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The UN will remain a negative force in the world as long as it allows itself to be Hijacked by Tyranny

For many the UN serves as the ultimate moral arbiter on the International stage. Regularly in debates on foreign affairs you can hear the resolutions and statements of the UN being invoked as if they carried the unquestionable authority of God. And yet the reality is that the UN operates a level of hypocrisy that is proving lethally dangerous for thousands of innocent victims all over the world. For while the world's democracies find themselves in the dock at the UN Human Rights Council, the worst atrocities are going uncommented upon while those Governments perpetrating them are legitimised and rewarded by the UN as they sit in Judgement of the Defence policies of the Governments of the Free world.

Indeed it is not simply the Foreign policy of democratic Governments that come under attack but their Domestic arrangements also. Time and time again the UN has witnessed motions from Islamic nations condemning the free press of the West accusing it of defaming Islam, this of course coming from the diplomats of countries whose State controlled media carry the most luridly anti-Semitic cartoons. And while the floor of the UN chamber is thrown open to those denying the Genocide in Darfur and attempting to silence NGOs that attempt to expose the truth about these atrocitie,s the UN congratulates itself on the wonderful job that its 'Peace' keeping forces in Southern Lebanon have done, hence why the Security Council has unanimously voted to extended their stay in the region. And yet the truth is that the UN forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) have acted as a blanket under which the genocidal Islamic terror organisation, Hizbollah, has re-armed to a level that puts their military capabilities on par with some States in the Middle East. Whereas in 2006, during its last assault on Israel's civilian population centres, Hizbollah had 14,000 fighters it now has 30,000 and whereas back then it had 15,000 rockets it now has 40,000 which, thanks to generous Syrian support, can now reach deeper into Israel than ever before. The very re-armament that the UN forces were sent to Lebanon to prevent has been so extensive that Hizbollah now has fortified military positions embedded in over 160 Lebanese villages.

Yet this kind of failure to be effective on the ground is nothing new or unusual for UN forces. While the 1994 Rwandan Genocide may be the most infamous example of UN troops standing by and looking on as the very people they had been sent to protect were slaughtered in their thousands, this is by no means the last example of such shocking complicity. Only just in August of this year did Rwandan and Congolese rebels rape over 200 wmen and children in Eastern Congo. After three weeks the UN peace keeping mission to the Congo has still failed to make any official Statement on the incident but the lack of comment on their part is nowhere near as damning as the fact that it was this very same mission that was posted in the area that they knew to be occupied by the rebels that stood back and failed to make any kind of attempted intervention in these shocking events.

Indeed even the most casual glance over some of the atrocities committed around the world in the past twelve moths reveals to just what an appalling extent the UN is failing to fulfill even the most basic elements of its own self proclaimed mission. Indeed under the Vienna Declaration all UN members pledged to defend human rights including the right to life. And yet.....

June 2009: Tehran dozens of protesters killed.

July: China troops fire on Muslim Wiga protesters 200 killed.

August: Russia two foreign aid workers killed in Chechnya with suspected Government complicity.

September: Yemen government bombs refugee camp killing 80.

October: Terrorists attack a Mosque killing the Iman and 14 others.

November: Philippines 57 opposition activists murdered.

December: Iran protesters met with live ammunition, beatings and arrests; 10 killed.

January: Pakistan 182 civilians killed in terror attacks.

February: Afghanistan Taliban attack kills 18 including medical workers.

March: Nigeria 500 Christians killed in religiously motivated attacks.

April: Kirghistan troops fire on demonstrators with 84 being slaughtered.

May: Libya executes 18 foreigners without proper trial.

The UN Human Rights Council reaction to all of these crimes? Silence!

And yet the emergency sessions and investigations that these violations failed to merit was exactly the response witnessed when Israel defended itself against the Gaza flotilla weapons smugglers; killing 9 self declared Jihadis with the HRC holding an urgent debate, issuing a condemnatory resolution and establishing yet another unimpartial investigation.

As long as the UN continues to allow itself to be used by the tyrannies and human rights abusers of the developing world against the Democracies and free societies of the West the UN will continue to act as a facilitator for supporting and legitimising the worst crimes perpetrated against human beings. If the UN is to have any hope as serving as a genuinely moral forum for the world's nations then those with terrible human rights records must be prevented from having any influence over the UN's processes and only those countries with authentic functioning Democracies should be given any real say over UN rulings. However for as long as the UN remains in its present form it will continue to serve for a tool for dictatorships to continue delegitimising and weakening the free world in the face of tyranny.

Once more Israel finds itself paying a bloody price for American ‘Peace’ dellusions

You really don't have to be an expert in the recent events of the Middle East to have been able to predict what might happen if yet another round of unwanted Peace talks was imposed on the Palestinians, but then Obama really is no expert. For Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority who is now well overdue in his electoral term, the status quo could hardly have been better. With a freeze on Jews building in the West Bank, Israeli security forces significantly pulled back in Palestinian areas, the Palestinian Economy experiencing unprecedented growth and copious amounts world sympathy, legitimacy and money all flowing in his direction, Abbas really has very little interest in seeking his rather cushy arrangement shaken up. No surprise then that Abbas set so many demands and preconditions before he would be so gracious as to even talk directly with the Israelis. Indeed at one point the Palestinian President's demands were essentially just setting the outcome of the negotiations before they'd even began, something which threatened them ever getting off of the ground in the first place.

Yet a general unwillingness to cooperate with negotiations is the least of problems with brash American attempts to impose negotiations on the two parties. Every round of so called Peace talks in the past has been marred by the murderous campaigns of Palestinian terror groups. And it didn't take miraculous levels of clairvoyance to foresee that the relative quiet Israelis and Palestinians have enjoyed in recent months would be brought to an abrupt end by so called Peace talks clumsily forced by Obama. Yet few could have predicted this intolerably familiar pattern of violence would be resurrected so soon.

Hamas however has wasted no time in attempting to derail even the slim hopes that these talks would succeed. Tuesday saw the grisly attack on an Israeli car near Hebron leading to the murder of the four passengers, including a pregnant woman. And the following day there was yet another shooting on an Israeli civilian vehicle in which two were badly injured. And while the media continues to peddle Palestinian excuses about Jewish settlements the reality is that Jewish settlers have seen normal life in their communities put on hold, the Israeli security measures formerly in place to protect them irresponsibly pulled back and now find themselves sitting targets for Palestinian terrorists desiring to foil attempts for peace.

What Hamas apologists in Britain and elsewhere will make of these attacks and the huge celebratory rallies that have accompanied them in Gaza is anyone's guess, although the capacity of Israel's enemies in the West to attempt to justify the murder of civilians and attack Israel's attempt to defend its population never ceases to amaze. And no doubt also of amazement to many, if only the media were to cover it, would be how in recent days the streets of the Palestinian city Ramallah has witnessed large crowds of Palestinians actually demonstrating against the Peace talks. A dark secret for such news agencies as the BBC.

How much more violence these ill conceived attempts for peace will unleash is hard to tell, but we can only hope that it will not be seen on the same horrendous scale witnessed with Oslo and Camp David.

The failing Presidency of Barak Obama: America comes to its senses sooner than expected

We all remember where we were the night of Obamas spectacular landslide victory. And we all remember the images of frenzied crowds in celebration from Chicago to Bangkok that were flashed across our screens, when the celebrity of Barak Obama outstripped that of even Madonna. Not since Mao's cultural revolution have masses been seen chanting the name of a politician with such genuine enthusiasm. Yet looking back it seems that those revelling in America knew almost as little about what Obama had in store for them as those inexplicably elated Thais did. And it has been the people of America rather than the people of Thailand who have felt the brunt of the Obama presidency. Perhaps they should have been suspicious even then, when crowds in far off countries who knew next to nothing about American politics were joining them in the almost messianic spectacle.

It is safe to say that for most Americans Barak Obama, now on his 42% approval rating, has proven to be one disappointment after another. For many it was the point at which the Democrats forced through a radically unpopular and unamerican bill of health care reform that made them stop and rethink. For others it was the growing realisation that Obama was inflating the size and influence of the State beyond proportions ever thought acceptable by American standards while this along with the failed stimulus plan saw the nation slip into ever more alarming levels of debt. Meanwhile in the minds of many American's there was a dim sense that Obama lacked their appreciation of their nation's greatness or understood the threat that radical Islam posed to this, while his diplomatic bumblings on the world stage were the cause of growing embarrassment. The charismatic leadership that had initially drawn so many in now seems to be failing Obama and giving way to an image of inexperience, weakness and even a lackluster attitude tinged with just enough arrogance to make it truly too unpalatable to watch.

And in the background of all of this has been stifling unemployment and ongoing bad news about the state of an economy that seems to refuse to recover. Not surprisingly then Democrats are starting to panic about the approaching November mid-terms in which many commentators are seriously discussing the possibility of Obama's party losing control of both Houses.

This weekend over 300,000 conservatives descended on Washington for a rally to demonstrate the nation's support for its Service Men and Women but also, and perhaps more significantly, to call for America to return to its founding values and principles. Heavily present throughout the ranks of this self-confident gathering of the Right were members of the avowedly anti-big State Tea Party movement, whose emergence is a sign of just how far the Obama presidency has pushed certain sections of the American public. And yet dissatisfaction with the reign of Obama is by no means the exclusive territory of fringe groups, indeed no doubt to Obama's dismay Martin Luther King's daughter even agreed to speak at the rally. Today you don't have to speak to many Americans before you come across those who optimistically, if a little naively, gave Obama their vote in 2008 and have no intention of repeating the same mistake this time around.

UCL and Radical Islam: sleepwalking towards apocalypse

UCL in the heart of the salubrious Bloomsbury was founded by the 18th century thinker Jeremy Bentham as a beacon of academic and religious tolerance. Yet surely even for an institution whose genesis is found in the principle of freedom of conscience and expression there comes a point where the question must be asked whether a fundamentalist approach to this matter will not ultimately bring about its own demise and the demise of freedom and tolerance itself? How much intolerance can be tolerated before this noble goal has canceled itself out? How much freedom of expression can you allow to those who agitate against freedom of expression before one day you find those very same voices silencing yourself? Enter Malcolm Grant, Provost of UCL.

Grant is a man for whom there seem to be no limits on what can be said. Such is his die hard devotion to freedom of speech that if assassins were outside his office plotting how to kill him it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to picture Grant asking them if they'd like to sit down and have something to drink while they discuss.


For although UCL's Provost has washed his hands of all responsibility of that minor Umar Farouk Abdulmatalab affair (the former president of UCL's Islamic society who attempted to blowup himself and a passenger jet over the skies of Detroit one Christmas day) the fact is UCL has been playing host to some of the most serious pro-Jihad Islamists that modern Britain has to offer. And as has now become all too apparent; when it comes to Islamic radicals the British are starting to look like connoisseurs.


And while Abdulmatalab may be the most high profile of UCL's Jihadi alumni he is far from the only young Muslim to have been radicalised in the walls of this hallowed institution. As a report released earlier this year by the Centre of Social Cohesion revealed in recent years UCL's Islamic society has invited an entourage of some of the most extreme and bigoted clerics they could get to come and preach to Muslim students on campus.


This is a phenomenon that UCL's authorities have shown themselves to be utterly complicit in. Later this month UCL will be playing host to the National Ramadan Conference, which judging by those invited to speak will be nowhere near as a prestigious event as its title might imply. However if raving anti-Semitism, Homophobia and anti-Westernism is your thing then this conference will be one not to be missed.


There's Jalal Ibn Saeed to look forward to who has described Jews as selfishly only caring about themselves while enslaving non-Jews who they believe to be damned, or there's Zahir Mahmoud who has declared his support for Hamas and martyrdom while courageously voicing his opposition to the British army and the western notion of free speech. But of course the jewel in the crown of this line up of hate has to be Uthman Lateef who is affiliated with the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir which the Government is currently looking into having made illegal. Lateef has also preached hatred against Homosexuals and championed the Muslim conquest of Europe. Yet probably the most exciting thing Lateef is ever known to have said in public is his prediction that the Devil will come from the Jews of Isfahan, accompanied by 70,000 of them by all accounts.
These are the kind of views that Malcolm Grant believes should be given a platform at his University.


And while Grant harbours delusions of being a warrior for free speech genuine warriors of Islamic holy war will be coming to recruit at UCL; something that both Boris Johnson and the British Army have been prevented from doing in the resent past. Meanwhile the prospects of an institution happy welcoming those who wish to destroy the values that it stands upon seem about as rosey as a civilization that does the same.

Britain must deal with the Anti-Semitism among its Muslim Community

British politicians are always paying lip service to the urgent need to combat the rise in anti-Semitism, such kitsch events as Holocaust memorial day are often the favourite time wheel out such lackluster calls against that hatred that thankfully still remains so absolutely beyond the pale in western society. Yet if our leaders really cared about turning back the tide of the growth of Jew hatred then they would stop trying to fool themselves and the rest of us about where the problem is really coming from. The truth of the matter is that most Jews in Britain today do not live in fear of attack from members of the BNP or white supremacist groups, but rather from another minority community which itself claims to be suffering persecution - the Muslim community.

Needless to say that coming out with the above statement is almost guaranteed to be met with accusations of Islamophobia. Yet just as Jews can not always be protesting frank conversations about Israel with accusations of anti-Semitism so too it just is not good enough for the Islamic community to hide behind the charge of Islamophobia every time its conduct is up for debate. The facts must be allowed to speak for themselves without any attempt to drown them out with shrieks of feigned offence and false indignation. And as the expert in Modern Anti-Semitism Professor Robert Wistrich points out; the statistical evidence shows that British Muslims commit violent acts anti-Semitism at almost ten times the rate of the non-Muslim population. And after that what more is there to be said?

Of course apologists will argue that it is only to be expected that as Muslims they will show concern for their co-religionists in Gaza and the West Bank and that this naturally expresses itself as an anti-Israel sentiment. But when Muslims are heard chanting Islamic death chants about the Jews and seen carrying placards about the Holocaust at anti-Israel demonstrations in London can it really be denied that there isn't something more sinister at work?

And while these things will inevitably be dismissed as the work of extremists it should be remembered that the work of British Muslim extremists have already had deadly consequences for Jews in recent years. After all in 2003 two British Muslims heeded the call of a third British Muslim ; Abdullah al-Faisal, to go and murder Israelis by blowing themselves up in a Tel Aviv music bar. And indeed it was the British Muslim Omar Sheikh who was the mastermind of the kidnapping and beheading of the Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002.

While these events are of course the work of intensely radicalised extremists it seems that Jew hatred filters down to rather less adventurous sections of Britain's Islamic community also. In recent days the story has come to light of a young man in Walsall who had adopted a Jewish appearance as part of his desire to convert to Judaism but found himself the subject of constant abuse from local Muslim teenagers until finally a group of seven of them set upon him and beat him badly.

If Britain's political leaders truly mean what they say about anti-Semitism then they would confront this issue directly and make clear to the leaders of the British Islamic community that this culture of hate must be brought to an end. No accusations of Islamophobia. No excuses about Israel. No threats about the risk of pushing their youth into the arms of extremists. The virulent anti-Semtism rampant in sections of Britain's Islamic community must end.

The time has come for Obama to admit he has been wrong on Iran

If there was ever a time for the American President to come out and apologise to his people and indeed the world at large for his failings regarding helping to facilitate the emergence a nuclear Iran then this week seemed like a pretty good one. First it was announced by the Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has activated a second centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium and then Iran itself came out boasting to the world that it already had the necessary mass graves for US servicemen freshly dug. Well i think we can safely say that that's well over a years worth of softly softly Obama style appeasement diplomacy exposed for what it really was all along; a farce.

The UN security council may well have forbade Iran's continued enrichment of uranium but as usual the rulings issued by the UN have been taken about as seriously as the latest Katie Price autobiography. By putting a second centrifuge into service Iran has been able to dramatically increase the efficiency with which it can enrich uranium so speeding it towards attaining levels of enrichment that would produce weapons grade materials. As of the beginning of this week we all just moved dangerously closer to living in a world in which Iran has the nuclear capabilities for dominating the region, holding the world to ransom and erasing those of its neighbours that it took a disliking to. Indeed this would be no cold war scenario, given the Islamist mentality that the Iranian regime operates under the prospect of doomsday visions are no deterrent for Iran's leaders. Should Iran achieve nuclear capabilities then the best possible scenario we could hope for would be a nuclear arms race across the Middle East, a situation in which the likes of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria would all be pointing nuclear weapons at one another.

But have no fear, in response to all of this the US military has revealed that it does indeed have a contingency plan for a military strike on Iran after all. The only issue is, as the chairman on the US Joint Chief of Staffs Adm. Mullen explained; the US military thinks a strike would 'probably be a bad idea'. Oh well in that case we'll all just sit around and wait for Ahmadinejad to go off the idea of nuclear weapons then shall we? Either that or try another round of appeasement; perhaps if we all offered to convert to Shia Islam.......

Ahmedinejad clearly isn't about to experience some sudden change of heart, indeed in response to the idea of a US military strike Iran promised that it would retaliate with attacks on US bases across the Gulf. Clearly those terribly tough economic sanctions that Obama was holding back as a last resort if his policy of talking nicely somehow failed to bare fruit have left the Iranians completely undeterred. What should really by now be obvious to all those concerned is that the Iranian problem is one that only gets worse the longer it is left. There is no point putting off the inevitable, especially when the inevitable intervention is going to become increasingly ever more perilous the longer it is delayed.

Now is the time for the Obama administration to admit that its policy on Iran was ill conceived from the start and that the time has come, and indeed came some time ago, for a new more proactive approach.

Cameron wouldn't have blundered over Israel in Turkey if he had have been in touch with his true values

It doesn't really matter whether the British Prime Minister made his ill judged comments concerning Israel during his visit to Turkey because he believed they would win favour with easily appeased hosts or impress a morally outraged electorate back home or even, heaven forbid, because he actually believed what he was saying to be true. What matters is that in saying what he did Cameron demonstrated one of two things; that either he really doesn't understand Israel or that he has completely lost touch with the values that he and his party purport to stand for.

The modern British Conservative Party has always stood on such principles as freedom of the individual, enterprise, democracy, the importance of the nation state maintaining a strong military for the defence of its citizens and the illegitimacy of terrorism. And if David Cameron knew anything about Israel and the values that its government and society cling to so resolutely then he would know that these principles that should be at the core of his conservatism are the very same core principles of the country that he has so flippantly chastised. And as a self professed moderate and liberal within his party David Cameron should find all the more to admire in the open and progressive nature of Israeli culture and society.

Furthermore before deriding Israel's attempts to defend its civilians from rocket fire by Islamist terror groups he might care to remember how he defends the presence of his own troops in Afghanistan - to keep the streets of Britain safe we are told. Indeed there is a strong case to be made for the link between terror training in Afghanistan and the threat of attacks on British soil, but in comparison to thousands of kasaam rockets being fired in the direction of the homes of over one million Israelis the link seems at best tenuous. Yet if Cameron seems convinced that the Afghan civilian lives lost are a justifiable price worth paying for keeping Britain safe then how can he describe Israel's blockade of Hamas controlled Gaza as unacceptable.

In calling Gaza a 'prison camp' and Israel's attempts to prevent weapons infiltrating the strip as piracy David Cameron is not only making claims that are patently false but he is also further contributing to the problem that he professes a desire to counteract. Such language only emboldens the stubbornness of those who are still holding out against all pressure to try and encourage them to negotiate and cooperate with Israel's efforts for the conflict's resolution. Indeed if demanding Israel abandon its security concerns for the whims of good publicity was not irresponsible enough then the total lack of consideration for the impact of such inflammatory statements in a volatile region is truly concerning.

If Cameron took the time to understand what Israel stands for in the world and the terrible dilemmas it faces, and if he took the time to hold this up against the values that he himself stands for then he would no doubt come to realise that far from talking Israel down he should be doing everything possible to help strengthen her ever precarious position and support the Netanyahu government in its attempts to find a viable way to coexist with its undeniably hostile neighbours.

Labour Logic: Robbing the Middle Classes and then paying them benefits

Those who dismissed David Cameron’s talk of rolling back the State as nothing more than a gimmick might want to take a good long look at some of the latest figures to be released on tax and welfare. They reveal a surreal picture of a society where the successful see their income savagely raided only to find remnants of it returned to them in the form of benefits and welfare that they have no need of. This is bloated state bureaucracy at its worst as it blindly eats up people’s hard earned wealth along with their independence.

The new calculations by Smith and Williamson reveal that the average family now has an eye wateringly high 39% of their income taken away from them in the form of taxes. However for the Middle Class this rises to the draconian figure of 49% of people’s income. On the most basic level there must surely be a clear moral unacceptability to the State forcibly requisitioning almost half of people’s money. Indeed for those in the top rate of tax income tax rises to 50% alone not including other forms of indirect tax. This is privately earned wealth and no matter what marvellous programmes the State purports to be undertaking on its citizen’s behalf it has no right to seize it in such abundance.

Perhaps there would be grounds for attempting to defend the fact that taxes on Middle Class families have increased by 40% since 1997 if in return Labour had been delivering some social miracle. If in return for robbing the rich to better the poor society had in fact witnessed greater equality and opportunities for the deprived then these policies may at least have had something with which to justify them. If we were being given immaculate hospitals, excelling schools, crime free streets and generous provision for the elderly then perhaps we would have to tolerate these inroads to our freedom.

But this is not what has been happening. Public services are undeniably shoddy and desperately underperforming in comparison to how much cash is thrown at them. The amount pensioners are allotted is pitiful while certain urban areas increasingly take on a feeling of lawlessness. Furthermore none of these attempts to redistribute wealth has done anything to make British society any more equal. The gap between rich and poor has continued to grow rapidly while social mobility under Labour has fallen to levels lower than those so complained about by the Left under Margret Thatcher.

The entire situation takes another dizzying turn for the unfathomable when another set of recently released figures are taken into consideration, this time by the Office of National Statistics. They show that last year 32% of benefits went to people on higher than average incomes, a bill of 53 billion pounds. Money is quite literally being given away to people who have no need of it. People are having their money taken from them only to then have it returned to them with astronomic administrative fees deducted and at the end of this process instructed to be eternally grateful to the omnipotent and all benevolent State because their own money is being handed back to them dressed up as tax credits and benefits.

This tax on the wealth creating sections on the population is undoubtedly stifling the incentive for entrepreneurship and self betterment. It tells people that there is no point in starting your own business or trying to increase your income because it will only be taken from you by the government anyway. What does increase your income, people are told, is handouts from the State. This not only takes away the incentive to prosper through your own initiative but it also takes away peoples incentive and ability to seek their own welfare provision. Heavily taxed Middle Class families who might otherwise choose to get private medical cover, pay for the children’s education privately or make their own pension provisions are left unable to do so. If these people were left alone to arrange these things for themselves then it would lift a significant burden from public services and leave them for those who genuinely need them. The same should be the case for the benefits system.

Middle Class families don’t need benefits, they need their own money and incentives to put more wealth in the economy and cater for their own health and educational needs. This is not about better bank accounts for the privileged because such a scenario inevitably only serves to benefit the less well off also. The above situation creates jobs and income for these people and frees up their public services and welfare system from those who shouldn’t need to rely on it.

What has happened under New Labour in this respect has been appallingly illiberal and intolerably stupid and unjust. Unjust to those who have had their hard earned money stolen by the government and unjust to those who genuinely require welfare but instead have seen it paid to those who have no need of it. At the first possible opportunity the new government must start to work to rectify this.

The Palestinian Authority – The art of saying one thing whilst doing the opposite

This week Palestinian authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been in Washington meeting with Obama. Presumably this must be some kind of reward for Abbas having finally agreed to enter into indirect talks with the Israelis, after having had his many preconditions met, not least the demand that all construction for Jewish homes in Israel’s disputed territories be stopped. Yet something rather strange has been going on during these talks and during a press conference in Washington this week the mask almost threatened to slip.

Obama spoke of the need for Israel to continue to make progress regarding its ‘settlements’, although its hard to see how much more Israel can do on ‘settlement’ expansion considering that it is already enforcing a total freeze on Jewish construction in the West Bank. How much more frozen can Obama expect the freeze to be? Then the American President turned his attention to the Palestinian side and remarked that they too needed to make progress regarding incitement. To this Abbas indignantly declared that there was no incitement taking place on the part of the Palestinian Authority. Yet all indicators would point otherwise, including a recent report by the NGO Palestinian Media Watch which quite clearly shows that since the so called Peace Talks were resumed the Palestinian industry of hate and call to terror has been booming.
http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=2375

For while Abbas has been talking to the American President and international press of his commitment to coexistence with Israel he has been saying something troublingly different to his own people. Just a few weeks ago Abbas gave a speech broadcast on Palestinian Television in which he made quite clear that all Jews should have to leave Israel. Indeed as the latest report by Palestinian Media Watch so clearly demonstrates, since the start of peace talks the Palestinian Authority has, at every level of Palestinian society, incited hatred against Jews and Israel, called for its destruction, glorified terrorism and encouraged Palestinian children to aspire to join in armed struggle against the Jewish State. Those bothering to keep an eye open will have witnessed even top members of the Palestinian leadership apologising to their people for the cessation of violence against Israel and assuring them that it will commence again soon. For as Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Religious Affairs Minister in the Palestinian Authority, explained in a public address on the 14th of May this year; peace must be a 4th rate priority for the Palestinians.

This incitement for the destruction of Israel through terror has taken place in everything from Palestinian school text books and kids TV programmes through to crosswords in newspapers and on television game shows. This year’s Palestinian Women’s Day on May the 17th was dedicated to the memory of Dalal Mugrahbi and a square in Ramallah was named after her. Who was Dalal Mugrahbi? No not a renowned Palestinian Feminist or Rights Activist but a female terrorist who was responsible for killing 37 Israelis during a bus hijacking. Meanwhile May was also a wonderful month for anyone who enjoys a good healthy combination football and Islamic terrorism. One Palestinian football team was named after Fatah terror mastermind Majed Abu Sharar while Abdallah Daoud, of the 2002 militant uprising in Bethlehem and organiser of several other terror attacks was honoured with an entire football tournament being named after him. Perhaps most chilling to watch is the footage from the June 2010 Palestinian Culture and Education Festival which featured jihadis dancing around the stage with rifles while singing of their will to martyrdom. An insight into Palestinian culture and education if ever there was one.
You can watch those festivities here:
http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=2376

Under the terms of the Oslo Peace agreements both Israel and the Palestinians are obligated to educate their populations for peace and Hillary Clinton has made perfectly clear that Palestinian cooperation in this matter is an essential element of peace talks being successful. Yet as all the evidence shows incitement to hate and terror is still alive and well under Abbas’ leadership and one has to ask how Israel can be expected to conduct negotiations with a Palestinian leadership that is still taking steps towards facilitating the ultimate destruction of the Jewish State.

Islam’s Latest PR Campaign – when it comes to tolerance and understanding why must the traffic only ever be in one direction?

This week the British Islamic community launched a new poster campaign for the London Underground entitled ‘Inspired by Muhammad’. The posters feature pictures of British Muslims alongside such benevolent statements as ‘I believe in Social Justice’ and ‘I believe in women’s rights’ followed each time by the claim ‘so did Muhammad’. Especially intriguing was the one that claimed Muhammad believed in protecting the environment. I’m not entirely convinced that climate change and deforestation were concerns Muhammad would have been aware of in 7th century Arabia, but then I suppose if you are a prophet…..

The campaign justifies itself with a set of YouGov statistics that claim to show just what a negative attitude the British public has towards Islam. I wonder why that might be? And so in light of our collective ignorance we are all to be re-educated by a set of posters and an online campaign focused around the question ‘who was Muhammad’. Sadly the makers of the website seem to have absent mindedly forgotten to make mention of Muhammad’s marriage to a Nine year old or his massacring of populations who so unreasonably failed to convert to Islam. I wager that those behind this campaign hope the British public will be a little more cooperative than the troublesome Polytheists of Mecca or the obstinate Jews of Khyber.

Yet the real question is why is it that it is always the rest of the British population who must be educated, lectured to and preached at about their terrible ignorance of the apparently faultless doctrine of Islam? It seems to have become perfectly acceptable for Britain’s Islamic preachers to dismiss the entirety of British culture as materialistic, licentious and decadent. True there are aspects of British culture which have increasingly become some of those things but this now seems to be being used by the Islamic leadership as an excuse for rejecting integration into British society, deciding instead that it is the rest of us who should learn from them.

And while the British population is busily being ‘educated’ in the breathtaking wonders of the way of Muhammad, who is really making any genuine effort to educate the insulated parts of the Britain’s Muslim community to the importance of Western values of democracy and tolerance for individual freedoms. What, I wonder, would be the reaction if a similar campaign was began to target the Islamic community with posters promoting traditional British, or heaven forbid, Christian cultural values?

Lastly it might be worth remembering that we see no such similar campaigns to win over the wider public to the brilliance of Sikhism or the justness of Hinduism. No doubt those behind the ‘Inspired by Muhammad’ campaign would say that these religions don’t need such an initiative because they don’t suffer from the same negative public image as Islam does. But then that only raises the question of why don’t they? Why don’t people see Sikhism as a religion of war or Hinduism as a religion of female persecution or any of the religions of Britain’s Chinese immigrants as aggressively hostile to British culture?

Perhaps the reason that these other minority groups aren’t launching similar PR campaigns is quite simply because they don’t have anything to prove. For when we are told over and over again that Islam is a religion of Peace, one can’t help but eventually respond ‘I think the lady does protest too much’.

Assassinate Thatcher? – Has Labour learnt Nothing?

When it comes to Labour, history just seems to keep on repeating itself. First they wreck the public finances (again) and lose office (again), now just like in the early 80s they are swinging dangerously back towards the old Left. During Labour’s leadership hustings at the GMB conference, in the suitably grim Southport, the bright-eyed hopefuls demonstrated they have clearly learnt nothing from Labour’s disastorous last years in government.

Andy Burnham told his Trade Union audience that Labour had listened too much to big business while Ed Miliband told them Labour in government hadn’t listened enough to…yes you guessed it…the Unions! Indeed Miliband (the younger) said that Labour had gone wrong precisely where it had neglected its core values. I wonder what those might be? The same core values in Michael Foot’s oh so popular 1983 manifesto perchance? Those would appear to be the days these people would want to return themselves to.

But perhaps the biggest surprise came when John McDonnell mirthfully told the audience that if he could do one thing to make the world a better place he would go back to the 80s and assassinate Thatcher. And for this he received the heartiest applause of the whole conference. How might he do it I wonder, with a bombing of a Hotel that would leave many bystanders dead and injured maybe, just as the IRA attempted to? Indeed in the past McDonnell has spoken glowingly of the IRA and how he believes it was their terrorism that helped spur on the peace talks.

Now all I can assume is that McDonnell and indeed most of the people at this conference must have spent the past 25 years in some obscure mining town cut off from the rest of the Britain; that is how far their politics seems to have progressed. For if they had travelled to just about any other part of the country then they could not have failed to notice how Thatcher’s revolution has immeasurably improved the British people’s lives and the Nation at large. Indeed Britons have gained more prosperity and opportunities for personal success as a result of Thatcher’s program than anyone ever could have imagined possible back when she took the reigns of a failing nation in 1979. The reason that Tony Blair was elected was because people thought New Labour had finally understood this.

If it turns out that Labour has in fact not understood that the British people now share Thatcher’s vision of property owning democracy and instead imagine that they want to be taken back to Mass Nationalisation, Cradle to Grave Welfarism, Council Houses, Heavy Industry, Coal, Soot, Unions, Strikes, Inflation, Unemployment, Shortages, Power Cuts, Rioting, Economic and Social Breakdown; then they will be out of power again for another political generation.

How Do you Solve a Problem like Lauren?

This is a question that Tony Blair must have been wrestling with for some years now, for Lauren Booth would appear to have made embarrassing the former Prime Minister her life’s work, only not quite. There is one pursuit that seems to take precedence over humiliating her brother-in-law; spreading as much hate as is humanly possible against the Jewish State of Israel.

From her ineloquent and childish columns and speeches that so compliment her simplistic and infantile thinking it doesn’t take long to realise that clearly the woman is a fool. Fools and madmen can be all too easily dismissed, usually rightly so, but in the character of Lauren Booth there is someone who is symptomatic of a phenomenon that goes far wider than her own drivel laden wittering. And while much of what she has written about has indeed been dull and self-pitying drivel about her personal life she like the wider phenomenon that she represents has an all together more dangerous streak.

This weekend Booth was one of the speakers at the 20,000 strong rally furiously protesting the death of the eight militants who attacked the Israeli Sailors sent to prevent them braking Israel’s naval blockade of Hamas. Just to repeat: that’s 20,000 protestors for eight dead, fortunately there hasn’t been quite the same ratio of protestors for the hundreds of thousands murdered in Darfur, the Metropolitan Police never could have coped you know. After having told her elated crowed not to watch the BBC because it had dared to feature an Israeli spokesperson, or ‘Israeli killer Zionist’ as Booth so articulately put it, she went on to say something far more chilling.

‘You wanna know something? I don’t care about Israel’s security’ she delivered coldly and calmly before bellowing down the microphone ‘I don’t give a damn!’

This statement she confidently justified with the claim that because of its conduct Israel doesn’t deserve security. Oh well that’s okay then.
But no, it’s not okay is it. Is she really telling us that Israeli civilians deserve to die because of the actions of their government? Even if the Israeli government were engaged in all the murderous campaigns that Booth claims does she really believe that Palestinian terrorists would then be entitled to kill Israeli children simply because they are Jewish Israelis? It would seem that she does.
Indeed she went on to say that the world should take up arms against Israel in revenge. Peace activists just ain’t what they used to be.

Back in 2009, at another mass rally against Israel’s right to self-defence, Booth had declared ‘when Israel kills a Gazan child, they kill my child’. One can only fear for the welfare of children whose mother can make such shamefully disingenuous and flippant remarks. Yet her comments almost make a little more sense when viewed along with her claim in the same speech to be ‘proud to be from Gaza’ which she then followed by leading the crowed in a chant of ‘we are all Palestinian’.

Ms Booth is of course from Southern England as were most of the other protestors and one might further ask why they weren’t all ‘Tibetans’ or ‘Darfurians’, don’t these peoples deserve just a little humanitarian solidarity also? In claiming to all be Palestinian Booth and her adherents were revealing what they really believe the core of the Palestinian identity to be; opposition of the State of Israel. For these people being Palestinian is not about being an Arab from a particular part of the Middle East, no a Palestinian must be someone who fights against the Jewish State and therefore any Westerner who joins them in that fight, no matter how half-heartedly, is also Palestinian. The two identities flow and merge into one it would seem.

And on the subject of identities merging it is worth noting that Booth also now works as a presenter for the Iranian mouthpiece Press TV, no Israeli spokespeople are featured there you can rest assured. On that channel you can watch Booth sporting a rather unfetching headscarf and carrying out interviews with the likes of suicide bomber wannabe Jenny Tonge, the two no doubt struggling not to outdo one another in the act of closet Jew hatred. But there is something truly sickening about seeing women who were clearly not raised Muslim now willingly donning the scarf. This is not simply turning back the clock on hard fought for women’s rights, this is introducing new types of female oppression that are totally alien to this society and that the likes of Emily Pankhurst could never have imagined having to battle against.

This is really the crux of the matter when it comes to a problem like Lauren Booth. Many have remarked on the strange alliance being formed between the illiberal Left and hardline Islamists, yet now the likes of Booth and George Galloway have so slavishly repeated the Islamist propaganda that they have crossed a threshold where they have ceased to simply be in alliance with these people but rather have become indistinguishable from them.

In Blackburn Booth spoke at a large protest, of mostly Muslim men, organised by the Islamic community there. After whipping up the crowed into a frenzy by telling them how discriminated against Muslims in this country are she proceeded with one of the most vile and hate filled tirades against Israel imaginable. Replacing the word ‘Israel’ with ‘the Jews’ in her address to 10,000 Muslims would have produced a speech that might have been the envy of Joseph Goebbels:

“We will fight for you and your children! And we have a message to you, Israel. You’re finished. That’s it. No more stories about self-defense. No, no, that’s over. You – you are the nation of hate! And you are the criminals – that we detest! … We are angry, and we want Israel out of this country!”

Indeed Lauren Booth has often referred to Gaza as a concentration camp and questioned how those who were in concentration camps themselves could do such a thing. But as the photo below of a rather well nourished Booth in a rather well stocked shop in Gaza would suggest she must know of some rather different concentration camps to the ones the rest of us are familiar with.

How do you solve a problem like Lauren Booth, I’m not sure. But there maybe many more Lauren Booths coming our way soon and they will constitute a real problem.

Here’s a photo of the delightful Lauren picking up a few snacks from a shop in Gaza while on her holiday there in 2008 (during the supposed blockade).

And another........

And here are some videos of Ms Booth speaking in Blackburn and at this weekends anti-Israel festivities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbDj3N2gy44

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pub57LhGbsE

The Euro Zone to be ‘dead within 5 Years’– the Eurosceptics just might get vindicated after all

Back in the spring of 2001 an election took place in which William Hague led his Conservative party on an avowedly anti-EU anti-Single Currency platform. Then he and his party were mocked and jeered as a stuck in the past band of pensioners and fox hunting throwbacks whose politics revolved around saving the village pub and salvaging Imperial measurements – pounds and ounces. Today as a Telegraph survey of the City’s 25 leading economists reveals that the majority of these experts believe the Euro won’t survive the next five years it seems that Hague’s blue rinse brigade may just have the last laugh.

With Greece, Spain and Portugal all facing severe economic difficulties it looks as if the best the Euro Zone could hope for is to be able to stagger on with a much reduced membership. Yet now some are questioning whether the single currency can hope to survive at all. Indeed even German Chancellor Angela Merkel has come out and spoken of the grave existential threats that the Euro faces. And without its single currency it seems that European Federalism could soon find itself in the same dejected state as so many of the other doomed ideologies that European leaders have attempted to impose on their peoples over the last century.

Undoubtedly the global downturn has played its part; indeed the recession seems to be fast becoming a locomotive of history whose effects could well be echoing down the decades with us with for quite some time to come. Yet surely now is the time for those who so blindly championed a European single currency to confess that the whole project was ill conceived from the first. Once again outlandish visions of grandeur took one look at reality and decided they didn’t much care for what it had to say. Those who professed opposition to the Euro were branded as having committed the crime of nostalgia and were accused of standing in the way of progress while the rest of us boldly and valiantly marched on to our brave new sunlit transnational Utopia.

But the single currency was ill conceived and not because grandmothers across Europe were sentimentally clinging to their Pounds, Francs and Drachma but rather for precisely the reason that those who weren’t listened to gave; simply that it was unworkable. Even within individual Nation States different regions have greatly varying economic circumstances and compete with one another to influence their governments into pursuing an economic policy that best suits their own needs. It was madness to ever think that this would somehow not be all the more the case across a whole continent.

Not that anyone one would acknowledge it then and not that anyone will probably acknowledge it now but those geriatric, flag waving, Jerusalem singing Euro sceptics that lined up behind Hague ten years ago just may find themselves to have been on the right side of history all along.

The Demonstrations outside London’s Israeli Embassy say a lot about the Two Sides

It is of course only natural that people should be upset when there is loss of civilian life at the hands of an army, especially if they have been led to believe that the victims were peace activists and humanitarian aid workers, rather than the heavily armed militants which they in fact appear to have been. Predictably the hallucinatory media and subsequent public reaction has been out of all proportion compared to what it would have been had these events occurred with just about any country other than Israel. Yet the nature of the demonstrations taking place outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington says important something about a cultural conflict brewing beneath the surface of British Society.

On Monday evening, the day that news of Israel’s interception of the Hamas bound Flotilla broke, as many as a thousand angry protestors swarmed around London’s Israeli embassy. The next evening in heavy rain their numbers dwindled to about 250 still very vocal hardliners. Depressingly this small protest received far more media attention than the pro-Israel demonstration of more than 700 supporters received the following evening, which inevitably was greeted by an even more depleted yet even more enraged anti-Israel demonstration. They furiously howled and shrieked ‘MURDERERS’ at those making their way to the Pro-Israel rally. They even began throwing things at one of the pro-Israel demonstrators who had they looked at more closely they would have seen a wooden crucifix hanging around his neck, for as he explained he was an Arab Christian who had come to voice his support for Israel.

While the pro-Israel supporters waved British and Israeli flags and sung the British National Anthem and Peace Songs a rather different picture has been emerging from the anti-Israel protest. Amidst the Palestinian flags activists were also waving a huge Hezbollah flag, the Iranian satellite terror group that calls for the murder of all Jews, an incitement to terrorism on the streets of London if ever there was one. And while the pro-Israel demonstrators carried placards calling for peace for Israelis and Gazan’s, freedom for Gaza from Hamas and aid to its people rather than arms the other side were chanting for Israel’s destruction and reciting that much loved old classic ‘From the River to the Sea; Palestine will be Free’ a direct call for the Genocidal destruction of the State of Israel.

And before someone helpfully attempts to remind me that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism we needn’t even go there because there was quite enough open anti-Semitism being voiced to keep race hate monitors busy for weeks to come. One Muslim boy (there were many young children brought along to this rally) was given the megaphone and loudly proclaimed ‘there was this five year old boy who was kidnapped by a Jew, can you believe it? Can you believe it?’ No I can’t believe it, it sounds made up to me and a bit like a medieval blood libel. Previously the same boy had declared ‘how can the Jews take this land?’ and how indeed could Quakerly liberals and Left Wing Jews stand along side such people without stopping to wonder if there wasn’t perhaps some conflict between the tolerant progressive views they purport to champion and the ones being voiced by their fellow travelers.

Not to be out done in the joys of Judeophobia by a minor a group of young Muslim men ecstatically bounced around while singing the Islamic battle cry ‘Khyber al-Yahud’ which calls on today’s Jews to remember Muhammad’s slaughter of the Jews at Khyber. But of course I’m sure someone more enlightened than myself will be able to tell me that in the correct Arabic translation this is actually a call to peace.

Remarkably the two demonstrations managed not to descend into violence, although several of the anti-Israel protestors had to be led away by the police, including one who was found to be carrying an offensive weapon. Not that there weren’t those who didn’t attempt to provoke the pro-Israel demonstrators. Perhaps most bizarrely was the incident of a group of heavily hijabed girls hysterically accusing ‘Fake Jews! Fake Jews!’ at a group of black hatted Orthodox men as they made their way from the Israeli rally. There was of course no time for them to stop and produce documents assuring these zealous young women of the validity of their Jewish status.

It is probably too much to ask that British observers be able to take a step back to fully consider the spectacle currently taking place on their streets. But if they did then coming quite clearly into vision they would see two distinct groups and two world views set before them. One side patriotically committed to Britain while also showing their support for the Middle East’s only real democracy, calling for peace for both peoples, an end to terror and a fare hearing for that democratic state in Britain’s media, not much of which bothered to turn up to report on these calls. On the other side onlookers would find an incensed rabble of Islamic fanatics, radical socialists and militant pacifists. All of them deeply opposed to mainstream British culture and many of them as eager to see the British establishment pulled down as quickly as they believe the Jewish State should be wiped from the face of the earth.

But you need not take my word for any of this. The footage below speaks for itself.

The anti-Israel Demonstration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc6IsmXUu7M&feature=player_embedded

The Pro-Israel Demonstration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Uaqmf69e0

Six Billion Out of the Deficit is the First steps to Dismantling the Welfare State? I rather think Not

Most people still in possession of their faculties are in agreement that reducing the budget deficit has to be the most urgent priority of the new British government. That incidentally is the consensus among Europe’s leading economies also. Indeed there are a good many among us who have raised the possibility that taking the equivalent of just 1% out of the national debt just may not be going quite far enough. Some experts have gone so far as to argue that at the very least 20% will need to be cut from the budget of every government department if the worst deficit sine the Second World War is to be brought to heel. The horrible irony being that that deficit was run up fighting the existential threat Nazi Germany posed to the nation’s survival, this one on the other hand has been run up by Gordon Brown fighting an existential threat posed by reality. The threat of course being to his own career, not to our national survival.

Yet Brown and his party in its dying days are not the only ones who seem to have preferred putting their own self interest over that of the national one. In response to the Queen’s Speech that laid out the new British government’s plans for reducing the national debt the public sector union PCS alleged that this was a dastardly attempt to start the process for the dismantling of the Welfare State. If only. But since when exactly were quangos and frivolous levels of government advertising part of the Welfare State? Of course the PCS doesn’t really believe that taking six billion out of the budget will signal the end of the National Health Service but rather they fear that cutting government waste could put their own pay packets on the line.

However the savings can not come from internal government administration alone. Reducing the number of paper clips and potted plants in civil service offices will only get you so far. The fact is that the annual cost of welfare in Britain is 200 billion pounds alone and much of that is spent on unemployment benefits and state pensions. Clearly some reductions will have to be made in this area also. Its either that or the nation continues borrowing 3 billion pounds a week as it was doing by the end of Gordon Brown’s time in government. Unfortunately the PCS seems to favour the latter as the more viable of the two options. They must be pretty much on their own with that one.

Sadly for those of us that hoped that the old Trade Union Left had been permanently consigned to a well deserved combination of obscurity and mundanity it looks like the year ahead could be rather a disappointing one.

The Obama-Biden Foreign Policy: If it wasn’t so tragic it would almost be funny

It may seem a little unusual to talk in terms of an Obama- Biden Foreign Policy but that was exactly the term the vice president Joe Biden chose to employ during his bizarre address to the European Union earlier this week. There is something mildly amusing about the thought of Biden attempting to elevate himself to such a position in the world’s collective imagination where he would be on a parity with the Great Obama. However that’s really where the hilarity should stop, from then on it’s all rather more concerning.

Biden’s speech to the EU was not only alarming because of the way that it seemed to express support for a Federal Europe; a total disregard for national sovereignty, not to mention the way in which the vice president bestowed the most undeserved levels of praise on the strikingly undemocratic Lisbon Treaty and described the European Parliament as the ‘bastion of European Democracy’. No where the speech really entered into a category of its very own levels of absurdity was when Biden directly stated that it was not Washington that should be considered the Capital of the Free World but rather Brussels, along with all its unelected Eurocrats presumably. But was it these people who oversaw the intervention in the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s or replaced oppressive and radically religious tyrannies in Iraq and Afghanistan with democracies? I think not.

Indeed it is not just the EU that the Obama-Biden administration has been actively courting. No the White House has found a new love of transnational organisations as seen with the pledge Obama made early on in his presidency to work more closely with the UN. At the risk of sounding tiresome I shan’t mention all the usual worn out statistics about the UN but rather simply point out that this organisation is currently hosting a conference on the ‘Inalienable Palestinian Rights’. This should surely beg the question of what kind of Rights the rest of us might hope to receive in the UN’s world vision. Since when did an organisation supposedly committed to equal rights for all peoples and nationalities start holding conferences on the Rights of just one group of people?

Where Obama’s Administration really enters into treacherous waters is with its horrifyingly naive view of Diplomacy and ‘soft power’. At a speech Obama gave this weekend at West Point, the elite military training college, the President once again outlined his belief that Diplomacy was the way forward for American Foreign Policy. Yet surely America’s recent total inability to limit the aggressive behaviour of States such as North Korea and Iran should have been enough to signal to anyone even mildly acquainted with reality that this approach is failing and humiliatingly so at that. What is even more concerning is that this approach has even crashed and burned with nations that should have been more easily won over. As the political commentator Bill Kristol pointed out the whole point of having someone like Obama as President is he was supposed to be able to get on side those borderline States that Bush was said alienate. Yet now we see two perfect examples of such borderline States, Turkey and Brazil, not supporting US foreign policy but rather doing a deal with Ahmadinejad’s regime that they hope will act as a screen for the Islamic State’s development of Genocidal weapons. Isn’t Turkey supposed to be part of NATO? And what business does a South American country have aligning itself with an Islamist Regime?

Clearly Obama’s Foreign Policy has only served to embolden the enemies of western democracy and weaken the position of America. The ideas behind Obama’s strategy are laughable but the consequences could all too quickly become tragic.

The Boycott Movement Stoops to a new Shameful Low

There was never anything particularly gallant or admirable about the movement for Boycotting Israel. It’s targeting of goods, academics, cultural figures and even sporting and science events has always really just been terrorism in another form. Consistently those targeted by the Boycott movement were neither the Israeli government nor the Israeli military but rather private individuals who happened to be Israeli; many of whom no longer even lived in Israel.

One of the most shocking episodes in this crackdown on personal freedom and free speech was witnessed at the University College Union in 2008. Then a motion was proposed that would have demanded all Israeli and Jewish Academics in Britain to be compelled to denounce Israel if they wished to maintain the positions they held in their Universities. An academic union that you might have thought would have had defending free speech as its priority was instead instituting Thought Crime and a witch hunt. Fortunately this proposal was not only deemed immoral but also illegal and it was subsequently overturned.

However if the 2008 UCU affair was reminiscent of the Medieval convert or die policy on Jews then there have been other cases more chillingly similar to the 20th century anti-Semitism that attacks Jews simply for being Jewish regardless of their politics or religion. In one such incident two Israelis were sacked from the editorial board of a Manchester Academic Journal simply because they were Israeli Jews, what stance they took on the conflict was considered irrelevant; the crime of the ethnicity of their birth was enough.

In the past year the sight of small rag banned groups of anti-Capitalist protestors standing outside Marks & Spencers and Waitrose, waving the Palestinian flag and undertaking the occasional supermarket sweep of the few Israeli herbs and fruits they can find in store has increasingly become less of a rarity. But now this eccentric group has taken an all together more vicious twist in their approach. Not satisfied with protesting outside large highstreet brands they have now found a private business owned by just one Israeli woman to attack. Ahava may be a big label and big business but the Ahava shop in Covent Garden is a privately run franchise. That this is a woman’s livelihood and business that she has put so much work and investment into seems of no concern to the protestors, they come to scare away shoppers for several hours every weekend and say they won’t stop until the shop closes. What do they imagine this will do to the owner if they succeed? It seems that Israelis are beyond human concern for these people and that punishing this one woman for the acts of the government of the country where her products are sourced from is entirely legitimate.

The people instigating these protests clearly appeared to be rather unusual, one or two of them even seemed as if they might be slightly mentally ill. What they are not however is stupid. They know full well that the placards they hold about dead children in Gaza have nothing to do with this woman and that closing down her business will do nothing to help Palestinians. Yet they do not stop. For a long time those that hate Israelis but don’t love Palestinians either have been baying for blood and they don’t care where they find it. Victimizing this woman and trying to make her suffer because of a foreign conflict is a vicious and vindictive way to behave and it should make anyone who has any involvement in the anti-Israel movement think carefully about exactly who it is they are rubbing shoulders with.

A place where the rights of Terrorists trump those of the General Public – Welcome to the UK

It is a strange situation to be in when your country decides that it is more concerned for the well being of people who want to kill you and everyone you know than it is for the safety of yourself and your fellow British citizens, but that is now where we all find ourselves. This month the Special Immigration Appeals Commission rejected the Home Office’s request to deport Abid Nasser and Ahmad Faraz Kahn back to Pakistan from where they had originally come. Travelling to the UK on student visas this was never intended to be your conventional student year abroad experience. Abid and Ahmad along with the eight other men they came to Britain with were not here to catch up on a bit of sightseeing, sample the local cuisine, pick up a bit of the lingo and join in the general student revelry safely away from mum and dad. No these boys in their early twenties were Al-Qaeda operatives with the intention of blowing up British people across North West England. It is not entirely clear what led these young men to identify Easter shoppers in Liverpool and Manchester as being particularly decadent westerners more deserving of incineration than those living elsewhere in the UK but the group began preparations for their mass murder none the less.

None of any of this seems to have been of the slightest interest to Britain’s immigration services who for years now have considered the interests of anyone wishing to come to this country to far outweigh those of British citizens already living here. After all it was not that the Commission claimed that the men weren’t Al-Qaeda ringleaders, they admitted they were. Nor was it that they doubted they posed a risk to the public, the report released by the appeals commission stated very clearly that these men were a direct threat to the British public. Yet judged to be more important than any of this was the commission’s concern that if returned to Pakistan the terrorists might face torture and even execution. Clearly the eight other men who Abid and Ahmad came to Britain with and who the Home Office also wanted deported had no such concerns for their wellbeing in Pakistan for they all returned there on their own accord. As for the two that will be continuing their stay here with us in UK, with no explosives found in their possession, they shan’t be going to prison either. Instead the best our security services can offer us is a control order; a costly but ineffectual measure to make it look as if someone is doing something.

As the political commentator Douglas Murray put it: this is not the behaviour of a society that wishes to survive. But then such calls will be wasted on vast swathes of the population who have so little appreciation for either the true worth or fragility of Britain’s liberal democracy or indeed pride in their national heritage that they are positively disinterested in the continuation of their own society. Of infinitely more concern to them is that the State they happen to live in should be the embodiment of enlightened multi-cultural tolerance and conform to the highest demands of the morality invented by the European Human Rights Commission. There are also significant sections of the population for whom Douglas Murray’s call will be utterly repugnant; their nihilism expresses itself as an open hatred of everything related to our culture and for them, whether they be members of far-Left groups or radical Mosques, the sooner traditional British society and its values are swept away the better.

Against all of this it seems that little can be hoped for as far as the government is concerned. The new Conservative Home Secretary has already said that she will not be further appealing the Commission’s decision. Once David Cameron had promised us all a new vigour in the fight against Radical Islam and the scrapping of the Human Rights Act in favour of a British Bill of Rights. However one or two things have changed since then. For one thing the Conservatives are now sharing power with the Liberal Democrats, a party who has attempted to appeal to the worst elements in political Islam, targeting Muslim areas with anti-Israel leaflets and whose leading figures such as Jenny Tonge and Simon Hughes, who proclaimed ‘thanks be to Allah’ during an election rally, have openly allied themselves with Islamists. So it would seem that the British public will just have to take its chances, our authorities no longer seem to have the will or the ability to protect us from foreign Jihadis wishing to blow themselves up on our highstreets.

Some Palestinian House Demolitions that you won’t have heard about

With the Western media fanatically covering every minutia of events in Israel to the point where Jews in the West Bank can’t build an extension on their home or illegally built Palestinian structures in Jerusalem can’t be demolished without the world’s media commenting and passing judgement on it you’d think that if 40 Palestinian homes were bulldozed you’d get to hear about it, wouldn’t you? Well in this case you probably won’t have. And the reason that you won’t have heard about it is because the ones doing the demolition work was Hamas, whose ever growing savage list of misdemeanours are protected by a blanket of silence in the West’s Liberal press.

Last week residents of Rafah, a town in southern Gaza, were forced from their homes by policeman wielding batons only to watch their homes demolished before their eyes. Unsurprisingly for this totalitarian Islamist terror state the media were of course restricted from entering the area while all of the destruction took place. The reason given for the demolitions was that these homes were built illegally on government land, a notion instantly thrown out of court when ever Israel demolishes Palestinian homes constructed without housing permits. Another 180 houses are slated for demolition in Rafah and no alternative measures have been taken to accommodate the residents of any of these houses, just as no compensation has been offered to any of the victims either. With a shortage of housing and building materials these acts will undoubtedly only exacerbate the unprecedented level of human suffering that Hamas has already caused in Gaza, yet the world seems unmoved.

Had Israel demolished 40 Palestinian homes there would have been an all together different response. The newspapers would have over flown with emotive pictures and venomous language condemning Israel as the perpetrator of ethnic cleansing. Panorama would have aired a documentary and Newsnight a special report. Perhaps the White House would have issued a statement calling such acts on the part of Israel ‘unconducive for peace’ and maybe the UN would have commissioned an enquiry or passed a resolution. But no there has been none of this.

The silence is not simply the result of the hypocritical and pseudo-racist attitude that fails to condemn governments in the developing world for acts that if committed by a Western nation would be labelled unforgivable crimes but rather it betrays the true motives of those who claim to care about the welfare of the Palestinians. Quite simply they don’t. If they did then they would speak out every time that Hamas or the Palestinian Authority carried out gruesome public executions, persecuted their Christian minority or stole millions of dollars in humanitarian aid for terror and private bank accounts. What those who present themselves as the champions of the rights of the Palestinian people really care about is ripping the Jewish State to shreds. And this they do as and whenever the opportunity presents itself, otherwise they remain silent.

Can the Coalition Go Far Enough on the Deficit?

The level of denial currently gripping the British public is such that what ever this new government does it will find itself lambasted by voters and considering the nature of the coalition the Chancellor may find himself coming under even greater pressure not to address the looming fiscal crisis. Once again everyone is choosing to live in the world they wish they lived in rather than in the one in which they actually do. When George Osborne announces exactly where 6.billion pounds worth of spending cuts will be coming from there will no doubt be a great deal of crying and wailing and gnashing of teeth from a good many quarters. But what people should really be ringing their hands in despair over is the fact that 6.billion will be an insignificant drop in a deficit ocean of 163.billion pounds worth of national debt that the economy is about to drown in.

During the election campaign Labour and the Liberals were complicit in conspiring to further the lie that what was more important than facing up to the pending deficit crisis was continuing government borrowing so that elaborate top heavy welfare systems could be fed with more cash and those on the payroll of bloated bureaucracies could be maintained. They scorned the Tories as the enemies of the British public, eager to slash spending on vital public services so that they could push down taxes for their wealthy landed friends from Oxford and Eton, so the Lib-Lab chorus claimed.

Furthermore now that Labour is out of office there have been further revelations of how Gordon Brown’s government not only caused the deficit and dismissed its importance but that in its dyeing days it wrecked the public finances further in a desperate and selfish attempt to maintain itself in power. In addition to the publicly known about deficit billions more were frittered on secret contracts targeted in Labour’s marginal seats; £600 million on a computer contract here, £13 billion on a tanker aircraft programme there. The legacy that New Labour has left Britain with is criminal.

The British public must now recognise exactly what they are facing. Britain currently stands with the largest budget deficit of any developed country in the world: larger than that of Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and America. And even if the government manages to achieve its projected reduction in the deficit Britain will still maintain its position as the worst offending economy in the G7. With a deficit of 11.6% of GDP Britain must accept the necessary cuts in public spending and worse still the inevitable tax rises. Voters can punish the Conservatives at the next election if they wish but like it or not they are the only Party who may just about have the courage to take the desperately needed action.

Just when you thought the UN couldn’t become any more Morally Redundant it goes and elects Libya to the Human Rights Council

Back in 2006 the UN disbanded its Human Rights Commission with Kofi Anan describing it as having a ‘credibility deficit’. A rather polite understatement if ever there was one. In its place was created a new beacon of hope for the world’s oppressed and down trodden called the UN Human Rights Council. But really they all should have saved themselves the bother. This year four Africa nations; Angola, Uganda, Mauritania and Libya ran unopposed for the four seats available to Africa on the Human Rights Council. Elections in which candidates run unopposed, that’s the UN’s version of Democracy for you. But what is so particularly shocking is that Libya’s horrifying ascent to this body of supposed universal moral justice did not scrape by as some terrible peculiarity of the voting system, no it received 80% of the vote. Put more simply Libya only needed 97 countries from the UN’s 192 members. Yet no less than 155 turned out to show their support for Libya taking its place at the Human Rights Council. All of these nations happily ignoring the 37 human rights groups that voiced their protest to Libya assuming such a position. Few debacles could have exposed more crudely the truth about what the UN really stands for.

In case you have never heard of Libya, as perhaps we should assume the countries who voted for it hadn’t, there are one or two things that you should know. The Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya is headed by one Colonel Kaddafi, easily one of the world’s most long serving and infamous tyrants. Friend of terrorists, scourge of human rights groups; which just so happen to be outlawed in Libya. And if you were wondering how a country that outlaws human rights groups can have a place on a Human Rights Council you might fist want to ask how a country that rejects the UN Charta, as Libya does, can indeed have any involvement in UN proceedings what so ever. Not surprisingly then when it comes to Human Rights abuses Libya is in a league all of its very own. In 2005 the Washington based Freedom House, one of the worlds most well respected political rights groups, gave Libya a 7 on its scale of political freedom. The scale only ranges from 1 to 7 with 1 representing the most politically free countries. So you can work out the rest for yourself.

More recently Colonel Kaddafi has accused none other than Switzerland of mass murder. This bizarre seemingly reasonless accusation may have something to do with the fact that Kaddafi’s son, the delectable Hannibal Kaddafi, was under arrest in Switzerland at the time for beating up one of his servants. Not to be out done Libya promptly retaliated by arresting a Swiss citizen supposedly on grounds of visa violations. To Libya’s credit at least a reason was given for the arrest. Disappearance, torture and arrest without charge are all common place in Libya.

Still Libya won’t find itself alone on the Human Rights Council. At the same time that it was being voted in Qatar was also elected to take one of the Asian seats on the council. Qatar has almost as interesting a record as Libya when it comes to violence against women, exploitation of ethnic minority workers and handing out death sentences as casually as most British courts issue Anti-Social Behavior Orders. Of Course Amnesty International refused to comment on the suitability of Qatar’s membership of the Human Rights Council, an indication of just what a principled organization that has become in recent years.

Any civilized nation should have broken its association with the UN decades ago so as to avoid being further tainted by this sickening organization that lectures democracies on the supposed illegality of their wars while failing miserably to so much as intervene in let alone prevent mass atrocities and genocides. Those countries that care about freedom, democracy and human rights must immediately divest from the UN. Nothing else can save their reputations for complicity in one of the most morally inverted spectacles in modern world history.

Cutting New York’s Anti-Terror Budget: the Mysterious World of Barak Obama

The recent failed car bombing in Manhattan’s Time Square along with the attempted Christmas Day transatlantic flight attack served as a reminder for many American’s that the September 11th attacks were by no means a one off special from the enemies of the West. Following these latest attacks they heard strong words from their President, reassuring words. But when it comes to Obama it always pays to look a little more closely to his actions.

Despite the pleadings of Mayor Bloomberg the Obama administration has announced that it will be cutting New York’s anti-terrorism budget this year; 27% off of mass transit security and 25% from port security. Perhaps not your typical response in the wake of a failed bomb plot that could have seen hundreds of New Yorkers and tourists blown away as they went about their business. But then it looks far less unusual when considered alongside Obama’s wider plans for scaling back the safety of Americans. Indeed this is the second year in a row that the current administration set about raiding $30 million from a government programme established to secure American cities. A not unworthy cause considering that since the 2001 Twin Tower attacks Homeland Security has prevented at least 11 terror attacks in New York alone. Yet Obama seems to remain unconcerned, for while his eagerness to splash out on welfare programmes will leave his next budget with a deficit hole of oh no more than $1.6 trillion, American’s can rest assured that their President will at least be making savings elsewhere; $2.5 billion from the defence budget to be precise.

None of this would really matter if we were living in the strange version of the world that Obama claims we are, but of course we’re not. A window into what that world looks like came in the form of Obama’s National Defence Review in February of this year. For while the review dedicates 8 pages to analysing the possible implications climate change could have on defence it only manages to fleetingly mention the threat of a nuclear Iran just once. As for the threat of Radical Islam, well the 128 page document didn’t seem to quite have room for that. Clearly the fact that the man responsible for shooting dead 12 soldiers at a Texan military base in November of last year was of course a Muslim is in the Obama world view nothing more than an irrelevant coincidence. Well we wouldn’t want to go and say anything that might undermine all of the nice things Obama said to the Islamic world in his Cairo speech. An address that strayed so far from reality that it really should have been nominated for the Booker prize for fiction.

Obama inhabits a mysterious world of his and the Lefts own making. It is critically dangerous because it fails to deal with the threats that we really face, dealing instead with a world that Obama wishes we lived in rather than with the one that we actually do. It is often said that Conservatives are merely Liberals who have been mugged by reality, well then all I can say is that Obama walks on much safer streets than the rest of us.