It figures. Now, apparently, there are some red faces: The university has already been urged by its own dons to give up the £300,000 it received from a foundation headed by the son of Colonel Gaddafi. Howard Davies, the LSE director, is said to have told academics this week that he was ashamed of the institution’s links to the dictatorship. Questions have been emerging about the LSE’s wider reliance on finance from authoritarian regimes. One of its lecture halls has been named in honour of a sheikh reputed to have promoted anti-Semitic material. An academic The first survey conducted in Egypt since the fall of President Mubarak shows that the main priority of most Egyptians is freedom and democracy: they believe economic and social reforms can wait. And the evidence from the polling is..? Asked to rank the priorities of the new Egyptian government, this is what the public wants: 1. Political stability (74% made this their first or second priority out of six) 2. Security of the masses (57%) 3. Economic growth (39%) 4. Generation of employment (16%) 5. Better education (11%) 6. Better healthcare system (3%) It is also clear that Obama and many others in the international community have been quicker in condemning settlement construction in Israel than atrocities by Arab dictators against innocent civilians. Has retired South African judge Richard Goldstone considered the possibility of heading a special commission of inquiry to look into the war crimes that are being perpetrated against Libyans and other Arabs? Settlements may be a problem, but they are not more dangerous than the massacres that are being perpetrated against Arabs. It took President Barack Obama nine days to condemn Col. Muammar Gaddafi's massacres in Libya as ‘outrageous’ and ‘unacceptable.’ It took the UN Security Council more than a The Foreign Secretary William Hague is getting it in the neck for the chaos, and indeed the buck must stop with him. He has, however, reportedly been spending the day passing it to his officials who are said to have been carpeted. Well, Hague can’t totally get away with that: it was he who said,... In the Times this morning, Rachel Sylvester wrote: The sense of powerlessness may be one reason why there was deep frustration at the Foreign Office and No 10 when the Americans last week vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Britain My daughter, who goes to an orthodox Jewish school, tells me that, when the subject of Israel is discussed in their Jewish studies GCSE class, students routinely state things like ‘the Jews have no right to Israel because they stole the land from the Palestinians’. In making statements like that, those regular 15-16 year old Jewish kids, are simply repeating what they are told relentlessly in every part of the media (as I have regularly reported on this web). In the midst of the big story of revolution across the entire Arab world (funny how the media is suddenly realising
Saturday, 26th February 2011
The debauching of the LSE
10:04pm
The Times (£) reports that half the board of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, which has received money from Libya among other Arab dictatorships, has called for a boycott of Israel, the one democracy in the Middle East.
...Friday, 25th February 2011
A case of wishful thinking?
2:50pm
I was more than a little puzzled to read apress release from YouGov about polling evidence from Egypt conducted by YouGovSiraj, YouGov’s Dubai-based Middle East company, for Al Aan, a pan-Arab satellite broadcaster. The press release says excitedly:
...The double standard
1:45pm
The unmissable Khaled abu Toameh, the Israeli Arab journalist whose record of unflinching truth-telling puts the entire western media to shame, yet again tells it as it is:
...Thursday, 24th February 2011
Carry On Up the Maghreb?
8:28pm
A huge amount of criticism has erupted today over the farcical incompetence of Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office in its efforts to evacuate British nationals stranded in Libya. While these terrified Brits faced marauding mobs and dwindling supplies of food, British embassy officials weren’t even answering their phones; while other countries were busily airlifting their people out in successive plane-loads, the British government was scurrying round trying to find an airline company to replace the flights designated for the rescue mission which had been cancelled.Tuesday, 22nd February 2011
Britain hymns Middle East democracy -- except the one it throws under the bus
6:13pm
While the British Prime Minister David Cameron is in Egypt hymning the prospect there of democracy and human rights (which looks increasingly as if it’s destined to remain merely a pipe-dream in the minds of western ostriches) what has been overlooked is that this same David Cameron has chosen this of all moments to push the one and only democracy in the region, Israel, under the Islamist bus. While America finally vetoed the UN motion slamming Israel’s ‘illegal’ settlements because it went too far even for Obama, Britain voted in favour.
...The oldest obsession
3:42pm
The tsunami of indoctrination in anti-Israel lies and bigotry by the British media and intelligentsia has reached such a pitch that, as blogger Edgar Davidson reports, it is now warping the minds of even pro-Israel Jews. He writes:
...
Monday, 28 February 2011
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