Today’s Observer carries a report that Jew-hatred attacks in Britain are now running at such a level the police have drafted in extra patrols and British Jews are beginning to emigrate. I have previously reported here on the menacing atmosphere in which British Jews are currently living, as a result of the malevolent misrepresentation of Israel’s actions in Gaza by Britain’s media and intelligentsia which are pumping out mind-twisting and ultimately genocidal Arab propaganda as unchallengeable truths. The Royal Court theatre in London is now adding fuel to that Jew-hatred by staging a ten-minute blood-libel written by Caryl Churchill. A copy of this text has now reached me (and it has also reachedHarry’s Place. Please bear in mind that what is actually being performed on stage may be slightly different.) Ostensibly about Israel, it is actually a direct attack... He has been appointing one tax dodger, lobbyist and wheeler-dealer after another. After appointing one official,Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who had unaccountably forgotten to pay his taxes, he... What we did is interpolate carefully instead of just using the back of an envelope. To those of us who have been following this scam for the past two decades, ‘interpolate carefully’ makes us suck our teeth. And so it has proved. Various scientists immediately spotted... Daily Mail, 9 February 2009 Professor David Nutt is the chairman of the Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and thus the Government’s chief adviser on this most troublesome and sensitive issue. Yet the Advisory Council will this week propose the downgrading of ecstasy from category A to category B — having apparently learned nothing from the debacle over cannabis, the downgrading of which contributed to an explosion of all drug use. More astonishingly still, Professor Nutt has said that ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding. In an academic paper, he ridiculed concern about the effects of ecstasy by comparing it to ‘equasy’ or ‘Equine Addiction Syndrome’. Since the pleasure of horse-riding meant people were prepared to risk death or brain damage from falling off a horse, he said, the risks from taking ecstasy and other drugs could be seen to be much exaggerated. You really do have to scrape your jaw off the floor. Not only will such trivialisation of ecstasy cause grave distress to parents whose children have died from taking the drug, but it knocks the ground from under the feet of parents terrified that their children will start taking it. The comparison is simply ridiculous. Horse-riding is not inherently harmful. Drug-taking is. Horse-riding is not addictive. Drug-taking is. Most people who ride horses do not come to any harm. The only reason there are not many more deaths from ecstasy is that unlike horseriding, it is illegal. And the ill-effects of ecstasy are not limited to death. Professor Nutt says horseriding can lead to brain damage — but fails to say that ecstasy almost inevitably harms the brain. Professor Andy Parrott, of Swansea University, is the UK’s leading expert on ecstasy, having spent more than 14 years researching it. He says that nearly everything Professor Nutt has said about ecstasy is incorrect. Ecstasy has a powerful effect on the brain, he says, maybe even stronger than cocaine. Among its effects are lethargy, irritability, depression and aggression and, in the longer term, damage to the cognitive part of the brain and to the immune system. Nutt says there are ten deaths from ecstasy per year. Parrott says the real annual figure is 40-70 deaths. Nutt says it is not addictive, leads to neither violence nor road traffic deaths and causes neither liver cirrhosis nor heart damage. Parrott says it causes compulsive and escalating use; its strong overstimulation of Professor Nutt’s astoundingly inopportune comparison with horse-riding is not, however, some passing aberration. The idea that drug-taking should be treated rather like a sport, with children taught how to do it without hurting themselves, is central to the ‘harm reduction’ approach which is a Trojan horse for drug legalisation — and which, dismayingly, has made huge inroads into the British establishment. Professor Nutt, it seems, is among its number. In his article, he went much further than merely downplaying the effects of ecstasy. He came close to suggesting that it is as absurd for dangerous drugs to be illegal as it would be to make dangerous sports in general illegal. And he argued that Britain needed ‘a new approach to considering what underlies society’s tolerance of potentially harmful activities’. This sounds very close to the argument that what is wrong with drug policy is the fact that dangerous drugs are illegal. This is not altogether surprising, given Professor Nutt’s links with the legalisation lobby. For example, he is listed as a scientific adviser to the Beckley Foundation, which is committed to legalising drugs under the guise of ‘studying consciousness and altered states’. One of the Foundation’s directors is Mike Trace, Tony Blair’s former deputy drugs His co-director, Amanda Neidpath, who advocates the bizarre practice of ‘trepanation’ Moreover, in an interview on Radio New Zealand a year ago, Professor Nutt said he would like a ‘complete review of the drug laws’ in the UK; when pressed further, he said he thought the time had come to be ‘more creative’ about drugs overall, and that approaches such as taxation and the regulation of their use ‘might be applicable to some drugs’. How can such a man remain as the chief drugs adviser to the British Government, which remains committed to the UN goal of eradicating the use of dangerous drugs by keeping them illegal? By downplaying the risks of ecstasy and other drugs, moreover, Professor Nutt has almost certainly ensured that yet more young people will try them. After a display of such irresponsibility, there should be no place for him in any government committed to the elementary duty of keeping young people safe from drugs. Indeed, how can such a man have been appointed to such a position in the first place? To answer that, you have to appreciate the extent to which the establishment has been taken over by the legalisation lobby. The Advisory Council is riddled with ‘harm reduction’ advocates who, believing it impossible to prevent young people from using illegal drugs at all, are therefore reluctant to admit the full extent of the harm they actually do. Accordingly, Professor Parrott had a struggle to persuade the Advisory Council to allow him to give evidence to its ecstasy review. In an open letter to the Council last November, he protested that it seemed unwilling to consider some of the most important scientific literature about the effects of ecstasy. Devastatingly, he wrote: ‘It is inadequate to just sit around and listen to a few people speak one morning, then have a “vote” on this important question — especially when the outcome seems predetermined, as it was the ACMD which instigated the downgrading in the first place.’ The Government clearly understands that it has a serious problem with the Advisory Council. The Prime Minister has apparently already decided to reject its recommendation to downgrade ecstasy, just as ministers ignored its opposition when they decided to re-classify cannabis upwards from class C to class B. Now the Government is saying privately that it will review the Advisory Council’s role. It must act decisively. Professor Nutt should be sacked, and the Advisory Council either comprehensively cleaned out or wound up altogether. The single most important reason why Britain’s drug problem is now out of control is that a critical mass of defeatist police officers, spineless politicians, global legalisation lobbyists with bottomless pockets and the ‘great and the good’, determined to prevent their drug-taking offspring from acquiring criminal records, all talk down the risks of drug use and talk up legalisation. Horse-riding it isn’t; but there’s an Augean stables here which cries out to be cleaned. Jewish Chronicle, 5 February 2009 As if the Jews didn’t have enough on their plate, what with blood libels and Israel-hating calumnies flying thick and fast over events in Gaza, the Pope had to choose this moment to readmit into the fold a bishop who denies the Holocaust. Britain’s Bishop Richard Williamson has said that only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps and ‘none of them in gas chambers’. He also reportedly endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and is on record as saying that the Jews are fighting for world domination ‘to prepare the Anti-Christ’s throne in Jerusalem’. Williamson is one of four bishops whose 20-year excommunication was lifted by the Pope. Save for a declaration that the Jews were, indeed, damned in perpetuity for the crucifixion of Jesus, it is hard to think of a Papal gesture which could have done more damage than for the head of a church responsible for centuries of Jewish persecution effectively to absolve a bishop of his Jew-hatred. At a stroke, Pope Benedict XVI threatened to destroy the progress made in Catholic-Jewish relations since the seminal Second Vatican Council, which absolved ‘the Jews of today’ from the crime of deicide. The furore that engulfed the Vatican over the Williamson decision was enormous. Many Catholics were deeply horrified. Jewish-Catholic relations were plunged into crisis. The Cardinal in charge of these ties admitted the Pope had badly mishandled the matter. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel rebuked the Pope and called on him to deliver a ‘very clear’ rejection of Holocaust denial, the Vatican buckled. On Wednesday afternoon, it ordered Bishop Williamson publicly and unequivocally to recant his views on the Holocaust if he is to be readmitted to the church. But it also said that the Pope had not been aware of the bishop’s views when he lifted the excommunication on him and that there had been a breakdown in communications. This seems scarcely credible. The Pope’s defenders have said that he merely wanted to end a schism within the church by bringing back the ultra-conservative faction represented by Williamson. But this faction, the Society of Saint Pius, founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, is deeply antisemitic; it rejects Vatican II and Lefebvre himself wrote to Pope John Paul II in 1985 that the Jews were ‘declared enemies of the Church’. Indeed, within days of this row erupting another of Lefebvre’s followers, a priest called Floriano Abrahamowicz, also questioned whether the Nazis used gas chambers. Now the Pope has said that this Society must also recognise Vatican II. But is it really likely that he didn’t know about its views when he sought to retrieve it from the ecclesiastical purgatory into which its obnoxious extremism had sent it? Previously, the Pope’s defenders said the four bishops were excommunicated not for their views but for being consecrated without papal consent, and that Benedict’s action merely reflected doubts about the validity of their excommunication. Now we’re told it was, actually, all a terrible muddle. But this is not the first time Pope Benedict has taken actions which raise doubts about his attitude to the Jews. He set in train the beatification of Pope Pius XII — dubbed ‘Hitler’s Pope’ for his silence in the face of the Holocaust, but whom Benedict defended for secretly saving many Jews — until protests forced him last October to put the beatification on hold. He also raised eyebrows by making it easier for ultra-conservatives to celebrate the Tridentine Latin Mass, despite its references to ‘perfidious’ or ‘faithless’ Jews. Such decisions, even if they are motivated by the desire for church unity, at the very least display a chronic moral obtuseness in failing to see what they represent beyond that limited goal. For Jews, the timing of all this is particularly neuralgic. Coming as it does when Israel is under existential attack not just from the Arab and Muslim world but also from Christian Europe, which seems hell-bent on that especially vicious form of Holocaust denial which involves painting Israel as Nazis, it reawakens the memory of the war-time church’s failure to take a stand against the Shoah. As a boy, the former Cardinal Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth and was later drafted into the Wehrmacht. While this doesn’t make him a Nazi — he was apparently unenthusiastic and his father was an anti-Nazi — it leaves a troubling residue of ambiguity which the Williamson debacle can only increase. No-one believes that the Pope shares Bishop Williamson’s views. But to say he didn’t know about them is to cast severe doubt on his fitness to fulfil the demands of his high office. The doctrine of papal infallibility has just taken a lethal hit. Daily Mail, 4 February 2009 Sometimes you have to pinch yourself to remember that Britain has historically always been the cradle of liberty. For today we seem to be sliding inexorably into a culture of control which would have been very familiar to the Stasi or the KGB. Carol Thatcher, the daughter of former Prime Minister Lady Thatcher, now faces being banned from the BBC after reportedly referring to an unnamed tennis player as reminding her of a ‘golliwog’. Carol, who was crowned Queen of the Jungle in the 2005 reality series I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, has been a regular presenter on The One Show — a daily magazine programme on BBC One — for three years and is described as part of the family on the BBC website. But yesterday the BBC threw her out by announcing in the wake of the ‘golliwog’ row that it now had ‘no plans’ to use her again in her regular presenting slot. Let it be said loud and clear, racially offensive language is unacceptable. Ms Thatcher maintains, however, that she made merely a jokey remark. Her friends say that all she did was to compare the player’s hairstyle to the ‘Robertson’s Golly’ which once adorned that company’s jars of jam and marmalade. But without knowing the context in which she made this remark — and the tone in which it was said — none of us can judge what to make of it. And that surely is the point. For the really disturbing thing about this episode — unlike that involving Jonathan Ross, who deeply offended millions in public, had to have an apology dragged out of him and kept his £18million job — is not so much the remark itself but the fact that Carol Thatcher made it in private. We can’t gauge whether or not this really is a hanging offence or a trivial aside of no consequence, because she made the remark after several drinks in the show’s hospitality room to the presenter Adrian Chiles, who is said to have been ‘outraged’ by it. So outraged that it seems it is being used to hang her out to dry. But it was a remark made in the course of a private conversation — which has now been used to sack her after someone involved in that lighthearted banter passed it on to BBC executives in the form of a complaint. It is the BBC’s reaction which is really shocking and offensive, together with the behaviour of the person who turned in Ms Thatcher (would they have done so if she’d had a different mother?) to the Corporation’s commissars. It is hard to think of anything more despicable than snitching like this on a private conversation. People say or do all kinds of things which are perfectly acceptable in the context of drinks with friends or colleagues, but which would cause a very different impression if they occurred in public. If we were all to be treated in this way, how many of us would remain in our jobs? Is there anyone who can honestly claim never to have uttered an injudicious remark when sharing a drink with friends? This is the whole point of privacy. The very essence of a liberal society is to acknowledge the distinction between public and private, and to tolerate in private what might not be acceptable in public. To seek to enforce codes of behaviour in private relationships is totally coercive and illiberal. Yet that is precisely what has happened in the case of Carol Thatcher. By reporting her remark to the BBC hierarchy — and who knows whether or not it was distorted or taken out of context in the lodging of this complaint — her disloyal and sneaky colleagues took an axe to her right to privacy. The implications are deeply disturbing. For such behaviour means that no one can ever relax with colleagues for fear that one of them might go running to the boss to complain. It destroys the freedom to speak in private for fear that this might be used to cast you into outer darkness for having a view which falls foul of some arbitrary definition of what is acceptable. After all, no offence could possibly have been given to the unnamed tennis player or the public at large because the remark was not broadcast. This is, in fact, the second time in just a few days in which someone has found herself facing the sack for behaviour which has caused no actual offence but where charges have been laid by officious colleagues enforcing an oppressive code of behaviour. Community nurse Caroline Petrie offered to pray for an elderly patient who was being treated at home. The following day, Mrs Petrie was confronted over her offer by a nursing sister. The day after that, she was told that she was suspended while disciplinary action would be taken against her which might lead to the sack. But although the patient had turned down her offer of a prayer, she said she was not the slightest bit offended and certainly had not made a complaint. As with Carol Thatcher, it was this nurse’s colleagues who were offended that Mrs Petrie had transgressed codes of ‘equality and diversity’ — which apparently preclude a nurse offering the Christian solace of prayer. And it was professional colleagues, both in that NHS Trust and in the BBC, who took it upon themselves to enforce those approved attitudes from which there can be no deviation. Mr Ross’s offence is that in sick language he offended the elderly. Old, white, middle-class people don’t really count for much in the BBC mindset. Ms Thatcher’s alleged offence involved race — which to the BBC constitutes the most heinous crime of all. Such political correctness is now the governing characteristic of public sector institutions such as the BBC and the NHS, along with an intelligentsia determined upon a draconian process of social engineering aimed at changing not just society but human nature itself. Ostensibly designed to protect disadvantaged groups, it is actually all about advertising the moral purity of those who enforce it. It’s a dogma enforced with the zealotry of a secular inquisition and is profoundly totalitarian in character. Indeed, behaviour such as this has always been a key feature of police states and totalitarian regimes. The Stasi or the KGB gained much of their power over the population they tyrannised by getting people to inform on each other, using such informers to bring forward evidence of ‘thought crimes’ from private or overheard conversations. Such use of informers sets people against each other in a climate of permanent and corrosive suspicion. Destroying the trust which is the basis of relationships, it is thus a principal means of controlling the population. In Communist regimes, Stasi and KGB informers and apparatchiks designated dissidents, religious believers and other free spirits as enemies of the state. In politically correct Britain, BBC informers and NHS apparatchiks designate jovially gabby broadcasters and Christian nurses as enemies of society, to be summarily convicted by kangaroo courts of conformist bureaucrats and banished in opprobrium and disgust. It’s all part of a wider trend. The police ‘hate crime’ division urges the public to inform on anyone who expresses an opinion they deem hateful to the usual range of disadvantaged groups. An energy company invites children to become ‘climate cops’, reporting on parents, relatives and friends who leave TV sets on and commit other examples of ‘climate crime’. It is this combination of lunacy and coercion which leads one to think that the land of those great apostles of free thinking, John Milton and John Locke, is fast turning into a nightmare straight out of the pages of George Orwell or Franz Kafka.
Sunday, 8th February 2009
The Royal Court's mystery play
1:27pm
Saturday, 7th February 2009
America -- what have you done?
6:01pm
President Obama has had, by general consent, a torrid First Fortnight. To put it another way, it has taken precisely two weeks for the illusion that brought him to power to be exposed for the nonsense that it so obviously was. The transformational candidate who was going to sweep away pork-barrel politics, lobbyists and corruption has been up to his neck in sleaze, as eviscerated here by Charles Krauthammer. Despite the fact that he came to power promising to ‘ban all earmarks’, his ‘stimulus’ bill represents billions of dollars of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections -- which have nothing to do with kick-starting the economy and everything to do with favouring pet Democrat causes.That famous consensus
5:52pm
Yet another example of the ‘research’ masquerading as science that is used to reinforce the man-made global warming fraud. One of the difficulties the green zealots have had is that Antarctica has been not warming but cooling, with the extent of its ice reaching record levels. A few weeks ago, a study led by Professor Eric Steig caused some excitement by claiming that actually West Antarctica was warming so much that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica. Warning bells should have sounded when Steig said
Has April Fools’ Day come early this year?
the metabolism makes it exceptionally dangerous for users to drive under its influence; it has profound effects on the heart and has even necessitated liver transplants among Scottish 30-year-olds.
czar, who was forced to resign from his new job at the UN after the Mail revealed he had been a self-described fifth columnist at the heart of the British Government, working covertly to undermine the UN drug conventions which commit member states
to the goal of eradicating drug use.
(boring a hole in the skull) as a protective measure against dementia, told a meeting of the World Psychedelic Forum that the Beckley Foundation’s projects included investigating the ‘possible beneficial use of micro-doses of LSD to improve cerebral circulation’.
Monday, 9 February 2009
February 9, 2009
Britain’s drug and pony show
February 8, 2009
The Vatican chokes over the Jews
February 4, 2009
The Stasi tactics of the BBC
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