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.

Jerusalem – Still just about holding it together

Most of the world will neither know or greatly care that today is Yom Yerushalayim, the day that celebrates the 1967 reunification of the holy city of Jerusalem. It is a day that has become endowed with an almost inexpressible level of significance in the modern Jewish collective conscious. It marks an event of biblical proportions; when an attempt was made to destroy the Jewish people in their land. That instead resulted in these same Jews finding themselves dancing to the Western Wall, their holy place from which all Jews had been forbidden from accessing by the Jordanian occupiers since 1948. In that time the Eastern half of the City saw its ancient synagogues demolished and the tomb stones of its Jewish cemeteries turned into building materials. To this day a Jordanian built hotel constructed mostly out of Jewish graves sits atop the Mount of Olives boasting impressive panoramic views over the rest of the city.

It is the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish identity that explains why David Ben Gurion and Israel’s founding figures were so determined that this city would be Israel’s capital. It is a central component of what makes Israel a Jewish State. And perhaps that is why the good people at J-Street, the anti-Israel organisation masquerading as its own opposite, were so quick to mockingly deride the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Eli Weisel when last week he published his open letter on the importance of Jerusalem.

Today the legitimacy of the Jewish claim to their holy city is under assault from every direction. That the city should be divided so that it once more resembles cold war Berlin is now the commonly held wisdom. When Israel’s Prime Minister declares that Israel’s Capital will never be divided, as Netanyahu did earlier today, he instantly establishes himself as an anti-peace extremist in the eyes of the rest of the world. The idea of Muslims sharing Mecca or indeed just about any other sovereign State agreeing to the division of its Capital is incomprehensible. And yet this is exactly what Israel is expected to roll over and give at the click of American fingers. A small price to pay in return for the other side not trying to blow you up on your buses and in your cafes, so Jerusalemites are so often told.

Israel is informed by those calling themselves its friends that the division of the City is the long term goal. Israel must after all take into consideration the demands of the Palestinians, even as these same world leaders that declare this take it upon themselves to decide which of Israel’s demands are legitimate or not. In the meantime Israel is told it must prohibit its Jewish citizens from living in vast swathes of the city, regardless of whether there already exist Jewish communities in these areas or whether Jews still have in their possession the deeds to stolen homes in these neighbourhoods, the documents dating back to the time prior to the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem's Jews in 1948. Indeed Israel is even criticised by the foreign media if it so much as caries out archaeological digs or creates green areas or tourist trails in the East of the city. Leftwing watchdogs list the Jewish residents of Jerusalem’s historic Jewish quarter as illegal settlers and more recently the British advertising Standards Authority has deemed that Judaism’s most well known religious site, the Western Wall, is occupied territory and therefore can not be featured in advertising by the Israeli tourist board.

In the face of such relentless pressure it is difficult to see how Israel will ever manage to maintain its hold on its Capital in the long term. But if the Jewish people are going to be able to maintain their status in their own land then Israel must. The punishment that Israel will receive from the world for refusing to hand over Jerusalem, the nation’s identity, the nation’s soul, will be hard to bare. However if Israel cannot fend off this assault on its legitimacy in its own Capital then it will never be able to fend off the mounting assault on the Jewish people’s legitimacy in their homeland or to the right to nationhood itself.

More Rockets Fired into Israel – But Who Really Gives a Damn!

You can almost see such headlines now can’t you, but of course there won’t be anything of the sort. If there were they would probably read something like the title above. Yes on Sunday yet more rockets were fired into southern Israel from Gaza by Islamic militants. Not that anyone reliant on Britain’s leftwing media outlets for their news would know. No all the BBC has to offer on Israel this morning is a story about a Turkish man arrested in the West Bank by the satanic Israeli authorities and another about the Warsaw Ghetto conditions Israel is imposing on Gaza.

This silence of the British media concerning missile attacks on Israel is all too reminiscent of the same silence witnessed prior to Israel’s Cast Lead attack on Hamas. Following this of course the world became delirious with moral outrage. As one Israeli victim of such a Hamas rocket attack asked Richard Goldstone at the UN ‘where were you then?’. And years went by in which Israel received 8,000 rockets in return for the 8,000 of its Jewish citizens that it forcibly expelled from their homes in Gaza. Still the world was unmoved. Interesting is it not that when Hamas fires rockets at Israeli civilians it’s an attack on ‘the State of Israel’, but when Israel bombs Hamas terror instillations it’s an attack on the Palestinian people. Still all of this has been said too many times already to still carry any lustre for those of us forced to keep repeating it.

But let there be no doubt in the minds of those still even handed enough to care, the British media and intellectual elites care nothing about the attacks Israel sustains from Islamic terrorists or anything for the plight of its civilians. It may not even care that much about the wellbeing of the Palestinians; indeed it seems positively delighted when ever presented with another opportunity to gleefully wave around more ‘proof’ of Israeli barbarism. One need only look to how London’s 10th rate free daily newspapers devoted their front pages day in day out to scandalised allegations of Israeli spies thieving good honest British passports for their sinister assassination work in Dubai. Deadly rockets when trained in the direction of Israeli civilians seem infinitely less interesting to the UK media. But what really gets Britain’s Leftwing establishment going is when Israel’s defence forces are so brazen as to lift as much as a finger in the defence of their long embattled people. This is what makes headlines.

The Lib Dems are Cameron’s Poisoned Chalice

It is a terrible irony, and one that we don’t usually have endure in our electoral system, that a Party in third place who actually saw its representation in Parliament decrease should be almost ensured a place in the next government. Of course if the Liberal Democrats get their primary coalition precondition demand met then they will be booking themselves into every future British government, forever! The proportional system they hanker after would almost certainly make them an indispensible part of all coalitions and short lived weak coalitions will become the unavoidable future.

That at least is why they should be kept out of any future government in general. There is however an altogether different reason why Cameron should want to keep them out of a Conservative government specifically. With the biggest increase in seats the party has seen for 80 years and more people voting for them than for Labour when it received its majority back in 2005, David Cameron’s Conservatives certainly have a mandate. Yet should they enter into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a party that ideologically opposes just about everything the Conservatives stand for, David Cameron would quickly find his ability to make the desperately needed difficult decisions utterly neutered. It would not be long before that coalition would break down and as the British public returned to the polls they would have little apatite for re-electing a Prime Minister who presided over a weak and ineffectual government but one which none the less brought them one of the most austere budgets Britain has seen for a generation.

None of this detracts from the fact that joining a Conservative led coalition would be some what of a poisoned chalice for the Liberal Democrats also, but this would in no way play in Cameron’s favour. Much of the Liberal Democrat vote comes from defected Labour supporters who can’t bring themselves to vote for the dreaded Tories along with those who see the Lib Dems as the party committed to principles over grabbing power for itself. Once the Lib Dems had shored up a Conservative government for even a short period this group of voters would rapidly melt away, many of them returning their support to Labour who would find themselves much strengthened against the Conservatives at the probably not so far off next election.

So what can Cameron do? Well he could try a minority government and then when the Liberals and Labour had blocked just about every piece of legislation his party proposed Cameron could return the country to the polls asking for a majority. Otherwise, depending on how brave he is feeling is could gamble. He could end talks with the Lib Dems in the hope they’d form a shambolic coalition with Labour, who incidentally would also need the support of an assortment of radical regional nationalist Parties if they were to have a majority. Then when that coalition inevitably collapsed the Conservatives could go into the next election with their credibility intact and as the only other credible option.

However if Cameron insists on forming a coalition with Nick Clegg then the only thing he ensures is his own inability to govern effectively, a huge drain of the support he has built up and in all probability his own demise.

Goldstone’s Behaviour in Apartheid South Africa Leaves Him in no Position from which to Pass Moral Judgement on Others

Considering what we all already know about the UN, the theatre of dictators and mouth piece of human rights abusers, it really should come as no surprise to learn that the man the UN mandated to head its fact finding mission into allegations of war crimes in Gaza is himself responsible for sentencing tens of blacks to death in Apartheid South Africa. Indeed Goldstone actively upheld the Apartheid regime’s race laws and shored up the system by sentencing several blacks to beatings. What moral standpoint does this man have to so much as lecture an ASBO teenager let alone pass judgement on a nation trying to defend itself against deadly terrorist attacks?

And what does Goldstone have to say in his own defence? Well predictably he claims he was merely part of a system and had to uphold laws even if he was actually opposed to them. Now I don’t know about you but that all sounds strangely familiar, the language of those washing their hands of moral responsibility that we’ve heard elsewhere. The analogy may be crude, even offensive but not unworthy of note I think. The last time I heard people talking this way about their role in executing people in a racist regime it was amidst the woefully inadequate and pathetic excuses of German concentration camp guards. To my ears at least that is what Goldstone’s claims sound like.

The fact that Goldstone not only took part in such reprehensible acts but now also attempts to dismiss them with talk of simply acting on orders from above must surely call into question just about any credibility he was ever considered to have had. This doesn’t sound like a man with a grasp on even the most basic moral principles. If the Goldstone report hasn’t already been entirely discredited this surely must only cast further doubt on the validity and legitimacy of the whole project.

The Chaos in Greece is all the Left has to Offer Us

As reports come through of Athenian Bank workers being murdered in a petrol bomb attack, of 100,000 rioters taking to the streets, of a country paralysed by strikes and of Government buildings set ablaze, the British public should reflect upon how the Greeks came to this appalling scenario. As they angrily dismiss any politician that is so brazen as to talk to them of cuts Briton’s shouldn’t be so quick as to forget that it’s now their own country that has Europe’s largest budget deficit, at the eye wateringly high 12% of GDP, just over that of Greece’s.

The total failure to come to terms with the reality of their situation is what is currently being violently displayed by the Greeks in their Capital; the reality being that they’ve lived fatally beyond their means, and it is this same failure to come to terms with reality that is seen when the British entertain the idea that what they’re currently being told by their centre-left politicians is in anyway plausible. It was the unhinged notion that it is the role of the Government to employ everyone who needs a job and borrow its way out of recessions that has insured Greece’s demise and it’s this same economic insanity that would quickly deliver Britain into precisely the same fate.

Upon the Acropolis Greek Socialists have erected a huge banner calling on the ‘Workers of Europe to Rise up!’ What exactly do they expect this to achieve, it is now those European economies that allowed their markets to recover unmarred by high tax and inflation while diligently preventing the size of their State from ballooning out of all control who are now begrudgingly riding to the rescue of the wildly thankless Greeks. Yet just as was witnessed in Britain in the 1970s; the economic chaos caused by mainstream-leftleaning governments soon creates the perfect breading ground for the most radical leftwing countercultural elements. Busily they are building up the barricades.

Today in Britain we rarely see a great deal of our extremist left beyond the university campuses. They come out from time to time at anti-war rallies to remind us they are still with us and startle us with the knowledge that there are still those clinging the arcane ideas of a 19th century German-Jewish philosopher who have not quite yet become entirely extinct. Yet if we allow the centre-left in Britain to continue with their reckless spending spree then we will quickly start to see a lot more of those proclaiming the doctrine of Marx and Anarchism and raising the red flag high on our streets. If the scenes from London in January 2009 (when Israel launched its Cast Lead operation against Hamas) are anything to go by then the seeds of a dangerous counterculture are present in vast swathes of our population’s mindset and it wouldn’t take a lot of economic mismanagement on the part of a Lib-Lab government to bring it into full and horrifying fruition.

Where do Europe’s Liberal Jews get their Priorities?

Gleefully the Guardian (among others) has reported with a predictably celebratory tone that over 3,000 European Jews have signed a petition claiming that unconditional support for Israel is dangerous. Well 3,000 is hardly a very noteworthy proportion of the over one and a half million Jews currently living in Western Europe. Of course it wouldn’t really have made a lot of difference if even 300,000 Jews had have signed the petition, it still would have failed to make it any less nonsensical.

Firstly one would rather assume that the message of the petition should be too glaringly obvious to be worth stating. After all if the Israeli government started mowing down its own people in the streets or pumping toxic chemicals into the Mediterranean I’m sure the vast majority of observers would have no qualms about condemning such acts. Secondly it could hardly be said that Europe’s political leadership is currently transfixed by an air of blind unwavering support for the Jewish State. What seems especially bizarre is that much of the text is primarily concerned with condemning Israel for construction in Jewish settlements, but as everyone knows Israel has already frozen building in all settlements as of late autumn of 2009. In short this petition was entirely unwarranted and clearly says far more about the mindset of those who initiated it than it does about anything else.

In one sense the supporters of this petition may have a point. Unbridled support for Israel regardless of its conduct would hardly be a wise policy for any foreign government to pursue. Yet surely there must be far more dangerous failings in the foreign policy of Europe’s powers than not being critical enough of Israel. I imagine it might be slightly more dangerous if the world fails to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weaponry for instance. And what about failing to prevent Sudan or Yemen from turning into an Al-Qaeda hotbed? What about allowing Hezbollah to have become more heavily armed than many of the surrounding nations in the region or permitting China to continue shoring up a nuclear armed senile dictator in North Korea? How about preventing civil war from breaking out in Pakistan or America emboldening the rogue regime in Syria through continued diplomatic rewards? And isn’t there the slight issue of ever further legitimising the Islamo-facist terror polity Hamas is creating in Gaza by continuously condemning Israel every time she attempts to defend her citizens from attacks emanating from the Strip?

Clearly there are some rather more dangerous prospects currently looming on the world stage, but the Jews that penned this statement seem to think reminding an already highly critical Europe that they shouldn’t fail to criticise Israel is the most pressing priority of all.

Where the loyalty of those who signed this petition really lies is hardly difficult to discern. Yet it is telling that they should choose to release such a petition at a time when Israel has just made major concessions so that it can engage in yet another round of peace talks with the Palestinians. Clearly attempts to undermine Israel, whether they come from Jew or Gentile, have little if anything to do with Israel’s conduct and far more to do with these peoples problem with Israel itself.

When it comes to the Middle East Obama Only has One Strategy – Pressure Israel

Over the last months, as the Obama administration has attempted to force the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships into negotiations it seems as if the same tactic for achieving this method has been used over and over again like a broken record: pressure Israel. Despite the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu repeatedly expressed his willingness to hold talks without pre-conditions it was Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who was stalling. Yet the American government consistently decided the solution to this problem was to pressure Israel to make ever more difficult concessions before the real negotiations even began. Every time the Israeli government met a Palestinian demand the Palestinians would dismiss it and make a new more demanding one; the response of the Obama government? Sure enough each time Washington endorsed this unreasonableness and further pressured and humiliated Israel, not to mention the effect this had on undermining Israel’s legitimacy, national security and the stability of its government.

This of course is a very odd way of doing diplomacy, everyone knows that it is during the peace talks themselves that the two parties make their demands and give concessions in return. By making Netanyahu give away many of his best cards before the game even began America has left the Israelis in a position where they either will not be able to move negotiations forward because they will not have any concessions left to make or more likely they will be forced to make even more crippling cuts into their national security in return for even the most menial level of Palestinian cooperation.

Yet if you think the American strategy here has been questionable things get even more unusual when it comes to Obama’s approach for preventing the advent of a nuclear Iran. During his election campaign Barak Obama promised the American people and more specifically the Jewish benefactors of his party that he would do everything possible to prevent Iran getting the bomb. In reality we got an administration that has been sluggish in putting any kind of real economic sanctions against Iran in place and more recently came the first statements that the military option was off the table. So clearly when using the words ‘everything possible’ he didn’t mean quite everything, or indeed very much at all really.

The topsy-turvy world view of Obama-ist foreign policy was first revealed early on in his time in office when he first met with the Israeli Prime Minister and espoused his bizarre notion that the key to preventing a nuclear Iran was first to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, of course who knows when on earth that might be achieved. Yet the latest and even more terrifying version of this ‘Israel first’ policy comes with Obama’s fanciful new vision for a nuclear free Middle East. Wonderful you might think, now Obama really is going to get to grips with preventing a nuclear Iran. Not so points out John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN. Because when you think about it the only country in the Middle East that this will really affect is the only country in the Middle East currently believed to have nuclear capabilities – Israel.

Of course this call for nuclear disarmament comes from a country that itself was recently revealed as having well over Five Thousand nuclear missiles of its own, who knows what the American’s need that little lot for. But if there was a country in the world that was in need of nuclear protection might it not be the one that in the 20th century witnessed three separate attempts by its neighbours to wipe it off of the face of the earth and which to this day has another major power in the region calling for its annihilation while busily working away at building the genocidal weapons required to do this. How exactly does Obama imagine that by Israel dispensing with its only real means of deterring would be attackers Iran will be deterred from pursuing its own nuclear ambitions? What is clear to so many observers but apparently not to Obama is that the weaker you make Israel the more you embolden her enemies.

Who knows where this warped thinking will lead us all. Perhaps when Obama is setting his mind to the problem of climate change he’ll decide the best way to cut global carbon emissions is not to pressure China and India but to tell the Israeli government they’re not allowed cars in their country anymore. It sounds ludicrous but with the likes of Obama sitting behind that desk in the Oval Office it really is starting to look like nothing is quite too outlandish.

How Stupid Do They Think the British Public is?

The first polls are now being released that suggest that David Cameron’s Conservatives may not merely end up being the largest party in a hung Parliament but that rather they may even receive a majority, that is there may not even be a hung Parliament after all. This at least is what the latest IPSOS/Mori poll for Reuters suggests. So in the wake of this prospect of a Conservative victory the other two major Parties have apparently decided to get serious, although by all accounts not that serious.

It seems that both the Liberal Democrats and Labour have decided that what will really convince the electorate of the wisdom of their political programme is the stamp of approval from a rag band of television personalities. This they seem to think is far from an insult to all of our intelligence but rather just the persuasive gesture required to counter Cameron’s lead.

Behind Labour stand such political heavyweights as Blackadder comedian Tony Robinson and former East Enders actor Ross Kemp, while the Liberal Democrats have won the backing of such luminaries as the Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliff and Brit flick blockbuster Colin Firth. What it is about these celebrities that is supposed to qualify their opinions as possessing more validity than the rest of ours is anyone’s guess, but it seems that the politicians don’t reckon on the public possessing the mental faculties capable of discerning this minor flaw in their ironically coinciding publicity stunts. To be fair the Liberal Democrats do have among their line up of notable supporters the somewhat more intellectual likes of Richard Dawkins, but there might be some among us who stop to question whether having a fanatical religion hating absolutist among the ranks of your supporters is really the kind of detail that should weigh so heavily in your favour.

Where as Cameron enjoys the backing of the Economist magazine and nearly one hundred business leaders Labour and the Liberals have decided that wheeling out just about anyone capable of getting their picture in ‘Hello’ will suffice. They couldn’t have insulted the voting public much more if they had have stood up on national television and called us all bigots. No longer will the politicians of these Parties be able to claim that the media has reduced our democracy to the level of the most lowbrow plebeian-esque popularity contest; Brown and Clegg have been openly complicit in this shameful decline themselves.

In the face of such desperate and unrepentant attempts at groping for a little extra popularity one can only expect and indeed hope that David Cameron continues to rise in the opinion polls

Greece – A Warning from Europe

There’s something reminiscent of Britain in the 1970s about what’s happening on the streets of Athens at the moment. Indeed as Britain’s debt deficit nears overtaking Greek levels, as it is predicted to do next year, it seems only sensible to reflect upon what the current crisis in Greece means for the UK. For those who have opposed Britain’s entry into the European single currency there is a clear element of vindication. Had Greece not been part of the Euro zone it could have devalued its currency and avoided at least some of the current financial catastrophe. With an ever spiralling national debt Britain could have found itself in a similar fiscal straightjacket if she had have been part of the euro zone.

Secondly; as the European Union and IMF prepare a bailout for Greece worth £39 billion this year and £104 billion over the next three years we should remember that if we were now a member of the Euro zone Briton’s would be in the same position as German’s now find themselves; footing a hefty bill for Greek excesses and monetary irresponsibility. What comes as perhaps the biggest insult to the injury now to be endured by Europe’s more prudent economies is that the Greeks, whipped up into a socialist fervour, have taken to the streets to riot against the austerity budget that is the only thing that has any hope of curing their situation. They loudly chant their opposition to the conditions being set by the IMF for this hugely generous bailout, seemingly and exasperatingly oblivious to the fact that it was the socialist style welfareism, bloated bureaucracy and addiction to borrowing that put Greece in the appalling situation where it currently finds itself.

And thirdly, as if perfectly timed to coincide with the election in Britain, what is happening in Greece should really make British voters stop and think before deciding who to vote for. As Gordon Brown accuses the Conservatives of masterminding an emergency budget full of spending cuts that he claims would threaten the supposed ‘recovery’, voters should remember that where the Greeks are today is the necessary end point of the kind of budgetary deficit run up by the spending policies of the likes of Gordon Brown. In the mind of the intelligent voter only those pledging to unflinchingly slash the deficit should be eligible for support. Furthermore as both Brown and Clegg accuse Cameron of alarmist and irresponsible Euro scepticism we should remember that had we been as integrated into Europe as their two parties would have liked then we would at best now be in the position of the bailout paying German’s and at worst in the situation of the crisis ridden Greeks or Spanish.

Let’s hope the voters can see just a little beyond the end of their noses to that not so far off place where they go for their low cost holidays.

Nick Clegg and the Obama Effect

After the initial Prime Ministerial TV debate Clegg saw his personal popularity leap to the dizzying heights usually reserved for such national heroes as Winston Churchill; a public approval rating of as much as 81%. Yet a YouGov Poll for the Times reveals that while his popularity is still not far off that ludicrous number, when exposed to his policies voters are avidly hostile. This discrepancy in opinion is what happens when we let the media turn our elections into soap operas and popularity contests.

Back in 2008 the British watched the American elections closely and now they want an Obama of their own; an outsider, someone espousing the usual glib popularist leftwing benevolence that so much of the BBC watching public never seems to tire of, and in Nick Clegg they found it. And just as the American’s hysterically applauded Obama’s campaign for ‘Change’ without ever so much as stopping to ask what it was they were being changed to, only to wake up the next morning to a President attempting to turn their entire national outlook upside down and impose on them healthcare reform that sent most American’s weak at the knees, so too the British are now doing the same with their own Obama.

With Lib Dem policy on immigration getting as little as 28% approval or their policy on the Euro just 22% in this latest Yougov Poll, it is hard to see how the leader of the party promising such strongly opposed policies can still be on a popularity rating of 79%. Of course as New Labour has taught us a little bit of spin can go a long way and Clegg certainly knows how to handle himself. But doesn’t it say something worrying about our democracy when so many people are going to be trundling down to their local polling station this Thursday to cast a vote for a party that they clearly know next to nothing about.

The Moral Inversion Goes On

So often Israel’s enemies accuse Israel of attempting to crush freedom of speech and of employing disproportionate force and violence against her opponents. This, they tell us, is at the root of their opposition to the Jewish State. How then are we to understand the recent events at Manchester University? Although it seems to have provoked zero interest from the main stream British media last week Talya Lador-Fresher, no less than Israel’s deputy Ambassador to the UK, was violently set upon by pro-Palestinian activists as she attempted to get to her car.

Even once inside the vehicle she was not safe from the crowed as two particularly diligent ‘freedom fighters’ climbed upon the car bonnet and attempted to smash the windscreen so as to get to the Deputy Ambassador. Clearly the demonstrators were particularly adamant that they enter into peaceful dialogue with the Israeli diplomat.

What had Mrs Lador-Fresher done to provoke such enthusiasm? Well for the second time she had attempted to take up Manchester University’s invitation to speak to its students. Her first attempt to do this back in February had to be entirely aborted when three hundred protestors from Action Palestine descended on the venue and prevented the Deputy Ambassador from speaking before throwing in a little grappling with the police and local Jewish students just for good measure. This time Mrs Lador-Fresher had successfully managed to address her audience but then afterwards the protestors discovered her dastardly attempt to get away unharmed.

If the Deputy Ambassador of Libya or North Korea had have come to speak at Manchester University could they have expected even half such a reception? I very much doubt it. What passes through the mind of anyone who attempts to argue that the people who attempted to so savagely attack this Israeli diplomat were acting to stop violence, oppression or the curtailing of civil liberties? What kind of acrobatics of moral inversion do such apologists have to undertake? These protestors aren’t people interested in ending an occupation or freeing a nation, these are brutal radicals for whom the ends will always justify the means. That end is the destruction of the Jewish State and if they must fight for it on a university campus in northern England rather than in West Bank villages then so be it!