civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy and further states that if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document. What self-serving rubbish. There was ample evidence at the time from numerous sources that Hamas was telling lies about the number of civilians who were killed by Israeli fire.... If I recall correctly, we went into Libya — or, at any rate, over Libya — to stop the brutal Qaddafi dictatorship killing the Libyan people. And thanks to our efforts a whole new mass movement of freedom-loving democrats now has the opportunity to kill the Libyan people. As the Los Angeles Timesreported from Benghazi, these democrats are roaming the city “rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies.” According to the New York Times, “Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.” We dropped bombs on Qaddafi’s crowd for attacking civilians, and we’re prepared to do the must be persuaded that their long-term future lies in Britain... The minister said there needed to be a new approach in which people did not simply ‘rub along together and as long as people obey the law that’s quite sufficient.’ ‘I think it’s a common experience now that we know less about each other than we used to and I think there’s a very strong feeling that we need to understand each other and we need to be working together as a nation,’ Lady Neville-Jones added. ‘[We are] trying to convince minorities in this country that Daily Mail, 4 April 2011 A major newspaper poll published at the weekend revealed something that should surprise no one — that an overwhelming majority of people believe Britain has gone soft on law and order. They are particularly upset that imprisonment is now so regularly replaced by community punishments. They want longer and tougher prison sentences instead. As if on cue, along comes the Sentencing Council to contradict the public. The Council is an independent body, made up of judges and others associated with criminal justice, which aims to produce consistency in courts’ sentencing decisions. Last week, it produced a consultation paper on sentencing guidelines for drug crimes. This proposed that some criminals convicted of supplying the most dangerous illegal drugs, such as heroin or cocaine, should escape jail and be given community service orders instead. The flawed assumptions behind this proposal tell us much about the galloping disarray that has overtaken law and order in Britain. True, community sentences are only suggested for those convicted of supplying small quantities of such drugs. But these ‘small’ amounts include up to 50g of heroin or cocaine — enough for 1,000 hits of heroin or 1,000 lines of cocaine. That’s an awful lot of Class A drug users. The Sentencing Council’s reasoning is bizarre. It states, for example, that jail should not apply to those ‘small-scale’ dealers who have ‘no expectation of gain’ and no ‘influence’ on any chain of criminal activity. In what world are its members living? Can anyone really imagine any drug dealer handing out enough heroin or cocaine for 1,000 hits with no expectation of personal gain? And the idea that any dealer operates in a vacuum, with no ‘influence’ on a criminal chain, is frankly risible. Big drug dealers rely on smaller drug dealers to distribute the stuff. All of them are involved in the same dreadful process of exploitation and enslavement. The Council’s overriding concern appears to be for the mainly female drug ‘mules’ who are used to transport drugs — often by swallowing them in tiny plastic bags — to UK drug dealers from overseas. As the Council observes, such people are often ignorant and exploited. Accordingly, it regards them as deserving sympathy more than censure. But many other criminals could just as plausibly be seen as ignorant and exploited. And the fact remains that such ‘mules’ profit themselves from causing exploitation, not to mention the harm they inflict upon society from drug users’ activities. In other words, the Council’s concern is directed wholly at the welfare of the criminal rather than the welfare of society and the need to protect it from the impact of illegal drugs. (On second thoughts, there is another obvious and no less unpalatable concern — the need to save money by cutting the need for prison places.) Moreover, its concern for the welfare of the ‘mules’ makes no sense even by its own lights. For it states that if ‘mules’ are convicted of carrying larger quantities of drugs, they should be sent to prison. But if they are being so badly exploited, surely the more packets of heroin or cocaine they are forced to swallow, the greater their exploitation. So by the Council’s own logic, the more drugs they carry, the stronger the case for not jailing them. Absurd? Of course. But that’s where the flawed reasoning in the Sentencing Council’s consultation paper leads. Sure, some drug crimes are more serious than others and should earn a heavier sentence. But drug dealing is always so serious that the starting point for sentencing should invariably be a jail term. The Council labours under the common delusion that small-fry dealers should be given low priority in order to concentrate on catching the ‘Mr Bigs’ of the drugs world. But the idea of a ‘Mr Big’ is little more than a chimera. For with so many users habitually selling some of their drugs, dealing is akin to a geometric pattern that continuously expands — with small-fry dealers often themselves becoming ‘Mr Bigs’ in turn. The only way to get on top of the ever-greater scourge of drug use is to be seen to apply fitting punishment to every dealer. Instead, the Sentencing Council’s proposal sends out the signal once again that the law against illegal drugs is not to be taken seriously. Such desperately dangerous signalling is hardly new. Only last week, a drug dealer who had been caught with a massive haul of drugs (including cocaine, ecstasy, three bin bags of cannabis and deadly crystal meth worth £50,000) was spared jail by Judge Stephen Holt, who gave him a 12-month suspended sentence. Back in 1967, Rolling Stones Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were all given jail sentences of between three months and a year merely for possessing cannabis — although after an outcry these sentences were later commuted to stiff fines. Yet what a difference from nowadays, when only a third of dealers supplying Class A drugs receive custodial sentences. The reason is that so many of the great and the good have been influenced by the relentless influence of drug legalisation propaganda. This has effectively brainwashed them into believing that the main problem is not the drugs themselves, but the law that is designed to control them. And this, in turn, is part of the wider perception — currently embodied by no less than the Justice Secretary himself, Ken Clarke — that prison doesn’t work and leads only to a ‘revolving door’ of criminality. The problem is, of course, that the preferred alternative to jail, community service orders, have just as bad a failure rate in keeping criminals on the straight and narrow — but with the added disadvantage that they provide the beleaguered public with no respite from such criminals’ activities. The real reason why there is such an animus against imprisonment among our ruling elite is that they have come to believe that punishment itself is uncivilised. On the contrary — without punishment there can be no justice and thus no civilised society. Among the general public, this essential moral truth is still widely understood. That’s why, when in last weekend’s poll people were asked to say whether punishment, containment, reform or deterrence was the most important function of prison, twice as many chose punishment over containment, with even fewer prioritising rehabilitation or deterrence. And that’s why no fewer than 81 per cent of the general public said sentencing was ‘too lenient’. For such soundly based views, however, the public are despised as atavistic knuckle-draggers by the more enlightened souls responsible for criminal justice policy. It is these leaders, however, who have lost sight of what justice actually means. That is the core reason for the demoralisation and loss of direction over law and order. The muddled defeatism of the governing class over prison mirrors its muddled defeatism over drugs. It believes that prison makes crime more likely and the law on drugs makes drug crime worse. But the truth is that the impact of imprisonment has been eroded through ever-shorter jail terms. And it’s not the law that makes drug use more of a problem, but rather that the law is applied inconsistently and that its signals are accordingly fatally compromised. Whether over drugs or crime in general, the actual problem is a loss of moral compass among those responsible for keeping us all safe. And that is why the Sentencing Council’s proposals are likely to induce even more despair among a general public that believes that, on law and order, its leaders have simply lost the plot.
Saturday, 2nd April 2011
Richard Goldstone recants. What price the Israel witch-hunt now?
11:16pm
In an extraordinary article in the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone has now admitted that his infamous report was wrong. Having fuelled the blood libel that in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza Israel had targeted civilians and possibly had committed crimes against humanity, he now says that, as a result of the final report of the UN committee of independent experts and other evidence that has emerged since his report was published, he accepts thatThe Libyan madness
10:57pm
Absolutely priceless -- Mark Steyn on Libya:
...Friday, 1st April 2011
The need to understand
4:42pm
The Security Minister Baroness Neville-Jones has been given the task of drawing up the British government’s revised strategy on counter-terrorism – the last one having been more of a counter-counter-terrorism strategy. Today, the Telegraphhas reported her as saying that British Muslims
...Wednesday, 30th March 2011
A light in the darkness: British Muslims for Israel
6:52pm
A warm welcome to a new and very brave kid on the block – British Muslims for Israel. As I have often said, where someone stands on Israel is for me the litmus test of whether they are a decent and rational human being or pose a threat not merely to Jewish interests but to civilised values. Unfortunately, even among those many Muslims who are opposed to the jihad and support western democracy, animosity towards Israel often runs horrifyingly deep. Any Muslim who speaks up in defence of Israel runs significant personal risks. So those behind British Muslims for Israel, which has emerged from the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy, merit a huge amount of praise and support. They also offer a ray of hope for the future. They show that there are Muslims who pass that key civilisational...
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
April 4, 2011
The public instinct on law and order
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