UK troops accused of training child soldiers in Yemen
Press TV – March 28, 2019
UK Foreign Office minister Mark Field has promised to get to the bottom of “very serious and well sourced” allegations that British special forces have been training child soldiers in the Saudi-led war against Yemen.
He was answering an urgent question asked in the Commons on Tuesday by the shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, who suggested the British troops may have been witnesses to war crimes.
She claimed as many as 40 percent of the soldiers in the Saudi coalition were children, a breach of international humanitarian law.
Field also said he would be making inquiries with the UK Ministry of Defence in light of a report that British Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers were injured in a firefight with the Houthi Ansarullah movement in Yemen.
The UK government has a general policy of not discussing the operations of its special forces but Field seemed determined to provide an explanation to members of Parliament.
There had been social media reports from Yemen in February suggesting that British soldiers had been injured in a firefight, and the Daily Express newspaper claimed two SAS members had been injured during a “humanitarian” operation.
However, it was claimed in The Mail on Sunday, a weekly newspaper, that UK special forces were not just involved in so-called humanitarian operations, but providing mentoring teams inside Yemen, including medics, translators and forward air controllers, whose job is to request air support from the Saudis. It claimed five special forces soldiers have been injured.
Conservative Party MP Andrew Mitchell said the allegations were so serious because they flew in the face of successive assurances given by ministers that the UK was not a participant in the Saudi war against Yemen, and was only providing general logistical support to Riyadh.
“These serious allegations that are authoritative and credible, and fly in the face of assurances that have been given from the despatch box on countless occasions,” Mitchell told the Commons.
The UK is known to be close to the Saudi military but denies it is involved in operations against the Houthis in Yemen.
A number of Western countries, the US and Britain in particular, are accused of being complicit in the ongoing aggression in Yemen as they supply the Riyadh regime with advanced weapons and military equipment as well as logistical and intelligence assistance.
The Saudi-led war has taken a heavy toll on the country’s infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, and factories. The UN has already said that over 22 million Yemenis are in dire need of food, while 8.4 million are threatened by severe hunger.
According to the world body, Yemen is suffering from the most severe famine in more than 100 years.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched the devastating campaign on March 26, 2015, with the aim of bringing a former government to power and crushing the Houthi Ansarullah movement. Riyadh has failed to fulfill its objectives.
The EU’s New Draconian Copyright Laws Should Make Every Young Person in Britain Rally For Brexit
By Adam Garrie – EurasiaFuture – 2019-03-26
The European Union parliament has just rubber-stamped new copyright legislation that will have a stifling effect on digital freedom of speech. Opposition to the proposals have seen big American tech companies including Google, online activists, world-wide-web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Paul McCartney and online star PewDiePie unite against the new draconian measures that will now need to be integrated into the corpus of national law throughout every EU member state. This process is expected to take around two years.
The worrying proposals
The most novel and therefore controversial aspects of the new EU copyright directive are contained in Articles 11 and 13 of the proposals. According to Article 11, any time a digital publisher links to or otherwise publishes even a small portion of copyrighted material, the owner of the outlet in question will have to pay a statutory rate (aka a tax) for the privilege of so doing.
Article 13 will force major online platforms, including and especially social media platforms to implement an automated vetting algorithm that will instantly censor any attempts at posting copyrighted material, without providing for any kind of reasonable appeal by the poster.
Arguments for the new proposals
The arguments in favour of the new legislation suggest that such mechanisms are needed to prevent the unauthorised exploitation of copyrighted material without the owner receiving rapid remuneration. The arguments against the new proposals however are far more lengthy and manifold which is itself is a cautionary warning sign against legislation that may prima facie be overly broad and consequently do more harm than good.
Arguments against the new proposals
–Stifling effect on the freedom of speech and artistic expression
While no legal system encourages the violation of copyright, most legal systems allow for something that in the United States is known as fair use. According to the fair use doctrine, copyrighted material may be typically used without remuneration or permission from the copyright owner if the copyrighted work is used in the services of journalism, information decimation vital to the public good, critique/review/criticism/journalistic analysis, certain forms of advertising (e.g. a cinema displaying an image of a film that is now playing or coming soon) and last but not least, parody (e.g. memes that show a copyrighted image of Kermit The Frog to illustrate a humorous or satirical message).
According to current EU copyright law, most of the fair use exceptions which have long been established in US law and most other Common Law countries also apply. However, many European judges take a narrower view of the concept of fair use than do most American judges.
Both Article 11 and Article 13 of the new EU copyright laws effectively end anything remotely related to the fair use doctrine. This would not only have a chilling effect on the ability of both small and large publishers who rely on fair use in order to produce the content that all readers, viewers and listeners now expect, but it will also vastly limit the freedom of expression of social media users who do not not even stand a chance of profiting from their creation and/or sharing of memes or short parody videos. This in and of itself will have a chilling effect on some of the main forms of free expression that makes the internet worthwhile to millions.
—Stifling effect on the freedom of information
Journalists rely on quoting from a variety of sources in order to accurately convey information to their audience. For example, if I were to link someone else’s analysis of the present situation under the new laws, just this simple link would cost Eurasia Future money according to the proposed reforms. The result would be that most outlets would simply not bother to link or quote important sources which itself could expose publishers to allegations of spreading “fake news”, even if this was not the case. This could set off a dangerous chain reaction which could see media outlets deprived of the profits they would have otherwise legitimately earned for providing a much valued service in the private sector.
It is noteworthy that Article 11 will not only apply to websites that copy and paste entire stories or articles without remuneration or permission (a practice I personally find troubling), but it will effectively tax publishers for even quoting and crediting a small portion of a source that helps to bolster one’s argument. If lawyers for example had to pay other lawyers or judges whose legal precedent they were citing in a court of law – one could imagine how awkward the tasks of the legal profession would become.
In an internet age where both true and false information is ubiquitous, the job of publishers is as important as that of lawyers and to this end, both require similar tools in order to effectively execute their job.
–Major enforcement problems
Because of the overreaching characteristics of the proposals, one must enquire as to weather the EU will soon chase down violators of these new laws outside of Europe in order to enforce its laws on publishers whose material on the world wide web can be viewed and in many cases likely will be viewed in the EU. Not only would this be costly but in many cases it would be fruitless as most countries outside of the EU will not likely comply with a foreign organisation effectively harassing their citizens. An example of a related concept was when in 2010 the US President specifically signed a law stating that US courts would not enforce foreign libel judgements on US citizens if the foreign country’s libel standards are more severe towards the defendant than those in the US. Due to the fact that the outcry against the EU’s new legislation has been louder in America than in much of Europe, one might reasonably expect something similar from Washington in respect of the new EU copyright law. This is true especially given the currently poor status of EU-US relations on the all important matter of trade.
Then there are the technical issues of enforcement. How could an as of yet unknown algorithm designed to censor the posting of copyrighted content on social media determine whether or not the person posting a copyrighted image is the owner of the copyright? Would one have to post all of his or her original art pieces for example into a mega data-base even if they are only sharing their original drawing with a small number of Facebook friends? Furthermore, who would own such a data-base and could the copyright holder’s right to exploit his material be trusted in the hands which every private or public entity controls this date-base? This could well be the road to a repeat of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in more ways than one. Lastly, if one is posting copyrighted material with the full permission of the copyright owner, how is the algorithm going to determine this?
Furthermore, when it comes to Article 11, it is not entirely clear who would collect the link tax and how? Take for example an 18 year old with no income or savings who runs a small website and posts copyrighted images or links to other websites. How much money is the EU prepared to spend on chasing such an individual down only to find that he is judgement proof? There’s a reason that the existing private sector doesn’t chase down judgement proof individuals and its called logic.
–Outlandish burden shifting
As it stands, copyright is almost always a civil rather than a criminal issue. As such, it is up to the copyright holder to discover that his or her work has been used without permission or remuneration and to then decide whether he or she will reach a settlement over the matter or take the infringing party to court. Realistically, copyright holders will not waste time and money on small matters. If a website nobody reads decides to publish entire copyrighted pieces with no permission, the publisher of the original piece – Eurasia Future for example, would likely ignore the matter. However, if the New York Times copied an entire article from Eurasia Future without permission or remuneration and if furthermore it could not be justified in any way by fair use – the matter would be raised in the appropriate way.
Under the new laws the EU will force third parties like Facebook and Twitter to automatically enforce copyright rules, thus shifting the burden of enforcement of copyright from the copyright owner to social media owners, search-engine owners and other website owners. This approach is entirely impractical as it invokes the power of law to force third parties to take a greater interest in protecting the use of copyrighted material than many copyright holders themselves have ever taken or care to take.
The same is true of the link-tax. Why should a public or private body collect taxation via statute when existing laws, however flawed one might argue they are, are still less burdensome on the entire public and private sector than the new proposals?
Geopolitical policy hypocrisy
The EU itself is a frequent critic of alleged internet censorship in China and Russia, even though the laws in China and Russia cannot be compared to the new EU proposals. In China, the only materials censored online are those which are deemed to be provocative in respect of the civil order, those which threaten the public peace and those which violate the social norms of the People’s Republic of China. In other words, China’s internet regulations are derived from a desire to protect China’s internal peace and cultural characteristics, rather than a cynical ploy to pit those with lots of money against those with little. Even an article critical of China’s internet policy accurately described the nature of internet regulation in the country, in spite of its overly cynical editorial overtones. It should also be noted that while western states criticise China for its policies, many western governments are trying to randomly censor free speech under the guise that it is “hate speech”, even though strongly worded and aggressive speech has traditionally been protected in the US and much of Europe so long as it doesn’t contain a specific criminal threat. This is in fact the very essence of the US First Amendment which has long been admired throughout Europe.
Russia has some laws which also seek to prohibit the posting of anti-social material online. But in reality, unlike China, Russia rarely tries to enforce any internet regulations and when it tries, it usually fails miserably. Thus, the internet in Russia is actually incredibly free in terms of an absolutist view of free speech.
Because of the new laws, the EU risks becoming a laughing stock in multiple countries including the United States – a country that clearly values fair use, in Russia – a country which realistically doesn’t censor anything on the internet and in China – a country where measures taken to protect people from being needlessly provoked are prioritised over protecting huge corporations from small social media users who aren’t seeking to make a profit from the memes they post online. Of course notably absent from the wider debates about the new EU laws were any commentary from the governments of China or Russia. If the tables were turned, one could imagine the chorus of excoriation against the eastern superpowers coming from both Brussels and Washington.
Brexit takes on a new importance
Of course, if the United Kingdom successfully exits the European Union, none of these new draconian measures will apply to Britain, just as they don’t apply to the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand or other countries in the English speaking world with similar domestic legal systems to that in Britain.
Furthermore, while Brexit has often been portrayed as a policy favoured by older British voters, because the new EU legislation will disproportionately impact young people whose business and leisure is largely centred around the internet, it is now crucial for young people in the UK who are opposed to the EU’s anti-free speech laws to rally behind a full Brexit that does not reduce the process to a series of halfway measures.
Only by remaining fully out of the EU Single Market and Customs Union can it be guaranteed that this regressive, repressive and oppressive legislation is kept away from British publishers and ordinary people who are active online.
Conclusion
The EU has made some powerful new enemies including the world’s largest tech firms. While the lights of free speech are dimming in Europe, at least for one European country, there is a clear path to the sunlit uplands of freedom. That path is called Brexit.
White Helmets Under Black Banners
By Yuriy Zinin – New Eastern Outlook – 22.03.2019
During the recent Third Conference on Supporting the Future of Syria, in Brussels, the USA decided to allocate $5 million to the White Helmets, a decision which has once more turned the spotlight onto that organization.
It first emerged in 2013, under a banner of political neutrality: a non-partisan NPO formed of volunteers who carried out humanitarian missions, and its members were promptly branded as heroes by the media. They were represented as people who rushed to rescue their fellow citizens in the face of savage bombing raids by government forces: saving lives, providing first aid etc.
According to the White Helmets, its volunteers have “saved” some 115 thousand people in the years since the organization was founded. This figure was taken at face value by Western officials and media, and has been endlessly repeated.
In addition to their humanitarian mission the “rescuers” prepared various materials from the front lines of the conflict in Syria. They posted photographs and videos of bombed hospitals, schools and mosques on their social media accounts as evidence of the “evil” of the Damascus regime. They focused on producing content that would touch viewers in the West on a raw nerve. So they emphasized, above all, the suffering of Syrian children: the victims of shooting, bombing and other horrors of war.
All these materials were directed at a mass audience, and their creators were highly praised and awarded a number of international prizes. In 2015, for example, the White Helmets were awarded the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize – worth approximately € 50,000. The film The White Helmets won an Oscar in 2018 for the Best Short Subject Documentary.
Nevertheless, all this tub-thumping is unable to hide certain inconvenient facts. Particularly, the fact that, ever since the organization’s brigades first appeared on the scene they have operated exclusively in areas outside the control of the Syrian government and controlled by armed opposition groups, including DAESH and the Al-Nusra Front.
These groups punished the slightest insubordination in the areas they controlled. The White Helmets’ claims that they remained politically independent when active in these areas are therefore rather unconvincing. Their members accepted the new status quo and were loyal to the militants, which naturally played into the militants’ hands.
According to experts from a number of different countries, members of the White Helmets were drawn into the conflict In March 2017 on the side of the armed opposition groups, and provided them with various kinds of support. In March 2017, Abu Jaber, one of the leaders of the Al-Nusra Front expressed his sincere thanks to the White Helmets, calling them the “unseen warriors of the revolution”. It is not for nothing that a number of Arabic media have described the organization as “White Helmets under a black flag”.
That did not prevent their sponsors from the West and the Middle East from generously financing their activities. The organization’s director admits that it has received money from government and private donors in the USA, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and a number of other European countries as well as Turkey, Qatar and other Persian Gulf states.
The largest donor has been the United States Agency for International development (USAID), which paid the White Helmets at least $23 million between 2013 and 2016.
The special services also lent a helping hand. One of the movement’s founders and inspirers is James Le Mesurier, a former British intelligence officer and soldier who has fought in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Lebanon. He is the head of the Mayday Rescue Foundation which supported the White Helmets using funds it received from donors, including $4.5 million from NGOs in the Netherlands and the same amount from donors in Germany.
The activists did their best to earn the funding and donations they were given.The organizations posted false reports on its social network accounts. It actively took part in a public relations campaign accusing the Syrian authorities and their allies of using chemical weapons.
The USA and its allies cited the materials fabricated by the White Helmets. These materials were used in meetings of the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to prepare the ground for resolutions and other measures, including military intervention, against the Syrian government.
The White Helmets played a very underhand role as agents provocateurs, by fabricating chemical weapons attacks in the town of Khan Shaykhun, in Idlib Province on 7 April 2017, and in East Douma in April 2018. There was no proof of responsibility, but that did not prevent the USA from attacking the Syrian air base of Shayrat in response to the first of these incidents, after which the USA, the UK and France launched missile attacks against a number of targets in Syria which were allegedly connected with the manufacture of chemical weapons.
As the rebels have lost territory in Syria, the areas in which the White Helmets operate has been reduced. The situation has changed dramatically, and in 2018 the organization went through a “very difficult time”, as Raed Saleh, the head of the group has acknowledged.
In June 2018 the Israeli army helped with an urgent evacuation of several hundred so-called rescuers belonging to the White Helmets from Syria, along with their families. Many of the countries that supported the organization declared that they were ready to accept these refugees and provide them with support.
The story of the White Helmets is an example of a new kind of media project: one with a strong humanitarian element, which unfolds in front of the public’s eyes. This project was launched following the failure to topple the Syrian government, as had been done in Libya. When it became clear that Bashar Assad’s presidency was not about to collapse, then his opponents initiated a long-drawn-out siege. And one of their main weapons was the White Helmets, with foreign support.
The White Helmets now resemble a terminally ill patient who is confined to bed and scarcely breathing. Now that the terrorists have been defeated in most parts of Syria, the organization has exited the stage – the only region where its members are still partially active is Idlib Province, which is not yet under government control.
But will the latest grant of funds, which the US lobbied for in the Brussels conference on Syria, be able to help save this chronic invalid? It seems unlikely. On the contrary, it will merely go to prove, once again, who the White Helmets are supported by, and whose interests they really represent.
Yury Zinin, Leading Research Fellow at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
Britain will oppose UN’s agenda on Israel’s human rights abuses of Palestinians – Foreign Secretary
RT | March 21, 2019
Jeremy Hunt, the British foreign secretary, has revealed that the UK will oppose the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) permanent agenda item on human rights abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, Hunt insisted that Britain will vote against all texts contained within the Item 7 resolution at the UNHRC’s meeting this Friday, because “elevating this dispute above all others cannot be sensible.” The item has been a permanent fixture on the UNHRC’s agenda, and debated at every session, since June 2007.
Item 7
- Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories
- Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.
- Right to self-determination of the Palestinian people
Hunt opposes the UN’s focus on Israel’s human rights conduct in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories, because it suggests “that one side alone holds a monopoly of fault.” He claims that a dedicated agenda for one nation “obstructs” the prospect of any long-lasting peace in the Middle East.
Ahead of Friday’s vote, the 47-member council discussed seven reports concerning alleged human rights violations by Israel.
In February, a UN human rights inquiry found that the Israeli military may have committed war crimes when 189 Palestinians were killed and 6,100 wounded during Gaza protests.
Palestinian demonstrators “did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to others when they were shot, nor were they directly participating in hostilities,” according to the panel’s report, citing confidential information about those responsible for the killings.
The commission said every use of live fire during the protests was unlawful, while also calling on Palestinians to cease the use of incendiary kites and balloons.
See also:
Mainstream media on Gaza: Israelis get killed, but Palestinians merely ‘die’
UK’s Labour Antisemitism Split
Just what the Doctor Prescribed
By Ian Fantom • Unz Review • March 21, 2019
Since the election in 2015 of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of Britain’s Labour Party there has been a crescendo of ‘antisemitism’ talk in the party, and talk of Jeremy Corbyn “not doing enough to combat antisemitism”. There has been constant talk in the mainstream media of a resurgence of antisemitism throughout Britain, with particular attention being focussed on the Labour Party. There were reports of members being targeted for apparently innocuous comments, such as Naz Shah, who was forced to apologise for retweeting a satirical cartoon by Norman Finkelstein about relocating Israel to the United States, and former Lord Mayor of London Ken Livingston, who, in defending her, stated, “When Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”. Ken Livingstone was suspended, and in his own defence he asked, “how can the truth be an offence?”. He stated that there was a “well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as antisemitic”.
Later, during a pro-Corbyn counter-demonstration in Parliament Square, organised by the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Labour, Labour Party member Stan Keable was secretly filmed by the BBC saying that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazi regime – “a well documented if shameful historical fact”, he wrote later. For this he lost his job with a Labour-controlled London council, and his union refused to support him. He told me he was also expelled from the party. A few months earlier a new group had been set up under the name ‘Labour Against the Witch-hunt’, and their website campaigns for the reinstatement of the growing number of members who have been suspended or expelled from the party. Stan Keable is their honorary secretary.
There has been constant pressure on Jeremy Corbyn from Zionists in the party to include the new ‘Internationally Accepted Definition of Antisemitism’ in the party’s code of conduct. By this they are referring to the ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism’, adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Eventually this was passed by the National Executive Committee and by the Parliamentary Labour Party, with just eight Members of Parliament voting against. According to this new definition, it would be considered ‘antisemitic’ to criticise Israel or Zionism. A Scottish member of the Labour Party and shop steward in the massive GMB union, Peter Gregson, was expelled from his union for campaigning against that new definition being adopted by the union. He was defended by an orthodox rabbi. He appealed and defended himself at the London headquarters of the GMB on 4 March 2019. He was unsuccessful, but by this time had 1 560 signatures of Labour Party members declaring, “Israel is a racist endeavour”, “brazenly breaking the IHRA rule”, he states. He is currently ‘under investigation’ by the Labour Party. His own write-up of the case appears at Change.org. A different slant was put on the case by the Jewish News and the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, though the Revolutionary Communist Group supported him.
I took advantage of his trip to London for his appeal at the union’s headquarters on 5 March, 2019, by inviting him to talk at a group whose meetings I organise each month, which we call Keep Talking. A colleague and I set up that group in 2010 to take over from the declining 9/11 Truth movement in London, which some of us believed to have been sabotaged from within.
The focus of our group had not been on Israel, or Zionism, and we tacitly agreed amongst ourselves not to deal with the Holocaust issue, because that was so taboo in the UK that any onslaught from the Zionist lobby could completely derail us from our main topic, which was false-flag terrorism and causes of wars. In fact, my colleague, Dr Nick Kollerstrom, author of many investigative books, including ‘Terror on the Tube’, had been targeted in a witch-hunt for a literature review he wrote on ‘The Auschwitz “Gas Chamber” Illusion’ and a comment about a swimming pool at Auschwitz, since deleted. I defended Nick Kollerstrom’s right to investigate that topic, and to write about it freely, though I myself had no knowledge of the topic, and so no views on it. That was the seminal incident that led to Keep Talking being set up.
Even so, our Keep Talking group wasn’t spared. In November 2016 our guest speaker was physicist and long-term weather forecaster Piers Corbyn, who explained his model of climate change and why he rejected the theory of the greenhouse effect for global warming. At the end of the talk he was asked by a newcomer, sitting on the front row, for his views on the Holocaust, to which he replied, “On some things it’s best not to have views”. Piers Corbyn had stated right at the beginning of his talk that if the press were to attack him it would be to get at his brother, Jeremy Corbyn, and indeed, it turned out that the newcomer on the front row was a journalist from The Daily Mail, who subsequently wrote up a story based on a book on the bookstall, ‘Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth and Reality’ by Nick Kollerstrom. I managed to get that article pulled in the paper edition, but nevertheless it appeared in the Internet pages of Mail Online. Subsequently, three of our meetings had to be called off, the first one because of an aggressive mob outside the venue, whilst the police stood idly by, even when a 74-year-old colleague of mine was thrown to the ground. The second was called off “on police advice” by the venue, when Jewish News put out a fabrication that we were about to discuss Mossad’s role in the death of Princess Diana, in the knowledge that we had stated that none of us had any knowledge or views on any involvement from Mossad. I have been persuing that under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. The third was called off when the board of the Conway Hall Ethical Society in London, which has hosted meetings on ‘conspiracy theories’ in the past, cancelled our bookings. None of these Keep Talking meetings was about Israel or Zionism. These incidents did, however, set me off investigating the groups and individuals involved. Such events were becoming widespread in the country, even resulting in the cancellation of jazz concerts by Unz contributor Gilad Atzmon, who has twice been a speaker at Keep Talking.
In the meantime, several ‘moderate’ Labour Party Members of Parliament have resigned from the party, to form a new parliamentary grouping, the Independent Group, to be joined by some who then resigned from the Conservative Party. They all resigned because of disagreements with their parties over Brexit, and they are generally regarded as ‘Remainers’, but the former Labour Party members conflate this with ‘antisemitism’ in the party. Since then, many have been saying in the mainstream media that Brexit is being sabotaged. And now, Remainer Jess Philips, MP, who is a member of Labour Friends of Israel, is emerging as the Establishment candidate to challenge Jeremy Corbyn, saying that Corbyn “won’t admit he’s a sexist antisemite”.
In Keep Talking we eventually decided to tackle this issue head on. In my investigations, tracing the organisations and people back in time, I came across the complete diaries of Theodor Herzl. A study of his writings reveals a lot about his plans that was for many years kept from the public, and even now is little understood amongst the public. Yet these writings explain the current resurgence in ‘antisemitism’, and why this should have been expected when the Labour Party voted for a leader whose wish was to return the party to its Socialist roots.
The Doctor’s Diaries
Dr Theodor Herzl was a Viennese journalist and playwright, and, according to the dust cover of Marvin Lowenthal’s 1956 ‘The Diaries of Theodor Herzl’, was “the father of the State of Israel, a heroic and legendary figure, beloved and revered by countless followers”. Undoubtedly, many present-day Zionists will be using Herzl as a role-model. Yet until 1960 only sanitised versions of his diaries were published. Herzl specifically requested this in Book 1 of his diaries: [page 55]
When this book is published, the prescriptions for the organization of the government will be omitted. The people must be guided to the good according to principles unknown to them. Therefore the editors of the book – if I am no longer alive – shall extract the administrative maxims and keep them in the secret State Archives. Only the Doge and the Chancellor may read them. To be omitted are also those remarks which could annoy foreign governments. But the course the negotiations took shall be retained, so that our people may see how I led the Jews home.
Medical doctors in the UK used to hide their prescriptions by writing them in Latin; Dr Herzl has other means. So what was Dr Herzl’s prescription that he was hiding from the public? The present generation is allowed to know, because Herzl wrote at the end of his Book 1: “after we have done everything that is necessary to carry out our plan inexpensively, we shall make our entire program public”.
In 1960 ‘The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl’ was published. The Preface states: “Hundreds of passages, a number covering several pages, were omitted because of political or personal considerations”, adding that the diaries “belong to history, and not only can, but should be made public”. A colleague of mine, who had handed me a list of quotations from the diaries, told me: “There are many versions of the diaries – I have 6 different releases but only one is complete and no surprise the incomplete ones don’t contain the interesting parts. It took me 2 years to locate a physical source and eventually got all 5 volumes from a book dealer in Jerusalem at a cost of over £250. The complete one is by The Herzl Press in 1960 edited by Raphael Patai and translated by Harry Zohn”. It seems that the complete diaries were eventually published in order to be hidden in plain sight. The volumes were later scanned and posted on the Internet, but I was warned that I should download them quickly before they disappear.
Rich Jews and Poor Jews
Theodor Herzl. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Herzl wrote: “I wanted in particular to contrast the suffering, despised, and decent mass of poor Jews with the rich ones. The latter experience nothing of anti-Semitism which they are actually and mainly responsible for”. So he has defined the problem as having been caused mainly by the ‘rich Jews’, for which the ‘poor Jews’ were paying the price. He told a colleague at the Neue Freie Presse, “I understand what anti-Semitism is about. We Jews have maintanied ourselves, even if through no fault of our own, as a foreign body among the various nations. In the ghetto we have taken on a number of anti-social qualities. Our character has been corrupted by oppression, and it must be restored through some other kind of pressure. Actually, anti-Semitism is a consequence of the emancipation of the Jews. … They do not realize that we are what we are because they have made us that way amidst tortures, because the Church made usury dishonorable for Christians, and because the rulers forced us to deal in money”. So now he’s blaming the Christian Churches for banning usury, almost as if that were an antisemitic act. Herzl is making it clear that the root of antisemitism is the usury brought about by the ‘rich Jews’, for which the ‘poor Jews’ are made to suffer. Yet he doesn’t attempt to tackle that problem, but replaces it by another. “Throughout our two thousand years of dispersion, we have been without unified political leadership. I regard this as our chief misfortune”, he states. “Now, if we had a united political leadership, the necessity for which I need not demonstrate further and which should by no means constitute a secret society – if we had such leadership, we could tackle the solution of the Jewish question – from above, from below, from all sides”. In other words, it’s a power grab, in which the ‘rich Jews’ will control the minds of the ‘poor Jews’. Herzl takes this further by declaring, “It is a military campaign”.
Planning a War
“The exodus to the Promised Land constitutes in practical terms an enormous job of transportation, unprecedented in the modern world”, he stated then asked himself, “Did I say “transportation’?” Yes, he did, and people have been suspended from the Labour party in the present era for mentioning the ‘transportation agreement’ between the Zionists and the National Socialists. Yet mass transportation is exactly what was in Herzl’s mind. He talks of a “proletariat of intellectuals”, saying, “I shall form the general staff and the cadres of the army which is to seek, discover, and take over the land.
Earlier in his diaries [p 17] he wrote to Baron von Hirsch, a rich Jew who had been funding the resettlement of refugee Jews in Argentina, asking for a meeting. He included the first draft of his letter, saying he may have made some changes, and adding, “But in substance, those were its contents, and again the only fear I had was that Hirsch or some third party looking over his shoulder might take me for a money-seeker”. That meeting took place on Whit Monday, 1895. He “dressed himself with discreet care”, explaining: “One must not show rich people too much deference”. In fact, he was extremely arrogant when he got to the meeting. Later the same day, he wrote to Baron Hirsch: “On returning home I found that I had stopped on page 6 [of his notes], and yet I had 22 pages. Due to your impatience you heard only the beginning; where and how my idea begins to blossom you did not get to hear”. After about three pages in his diary he comes to the point:
I spoke of an army, and you already interrupted me when I began to speak of the (moral) training necessary for its march. I let myself be interrupted. And yet I have already drawn up the further details, the entire plan. I know all the things it involves; Money, money, and more money; means of transportation; the provisioning of great multitudes (which does not mean just food and drink, as in the simple days of Moses); the maintenance of manly discipline; the organization of departments; emigration treaties with the heads of some states, transit treaties with others, formal guarantees from all of them; the construction of new, splendid dwelling places. Beforehand tremendous propaganda, tremendous propaganda, the popularizition of the idea through newspapers, books, pamphlets, talks by travelling lecturers, pictures, songs. Everything directed from one center with sureness of purpose and with vision. But I would have had to tell you eventually what flag I will unfurl and how. And then you would have asked mockingly: A flag, what is that? A stick with a rag on it? – No, sir, a flag is more than that. With a flag one can lead men wherever one wants to, even into the Promised Land.
He is clearly preparing for a military campaign, and the two basic ingredients for any war of aggression are money and propaganda. He called it ‘education’ in the meeting with Hirsch, and Hirsch was having none of it.
Project Fear
In his conversation with a colleague at the Neue Freie Presse, Ludwig Speidel, he reports himself on page 10 as saying: “However, anti-Semitism, which is a strong and unconscious force among the masses, will not harm the Jews. I consider it to be a movement useful to the Jewish character. It represents the education of a group by the masses, and will perhaps lead to its being absorbed. Education is accomplished only through hard knocks”. He refers to the “education of our people” in his subsequent conversation with Hirsch on page 20, saying, “There are two possible aims: either we stay where we are or we emigrate somewhere else. … At any rate, in the meantime new generations will arise whom we must educate for our purposes”. He continues: “Now, with regard to education, I propose to employ, from the outset, methods quite different from those which you are using”, but before he has explained what they are he says some things about Hirsch’s methods, which Hirsch contests. Then Herzl continues: “To attract Jews to rural areas you would have to tell them some fairy-tale about how they may strike gold there”. In his third letter to Baron Hirsch he writes: “There are, ultimately and above all, the Jewish masses, and I shall know how to get across to them”. “After ten years”, Herzl writes on page 51, dated 6 June 1895, “the movement will be irresistible, and the Jews will come running to us barefoot through fog and darkness. Nothing will he able to stop them, at least not in the countries in which they are free to move. If there should then be attempts to impede the free passage of the Jews, we shall know how to mobilise the public opinion of the world (liberals, socialists, anti-Semites) against the imprisonment of the Jews. Then, too, our diplomats will be at work (we shall make financial concessions in the form of loans and special gifts). Once we are outside, we shall put our trust in our army, our purchased friendships, and a Europe weakened and divided by militarism and socialism. This is Jewish emancipation”. Then on page 56, dated 9 June, he writes, “In the beginning we shall be supported by the anti-Semites through a recrudescence of persecution”. According to a translator’s note, he writes ‘recrudescence’ in French. It’s an English medical term, too. It means a fresh outbreak, or a resurgence, of a condition. So he is planning a resurgence of antisemitism, in order to get his plans off the ground. That could explain how in different generations they can claim that antisemitism is getting worse.
On 12 June he describes plans for persuading governments to co-operate in the transfer of Jews, and on page 83 he writes: “It would be an excellent idea to call in respectable, acredited anti-Semites as liquidators of property. … At first they must not be given large fees for this; otherwise we shall spoil our instruments and them make despicable as ‘Stooges of the Jews’. Later their fees will increase, and in the end we shall have only Gentile officials in the countries from which we will have emigrated”. He continues on the next page: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends; the anti-Semitic countries our allies”.
Still on 12 June, but now on page 96, he expresses the same sentiments without using the word ‘antisemitic’: “Today the thought arises in me that I may be solving more more than the ]ewish Question. Namely, tout bonnement [Very neatly], the social question! I don’t know, I doubt it, because in all these matters I have the creation of new conditions in mind; and the difficulty in the social question is precisely that everywhere men are bogged down in ancient abuses, lengthy stagnation, and inherited or acquired wrong. Whereas I presuppose a virginal soil. But if it turns out to be true, what a gift of God to the Jews!”
Two days later, on page 143, he says in an imagined speech to the Rothschilds’ Family Council: “I have already told you that we want to let respectable anti-Semites participate in our project, respecting their independence, which is valuable to us – as a sort of people’s control authority”. In another imagined address to the Rothschilds’ Family Council, he writes on 15 June, page 152: “Any person of discernment must see the development clearly even now. But no great exertion will be necessary to stimulate the migration movement. The anti-Semites are already taking care of this for us. As soon as our institution becomes known, the anti-Semites will agitate for the Society in the government, in parliament, at rallies, and in the papers. Good for the Jews who are going with us. Woe to them who will let themselves be forced out only by brutal arguments”.
Clearly, the plan was to use the ‘antisemites’ to instil fear amongst the ‘poor Jews’, in order to get them to move ‘voluntarily’, and those ‘poor Jews’ who don’t go along with the plan will suffer the consequences. Later, in the same imagined address, now on page 180, he writes that “the legal equality of the Jews, where it exists, can no longer be abolished”, and that “that would immediately drive all Jews, poor and rich alike, into the arms of the revolutionary parties”. “Therefore, no effective measures can actually be taken against us”, Herzl writes, “And yet, anti-Semitism increases among the nations every day, every hour, and must continue to grow, because the causes have not been and cannot be removed”. Yet he has already told Speidel about the fundamental cause of antisemitism being to do with usury, or the perception on usury, and Speidel agreed. He is clearly not trying to solve a problem, but to create one.
An honorary anti-Semite
Herzl envisaged that full disclosure of his project would eventually appear in his newspaper, to which he owed a debt of gratitude. However, in Book 2 of the diaries it becomes clear that the newspaper wanted to publicly distance itself from Zionism. An appendix at the end of Marvin Lowenthal’s 1956 Diaries, in an entry for ‘Neue Freie Presse’, states that a colleague of Herzl’s commented: “This leading Austrian newspaper was apprehensive of being identified with a movement which was, after all, only the private concern of one of its most eminent contributors. It sought rather to identify itself with German-Austrian liberalism. In Zionism it saw a kind of Jewish edition of anti-Semitism”.
The appendix also includes an entry on the publisher of the newspaper, Eduard Bacher, stating: “In the Jewish question, Bacher’s liberalism was equivalent to anti-Zionism. … In December 1899, it looked as though Bacher was prepared to sell out his interests in the ‘Neue Freie Presse’, and Herzl, with the financial backing of his family, offered to buy them. Days of exciting scenes ensued, with the negotiations spiced by quarrels and reconciliations. Eventually Bacher did not sell, and Herzl was given the highest salary on the paper and put in complete charge of its literary department”.
This power struggle constitutes much of Book 2 of his diaries. Herzl states, modestly, on page 99, “What an example I am to the poor, aspiring Jews, such as I used to be myself!”. So he was poor, but now he, supposedly with family connections, has the financial backing to purchase Vienna’s leading newspaper. Perhaps the key to understanding this lies in interpreting his subsequent mind-bending sentence: “If my object had been money, I should never have been able to come face to face with the biggest financial power on earth, the Rothschilds, the way I am going to do”. That sentence might make sense if it had ended with “the way I have done”. So how did he come into the money?
As Herzl nears the end of his Book 1, he further demonstrates his “kind of Jewish edition of anti-Semitism”, with: “The anti-Semites will have carried the day. Let them have this satisfaction, for we too shall be happy. They will have turned out to be right because they are right”. Indeed, Herzl later wrote, in Book 2, on page 266: “Bacher joked: ‘The Jews will listen to you more peevishly than the Gentiles. You will become an honorary anti-Semite’”. I doubt whether Bacher was joking.
Recrudescences
So how does one bring about a Herzlian recrudescence, as prescribed by our doctor, when he stated: “In the beginning we shall be supported by the anti-Semites through a recrudescence of persecution”?
We are clearly now in the grip of another Herzlian recrudescence. In December 2018 The Times of Israel reported “Unprecedented EU poll finds 90% of European Jews feel anti-Semitism increasing: Anti-Semitism ‘disturbingly normalized,’ says EU rights chief, after massive survey of 12 EU states finds 85% of Jews rate it the biggest social problem in their countries”. Only at the end of the article do they point out that the survey measured Jews’ “perceptions of anti-Semitism”, rather than actual antisemitism, and publish a quote saying: “We can clearly see that they feel anxious – and indeed, more anxious than they did five years ago in most instances – and whilst these are valuable indicators, genuine threat levels are much more objectively and accurately measured by security services than these types of surveys”.
Neither the article nor the survey itself states which definition of ‘antisemitism’ is being used. Since the previous survey several EU countries had adopted the new ‘IHRA’s working definition of anti-Semitism’, but the organisation that ran the poll, together with IPSOS, and published the poll, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), had not adopted that definition. One major change has been the interpretation of criticism of Israel as being antisemitic, and the survey implies that definition when, for instance, they state: “The most common anti-Semitic statements Jews come across regularly, according to the survey, are comparisons between Israelis and the Nazis with regard to the Palestinians”. ‘Antisemitism’ used to mean prejudice or hatred of Jews as Jews. If this is anti-Semitic, in the sense of anti-Jewish then it is also anti-Teutonic. But under the new Zionists definiton of ‘antisemitism’, the word is as remote as ever from the meaning of ‘anti-Jewish’. The Times of Israel report also states, “Suggestions that Jews have too much power and ‘exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes’ also ranked highly”. Again, does that really suggest prejudice against Jews or hatred of Jews as Jews? The main proponent of the idea of Holocaust victimhood was Norman Finkelstein, in his book ‘The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering’.
The FRA’s director, Michael O’Flaherty, called on EU states to “take note and step up their efforts to prevent and combat anti-Semitism”. There seems to be a lack of separation between objective polling and campaigning on the basis of the results, which were not on ‘anti-Semitism’ but on perceptions of ‘anti-Semitism’. The launch of the survey was streamed, and within seconds it was announced that the survey was part of the fight against antisemitism. There is clearly an agenda in this project. The survey was carried out online, and Jews were notified via their organisations. The survey report admits: “Unaffiliated Jews are difficult to reach for surveys in the absence of the sampling frames, and it can be assumed that they are underrepresented in the current sample”. That would especially be relevant when we are talking merely about perceptions.
A clear example of Herzl’s plans to frighten the ‘poor Jews’, or the ‘little Jews’ as he sometimes called them, was Benjamin Netanyahu’s appeal to French Jews to relocate to Israel, following the Charlie Hebdo outrage. “To all Jews of France, all Jews of Europe”, he tweeted, “Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home”, the Independent reported. Later he gave a speech in France, saying: “These days we are blessed with another privilege, a privilege that didn’t exist for generations of Jews – the privilege to join their brothers and sisters in their historic homeland of Israel”. He spoke, not for the first time, of every French Jew being welcomed to Israel “with open arms”.
Was Netanyahu really saying that Jews would be safer in war-torn Israel than in France? That’s the message that was coming across. To me, this is reminiscent of the Dreyfuss Affair in Herzl’s time. Herzl later put it about that he had been motivated to write ‘The Jewish State’ by the Dreyfus Affair, “in order to promote the Zionist cause among non-Jewish Americans”, according to Herzl’s biographer, Shlomo Avineri. Yet the timing does not support this idea, and there is no mention of the Dreyfus Affair in Book 1 of Herzl’s diaries. That was used retrospectively to as a scare tactic.
Then on 21 February 2019 The Times of Israel announced: ‘Anti-Semitism worst since WWII, Macron tells French Jewish group: President vows to ban racist groups and recognize anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism after spate of recent incidents targeting Jews’. Macron used the word ‘resurgence’ rather than ‘recrudescence’, but it means the same. The Times of Israel then gives the game away by refering to the Dreyfus Affair, which Herzl had claimed to have led him to Zionism. “Anti-Semitism has a long history in France where society was deeply split at the end of the 19th century by the Alfred Dreyfus affair over a Jewish army captain wrongly convicted of treason”, the article states. The article also stated: “Macron announced measures including legislation to fight hate speech on the internet, to be introduced by May”. I like the beautiful ambiguity of that statement. I think May would be in dire difficulties if she tried the same thing on in Westminster, which would be akin to her failed attempt to introduce a ‘Counter-Extremism Bill’ which, if it had gone into law, would have enabled any critics of the state whom the state deemed to be ‘extremists’ to be arrested and probably imprisoned.
Zionism versus Socialism
So why should this Herzlian recrudescence be targeting Jermy Corbyn’s Labour Party in particular? I think Jeremy Corbyn is the least likely person I’ve ever met to advance ‘racist’ sentiments, whether they be anti-Jewish or anti-any-other-ethnic-group. Yet the Times of Israel article states: “The UK results [of the survey], experts suggest, may point to a ‘Corbyn factor’ connected to the ongoing row over anti-Semitism in the British Labour party”.
The former Labour Party MPs, who quit to form the Independent Group, seem to be conflating Brexit with antisemitism in the Labour Party. Yet the timing, and the coordinated resignations shortly afterwards from the Conservative Party, citing Brexit, but not antisemitism in the Conservative Party, makes it clear that the issue was Brexit, and that antisemitism had been weaponised. Jonathan Cook, writing in Middle East Eye on 27 December last year, presented an analysis of the antisemitism witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn, headed ‘Labour and anti-semitism in 2018: The truth behind the relentless smear campaign against Corbyn’. “Bombarded by disinformation campaigns, many British Jews are being misled into seeing Corbyn as a threat rather than as the best hope of inoculating Britain against the resurgence of right-wing anti-semitism menace”, he writes. He reports on the above survey, as well as other surveys and supposed antisemitic incidents. “The Guardian has been at the forefront of framing Corbyn as either indifferent to, or actively assisting in, the supposed rise of anti-semitism in Labour”, he writes. In fact, he writes, “Other surveys show that, when measured by objective criteria, the Labour party scores relatively well: The percentage of members holding anti-Semitic views is substantially lower than in the ruling Conservative party and much the same as in Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats”.
But why would Jeremy Corbyn be especially targeted? Jonathan Cook writes: “Israeli politicians loathe Corbyn because he has made support for the Palestinian people a key part of his platform”. That is a commonly held view, and is undoubtedly true. However, a study of Herzl’s complete diaries will show that the problem has much deeper foundations than that.
Herzl makes it clear that he is against democracy. He writes (page 169): “I am against democracy because it is extreme in its approval and disapproval, tends to idle parliamentary babble, and produces that base class of men, and professional politicians. Nor are present-day nations really suited to the democratic form of government; and I believe they will become less and less suited to it. … Politics must work from the top down”. He envisages an ‘aristocratic republic’. “Our people, to whom we are presenting the new country, will gradually accept the new Constitution that we give it. But wherever opposition may appear, we shall break it down. Everywhere we shall try it with friendly persuasion, but if need be we shall push it through by brutal force. … We shall impose extensive but firm limits on public opinion”. That sounds to me like a good description of where British politics is heading at the moment, especially when Herzl states in the same context, “Government by referendum does not make sense in my opinion, because in politics there are no simple questions which can be answered merely by Yes or No”. The eighth Labour MP to resign on the basis of Brexit and antisemitism was Joan Ryan, leader of Labour Friends of Israel, who had been featured in Al Jazeera’s The Lobby programme as one of the main players in the undermining of Jeremy Corbyn.
Herzl makes many references to Socialism and Socialists, and is clearly not in favour.
“You talk like a Socialist”, he told Baron Hirsch when he first met him (page 24). In an imagined speech to the Rothschild’s Family Council he states: “My view is that Socialism is a purely technological problem. The distribution of Nature’s forces through electricity will eliminate it” (page 45). In his first letter to Bismarck, he states that he is not a Social Democrat (page 119), and two pages later, in discussing the consequences that would arise if Jews were to be deprived of equal citizenship, he states, “Immediately all Jews … would join the Socialist Party, with all their resources”. In another imagined address to the Family Council, he states (page 157): “the moneyed Jews are driven to pure speculation by the persecution of capital by the Socialists and anti-Semites”. On July 15, 1895, he asked a friend what he thought of the anti-Jewish riots in Vienna. “’The Jews must turn Socialist’, the friend replied, obstinately”, wrote Herzl (page 202). Ten days later (page 214) he writes that he asked a local friend what his solution was. “The Jews have to join the Socialist movement!”, the friend replied. Herzl wrote, “In my opinion, that would be as nonsensical as Socialism itself”. It is clear that Herzl regards Socialism as a rival to Zionism, especially when he writes: “I hear that he [Birnbaum] has turned away from Zionism and gone over to Socialism when my appearance led him back to Zionism again”.
In Volume 2 Herzl makes this rivalry between Zionism and Socialism even more evident. He wrote on March 17, 1897, about the first Zionist meeting to take place in Vienna, which had taken place the previous day. “A few Socialists spoke in opposition to Zionism, using old arguments”, he wrote, “The Zionist resolution was carried, with only 50 voting against it. Then the Socialists intoned the ‘Lied der Arbeit’ [Hymn of Labour], whereupon our people responded with the ‘Bundeslied’ [Song of the Covenant], which deeply moved everyone”. In September 1897 he relates a conversation with Count von Bülow, who was about to become German Foreign Minister. “The anti-Socialist aspects of Zionism was gone into in the greatest detail”, he reported (page 666). On the next page Herzl stated: “I made my position clear – that it was folly on the part of the Jews to join the Socialist Party, which would soon rid itself of them”. And on the next page, he wrote, “With regard to the Socialist aspects of the problem, at any rate, we saw eye to eye. He was impressed when I mentioned the fact that at the University of Vienna we have taken students away from Socialism”. On page 700 he talked of “the most effective propaganda against the Socialists”.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum
I think it’s very clear from this that Hezl was against Socialism. This, together with the methods advocated by Herzl, will explain why the Labour Party, as soon as it returned to a Socialist leadership, had a problem with the recrudescence of ‘antisemitism’. If criticism of Zionism is deemed ‘antisemitic’, then criticism of Zionism’s iconic figure, “the father of the State of Israel, a heroic and legendary figure, beloved and revered by countless followers”, and undoubtedly a role-model for many Zionists, will undoubtedly be deemed ‘antisemitic’. But the Labour Party is not anti-Jewish, nor is there a problem of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Labour Party. The problem is that Zionism is endemically anti-Socialist, and that in order to combat Socialism in the Labour Party the present-day Zionists are doing just what the doctor prescribed.
Water Shortage? Blame Climate Change!
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | March 19, 2019
Water shortage? Why not blame it on global warming!
Within 25 years England will not have enough water to meet demand, the head of the Environment Agency is warning.
The impact of climate change, combined with population growth, means the country is facing an “existential threat”, Sir James Bevan told the Waterwise Conference in London.
He wants to see wasting water become “as socially unacceptable as blowing smoke in the face of a baby”.
“We all need to use less water and use it more efficiently,” he said.
Sir James Bevan was appointed chief executive of the Environment Agency – the public body responsible for protecting the environment and wildlife in England – in 2015 after a career as a diplomat.
He told his audience that, in around 20 to 25 years, England would reach the “jaws of death – the point at which, unless we take action to change things, we will not have enough water to supply our needs”.
Only one slight snag with Sir James’ little theory, there has been no reduction in rainfall levels in England, and droughts used to be much more severe and prevalent in the past:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly
Even commonly made claims that summers are getting drier do not stand up to scrutiny:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly
And just for good measure, the area of the country which is most vulnerable to water stress is also not becoming drier:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets
And finally, summers in England are not getting hotter. The hottest summer still remains that of 1976. Indeed, last summer was the only one other than 1976 which was actually hotter than 1911!
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly
There may be many reasons for water shortages, such as increased demand and leaks, but “climate change” certainly is not one of them.
But it is much easier for Sir James Bevan to blame global warming and ask us all to take less baths, than have to provide solutions to problems he can address.
The Guardian of Judea
By Devon Nola | March 19, 2019
In the last week, we saw yet another organised smear campaign of hate and slander orchestrated by Jewish interest groups and Labour Party affiliates wielded against Internationally acclaimed Jazz musician, Gilad Atzmon. A protest was planned for Atzmon’s concert at The Vortex Jazz Club after numerous emails from local Labour Council members and members of these groups demanded the cancellation of the gig fell on deaf ears. They claimed Atzmon plays ‘Nazi-apologist Jazz.’ Personally, I’m not familiar with the genre. The chief organiser was Jewdas, a group that qualifies itself as “Radical Jewish Voices”. The four co-sponsors were: Momentum, an alleged grass-roots collective, Socialists Against Antisemitism, whose name is self-explanatory if not contradictory, London Young Labour and The Jewish Labour Movement.
What is most interesting is this event was supported and promoted by journalist for The Guardian, Owen Jones. It’s always shocking when a journalist supports any sort of censorship. Jones posted the event on his Facebook page and within two days, managed to rack up over 350 comments telling him what a huge mistake he was making, the accusations against Atzmon were false and totally absurd, and might he provide some proof to substantiate the claims. Many came from avid readers and supporters of Jones’ usual commentary but were aghast at his support of preventing a respected musician from earning a living and they expressed this in no uncertain terms.
When Jones finally did respond, it was to attach a hit piece that came from an ultra-Zionist website full of misquotes, quotes out of context and even completely fabricated quotes. Rather than sifting through Atzmon’s prolific body of written work to decipher if the accusations against him were legitimate, Jones instead chose this piecemeal missive full of lies.
Realising, at that point, Jones hadn’t actually read anything by Atzmon, I attached a copy of a page from Atzmon’s book, “The Wondering Who”. I assumed once he read Atzmon’s thoughts, directly, versus some bastardised fictional version, he would realise his error in judgement and deliver a swift apology. This is what an honest journalist, a person with integrity would do. Astonishingly, Owen Jones chose a different path. He didn’t admit to his mistake (giving him the benefit of the doubt, here), but rather removed the entire thread, or shall I say, the evidence. This was a calculated, conscious decision, by Jones, suggesting he was fully aware of the deceit being peddled in both the protest he was supporting and the piece he scrounged up to defend it. This isn’t the behaviour one expects from a journalist. It’s typically something one finds in a sleazy tabloid writer whose articles are printed next to ads for miracle serums to cure baldness or penis enlargement.
Some time ago, Atzmon coined the phrase “The Guardian of Judea” for the well-known paper. Witnessing one of their journalists engaged in such a slanderous campaign, where completely unfounded accusations of antisemitism, Nazi apologist and holocaust-denier are being lobbed at an innocent man like tennis balls on the final Sunday of Wimbledon, I’m inclined to think this is yet one more astute observation by the legendary saxophonist.
List of signatories to letters demanding the ouster of Gilad Atzmon:
As’ad AbuKhalil, The Angry Arab News Service, Turlock, CA
Suha Afyouni, solidarity activist, Beirut, LEBANON
Max Ajl, essayist, rabble-rouser, proprietor of Jewbonics blog site, Ithaca, NY
Haifaa Al-Moammar, activist, stay-at-home mom, and marathon walker, Los Angeles, CA
Electa Arenal, professor emerita, CUNY Graduate Center/Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Women’s Studies, New York, NY
Gabriel Ash, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Geneva, SWITZERLAND
Joel Beinin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Dan Berger, Wild Poppies Collective, Philadelphia, PA
Chip Berlet, Boston, MA
Nazila Bettache, activist, Montréal, CANADA
Sam Bick, Tadamon!, Immigrant Workers Center, Montréal, Québec
Max Blumenthal, author; writing fellow, The Nation, New York, NY
Lenni Brenner, author, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, New York, NY
Café Intifada
Paola Canarutto, Rete-ECO (Italian Network of Jews against the Occupation), Torino, ITALY
Paulette d’Auteuil, National Jericho Movement, Albuquerque, NM
Susie Day, Monthly Review, New York, NY
Ali Hocine Dimerdji, PhD student at The University of Nottingham, in Nottingham, UK
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, professor emerita, California State University
Todd Eaton, Park Slope Food Coop Members for Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions, Brooklyn, NY
Mark Elf, Jews sans frontieres
S. EtShalom, registered nurse, Philadelphia, PA
Benjamin Evans, solidarity activist, Chicago, IL
First of May Anarchist Alliance
Sherna Berger Gluck, professor emerita, California State University/Israel Divestment Campaign, CA
Neta Golan, International Solidarity Movement
Tony Greenstein, Secretary Brighton Unemployed Centre/UNISON, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, Brighton, UK
Andrew Griggs, Café Intifada, Los Angeles, CA
Jenny Grossbard, artist, designer, writer and fighter, New York, NY
Freda Guttman, activist, Montréal, CANADA
Adam Hanieh, lecturer, Department of Development Studies/SOAS, University of London, UK
Swaneagle Harijan, anti-racism, social justice activism, Seattle, WA
Sarah Hawas, researcher and solidarity activist, Cairo, EGYPT
Stanley Heller, “The Struggle” Video News, moderator “Jews Who Speak Out”
Mostafa Henaway, Tadamon!, Immigrant Workers Center, Montréal, CANADA
Elise Hendrick, Meldungen aus dem Exil/Noticias de una multipátrida, Cincinnati, OH
Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer, New York, NY
Ken Hiebert, activist, Ladysmith, CANADA
Elizabeth Horowitz, solidarity activist, New York, NY
Adam Hudson, writer/blogger, San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Dhruv Jain, Researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academie and PhD student at York University, Paris, FRANCE
Tom Keefer, an editor of the journal Upping the Anti, Toronto, CANADA
Karl Kersplebedeb, Left Wing Books, Montréal, CANADA
Anne Key, Penrith, Cumbria, UK
Mark Klein, activist, Toronto, CANADA
Bill Koehnlein, Brecht Forum, New York, NY
L.A. Palestine Labor Solidarity Committee, Los Angeles, CA
Mark Lance, Georgetown University/Institute for Anarchist Studies, Washington, DC
David Landy, author, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel, Dublin, IRELAND
Bob Lederer, Pacifica/WBAI producer, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, New York, NY
Matthew Lyons, Three Way Fight, Philadelphia, PA
Karen MacRae, solidarity activist, Toronto, CANADA
Heba Farouk Mahfouz, student activist, blogger, Cairo, EGYPT
Marvin Mandell and Betty Reid Mandell, co-editors, New Politics, West Roxbury, MA
Ruth Sarah Berman McConnell, retired teacher, DeLand, FL
Kathleen McLeod, poet, Brisbane, Australia
Karrie Melendres, Los Angeles, CA
Matt Meyer, Resistance in Brooklyn, New York, NY
Amirah Mizrahi, poet and educator, New York, NY
mesha Monge-Irizarry, co-director of Education Not Incarceration; SF MOOC City commissioner, San Francisco, CA
Matthew Morgan-Brown, solidarity activist, Ottawa, CANADA
Michael Novick, People Against Racist Terror/Anti-Racist Action, Los Angeles, CA
Saffo Papantonopoulou, New School Students for Justice in Palestine, New York, NY
Susan Pashkoff, Jews Against Zionism, London, UK
Tom Pessah, UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine, Berkeley, CA
Marie-Claire Picher, Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB), New York, NY
Sylvia Posadas (Jinjirrie), Kadaitcha, Noosa, AUSTRALIA
Roland Rance, Jews Against Zionism, London, UK
Danielle Ratcliff, San Francisco, CA
Liz Roberts, War Resisters League, New York, NY
Emma Rosenthal, contributor, Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation, Los Angeles, CA
Penny Rosenwasser, PhD, Oakland, CA
Suzanne Ross, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, The Riverside Church Prison Ministry, New York, NY
Gabriel San Roman, Orange County Weekly, Orange County, CA
Ian Saville, performer and lecturer, London, UK
Joel Schwartz, CSEA retiree/AFSCME, New York, NY
Tali Shapiro, Anarchists Against the Wall, Boycott From Within, Tel Aviv, OCCUPIED PALESTINE
Simona Sharoni, SUNY, author, Gender & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Plattsburgh, NY
Jaggi Singh, No One Is Illegal-Montreal/Solidarity Across Borders, Montréal, CANADA
Michael S. Smith, board member, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York, NY
Pierre Stambul, Union juive française pour la paix (French Jewish Union for Peace), Paris, FRANCE
Muffy Sunde, Los Angeles, CA
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin, Bronx, NY
Tadamon! (http://www.tadamon.ca/), Montréal, CANADA
Ian Trujillo, atheist, Los Angeles, CA
Gabriella Turek, PhD, Auckland, NEW ZEALAND
Henry Walton, SEIU, retired, Los Angeles, CA
Bill Weinberg, New Jewish Resistance, New York, NY
Abraham Weizfeld, author, The End of Zionism and the liberation of the Jewish People, Montreal, CANADA
Ben White, author, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy, Cambridge, UK
Laura Whitehorn, former political prisoner, NYS Task Force on Political Prisoners, New York, NY
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, founding member, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG)
Asa Winstanley, journalist for Electronic Intifada, Al-Akhbar and others, London, UK
Ziyaad Yousef, solidarity activist
and also:
Ali Abunimah
Naseer Aruri, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Omar Barghouti, human rights activist
Hatem Bazian, Chair, American Muslims for Palestine
Andrew Dalack, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network
Haidar Eid, Gaza
Nada Elia, US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
Toufic Haddad
Kathryn Hamoudah
Adam Hanieh, Lecturer, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London
Mostafa Henaway, Tadamon! Canada
Monadel Herzallah, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network
Nadia Hijab, author and human rights advocate
Andrew Kadi
Abir Kobty, Palestinian blogger and activist
Joseph Massad, Professor, Columbia University, NY
Danya Mustafa, Israeli Apartheid Week US National Co-Coordinator & Students for Justice in Palestine- University of New Mexico
Dina Omar, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine
Haitham Salawdeh, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network
Sobhi Samour, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London
Khaled Ziada, SOAS Palestine Society, London
Rafeef Ziadah, poet and human rights advocate
British RAF servicing Saudi jets bombing civilians in Yemen – UK armed forces minister
RT | March 18, 2019
Britain is providing “engineering support” for UK-supplied aircraft operated by the Royal Saudi Air Force, responsible for killing innocent people in Yemen, a British government minister has revealed.
Armed Forces Minister Mark Lancaster was responding to a question in parliament from Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, on military personnel seconded to BAE Systems in Saudi Arabia, when he admitted that the RAF have provided engineering and “generic training” to the Saudi Air Force involved in the bombing of Yemen.
“RAF personnel on secondment to BAE Systems in Saudi Arabia have provided routine engineering support for UK-supplied aircraft operated by the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF), including aircraft engaged in military operations in Yemen.”
Lancaster insisted UK personnel were not involved in the loading of weapons for operational sorties, in response to Russell-Moyle’s claim that the “British support keeps Saudi’s air war going.”
Andrew Smith of Campaign Against the Arms Trade has branded the revelation “shocking but not surprising,” arguing that UK military personnel “should not be servicing Saudi jets or supporting the Saudi armed forces.”
It’s not just the UK that has been widely criticised for being party to the Saudi-led coalition’s bombardment of Yemen.
In December, the US Pentagon revealed that they were having to claw back $331 million of taxpayer-subsidized money gifted to Saudi Arabia and the UAE over a three-year period, when it ‘accidentally’ refueled their aircraft for free during their war on Yemen.
In November, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry accused the UK government of having “blood on its hands” after admitting that the RAF had trained over a hundred Saudi pilots in the past ten years.
Coalition forces led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have relentlessly bombed Yemen since 2015 in an effort to oust the Houthi rebels controlling the capital city of Sanaa.
They have reportedly targeted hospitals and other civilian infrastructure, leading to a massive cholera outbreak, and upwards of 60,000 people are believed to have died in the conflict since 2016 – with a further 85,000 estimated dead from famine and malnutrition.
Half of Yemen’s population relies on food aid to survive, placing them in immediate danger of starving to death after coalition forces blockaded the port city of Hodeidah last year.
The Zionists’ Fight Extends Beyond Palestine
By Miko Peled | Mint Press News | March 14, 2019
The Zionists’ suppression of freedoms extends beyond Palestine, particularly when it comes to freedom of speech about Israel. Zionist agents, planted in centers of power around the world, are busy silencing those who would criticize Israel. Using an array of highly effective methods, they have been successful at getting laws passed by legislators, getting major political figures falsely accused of making anti-Semitic statements, and establishing a new, Zionist-manufactured definition of what it means to be anti-Semitic.
Earlier this year the United States Senate passed Resolution S-1 that gives the federal government the right to penalize anyone calling to boycott Israel. Then — being a black, Muslim woman who dared to challenge the patriarchy, white supremacy, and Zionism and thus alienate the Washington establishment — Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was targeted and accused of anti-Semitism.
As I had reported in 2017 and again in 2018, this disturbing political witch hunt is not limited to the U.S. In the U.K., members of the Labor Party, including the leader Jeremy Corbyn, have been under attack for several years, with the latest targets being MP Chris Williamson of the U.K. Labour Party and journalist Asa Winstanley. They are latest of a long list of members of the party who have been suspended from the party because of bogus accusations of anti-Semitism.
A campaign to bring down Corbyn
Israel is terrified of a Corbyn government in the U.K. and we can expect that it will stop at nothing in order to bring him down. The campaign to undermine him includes the office of the Israeli prime minister. This was made evident in August of 2018 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that Corbyn receive “unequivocal condemnation” for attending “a memorial service for the Munich massacre terrorists.” Corbyn attended no such memorial, as I was able to demonstrate in a piece published by MintPress News at the time.
The Zionist fear of Corbyn is a result of his lifelong commitment to justice and his unwavering support for all oppressed people, including the Palestinians. He has said on more than one occasion, and as recently as this month, that the U.K. must freeze its arms sales to Israel. However, attacks aimed directly at Corbyn are not enough to get the job done. Israel and its agents around the U.K. have been engaged in a campaign of lies and smears, the results of which are shown in this report that was put out by the Labour Party and published by the BBC.
The report points out, among other things:
- 673 complaints of anti-Semitism by Labour Party members were received — a Labour spokesman said this represented about 0.1 percent of the membership;
- 96 members were immediately suspended after complaints were made, and a further 211 were told they would be investigated;
- 146 members received a first warning, and 220 cases did not have sufficient evidence of a breach of party rules for an investigation;
- Of the 307 who were suspended or notified of an investigation, 44 members left the party.
These are complaints that pertain to members of the party. An additional 433 complaints were received by the party that were not about Labour Party members. Clearly, the campaign by the pro-Israel groups aims to overwhelm the Labour Party into submission and bring about the fall of Corbyn by using a barrage of anti-Semitism accusations.
Jeremy Corbyn is a man who has stood against racism and injustice his entire career. His leadership has energized the party, which has gained more than half a million new members over that span. However, one has to wonder if there is an argument being made somewhere that Corbyn is the reason for this sudden outbreak of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Again, one can only guess that the Zionist goal is to bring the Labour Party to exhaustion, and to the conclusion that Corbyn is too much trouble for his worth and thus must be replaced for the good of the party.
Chris Williamson
Slated to be Corbyn’s number-two man, at least in the minds of Corbyn supporters, Williamson is no less principled and no less a fighter than Corbyn himself. He is charismatic and he and Corbyn could make a powerful progressive leadership team, which is why he had to be taken down.
The hope, one assumes, on the pro-Israel flank of the Labour Party is that Corbyn’s current deputy, Tom Watson — who is an avid Zionist and not at all a Corbyn supporter — will take over once Corbyn steps down, or rather, once Corbyn is taken down by Zionist agencies working for Israel. Watson, for his part, is already rallying supporters behind him in a new group he formed within the Labour Party, called “Future Britain.”
Williamson, like Corbyn, is dedicated to the idea of democratizing the Labour Party, which means taking control from the party establishment and giving it to the members. Combine that with his pro-Palestine views and he is the perfect target for an anti-Semitism smear.
Asa Winstanley
According to a report in the Electronic Intifada, a publication for which Asa Winstanley writes, the Labour Party has initiated disciplinary proceedings against Winstanley, who is also a member of the party. This was first published by a journalist from the Jewish Chronicle — which is a Zionist, anti-Palestinian publication. Winstanley is a journalist whose views on Palestine are clear, uncompromising and precise [he insisted on shunning Gilad Atzmon as ‘antisemitic’]. No doubt he was placed on the list of members to be smeared and suspended because of his honest writing on Palestine.
Zionist oppression and brutal tactics against the people of Palestine, and the attempts to silence their supporters around the world, are not going to end on their own. People of conscience must stand for Palestine; people whose right to free speech is being denied must stand up and stand together; steps must be taken to end the dominant influence and automatic legitimacy that Zionism and its agents enjoy around the world.
The Shame of It!
The UK failed to back a UN investigation into Israel’s shoot-to-kill-or-cripple policy against Gaza’s caged civilians. Will the Foreign Office also fail to adopt its findings?
By Stuart Littlewood | American Herald Tribune | March 17, 2019
Open letter to Alister Jack, MP for Dumfries & Galloway
cc Jeremy Hunt MP, Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs
Dear Alister,
Here’s something to take your mind off Brexit.
You’ll have heard of Dr Swee Ang. She is the first female Orthopaedic Consultant appointed to St Bartholomew (‘Barts’) and the Royal London Hospitals.
In the 1980s and 1990s Dr Swee worked as trauma and orthopaedics consultant in the refugee camps of Lebanon and later for the United Nations in Gaza, and the World Health Organisation in the West Bank and Gaza. She is Founder and Patron of the British charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP).
She also treated the victims of the Pakistan (Kashmir) earthquake, and as consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon operated on and looked after the victims of the 7 July 2005 suicide bombing at the Royal London Hospital.
Dr Swee is co-author of War Surgery and Acute Care of the War Wounded; she also wrote From Beirut to Jerusalem documenting her experience in the Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon and Gaza.
Last summer she was aboard the Al-Awda sailing to Gaza with urgently medical supplies when the vessel was violently assaulted and hijacked in international waters by our so-called friend and ally which, we’re repeatedly told, shares our values and whose enemies are our enemies. The Al-Awda was dragged to an Israeli port and her passengers and crew were roughed up (some seriously injured) and abused, thrown in an Israeli jail and had their possessions and money stolen. The precious cargo, as far as we can ascertain, never reached the desperate wounded.
Dr Swee has just emailed:
“The UN Commission for Human Rights will be concluding its investigation on the shooting of thousands of Palestinian civilians demonstrating within the borders of Gaza. At least 189 were killed (more now) and thousands shot with live ammunitions – with loss of limbs and still needing multiple surgeries if they were to keep their legs and arms. It is estimated that with conventional limb salvaging surgeries at least £39 million has to be found to prevent further amputations (figures put out by MAP).
“Last year the UK abstained from supporting the UN conducting such an investigation. However it went ahead and I was fortunate enough to attend the meeting at Amnesty International two days ago to hear the personal testimonies of Dr Tarek Loubani who was shot on 14 May 2018, and Dr Mahmoud Matar the head of the Limb Reconstruction Service in Gaza. They will be testifying to the UN Commissioner coming Monday in Geneva. There is an urgent request for us to write to Jeremy Hunt [Foreign Secretary] with copy to our local MP asking the UK Government to adopt the findings and recommendations of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights. In fact the concern is that UK might vote against it since last year we abstained.
“Please do so urgently. This is something we all can do. Email for Jeremy Hunt is:
jeremy.hunt@fco.gov.uk / juntj@parliament.uk
Even if you are not a UK national but are Palestinians you have the right to email him on behalf of your people. Please also ask your friends to support the UN Commissioner for Human Rights.
“Thank you all and God bless, Swee.”
Wounds “the size of a fist” causing lifelong disability
According to Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) who operate in Gaza, the Israelis have been using ‘dum-dum’ type rounds that cause wounds of “unusual severity”. This sort of ammunition is understood to be outlawed in warfare. Last year MSF surgeons in Gaza reported “devastating gunshot wounds” among hundreds of people injured during the protests, the huge majority – mainly young men, but also some women and children – having unusually severe wounds to the lower extremities.
MSF medical teams note the injuries include an extreme level of destruction to bones and soft tissue, and large exit wounds that can be the size of a fist. “Half of the more than 500 patients we have admitted in our clinics have injuries where the bullet has literally destroyed tissue after having pulverized the bone,” said Marie-Elisabeth Ingres, Head of Mission of MSF in Palestine. “These patients will need to have very complex surgical operations and most of them will have disabilities for life.”
She hadn’t seen these kinds of injuries before. The wounds appeared to be caused by ammunition with an expanding ‘butterfly’ effect. “Mass lifelong disability is now the prospect for young Gazans who merely gathered in unarmed protest”
Writing in the BMJ (British Medical Journal) the Head of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in Gaza, Dr Nafiz Abu-Shaban, said that the hundreds of high energy compound tibial fractures from Israeli live fire are the most difficult of all open fractures to treat. They may require between 5 and 7 surgical procedures, each operation taking 3-6 hours. “Even with state-of-the-art reconstruction, healing takes 1-2 years. Most of these patients will develop osteomyelitis. A steadily increasing toll of secondary amputations is inevitable. They will also need intensive rehabilitation, but the only rehabilitation hospital in Gaza was destroyed by Israeli bombing in 2014….”
UK favours “whitewash toolkit” instead
The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva adopted a resolution to set up an independent, international Commission of Inquiry to investigate all violations of humanitarian and international human rights law in the occupied Palestinian territory, with particular focus on recent events in Gaza. The resolution was passed with only two states opposing (the USA and another of Israel’s poodles, Australia), 29 in favour and 14 abstentions. The UK was among the abstainers.
Trying to explain its pathetic stance, the UK Mission in Geneva called the resolution “partial and unhelpfully unbalanced” for not explicitly demanding an investigation into the action of non-state actors such as Hamas. But why should it? Hamas is not the invader, illegal occupier, aggressor and blockader. It governs the besieged Gaza Strip as best it can after being democratically elected in 2006. The UK Government then called on Israel to “make clear its intentions and carry out what must be a transparent inquiry into the IDF’s conduct at the border fence and to demonstrate how this will achieve a sufficient level of independence.” In other words, investigate itself.
However, Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem condemned the already-announced internal Israeli military probe as “part of the whitewashing toolkit”. The British Government was criticised in parliament for its limp-wristed attitude and reminded of Israel’s self-exoneration over the killing of four boys playing on a beach during its 2014 military offensive on Gaza.
The preamble to the UNHRC resolution states the reasons for a proper investigation brilliantly. It’s worth repeating here….
- Convinced that the lack of accountability for violations of international law reinforces a culture of impunity, leading to a recurrence of violations and seriously endangering international peace,
- Noting the systematic failure by Israel to carry out genuine investigations in an impartial, independent, prompt and effective way, as required by international law, into the violence and offences against Palestinians by the occupying forces, and to establish judicial accountability for its actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,
- Emphasizing the obligations of Israel as the occupying Power to ensure the safety, well-being and protection of the Palestinian civilian population under its occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,
- Emphasizing also that the intentional targeting of civilians and other protected persons in situations of armed conflict, including foreign occupation, constitutes a grave breach of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, and poses a threat to international peace and security,
- Recognizing the importance of the right to life and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association to the full enjoyment of all human rights…
Despite all that, Theresa May and Boris Johnson (Foreign Secretary at the time) still couldn’t bring themselves to back the UN resolution.
In recent years this country has so abandoned it moral compass that failing to support a perfectly legitimate investigation into the Israeli military’s brutal behaviour towards the Palestinians they have robbed and abused and murdered for 70 years — a scenario we engineered — is unsurprising.
But many see no difference between the racist thugs who command the Israeli army and the degenerate responsible for the New Zealand mosque massacre. Let us hope Her Majesty’s Government eventually discovers its backbone and adopts the report and findings of the UN Human Rights Council lest we all die of shame.
Kindest regards,
Your constituent Stuart Littlewood
BBC’s Age of Denial
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | March 16, 2019
I doubt if a day goes past now without a blast of global warming propaganda from the BBC.
Isabel Hardman has a new five part series on Radio 4, called the Age of Denial.
Although it covers all forms of denial, it is clearly aimed at climate sceptics, as this opening episode makes obvious:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000357k
Hardman interviews Kari Marie Norgaard, a social scientist from Oregon, who has written a book about climate change denial.
You can listen to the first five minutes, but to give the gist, Norgaard visited a small town in western Norway in the winter of 2000/01, to do research for a book she was writing. She found that the winter that year was a mild one, with the snow arriving late.
But what really stunned Norgaard was that none of the locals wanted to talk about “climate change”, which she was convinced was to blame.
Hardman and Norgaard then discuss various reasons why this should be so, which amounted to no more than a load of psychobabble.
For some reason, it did not occur to either to ask what the locals knew already. That it was just the sort of weather event that they, or their forefathers, had seen in the past.
Indeed, when we check the actual data at Bergen, the longest running site in the region, we find that those winter temperatures in 2000/01, far from being unusual, were the norm in the 1930s and 40s, and not infrequent at other times either:
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/stdata_show.cgi?id=634013170000&dt=1&ds=5
In the remainder of the episode, Hardman discusses various theories from other psychoanalysts. But it is all just a spurious intellectual attempt to create a condition called ‘Denialism’. No doubt so that climate sceptics can be conveniently labelled and then ignored.
In reality, you don’t need to be a psychologist to understand why so many people are suspicious of what they are told about climate change.
The answer lies in the fact that they see no evidence on the ground to support the barrage of apocalyptic warnings showered on them.
People who live near the coast can see with their own eyes that they are not about to be inundated by the sea.
Temperature rise has been so small in the last century that most people would not even be aware of it if they were not told about it.
As for extreme weather, older people know that there have always been floods, droughts, heatwaves and storms. Sadly it is the younger generation, who have no such experience, that is vulnerable to propaganda.
In short, people are far more knowledgeable than the sneering Isabel Hardman gives them credit for. And they know when they are being sold a pup.
Moreover, these ordinary people have far more pressing concerns in their daily lives than to be paranoid about climate change. Perhaps if Hardman came out of her metropolitan BBC bubble and talked to ordinary people, she might find this out for herself.
Rather than trying to package sceptics as people with psychological problems, she might ask why others have become totally paranoid about climate change. When I see school kids questioning the point of going to school when “their future could be ruined by climate change”, I truly despair.
What on earth are we doing to these youngsters? Do we really want them growing up so indoctrinated and unable to use their own faculties that they cannot even check the facts for themselves? Do we really want them to grow up so neurotic that they are scared of the weather?
Are we happy to see them marching around like a bunch of zombies, full of meaningless slogans about topics that they don’t have the slightest understanding about?
It is a sort of mass hysteria that has unfortunately been all too common during human history. It used to be a matter of burning witches, or human sacrifices by the Aztecs. Now it is demonising CO2.
Perhaps Isabel might like to devote her next series to this.
Featured Video
Revive Iran’s MOU Deal or Face a Forever War /John Mearsheimer
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New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Revive Iran’s MOU Deal or Face a Forever War /John Mearsheimer
- Kafr Qasim at 70: The massacre Israel still hasn’t owned up to
- Would President Vance really ditch Israel?
- LAPD Pilot Will Track Vehicles In San Fernando Valley
- Britain’s Online Censorship Law Now Comes With a Crisis Plan for Your Posts
- NATO’s “Nordic model” brings Arctic confrontation closer to Russia’s nuclear bases
- Using nuclear weapons, the US-Israeli alliance still can’t beat Iran
- Sunset on the Quality of Western Propaganda: Arrival of the Dr Strangelove Moment
- Ukrainian general accused of protecting crime bosses
- US-‘Israel’ alliance faces growing rupture after midterms
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
