Britannia Radio

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29 November 2011 9:24 PM

Hague shakes his puny fist in the thirty years' invisible war

The British embassy in Tehran has been attacked. A mob threw petrol bombs, burned the Union flag and at least one vehicle and smashed a portrait of the Queen. Earlier reports said that at the compound where the diplomats live, six were held hostage for several hours – although that was downplayed by the UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague.

In response to this attack Hague said that, notwithstanding the fact that he phoned the Iranian foreign minister to tell him how angry he was, and summoned the Iranian chargé d’affaires to the Foreign Office to tell him how angry he was,

‘clearly there will be other, further, and serious consequences’.

Golly. ‘Serious consequences’, eh? His words irresistibly call to mind King Lear raging:

‘I will have such revenges on you both/That all the world shall --I will do such things,--/What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be/The terrors of the earth.’

How the Iranians must be chortling. All those years when they were blowing British soldiers to smithereens through their roadside bombs in Iraq and training up the Taleban to kill British and coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, Iran suffered zero consequences from Britain.

When during 2007 the Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized 15 Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines and held them for 13 days before releasing them, Iran suffered zero consequences from Britain – whose sailors grovelled to the Iranians instead.

When Iran’s proxies attacked Israel from Gaza and supplied thousands of rockets to threaten Israel from Lebanon, Iran suffered zero consequences from Britain – which attacked Israel instead for blocking the peace process.

All the years when Iran steadily progressed towards building its nuclear weapon in defiance of international law and in open pursuit of genocide against the Jews and regional domination, Iran suffered zero consequences of any significance from Britain.

One week ago, Britain finally got a little bit tougher when, galvanised from its torpor by the International Atomic Energy Agency which astounded everyone by actually telling the truth that Iran was working on producing a nuclear weapon, the UK government banned all British financial institutions from doing business with their Iranian counterparts, including the Central Bank of Iran. To which the Iranians have now responded with violence.

Now Hague is reacting as if that’s the last thing anyone expected. Yet on Sunday, the Iranian parliament overwhelmingly called for the expulsion of the British ambassador. And in that very debate an Iranian MP actually called for the British embassy to be stormed and diplomats taken hostage.

Are we really to understand that, having finally taken some action against Iran that might have an effect, the British government took no steps to protect its diplomats apart from warnings to avoid getting caught up in demonstrations? How can anyone not have had at the forefront of their mind the mammoth US Iranian embassy siege in 1979?

And anyway, what have we been doing maintaining diplomatic ties with Iran in the first place? Why on earth did we not cut them years ago? After all, Iran declared war upon the west in 1979 when the Islamic regime came to power. Since then, there has been virtually no serious terrorist attack against the west which hasn’t had Iran’s fingerprints on it (as I have written before, I have long suspected its involvement in 9/11 too). Britain itself suffered the Iranian embassy siege of 1980 and Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against the life of Salman Rushdie, which drove that writer into hiding for years. Yet successive British governments, along with the US and the Europeans, have behaved throughout as if merely a few rogue actors were responsible for all these attacks, and relations with Iran sailed on pretty well without any serious or permanent interruption.

For some thirty years, Britain and the west have experienced war waged upon them by Iran – but fantastically, have refused to acknowledge this fact. They refused to fight back. They refused therefore also to acknowledge what has been crystal clear for at least the past two decades: that it was never going to be a choice between war or peace with Iran. It was always going to be a choice between fighting that war sooner, when Iran was weaker and the west had more chance of minimising the fall-out, and fighting that war later, when Iran would be much stronger -- and possibly even a nuclear power -- and when the consequences for the west would be that much more terrible.

What the west refused to grasp was that there was never any chance of the Iranian regime seeing sense. That’s because what drives its dominant members at least is not conventional political impulse but an apocalyptic messianism. That means they actively seek to bring about a conflagration -- even if this consumes much of Iran -- since they believe that this apocalypse will prompt the return to earth of a religious messiah figure. They actually want to bring about the end of the world. But the west just didn’t take any of this remotely seriously.

The result has been catastrophic for the world. Iran has been outwitting the west at every turn, aided immeasurably by an American President who extended to these genocidal fanatics the hand of friendship while smashing his fist down on their principal prospective victim, Israel. As a result, Iran has enormously extended its power in the region and become seen there – disastrously -- as the strong horse which must be ridden, while the once-mighty US has become the enfeebled nag that is no longer prepared even to defend itself, let alone anyone else.

For heaven’s sake, when even that milksop Tory Sir Malcolm Rifkind is saying that a nuclear Iran must be prevented and ‘the prospect of military action must be kept on the table’ it really is time to man the lifeboats. Yet William Hague merely shakes his puny fist and squawks about ‘serious consequences’ when an attack on the British embassy takes him by surprise in this thirty years’ invisible war -- which is now rapidly reaching its terrifying denouement.

28 November 2011 8:23 PM

Another journalistic scandal -- so where's the outrage?

A particularly egregious claim by proponents of anthropogenic global warming theory is that ‘the science is settled’ and that there is a consensus amongst scientists that the atmosphere is catastrophically heating up because of man’s ever-heavier carbon footprint. Egregious because, in a classic bit of circular reasoning, scientists sceptical of AGW have been systematically denied a voice in the press and on the airwaves, their exclusion thus ‘proving’ the alleged ‘consensus’ through their absence.

Until recently, it might have been assumed that the cause of such exclusion by the BBC was simple ideological bias. For the past two weekends, however, David Rose in the Mail on Sunday has been showing that something far worse has been going on. Yesterday, Rose revealed that the BBC was so deeply in the pocket of AGW scientists that its reporting of AGW was utterly compromised.

Trawling through the second tranche of leaked emails from the nerve centre of AGW theory at East Anglia university in ‘Climategate 2’, Rose discovered, for example, that the leading UK research unit on global warming, the UEA’s Tyndall Centre, had spent £15,000 on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves. Last week, Rose wrote a related story about the involvement of the BBC’s ‘environment analyst’ Roger Harrabin in those Tyndall Centre-funded seminars. Yesterday, Rose wrote:

‘The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade.

‘They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output.

‘... BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA’s two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage.

‘Following their lead has meant the whole thrust and tone of BBC reporting has been that the science is settled, and that there is no need for debate,’ one journalist said. ‘If you disagree, you’re branded a loony.’

The BBC is a publicly-funded broadcaster whose charter commits it to the highest standards of journalistic objectivity. Such revelations might be thought to be a scandal of a high order, no? You would expect them therefore to cause a stir in the rest of the media, no?

No. Today, several stories were published about AGW, not least because of the opening of the Durban conference. We learned from the Times (£) that the fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood is to donate £1 million to fight climate change. We learned from the Guardian that £1bn was still available from the government to fund pioneering carbon capture and storage projects (phew). We learned from the Daily Telegraph that the science behind AGW theory ‘continues to strengthen’. Yet as far as I can see, not one word has appeared about the MoS revelations in the mainstream media.

Just imagine if, hypothetically, it had been revealed that the BBC had been quietly paid by the oil industry to shoot down AGW theory through sponsored seminars, vetted scripts and the exclusion of green activists from the airwaves. Or that it had been paid to promote in similar fashion the agenda of American neoconservatives, or bankers and hedge-fund managers, or UKIP, and correspondingly keep critics of the neocons, bankers or UKIP off the air. Does anyone think that following such revelations not one word would be published elsewhere – or would there be absolute uproar?

Merely to pose the question is to realise just how complete is the rout.