Saturday, 26 December 2009

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.

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The Home Secretary displays his keen intelligence, moral sense and deep love of liberty

THURSDAY, 24TH DECEMBER 2009


The think-tank Civitas has picked up on a sinister government initiative which everyone else appears to have missed. As reported in today’sTelegraph, 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. It’s the fact that no-one knows about it that shows it’s going on in spades.

Might it be that ‘hate-crimes’ are not being reported because they are, er, not actually happening? Good grief, what a thought! Of course they are happening! Don’t we know that there is simply no-one who is not racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transgenderist, disablist or ageist, or maybe all of the above?

So how can the government ensure that this epidemic of hate of which we are each of us surely either guilty or a victim will ensure that more of it is reported so that it will thus be shown to be diminishing? Why, by redefining more and more of our behaviour as ‘hate crime’ of course!

The government already showed its far-sightedness by increasing the categories of ‘hate crimes’ from ‘racism to include religious aggravation, homophobia and 'transphobic’ offences – resulting in a seven-fold increase in prosecutions for hate crimes over the past decade.

I’m sure we all feel massively safer as a result. But might they be looking for crimes that don’t exist – and criminalising the law-abiding as a result? Heavens, no. The Crown Prosecution Service says:

‘The under reporting of crime can sometimes be due to lack of confidence in the criminal justice system’.

Of course! And the fact that it’s being under-reported means the government knows it’s happening!

As Johnson observed, the Home Office needed to see

a substantial level of proof before we conclude that hate crime is not a problem in a particular area.

Isn't it wonderful to be living in the cradle of liberty?

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...

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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...

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Too hungry, Dave -- and the people don't like it

6:18am

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...

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'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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