The US finally decided to boycott the meeting because, as it said,despite improvements to the text of the draft declaration it still crossed the red lines the US had set down: ‘The text still contains language that reaffirms in toto the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action [DDPA] from 2001, which the United Daily Mail, 20 April 2009 The Government is convulsed by spiralling revelations in which ministers and their aides are all smearing, plotting and spinning, not just against their supposed enemies, the Tories, but against their real enemies — each other. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police is reeling under mounting claims of brutality at the G20 demonstration, the ignominious collapse of its pursuit of Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green, and the resignation of the chief counter-terrorism officer involved in that debacle over a further and unconnected act of gross incompetence. These storms are not unrelated. Indeed, almost everywhere the governance of Britain appears to be crumbling before our eyes. Take the uproar at Westminster. This began as the disclosure of a disgusting smear operation against the Tories, supposedly instigated as a freelance initiative by Brown’s chief spinner, Damian McBride, working in cahoots with disgraced former adviser Derek Draper. Now further claims have surfaced that Labour’s general secretary Ray Collins had attended a meeting to discuss setting up the smear website; and, more explosively still, that Schools Secretary Ed Balls used McBride to smear ministerial rivals and advance his own ambitions. The noise of people running for cover is deafening. Mr Balls splutters that the claims are ‘fabricated and malevolent nonsense’. Mr Collins denies he knew about the smears. Everyone is shocked – shocked! — by Damian McBride. And Gordon Brown, for whom McBride was his great clunking fist, was apparently never at the scene of the crime. Yes, and there are fairies at the bottom of the garden. The fact is that bullying and browbeating, spinning and smearing are the stock-in-trade of this Government. McBride was merely the foot-soldier. True responsibility lies with the politicians who have used such creatures to carry out their destabilising campaigns and have perverted the whole of politics as a result. Now, take a look at the uproar in the Met and you will see striking parallels. It appears that Ian Tomlinson, who wandered into the path of the G20 protest and was struck by a policeman, died of internal bleeding; an officer has been interviewed under caution on suspicion of manslaughter. Fresh claims of police brutality are growing by the day. Even if certain activists are seizing upon the general furore to defame the police, it looks as though there is truth in at least some of these claims. If so, once again ultimate responsibility lies at the top of the food chain. In situations such as the G20 protest, where the police faced organised provocation and violence, there are always elements in the ranks who want to give people a good kicking. A properly managed police force recognises this and prevents it. The apparent failure to do so here was undoubtedly the product of the chaos, incompetence and demoralisation in the higher reaches of the Met with which the new Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, is having to grapple. Such incompetence was displayed with the arrest of Damian Green by counter-terrorism chief Bob Quick, on the grounds that Green had been leaked information which was a threat to national security. Yet the Director of Public Prosecutions has now said that this material was not even secret, and didn’t relate to national security at all. In a further farcical development, Quick was forced to resign after carelessly displaying, when leaving his car in Downing Street, details of the impending arrest of people suspected of plotting terror attacks in the north of England. As a result, the police were forced to make premature raids, possibly thus jeopardising any successful prosecution. How can the officer in charge of counter-terror command in the most important police force in the country be such a booby? The answer lies in a profound sickness in the police. The Met was brought to its knees under Sir Ian Blair, but the malaise extends to other forces and goes back at least 20 years. During that time, the police have been politicised and demoralised through control by ministerial targets and the equally paralysing doctrines of political correctness. But the problem goes far wider and higher. This culture of politicisation has rotted the Civil Service from the top. Instead of giving dispassionate advice to ministers, Whitehall is now packed with placemen doing the bidding of government — and supinely going along with the destruction of integrity in public life. Indeed, it was Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell who passed the Damian Green case to the Cabinet Office Director of Security and Intelligence — who passed it to the Met, saying the leaks had already damaged national security. But if as the DPP stated no such threat existed, one can only conclude that these most senior civil servants cynically hyped up a non-existent threat to stifle a perfectly legitimate source of political embarrassment. Such concerns deepen yet further with the disclosure that the police trawled Mr Green’s computer for information on the Director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti –whose only offence is to be a thorn in the Government’s side. The politicisation of the civil service goes back to Mrs Thatcher. She viewed it as riddled with hopeless defeatists and time-servers who needed to be circumvented if Britain’s decline was to be arrested. Subsequently Tony Blair took that ball and ran with it, undermining the civil service by an army of political advisers. The stage was thus set for the ruthless destruction of Britain’s constitution, national identity and culture to create a post-modern, post-national, post-moral utopia. To grasp the full dimensions of this one has to go back to the end of the Second World War. Despite defeating fascism, Britain was exhausted and bankrupt – and its ruling class was also profoundly demoralised by the end of empire. In this weakened state, the elites were vulnerable to the absurd and destructive ideas which surfaced in the sixties and which centred around the ‘me society’ and the corresponding destruction of authority and norms of behaviour. These progressively destroyed the education system, the nuclear family and the idea that anti-social behaviour needed to be punished or deterred. Instead, everyone became a ‘victim’ clamouring for their ‘human rights’ from a state which as a result accrued more and more power over their lives – all the while undermining democracy by giving away the nation’s powers of self-government to the EU and other transnational institutions which would usher in the brotherhood of man. Duty was thrown out of the window, and with it went integrity in public service – a development which, with the collapsing education system leaving even university graduates unable to think for themselves and with a parliament weakened by its increasing irrelevance, has produced a governing class of third-raters drunk on power. Is it any wonder that the administration of this country is crumbling into chaos and corruption ? The abuse of power by politicians and the police tells us that it is not just the Labour government that is so clearly dying on its feet. It is the country itself. A change of government will not be enough. The rot will only be stopped if Britain starts once again to believe in itself — and in the unique history, institutions and values that once made it great, but which are now so grievously undermined. Jewish Chronicle, 17 April 2009 He said his opponents ’should probably be called the Likud lobby… Whereas Israelis in Israel routinely criticise Israeli policies that they think may prove to be suicidal for their country, those who criticise the same policies here, for the same reasons, are subject to political reprisal.’ Leave aside for the moment the unlovely figure of Chas W Freeman himself, and that what actually brought him down was the widespread consternation among members of Congress — especially House Leader Nancy Pelosi — that a pivotal role over US intelligence should go to such a brazen apologist for the Tiananmen Square massacre. His words should cause wider concern for those of us watching aghast as Israel is progressively delegitimised. For the emergence of this new bogyman, the ‘Likud lobby’, is an ominous reflection of the attempt to drive a wedge between Israel’s supporters by demonising one side of an increasingly bitter and desperate internal argument. In one camp are those who believe that the only route to peace is through the ‘two-state solution’and the creation of a state of Palestine. In the other, are those who believe the cause of the conflict is not the absence of such a state, but that the Palestinians are being used as a Trojan horse by the Arab and Muslim world to destroy Israel altogether. Since Israel places conditions upon the Palestinians (to abjure terror) before it will agree to such a state, the ‘two-staters’ agree with the prevailing EU-UK-US consensus that Israel must be pressured to make ‘painful concessions’ to end the stalemate. The ‘existential war’ camp believes that, with Iran-backed Hamas poised to take control as soon as Israel departs the West Bank, this would be not so much a two-state solution as a Final Solution. The two-staters respond by demonising their opponents as ‘right-wing’, ‘Likudniks’ and ‘warmongers’, even though they may be innocent of all three charges. No matter — to so-called progressives, anyone who is not on the left must be on the right; and since the left embodies all things that are good, the label ‘right-wing’ is a synonym for all things evil, of which both war and the Likud are without doubt prime exemplars. The concern is that the Obama administration — although it showed an early graciousness towards the new Netanyahu government — takes the same view. Dominated as it is by a combination of leftists, peace-process retreads and Israel-haters and Jewish-conspiracy theorists, it is seizing upon this division among the Jewish ranks to redefine ‘the Jewish lobby’ as its patsy. With the predominant view at present apparently being that Israel’s security must be sacrificed to achieve the ‘grand bargain’ with the Iranians (’living with’ a nuclear Iran!) it is happy to demonise objectors as ‘the Likud lobby’. And there is no shortage of Jews coming forward to help it do so — most notably in the form of J-Street, the George Soros-backed alternative Jewish lobby which has set itself to displace AIPAC and the established Jewish groups. This describes itself as ‘pro-Israel, pro-peace’. It is composed of Israeli and Jewish leftists such as Daniel Levy, who has done incalculable harm to both Israel and the free world by assiduously peddling the idea to western leaders that talking to Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran, Syria and Uncle Tom jihadist and all is the way to peace. J-Street is being smiled on by those within the Obama administration who are in tune with J-Street’s appalling core premise: that Israel is to blame for Arab terror — the age-old calumny of blaming the Jews for their own destruction. The danger of J-Street lies not just in its savvy, web-based mode of operation but through the way it defines itself as ‘moderate’. So those who believe with overwhelming reason that a Palestine state would bring Iran to Israel’s border are painted as extremists to silence their voice. Yet if they protest, it is the J-Streeters who claim they are being ‘cowed into silence’. When Israel’s ‘friends’ characterise suicidal policies as ‘moderate’, while policies essential for Israel’s self-preservation are ‘extreme’, who needs enemies like Chas W Freeman?
Sunday, 19th April 2009
Short shrift for Israel's human rights in Londonistan
10:54pm
So in the end, at the eleventh hour and fifty ninth minute on the eve of the ‘Durban 2’ anti-anti-racism, anti-Israel hatefest that starts in Geneva tomorrow, the US finally decided not to attend – but appallingly, Britain has decided to turn up. Despite the harm it had done in participating for a week in the preparatory meeting for this disgusting farce and then ambiguously withdrawing, the Obama administration finally did the only decent thing – while perfidious Albion has lived up to its name once again.
...
We appear to be living through a re-run of the last days of the Borgias crossed with the Keystone Cops.
Such behaviour is a gross abuse of power. So how have our once incorruptible civil service and stalwart police descended to such a pass?
The response of Chas W Freeman, the short-lived chairman-designate of the US National Intelligence Council, to being forced to resign recently after protests over his lobbying activities for Saudi Arabia and China and his extreme antipathy to Israel, was not merely to pin the blame on that all-purpose scapegoat, ‘the Jewish lobby’, or even its modern version, ‘the Israel lobby’. He came up with another variation on the theme.
Monday, 20 April 2009
April 20, 2009
Third-raters drunk on power
April 18, 2009
With ‘friends’ like these, who needs enemies?
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