5 million refugees, to war in the Congo, with over 4 million dead or driven from their homes, to Chechnya, where an estimated 150,000-200,000 have died and up to a third of the population has been displaced at the hands of the Russian military

not to mention the 3,000-5,000 Palestinians killed in the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in ‘Black September’ 1970 by King Hussain of Jordan, described by Robert Fisk in his memoirs as

often difficult to fault

and he concludes, as I do, that what the founding fathers of Zionism failed to foresee was that

the prejudice and obsession that had hitherto been reserved for Jewish individuals and communities would be transferred to the Jewish state.

Old poison – new bottle.

Saturday, 10th January 2009

In the face of this madness, some facts

10:56pm

 Here are some facts that the western media might just possibly by some strange and uncharacteristic oversight fail to report. The Israel Defence Force blog shows what it says is a captured Hamas map showing how Hamas are using the inhabitants of an entire neighbourhood as human shields by lacing it with a web of explosive devices. The Israel Foreign ministry says:

The map shows that snipers are positioned at the entrance of the A-Tawil mosque and in the mosques next to it and describes the directions the snipers are aiming. It indicates that explosives are planted in the entrances of civilian homes. 

Israel also says this shows Hamas preparing to fire a rocket from a rocket launcher in a Gaza school yard;  it also says another sequence in the video shows Hamas rockets being fired during the ‘humanitarian pause’. Here an embedded Israeli journalist describes...

Continue reading...

January 12, 2009 Another front in Labour’s class war Daily Mail, 12 January 2009 There is much excitement over the fact that former Cabinet minister Alan Milburn is being brought in from the cold by Gordon Brown to head a review of social mobility. The return of this arch-moderniser and erstwhile political foe is being seen as yet another tactic to shore up the Prime Minister’s position in readiness for an early General Election. Milburn’s ultra-Blairite reputation supposedly punctures the charge that Gordon Brown is bent on re-imposing the Old Labour agenda of redistribution and state control. But here’s the strange thing. It appears that Milburn is being brought back to mastermind the latest offensive in the class war — to the opposition against which, as one of the principal outriders in Tony Blair’s campaign to drag Labour into the centre ground, he devoted his political career. The Prime Minister apparently wants to stop the middle classes from dominating professions such as law, medicine and the media. Accordingly, Milburn will head a review of the supposed obstacles in the way of the poor — including the work experience or internships used by middle-class parents to give their children a head start. In addition, the Cabinet Office minister Liam Byrne will this week launch a white paper on social mobility. It is certainly dismaying that so many young people are trapped in social disadvantage. Children from the highest socio-economic group are nearly three times more likely than those from the lowest to get good GCSEs, and six times more likely to go to university. What’s more, even fewer young people from the poorest backgrounds now go to good universities than when Labour came to power. But that’s because, as Tory spokesman Chris Grayling rightly observed, education standards have plummeted, family life has disintegrated and the welfare state traps ever more people in dependency. The way to boost social mobility is therefore to stop the rot in education, shore up intact families and reform welfare. But the Government will not do that. How could it? To do so would be to stifle its deepest instincts to bring about an egalitarian utopia through social engineering and state control of individual lives. In education, it has systematically rigged the system to boost artificially the achievements of under-qualified young people, thus penalising those showing real merit. Now Messrs Milburn and Byrne appear set to continue this unjust discrimination. Although Downing Street has denied that quotas could be used to reduce internships for middle-class children, it has also made it clear that children who go to private or grammar schools — or who have professional parents — are its main targets. So it appears that once again the agenda is bashing the middle class, and rewarding young people not for what they have achieved but on account of their family background. In a grotesque mirror-image of everything Labour is supposed to be against, it will once more favour people on the basis of where they come from — but only if they come from the wrong side of the tracks. This makes a total mockery of its supposed aim to improve access to the middle class for those from poor backgrounds. For once such folk have hauled themselves into that middle class, they will promptly get clobbered by Labour for being ‘privileged’. Moreover, given the number of Labour MPs who secure either job placements or internships for their own children, the hypocrisy is pretty staggering. Milburn has long expressed concern about sluggish social mobility. And he has acknowledged that the correct approach lies not in taking things away from people, but in ensuring that opportunities are opened up for all. But the evidence suggests that, just as Tony Blair himself did, Milburn deludes himself about New Labour’s purported success in doing so. Labour says it wants to improve social mobility. But even fewer young people from the poorest backgrounds now go to good universities like Oxford than when Labour came to power In a debate on the subject last year, he used some fancy footwork with official statistics to claim that social mobility had increased because incomes for the less well-off had risen. But, in fact, incomes among the very poorest have actually risen more slowly than among those at the top. He also claimed that a ‘very good’ education was available to a small minority of people only because they could afford to pay for it. But the truth is that a ‘very good’ education is not available to all, simply because government education policy has destroyed education standards — and by axing so many grammar schools, reduced the opportunities for academic excellence that once lifted so many children out of disadvantage. Ministers boast that record numbers of young people now go to university. But this has caused a catastrophic drop in standards as universities — under threat of losing grant aid — are forced to admit students who don’t cut the mustard. Not surprisingly, record numbers of students are now dropping out — particularly among precisely the kind of people the Government is determined to shoe-horn into universities and professional jobs at the expense of the better-qualified. Figures dragged out of the Government show that students from poor families who get preferential places at universities by being offered lower A-level requirements are three times more likely to drop out of their courses than those who win places by simple merit. Byrne insists it is a ‘classic liberal error’ to assume that the middle classes have to suffer in order to give others a fair chance. But that’s precisely what this Government has been doing for the past decade. Yet far from opening up real opportunity for those from poor backgrounds, this approach has tricked them by giving them only the illusion of achievement. It has thus achieved the truly brilliant outcome of treating the middle class with undiluted spite and the poor with profound contempt. There is, of course, a direct link between declining education standards and people playing the system through internships and other manoeuvres. Undoubtedly, internships are potentially unfair because the lucky few who get them have a head start over those who don’t. But the reason they have mushroomed over the past few years is that, with crashing academic standards producing — absurdly –vast numbers of top grades, employers often rely on internships to show the true worth of a candidate. Now it is reported that 400,000 students due to graduate from universities this summer will be offered government-sponsored internships to help them cope with a recession-hit job market. But it is far from clear that the Government will help fund companies to do this; nor that such interns will be paid anything at all; nor that after their three-month internship is up they will actually get a job. After all, many companies are either axing their graduate schemes or not giving jobs to those already on them. In other words, this just looks like a prime piece of political window dressing. Social mobility is rightly considered to be the lynch-pin of progressive politics. But it is inextricably connected to the creation of a meritocracy. What this government is committed to, in direct contrast, is the destruction of meritocracy and its replacement by social gerrymandering. The fact that an ultra-Blairite politician should be drafted in to pursue such an Old Labour agenda should not surprise us, since the pursuit of egalitarianism was always Labour’s real ‘Clause Four’. Everything else was smoke and mirrors — the real reason the New Labour project went belly-up. Alan Milburn’s return is thus not a radical departure at all; it’s just more of the same old same old.