Thursday, 24th December 2009
Season's greetings
3:09pm
As the holidays arrive, this blog will be slowing down over the next few days. Very best wishes to readers for Christmas and the new year.
The Home Secretary displays his keen intelligence, moral sense and deep love of liberty
2:52pm
The think-tank Civitas has picked up on a sinister government initiative which everyone else appears to have missed. As reported in today’s Telegraph, Civitas noticed an announcement made in September by the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, to encourage people to lodge complaints about hate crimes, which they say are being under-reported.
Apparently, the government knows for certain there is a lot of ‘hate-crime’ going on. How do they know this? Because it is not being reported.
Said Johnson:
‘While it may seem counter-intuitive to some, we believe that an increase in the number of hate crimes being reported can be a sign that we are starting to have a positive impact’.
Ah! I see! So if more ‘hate-crime’ were being reported, it would mean the authorities were getting rid of it....
Wednesday, 23rd December 2009
Can they give Britain a loan, please?
10:31pm
The choir of Clare College, Cambridge and its pro-'Palestinian' conductor are reported to have cancelled a planned performance in 'east' Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria because they are also performing in Israel.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign wrote a letter, signed by more than 200 people, asking that the choir cancel its tour of Israel or risk, in their words, ‘appearing indifferent to Palestinian suffering’. As a result, the PA asked the Bishop of Jerusalem to withdraw the invitation for the choir to sing in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
Betty Hunter, the general secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, says that desire to travel to the West Bank does not excuse the choir's tour of Israel. That tour, she says, is ‘surprising and shocking’ - something which, in her words, ‘promotes Israel as a normal state rather than one which represses...
The tragic coma of English reason
10:08pm
In recent days, an open and unambiguous medieval-style blood libel has been regurgitated in the mainstream British media. This has been full of the sensational report that Israeli doctors had been ’harvesting’ the organs of Palestinians. The implication was that a) this was only being done to Palestinians and b) the Palestinians had been alive when it was done. Neither calumny was remotely true.
What had actually happened was that – asTom Gross has noted -- some 15 years ago one rogue Israeli doctor had been transplanting minor organs like cornea and skin from dead Israelis – mainly Jewish Israelis, but also a few Arab ones – without obtaining permission from the families. This is on a par with a similar scandal in Britain, where it was discovered that doctors had been removing organs from dead children as a matter...
Too hungry, Dave -- and the people don't like it
6:18am.jpg)
For once, I agree with the analysis – if not the conclusion – of the leader in the Independent yesterday. Looking at David Cameron’s failure so far to ‘seal the deal’ with the British people, it observes that he has managed to convey not a clear alternative to Labour but instead
an impression of drift and contradiction.
Examples the paper cites and which certainly have leapt out at me are
The EU. He collapsed like a pyramid of cards over the Lisbon EU constitutional treaty. He should have had a referendum on Britain’s continuing membership of a body that has now removed the power of self-government from member states. The excuse that his promise to hold a referendum was vitiated by the done deal of the treaty is pathetic. If the new constitution is as lethal to British...'Lawfare' in Londonistan
6:14am
I see that Hamas have boasted that they have been helping masterminding the attempts to arrest Israeli leaders visiting /London for ‘war crimes’. Diya al-Din Madhoun, who heads the Hamas committee set up to coordinate the campaign, said:
‘We have provided a group of independent lawyers in Britain with documents, information and evidence’.
No surprise that Britain is the country Hamas uses for its strategy of ‘lawfare’. As Alexander Hitchens writes on Standpoint’s blog, the UK is the hub of Hamas’s European operation. But who are these ‘independent’ British lawyers who are thus being used by a terrorist group bent upon genocide to arrest their putative victims – and helping them use the legal instruments of democracy in their war to destroy it?
As Hitchens writes, one of them is Daniel Machover, a veteran...
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To those outside Judaism, the issue is arcane, complex and doubtless baffling. It probably does not affect anyone else because of the unique conflation in... I am told that, in the upper echelons of the Conservative Shadow Cabinet, the sanguine conclusion has been reached that they can ‘live with a nuclear Iran’. I am also told that, in the Downing Street bunker, the Prime Minister is considering bestowing a peerage upon Dr Mohammed Abdul Bari, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain -- a man whose goal is the Islamisation of the UK – as a quid pro quo for the peerage given to the Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks. If true, these developments illustrate once again the lethal spinelessness of Britain’s political class. The actual evidence didn’t lay a glove on Blair who was therefore always likely to be exonerated, as I observed in an article for the Spectator before its conclusions were published. People... Wednesday, 16th December 2009
An illiberal and ignorant judgment
1:00pm
So the Supreme Court has ruled against the JFS after all, which it has found guilty of racial discrimination. This judgment, handed down today, was the seminal case brought against the JFS, an Orthodox Jewish secondary school in London, by a parent whose child had been refused admission to the school on the grounds that the child was not recognised by orthodox Jewish precepts to be Jewish. This was because he had been born to a mother whose conversion to Judaism had been conducted under the auspices of the Masorti movement, a conversion which is not recognised by the Orthodox Jewish authorities which govern the JFS as having any status in Jewish religious law.Tuesday, 15th December 2009
White flag politics?
9:26am
Two disturbing reports reach me on the grapevine.Monday, 14th December 2009
Verdict first, evidence nowhere
6:01pm
I have only just caught up with John Rentoul’s excellent ‘Iraq inquiry rebuttal’ blog, which I recommend as essential reading to help combat the hallucinatory distortions now taking place almost every day in the media reporting of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. For me, it’s a case of déjà vu all over again. During the Hutton inquiry into the death of the WMD expert Dr David Kelly, I read, watched and listened in disbelief as the coverage of that inquiry systematically wrenched and distorted the evidence to fit the prior conclusion by the media that ‘Blair lied and people, including Dr Kelly, died as a result’.Sunday, 13th December 2009
Why those emails are lethal
11:57pm
In the Mail on Sunday, David Rose has dug into the email correspondence at the heart of the East Anglia CRU ‘Climate-gate’ scandal and found that, far from being a few carelessly written messages taken out of context, they are – surprise, surprise -- a game-changer. He writes correctly that they strike at the very heart of anthropogenic global warming theory by showing that the ‘evidence’ that post-industrial revolution temperatures are unprecedented is a manufactured fiction – and that at least some of these scientists, themselves at the very heart of promulgating AGW theory, knew perfectly well that the evidence did not support their claims. Here’s what Rose reports about the infamous ‘trick ‘of ‘hiding the decline’ to which the CRU director Phil Jones referred and which warmists claim has been wrenched out of context. Not so. Rose writes:
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