Friday, 27th February 2009
Just whose side is he on?
6:41pm
Chas W Freeman has now been confirmed as Obama’s pick for the chairmanship of America’s National Intelligence Council. This appointment, to a post which oversees production of America’s National Intelligence Estimates and shapes America’s understanding of the threat posed by the world’s rogue regimes and terror organisations, has caused even Obama supporters to choke into their cappuccinos. For Freeman is not simply, as I wrotehere, in the pocket of Saudi Arabia, with ties to the bin Laden family after 9/11. Seven months after 9/11, he told the Washington Institute:
I accept that al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden almost certainlyperpetrated the September 11 attacks.
He is not simply a vicious enemy of Israel, pushing for a one-state solution ie the destruction of Israel.
He is not simply a supporter of the Walt/Mearsheimer anti-Jew canard that ‘the Jewish lobby’ manipulates...
Another ruling in the US vaccine court
5:26pm
Seven days ago, the US vaccine court awarded damages to a ten year-old child, Bailey Banks, who it said had developed acute brain damage involving autistic spectrum disorder as a result of his MMR vaccination.
This followed a judgment by the same court a few days previously in the ‘Cedillo’ case which threw out three test claims involving MMR on the grounds that that there was no proven link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The judges in that case said parents had been misled by doctors who were guilty of ‘gross medical misjudgment’ and had peddled ‘speculative and unpersuasive’ theories.
That judgment in turn followed another case in which the vaccine court said nine year-old Hanna Poling had developed autism as a result of a cocktail of nine vaccines administered simultaneously, including MMR, which had
...significantly aggravated an underlying
A less than engaging strategy
12:58am
A couple of weeks ago, there were claims on Panorama and in the Guardian that the government was about to make a drastic change to its strategy for tackling Muslim extremism in Britain. According to these claims, it realised it had made a catastrophic error in identifying extremism with violence, thus ignoring the conveyor-belt of extreme Islamist ideas which is radicalising ever rising numbers of young British Muslims -- and, worse still, engaging people with those extremist ideas as government advisers on combating Islamist violence. At the time, I expressed scepticism about such an outbreak of realism and suggested it was more likely that an argument was going on in Whitehall between these two factions.
On Wednesday evening, the Communities Secretary Hazel Blears delivered a major speech on the subject which, far from presaging a change in strategy, was...
Thursday, 26th February 2009
Liberal fascism
6:18pm
On Harry’s Place, Dave Rich makes some good points about the now common analogy that is drawn between Israel and the Nazis, or Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, as used by such Israel-haters as George Galloway, Jenny Tonge, the British Muslim Initiative and others. Its import, as he says, lies in far more than its mere offensiveness and demonstrable barmyness. It is used for very specific political purposes. Since Nazism is totally beyond the pale – and since the Israel-haters believe, falsely, that Israel’s legitimacy rests upon the Holocaust – tarring it as a Nazi state delegitimises it and thus advances the agenda of its destruction.
But Rich points out a further consequence of demonising Israel in this way:
...If Israel is a Nazi state, then anybody who does not oppose Israel is morally no better than a
February 27, 2009 Silent in the face of antisemitism National Review Online, 27 February 2009 In a letter to the Jerusalem Post, David Harris, director of the American Jewish Committee [AJC], has defended his organization’s decision to participate in the preparatory meeting for Durban II — the follow-up to the 2001 U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which took place in Durban, South Africa. Two weeks ago, AJC senior official Felice Gaer was part of the delegation America sent to try to improve the draft of the declaration, the final version of which will ultimately be approved at Durban II itself. The U.S. vowed that if its attempts to improve the draft failed, it would not participate in the final conference. Israel and the United States walked out of the 2001 conference in protest against the anti-Semitism on display there. Israel and Canada have already announced that they do not intend to participate in the Durban II conference in Geneva this April, fearing a re-run. The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick raised similar concerns, which is what compelled Harris to respond. Harris wrote that although “under the present circumstances” the United States should not attend the April conference, “this leaves two options: to throw up our hands, or work to change those circumstances.” The AJC, he explains, believed it should “work with our government to assess whether Durban is beyond salvaging. . . . If Durban can be fixed, everybody wins — not least, the global struggle against racism, to which AJC has been committed for more than a century. If it can’t, we will absolutely seek to hold the administration to its promise to withdraw.” This is, to put it mildly, a serious misjudgment. Durban II is intrinsically a disgrace, and no civilized country should have anything to do with it. Since it is being run by the U.N. Human Rights Council — whose Durban Preparatory Committee is chaired by Libya, with Iran and Cuba as vice-chairs — the idea that such a meeting can assist in “the global struggle against racism” is absurd. The key point, moreover, is that Durban II has been set up specifically to “reaffirm” and “foster the implementation” of the original Durban Declaration, which singled out Israel for censure and libeled it as a racist state. Even if some of the more egregious aspects were to be removed from the final declaration at Geneva, there is no way in which it can be anything less than obnoxious. If Libya and Iran have any sense, they will offer at the last minute some cosmetic changes to allow America to trumpet its great victory — a victory that would merely sanitize and legitimize a declaration that would remain odious. Moreover, so far, the American delegation has singularly failed to draw the poison from this process. U.N. watcher and NRO contributor Anne Bayefsky has reported that when Iran and Syria blocked an attempt to include a provision that would “condemn without reservation any denial of the Holocaust,” the American delegation remained silent. Worse, the delegation similarly kept mum when the Palestinian delegation slipped in a demand that all U.N. states provide Palestinians protection from Israel. Worse still, the Palestinian passage also called for implementation of the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice against Israel’s security fence, which would effectively strip “racist” Israel of the means of defending itself against mass murder. Not only has the American delegation failed to stop the draft declaration from actually getting even worse: just by taking part, it has done immense damage. It has whipped the rug out from under the U.K., which was apparently on the verge of announcing it would have nothing to do with Durban II, and from other smaller states, like the Czech Republic, that were waiting on America’s decision and feel they can’t pull out as long as America is involved. It’s bad enough for a delegation representing America as a whole to be involved in this, and to stay silent in the face of anti-Semitism. But for an organization representing the interests of American Jews to be part of such a delegation is worse, and it reflects a broader contradiction within the Jewish community. Some 80 percent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Obama — despite the very substantial evidence from his own writings, and from the people he has associated with, that he would be no friend to Israel, and no effective defender of the West against the Islamic jihad. Now we are seeing precisely what these Jewish voters have helped bring about — an American foreign-policy and intelligence administration stacked with Israel-bashers, new-realist appeasers, and Oslo-process retreads — the last category having apparently learned nothing from the debacles of the Second Intifada, the Gaza disengagement, and the new reality of Iranian power and Islamism spreading throughout the region. As Israel faces, from Iran, the most serious threat to its existence in its history, it now also faces an American president who has given Iran the supreme gift of time to realize its nuclear goal, while he “engages” Iran and Syria and undermines their more moderate opponents. And in the wake of Israel’s latest military actions, he has promised $900 million to rebuild Gaza — the home turf of Hamas, which is sure to benefit from this largesse funded by the American taxpayer, even if the money is routed through non-governmental organizations and the U.N. This is a grim prospect for Israel. How can American Jews have helped bring it about? The answer is that, contrary to the canard that “the Jewish lobby” has hijacked American foreign policy in the interests of Israel, for most American Jews Israel is not a high priority. Of much greater concern are their liberal social attitudes and their reluctance to believe that a black Democratic president could pose a threat to Jewish interests. The danger is that they may find themselves being used to camouflage and legitimize such a threat. The AJC’s participation in the run-up to Durban II is a terrible portent of what is to come. |
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