Inside the 'concentration camp' that is Gaza

The nasty and the hateful have decided that if they call Gaza a 'concentration camp' they will gain even more publicity for their campaign against the existence of Israel and really upset Jews who know what a 'concentration camp' really is because they lost large parts of their families in them during the Nazi rule of Germany.

I have blogged previously about the real situation in Gaza, some can be found amongst the postings here so I was not surprised to find these photos of Gaza. What is interesting to me is not just the photos of a clean and prosperous Gaza such as in the photos at the top of this piece but that even in the photos that show a 'dirty' Gaza such as this one...

... it looks no dirtier or less developed than any number of towns I have visited in the subcontinent and further abroad. This is how poor people live in the vast majority of the world, it is us in the prosperous West that just don't see it and so don't understand.

For those who call Gaza a 'concentration camp', look at the people in the photos above and see their full shops, stalls and bellies and then look at these photos of Jews in Nazi concentration camps...

Do you feel any shame at your use of the description 'concentration camp' now? Or are you without shame?

Not subtle but funny - Glen Beck enjoys the victory

Not classy, not graceful, more than a touch 'gloaty' BUT not a patch on the bile that spewed out of MSNBC and others after Barack Obama's election as President.



Thanks to A Tangled Web for the spot.

'Solidarity brother, solidarity'

I have long pointed out the anti-Conservative bias spewed out by the BBC's Michael Crick, a man who is never happier as a journalist than when 'investigating' a Tory but who shows very little interest in investigating the left of British politics. So I was not surprised to read his views about the BBC 'journalist' strike - "I haven’t listened to the Today programme. I regard listening to or watching the BBC as strike breaking."

With such as Michael Crick and James "If we win the election"Naughtie in front of the microphone and such as Paul Mason in the control room, is it any wonder the BBC is as politically biased as it is?

That might help to explain Newsnight's political stance

Harry's Place about the BBC journalists strike reminded me of something that I had forgtten about Newsnight's economics editor, Paul Mason; something that Harry's Place reported just over two years ago. Go and read for yourselves...

'I do not think that a BBC journalist would participate in three events organised by the BNP or BNP front organisations. I am suprised that Newsnight’s Economic editor – of all things! – feels comfortable participating in SWP events.

...

... the Socialist Workers’ Party: which in the past ten years has devoted its energies to promoting speakers from Hamas and Hezbollah, lying about their genocidal racism, and promoting the viciously antisemitic Gilad Atzmon.'

Airport security UK and abroad

Jon Worth explains why if he wanted to bomb an airliner he wouldn't pick one leaving a UK airport. Here's an extract:

'I’ve recently taken return flights from the UK to Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt (to go diving in Dahab), and my parents have flown to and from Morocco, returning to the UK from Fez.

On the way to Egypt and Morocco we were subject to the normal checks on liquids in our hand luggage, and obliged to bin anything over 100ml, still in response to the 2006 transatlantic bomb plot.

But what about the other way around?

You can take as much liquid as you like (within reason) through security in both Fez and Sharm-el-Sheikh – I took 2 litres of water through, just to test it. Not an explosives check in sight, just a metal detector, and through went my water. Isn’t there something a bit odd about that, as there are some rather unpleasant groups operating in both Egypt and Morocco? If I wanted to bring down an airliner I sure would do it departing from there towards London rather than the other way around.'

Unusually I find myself agreeing with Jon Worth as I too have flown from airports where security is a joke and where people are allowed to carry what they like through as cabin luggage. I have mistakenly taken a penknife through x-ray machines in my hand luggage without being detected. Yet in other foreign airports I have had my hand luggage checked by sniffer dogs, electronic explosive sniffers and thorough hand searches.

Missing/bridging Doctor Who scenes from Matt Smith's first season as The Doctor - Perfect for a Saturday evening devoid of Doctor Who

This scene bridges the gap between 'The Eleventh Hour' and 'Beast Below'; The doctor explains the Tardis's Chameleon Circuit problems and Amy is still in her nightie



This scene bridges the gap between 'Flesh and Stone' and 'The Vampires of Venice'; nice references to previous 'comapnions' - "was that a leather bikini" - Eh hello Leela...

Sick bastards

The Mail reports that :

'Sick Islamic terrorists tried to bring down a US cargo plane using two exploding DOGS, it was revealed today.

The Kamikaze canines - whose stomach had been stuffed with bombs and detonators - were discovered at Baghdad airport two years ago, French daily Le Figaro said.

They had been primed to explode in mid-flight, but were never loaded aboard the aircraft because freight handlers spotted both dogs had died in their cages.'

The people that tried this method of terrorist mass-murder are sick bastards but we have to realise that tyet are part of a cadre of Islamic terrorists who want to kill as many of us infidels as they can. Having tried hiding explosives inside shoes, printers, underpants and dogs, who is to say the next attempt won't be inside live humans - breast implants would seem to be a possibility.

The ever pleasant Iranian regime

During the week I saw some video of an Israeli weightlifter winning a gold medal at the World Masters Weightlifting in Poland and being deliberately snubbed by the Iranian athlete who came second. I didn't blog about it as I thought that maybe the Iranian athlete was under team orders to ignore the Israeli athelete. However it seems that I underestimated the Iranians as A Street Journalist reports that:

'Mir Rasool Raisi, Head of Delegation to Iran's Weightlifting Team, and Hossein Khodadadi, a veteran weightlifting champion, have been banned from all sport activities for life. Mr. Khodadadi appeared on the platform beside an Israeli weight champion during the Poland competitions.

Jalal Yahya-Zadeh, head of Physical Education Committee for Youth Committee announced this news and and added: "The fact that an Iranian weightlifting veteran has competed against an Israeli during the worldwide competitions and has stood beside him during the distribution of medal is unjustifiable."'

What a delightful regime rules in Iran.


Here's the video of the medal ceremony...

Brainwashing the next generation about green issues especially man made climate change

Nick Duerden in The Independent has written a good piece on the brainwashing of the nation's children about green issues and the encouragement for them to use 'pester power' to change the habits of their parents. Please read the whole piece but here are a few extracts:

'After her second day at school, my four-year-old daughter sat me down at the kitchen table for a conversation. She wanted me to explain exactly how I take her to school each morning.

"It's not by car, is it?" she said.

I confirmed to her that, no, it wasn't by car.

"We go by bicycle when daddy is running late; otherwise we walk," I told her.

"Good," she replied.

I asked why.

"Cars are bad."

I learned later that upon arrival at her reception class each day pupils have to tick a box on a piece of paper denoting how they journeyed to school that morning. Though they are never told in quite so many words that cars are actually bad, they are nevertheless steered, by their eco-aware teacher, towards the two former modes of transport – because cycling and walking are both environmentally friendly, and environmentally friendly, as my daughter appears already to know, is "good".

...

Friends who have children older than my own have told me this is just the tip of an iceberg which (so long as the iceberg doesn't inconveniently melt due to global warming) will continue to grow as she does.

"Mine told me to turn off the hoover the other day," a father said to me, "because it used too much energy. She also stands by me while I brush my teeth, to make sure I have the tap turned off while I'm doing it."

This, I know now, is pester power in action. And in a world where we must all become more green aware, it is children who are at the very forefront of the movement, children who collectively soak up all the information like the sponges they are, before disseminating it in a manner that, rather winningly, brooks no argument.

In the UK today, more than 67 per cent of schools have now signed up to the Eco-Schools Programme.

...

But pester power is not without its share of controversies. Not all -parents, after all, necessarily want their children at such a young age to get on such a high horse, not least when an increasing number of people are starting to feel that the purported realities of global warming have been exaggerated, perhaps for politically motivated reasons.

"Not all parents appreciate the message," Andrew Suter says, "and, yes, we do occasionally encounter scepticism. But our response to that is simply to say that all we are really doing is encouraging children to care about the world around them, and to do positive things in it. Nobody, surely, could have an issue with that."

He concludes, pointedly, by saying that children themselves have yet to question the veracity of climate change, "chiefly because they are children. They are not cynical yet." '

I think more cynicism about man made climate change is needed.

The words that dare not be said

The BBC report

'Five Rotherham men jailed for child sex offences

Five men have been jailed after being found guilty of sex offences against girls as young as 12.

The men were condemned as "sexual predators" by the judge after they were found guilty of grooming teenage girls for sex.

'Rotherham men' no further description is needed because all Rotherham men are the same.


The Mail reports the same story:

''Sexual predators': Gang of Asian men weep as they are jailed for total of 32 years for abusing white girls as young as 12

A gang of Asian ‘sexual predators’ were jailed yesterday for abusing white girls as young as 12.

The five men preyed on their victims over several months and threatened them with violence if they refused their advances.

One of the men branded his victim a ‘white bitch’ when she resisted, while a second smirked: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.''

So to The Mail these are 'Asian men' from Rotherham.

However even this is not the whole story, so before Hindu men get upset on Diwali, Sikh men reach for their kirpan, Buddhists start chanting Oh Mani Padme etc. etc. etc. Let me explain that the BBC's 'Rotherham men' and The Mail's 'Asian men' are in fact 'Muslim men of Pakistani descent living in Rotherham'.

This is not the first story that I have read of Muslim men in the UK taking sexual advantage of young white women and I doubt it will be the last; but for so long as the British media refuse to describe the perpatrators for what they are, the problem cannot be addressed.

It may be a first

None of the four 'top' Middle East stories on the BBC website are about israel and neither are any of the seven headline only stories on the right. Not only that but both of the 'Also in the news' articles are psoitive ones about Israel. What is going on? Is this a consequence of the BBC 'journalists' strike? How long will it last?

Abu Hamza and his passport

'The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) agreed with Hamza. The 52-year-old was jailed for seven years in February 2006 for inciting murder and race hate. He is currently at Belmarsh Prison, where he is challenging attempts to extradite him to the US on terror charges. That case was delayed by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in July. Attempts to take Hamza’s passport away were launched in 2003 but have been postponed due to other legal actions against him.

In his Siac ruling, Mr Justice Mitting said: “We are satisfied on balance of probabilities that if a deprivation order were to be made, the appellant (Hamza) would be made stateless.”'

So? Why should this country spend any time worrying about the rights of Abu Hamza? He has made his views quite clear and was jailed for seven years in 2006 for inciting murder and racial hatred.

The European Court of Human Rights stopped the UK from extraditing Abu Hamza to the USA; the court said the possible length of US jail terms - life without parole - raised concerns about breaches of the European human rights code and needed further examination before a final ruling.

Now the Special Immigration Appeals Commission say that he must not be deprived of his passport.

Let's remember the words of Abu Hamza and ask why this person is owed anything by this country that he hates so much:

Calling for Britons to become suicide bombers in the UK - "We ask Allah to make us mujahideen (holy warriors). We ask Allah to make us shaheed. Our immediate duty now is to correct our own homeland. So let us open our eyes, let us not go for jihad which is far away from our countries.

"Although it is good it is not as good as you do in your own door. You don't have to travel thousands and thousands of miles to become a shaheed - you can be shaheed right on your own doorstep. May Allah open our eyes for what's good for us - so we don't waste our Muslim blood far away."'


On the coming world domination by Islam - "The real weapons of mass destruction are the desire for martyrdom. Millions of you are ready to be shaheed. Half a million martyrdom shaheed is enough for Muslims to control the whole of earth forever. In the end of the day, Islam must control earth, whether we like it or not."

On why all Israelis are legitimate targets - "All the Israelis are fighters. That's why anybody over 15 is a warrior and he should be killed..."

Cee Lo Green vs William Shatner - NSFW

Cee Lo Green - 'F**K You'



William Shatner - 'F**k You'


Hmmm...

Keith Olbermann suspended after donating to Democtrats, I wonder how many BBC people would be guilty of contributing to the Labour party...

Politico reports that:

'MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has been suspended indefinitely without pay after POLITICO reported that he made three campaign contributions to Democratic candidates.'

I wonder how many BBC 'journalists' have contributed to Labour candidates in this country?

'Doubts'!?

The Telegraph reports that:

'Doubts grow over wisdom of Ben Bernanke 'super-put'

The early verdict is in on the US Federal Reserve's $600bn of fresh money through quantitative easing. Yields on 30-year Treasury bonds jumped 20 basis points to 4.07pc.'

Gold closed today at a shade above £1,395 an ounce; doubts!?

Phil Woolas the verdict

Whilst the BBC lead on Phil Woolas's vow that he intends to take the decision to a judicial review, The Guardian print the whole judgement, here's some extracts to show what the court said about Labour's Phil Woolas:

'"Having considered the evidence which was adduced in court we are sure that these statements were untrue. We are also sure that the respondent had no reasonable grounds for believing them to be true and did not believe them to be true.

...

The statement was false and the respondent had no reasonable ground for believing it to be true and did not believe it to be true.

"It follows in our judgment that the respondent is guilty of an illegal practice, contrary to section 136 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 with regard to those statements."

...

"We are satisfied that the statutory penalties for the illegal practices committed by the respondent are both necessary and proportionate, having regard to the seriousness of the statements made with regard to the petitioner's alleged attitude to the Muslim extremists who advocated violence."'

I wonder what the odds are on David Cameron brining up Ed Miliband's appointment of Phil Woolas to the Shadow Cabinet whilst this acse was pending?

The one hundred and third weekly "No shit, Sherlock" award

This week's award goes to Der Spiegel for their headline 'Obama Comes Across as Cold, Arrogant and Elitist'

"No shit, Sherlock"

A special "No shit, Sherlock" award

Outside of the usual weekly award, I have found a comment that deserves a special mention. reuters report that 'U.S. dollar printing is huge risk -China c.bank adviser'

Really, do you think?

"No shit, Sherlock"

Back to the Future - analysed, maybe too much

Thanks to Gizmodo for the spot.

An interesting timeline

The Mail reports on the Islamic extremists who supported Roshonara Choudhry in court yesterday. Roshonara Choudhry was the Muslim found guilty of attempted murder aftyer she stabbed Stpehn Timms, MP, for the crime of voting for the invasion of Iraq.

The Mail article is the usual shock, horror piece about the type of Islamic extremists who openly call for the overthrow of the British government and now the killing of MPs , whilst claiming state benefits.

One line that leapt out at me was this one, that shows that for all The Mail's posturing on this issue, they still don't get it:

'He was radicalised after inviting Omar Bakri Mohammed (an extremist Muslim cleric now banned from Britain) to speak at the university'

Interesting that The Mail believes that a non-radicalised Muslim could invite a hate-monger like Omar Bakri Mohammed to speak in the UK.

Here are the words of Omar Bakri Mohammed from 2008:

"Do not obey the British law," Bakri told them. He praised his hero Osama bin Laden for being a warrior and exclaimed: "We must fight and die for Islam - this is the map and road to Jennah [heaven]." He said that Muslims did not need to obey man-made laws and that if anyone ordered them to, they should say they are Muslims "loud and proud".

Phil Woolas's 'political suicide'

In September The Telegraph reported that Phil Woolas had said that:

'he and his campaign team never thought of telling lies about his closest general election rival, the Liberal Democrat Elwyn Watkins.

...

Mr Woolas denied that he had falsely claimed Mr Watkins was courting the vote of Islamic extremists who had allegedly made death threats against Mr Woolas.

He said: “My view was that the local Lib Dem party was trying to get support from the side of the spectrum which was being persuaded by those views. By their wooliness on the issue they were giving succour to that vote.

“I saw it as pandering to these votes.”

He denied his claims that Mr Watkins's silence on the issue amounted to an attack on his personal conduct.

"It was not an attack on Mr Watkins, it was an attack on Mr Watkins's political strategy," he replied.

"I do not think he should have needed an invitation (to condemn the extremists). I think it was politically naive of him. If there were leaflets going round saying 'BNP support Phil Woolas', I would say I do not want this support."

The MP said the militant threat in the run-up to the election was genuine and he stood up against it with the strong support of mainstream Muslims.

"There was a fear of violence, there were reports of scuffles, there was an attack on a Labour candidate," he said.

"My strategy was to mobilise mainstream Muslims and the white community against the extremists and to do that I had to highlight it to the white community.

"The Asian community were urging me, by and large, to highlight what they saw as a slur on them."

His counsel, Gavin Millar QC, asked whether an email from his election agent which questioned whether they "could get away" with focusing on Muslim extremists in one of his election leaflets was a legal reference.

Mr Woolas replied: "The idea that I set out to break the law never came into our minds. It would be political suicide, as well as wrong."'

Today I read on the BBC that:

'Two High Court judges have ordered a re-run of this year's General Election campaign in the Lancashire constituency of ex-immigration minster Phil Woolas.'

'Political suicide' Mr Woolas? Maybe Phil Woolas will not stand again after this embarrassment; but then do Labour politicians have any shame? Actually can he stand again? Does anyone know that bit of electoral law?

Also does Ed Miliband have questions to answer having appointed Phil Woolas to his shadow cabinet whilst the matter was still before the courts?

Also note how the BBC article, currently, does not use the word 'guilty' to describe Phil Woolas, just that the court 'heard' the issues relating to the leaflets and the election has to be 're-run'. Why so protective of Mr Woolas BBC?

The BBC journalists strike - long may it continue

BBC Radio 4 this morning is a pleasure, 'Great Lives - Winston Churchill' before the 8am news. Could there be a bigger contrast with usual left-wing supporting fare of the Today programme?

Only this 48 hour strike is scheduled so far; how can we ensure that there are more and longer strikes? An all-out indefinite strike would be ideal, can that be achieved? Any agent provocateurs out there?

Weird images and possibly the most repetitious commentary ever on 'flames you cannot see' in a Methanol fire

A fire at the 1981 Indianapolis 500 on Rick Mears's car and mechanic. It must have been awful, but what is even worse is the quality of the commentary.



Thanks to Boing Boing for the spot.

Hold on something has just struck me

We are being told that the Yemeni sourced explosive printer cartridges were addressed to Chicago synagogues. We are also being told that they were set to go off in mid-air.

If the latter is true why would the terrorists address them to a sensitive address, why not just a private address or media centre in the US? If the former is true then was the target the plane or the synagogue?

I suppose one explanation was that the terrorists hoped to explode the devices in planes so killing hundreds in the air and on the ground, but if the devices failed to go off in the air their final destination meant that at least a few Jews would be killed.

Either way, lovely people aren't these terrorists?

What happens when Sound and Vision clash?

Ba Ba Ba, Fa Fa Fa - no trickery just the way the brain processes sound and vision - The McGurk effect.



Thanks to Boing Boing for the spot.

Nancy Pelosi - "thanks for the memories"

A lovely piece I think you will agree, as we say bye bye to Nancy Pelosi and many other unpleasant left-wing fools.



Thanks to Theo Spark for the spot.

"Who said there is the Islam of Hamas and the Islam of Al-Qaeda?"

The rather trenchant views on Islam and its peacefulness of Mosab Hassan Yousuf, son of Hamas leader of West Bank Sheik Hassan Yousuf. Do watch it all and wonder if the main BBC channels would ever show what their Arabic language channel did?

Governor Jerry Brown

back in the late 1970s I loved this song even and it got me interested in US politics. Then I believe Jerry Brown was the youngest ever Californian state Governor whilst now he has just been elected as California's oldest Governor. So altogether now -

"Now it is 1984
Knock knock at your front door
It's the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool neice
Come quietly to the camp
You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't you worry, it's only a shower
For your clothes here's a pretty flower...
DIE on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg's already hatched
You will creak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown"

And here are all the lyrics, including the revealtion that it was his aura that never frowned, not as I have sung for years - his army!

"I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president ...

Carter power will soon go away
I will be Fuhrer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school

California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California

Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face
Close your eyes, can't happen here
Big Bro' on white horse is near
The hippies won't come back you say
Mellow out or you will pay

California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California

Now it is 1984
Knock knock at your front door
It's the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool neice
Come quietly to the camp
You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't you worry, it's only a shower
For your clothes here's a pretty flower...
DIE on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg's already hatched
You will creak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown

California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California"

 And here's a rather good live performance I believe at Mabuhay Gardens, San Francisco, CA 1979; excellent microphone technique...

Prisoners' human rights

Having listened to BBC 5Live's Nicky Campbell's pathetically meek interview of John Hirst, I was relieved to find that Andrew Neil actually challenged the man convicted of manslaughter



Also here is John Hirst on the Jeremy Vine radio show being interviewed by Jeremy Vine and Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes)



Finally here is John Hirst's recent celebratory video

As John Hirst is seen smoking cannabis in the above video and he admits this in the Jeremy Vine interview (at around 4:30), can I suggest that the police arrest him for this crime.


Should prisoners have human rights? Of course they should. But why give them the vote. Can I suggest that just as the UK has not signed up to Protocol 7 - crime and family, that we remove ourselves from whichever Protocol or Article is enforcing this decision.

Tony Blair's signing up of this country to the European Human Rights Convention was a huge mistake and one that only a lawyer could have thought correct. We are so far down this slippery slope that I fear there is no way back. What next, the European Convention on Human Rights includes the right to marriage...


As an afterthought, Article 9 of the Convention on 'conscience and religion' provides a right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This includes the freedom to change a religion or belief. This option is very much against the tenets of Islam where to leave Islam is covered by the crime of apostasy and punishable by death. What will happen to the European Convention on Human Rights when Islam becomes an even larger minority religion in The Netherlands, France, Germany and the UK?

The weirdest House of Lords debate ever?

'Lord James of Blackheath: I have given your Lordships three examples of why I think we need something, but the creation of the three Is along the lines that I have been talking about would be of the order of a £5 billion cheque required

1 Nov 2010 : Column 1538

to do it. However, we do not have £5 billion; we do not have half of £5 billion to put in to the creation of this at the moment, so what do we do about it? At this point, I am going to have to make a very big apology to my noble friend Lord Sassoon, because I am about to raise a subject that I should not raise and which is going to be one which I think is now time to put on a higher awareness, and to explain to the House as a whole, as I do not think your Lordships have any knowledge of it. I am sorry my noble friend Lord Strathclyde is not with us at the moment, because this deeply concerns him also.

For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords, in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, "We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate". I had the biggest put down of my life from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde when I told him this story. He said, "Why you? You're not important enough to have the answer to a question like that". He is quite right, I am not important enough, but the answer to the next question was, "You haven't got the experience for it". Yes I do. I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money.

Baroness Hollis of Heigham: Where did it go to?

Lord James of Blackheath: Not into my pocket. My biggest terrorist client was the IRA and I am pleased to say that I managed to write off more than £1 billion of its money. I have also had extensive connections with north African terrorists, but that was of a far nastier nature, and I do not want to talk about that because it is still a security issue. I hasten to add that it is no good getting the police in, because I shall immediately call the Bank of England as my defence witness, given that it put me in to deal with these problems.

The point is that when I was in the course of doing this strange activity, I had an interesting set of phone numbers and references that I could go to for help when I needed it. So people in the City have known that if they want to check out anything that looks at all odd, they can come to me and I can press a few phone numbers to obtain a reference. The City firm came to me and asked whether I could get a reference and a clearance on foundation X. For 20 weeks, I have been endeavouring to do that. I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.


1 Nov 2010 : Column 1539

I made the phone call to my noble friend Lord Strathclyde on a Sunday afternoon-I think he was sitting on his lawn, poor man-and he did the quickest ball pass that I have ever witnessed. If England can do anything like it at Twickenham on Saturday, we will have a chance against the All Blacks. The next think I knew, I had my noble friend Lord Sassoon on the phone. From the outset, he took the proper defensive attitude of total scepticism, and said, "This cannot possibly be right". During the following weeks, my noble friend said, "Go and talk to the Bank of England". So I phoned the governor and asked whether he could check this out for me. After about three days, he came back and said, "You can get lost. I'm not touching this with a bargepole; it is far too difficult. Take it back to the Treasury". So I did. Within another day, my noble friend Lord Sassoon had come back and said, "This is rubbish. It can't possibly be right". I said, "I am going to work more on it". Then I brought one of the senior executives from foundation X to meet my noble friend Lord Strathclyde. I have to say that, as first dates go, it was not a great success. Neither of them ended up by inviting the other out for a coffee or drink at the end of the evening, and they did not exchange telephone numbers in order to follow up the meeting.

I found myself between a rock and a hard place that were totally paranoid about each other, because the foundation X people have an amazing obsession with their own security. They expect to be contacted only by someone equal to head of state status or someone with an international security rating equal to the top six people in the world. This is a strange situation. My noble friends Lord Sassoon and Lord Strathclyde both came up with what should have been an absolute killer argument as to why this could not be true and that we should forget it. My noble friend Lord Sassoon's argument was that these people claimed to have evidence that last year they had lodged £5 billion with British banks. They gave transfer dates and the details of these transfers. As my noble friend Lord Sassoon, said, if that were true it would stick out like a sore thumb. You could not have £5 billion popping out of a bank account without it disrupting the balance sheet completely. But I remember that at about the same time as those transfers were being made the noble Lord, Lord Myners, was indulging in his game of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic of the British banking community. If he had three banks at that time, which had had, say, a deficiency of £1.5 million each, then you would pretty well have absorbed the entire £5 billion, and you would not have had the sore thumb stick out at that time; you would have taken £1.5 billion into each of three banks and you would have absorbed the lot. That would be a logical explanation-I do not know.

My noble friend Lord Strathclyde came up with a very different argument. He said that this cannot be right because these people said at the meeting with him that they were still effectively on the gold standard from back in the 1920s and that their entire currency holdings throughout the world, which were very large, were backed by bullion. My noble friend Lord Strathclyde came back and said to me that he had an analyst working on it and that this had to be stuff and nonsense. He said that they had come up with a figure

1 Nov 2010 : Column 1540

for the amount of bullion that would be needed to cover their currency reserves, as claimed, which would be more than the entire value of bullion that had ever been mined in the history of the world. I am sorry but my noble friend Lord Strathclyde is wrong; his analysts are wrong. He had tapped into the sources that are available and there is only one definitive source for the amount of bullion that has ever been taken from the earth's crust. That was a National Geographic magazine article 12 years ago. Whatever figure it was that was quoted was then quoted again on six other sites on the internet-on Google. Everyone is quoting one original source; there is no other confirming authority. But if you tap into the Vatican accounts-of the Vatican bank-you come up with a claim of total bullion-

Lord De Mauley: The noble Lord is into his fifteenth minute. I wonder whether he can draw his remarks to a conclusion.

Lord James of Blackheath: The total value of the Vatican bank reserves would claim to be more than the entire value of gold ever mined in the history of the world. My point on all of this is that we have not proven any of this. Foundation X is saying at this moment that it is prepared to put up the entire £5 billion for the funding of the three Is recreation; the British Government can have the entire independent management and control of it-foundation X does not want anything to do with it; there will be no interest charged; and, by the way, if the British Government would like it as well, if it will help, it will be prepared to put up money for funding hospitals, schools, the building of Crossrail immediately with £17 billion transfer by Christmas, if requested, and all these other things. These things can be done, if wished, but a senior member of the Government has to accept the invitation to a phone call to the chairman of foundation X-and then we can get into business. This is too big an issue. I am just an ageing, obsessive old Peer and I am easily dispensable, but getting to the truth is not. We need to know what really is happening here. We must find out the truth of this situation.'

I know the above just looks bizaare but it is in Hansard 1 Nov 2010 : Column 1538

Why has this not been reported in the press or anywhere in the UK media? The only place that I have seen this is in a piece by Charlie Stross.

I am confused and befuddled by what Lord James of Blackheath was suggesting, can you make sense of it?

Fourteen centuries of hatred

Jonathan Kay, © Commentary Magazine • Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2010

'When Israeli planes smashed Egyptian airfields in the opening hours of the Six-Day War, announcers on Radio Cairo took to the airwaves, calling on Arabs in neighbouring countries to attack any Jews they could find. In the Libyan capital of Tripoli, then home to about 5,000 Jews, rioters responded with an orgy of murder, arson and looting that lasted three days. Even after the survivors had fled to Israel and the West, leaving Libya effectively judenrein, the anti-Semitic bloodlust remained unquenched. It was "the unavoidable duty of the city councils," opined one Libyan newspaper, "to remove [Jewish] cemeteries immediately, and throw the bodies of the dead, which even in their eternal rest soil our country, into the depths of the sea ... Only then can the hatred of the Libyan people toward the Jews be satiated."


Shocking words. Yet they do not come as a shock when one comes upon them in Martin Gilbert's newly published history of Jews in Muslim lands, recently excerpted on these pages. By that point in the chronology, I had become so numbed by the author's relentless catalogue of pogroms, executions, expulsions, forced conversions and the generalized terrorizing of Jews that the atrocities had lost their power to appall. It is not that Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill and author of books too numerous to count on Jewish and Israeli themes, is an unimaginative storyteller; this simply is the grim, unchanging nature of the epic hatred he has taken as his subject.


The Koran contains several very specific curses against Jews. And as modern terrorists often like to remind their YouTube audiences, Muhammad himself was a prolific Jew-killer. This passage from In Ishmael's House, for instance, describes events that took place after the Prophet's soldiers captured members of the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe in the year 627: "[All] 700 Jewish men were taken to the market at Medina. Trenches were dug in the market square and the men, tied together in groups, were beheaded. Their headless bodies were then buried in the trenches while Mohammed watched ... All Jewish males who had not reached puberty, and all the remaining women and girls, were sold into slavery." This mass slaughter came to be described in Muslim religious literature as the product of divine revelation. To this day, it is cited as clear proof that Allah permits the most hideous forms of punishment to be meted out against nonbelievers.


In the decades following Mohammed's death, the rapid expansion of Islam across the Levant, North Africa, Iran, Central Asia and parts of Europe swallowed up a great multitude of ancient Jewish communities. In some cases, Jews initially welcomed, and even joined, Muslim armies, expecting deliverance from the bigotry and cruelty they suffered under Christian and other pre-Islamic regimes. And in many Muslim lands, Jewish religious and commercial life was permitted to continue.


But even in the best of circumstances, Jews were not treated as anything near equals. The eighth Umayyad caliph, Omar Abd-al-Aziz, commonly is credited with enumerating the rights of Jews and Christians-- "People of the book" -- under his codified rules for dhimmi communities. Yet his rules (whose spirit survives in many modern Islamic societies to this day) also declared that dhimmis could not ride horses, only donkeys; had to wear special clothing and shoes; could not serve as a witness in a case involving a Muslim; could enter bathhouses only when wearing a special sign around their neck; could not inherit property from a Muslim, or even bequeath their own property to their children.


The prospect of a Muslim being in any way subservient to a Jew was seen as especially obscene. In this regard, Gilbert describes a telling 19th-century episode from the Moroccan town of Entifa, where a 65-year-old Jewish man took in an impoverished Muslim woman as a servant during a period of extreme famine. When the town's governor caught wind of the arrangement, he thundered, "Can a Jew have a Moorish woman serve him? He deserved to be burnt!" The man was nailed to the ground and beaten to death.


Gilbert avoids broad generalizations. As his narrative moves forward from century to century, he shows snapshots from different Muslim lands -- emphasizing scattered instances, such as in Cordoba and, later, the Ottoman Empire, where truly humane and enlightened Muslim leaders took pains to protect Jewish subjects. In the courts of such leaders, Jews often rose to positions of wealth and power -- typically as doctors, linguists and commercial liaisons. Yet these successes didn't help Jews win acceptance but rather the opposite: Muslims saw Jews' good fortune as an insult to the revealed order of the universe. In this climate of poisonous jealousy, it took only a single isolated violent spark for an entire Jewish community to be engulfed in an inferno of murder, rape and looting. In 1066, for instance, the murder by a single Jewish vizier in Muslim Spain was followed by pogroms that killed 5,000 Jews. Centuries later, the appointment of a Jewish vizier by the Mongol emperor Arghun Khan led to similar massacres of Jews in Persia and Babylonia.


It goes without saying that Muslim civilization has no monopoly on violent and systematic anti-Semitism: Spasms of murderous Jewhatred were common all across Christendom during the 14 centuries of Islam's existence. But in recent generations, Western societies at least have tried to come to terms with their history in a morally serious way. Gilbert's book makes clear that this self-critical approach to history remains foreign to Muslim societies, especially where Jews are concerned. While Israelis have wrung their hands for three generations over the relatively minor (by historical standards) bloodshed incurred in their nation's creation and the wars that have unfolded since, no equivalent soul-searching has accompanied the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Muslim lands in the middle of the 20th century or the persecution and pillaging of countless Jewish communities throughout the entire history of the Islamic faith.


To this day, in fact, bloody episodes from early Muslim history involving the killings of Jews are often cited casually in Arab propaganda against Israel. No effort is made to interpret these stories in any sort of allegorical sense; instead, they are celebrated at face value as victories that validate the foundational Muslim narrative of conquest and submission.


The historical pattern Gilbert describes should inform the current debate over Muslim enmity toward Israel, and the exterminationist rhetoric and deeds that flow out of it. In the dream world of foreign-policy pop-punditry, it often is taken for granted that Jews and Muslims will get along like North and South Dakotans once Israel agrees to become an even smaller country than it already is. Yet this argument -- reflecting Western leaders' Asperger's-like fixation on international law and lines drawn on maps -- finds absolutely no support in the region's history. In the unending account of violence Gilbert has compiled, it is hard to find a single episode that centres mainly on real estate: The issue was always the fact of Judaism itself rubbing up against Muslims‚ pride and conceits.


The creation of the Zionist movement radically changed the Western understanding of the Muslim-Jewish conflict -- sweeping up generations of campus intellectuals who have projected upon it all their own obsessions with colonialism and class struggle. But in the Muslim world, Gilbert's narrative shows us, Israel's creation actually didn't change the Muslim-Jewish dynamic as much as is commonly imagined. The rhetoric and barbarism hurled against Israeli Jews after the Zionist project began were not new but simply the old, more diffuse rhetoric and barbarism being redirected, as by a lens, toward a particular pinprick on a map. This is tied up with the reason that many Muslims refuse even to say the word "Israel," preferring terms such as "the Zionist entity": Deep down, they regard Israel not as a country in the proper sense but rather as a sort of soil-and-concrete stand-in for the stubborn, maddeningly ineradicable Jewish presence in Middle Eastern life since the age of Muhammad.


Aside from its value as a purely historical exposition, In Ishmael's House is a splash of cold water for all those supporters of Israel who imagine that the world can be brought around to their side if it can just be made to appreciate how successful and advanced the Jewish state has become. As the author shows us, the continued vibrancy and economic success of Jewish civilization -- so close to Islam's very heartland -- is precisely what has fed Muslim rage and jealousy for 14 centuries. The obscure, hardscrabble Jewish holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias attracted little attention from Muslims when they were poor. It was only once the desert started to bloom during the Zionist period that Muslims became obsessed with a holy city that doesn't warrant even a single explicit mention in the Koran and that Muhammad seems never to have visited. (Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of Middle Eastern history that the ancestors of many of the Palestinians now described as "refugees" originally migrated to the area from neighbouring Arab countries only in order to profit from the regional economic boom created by the well-educated European Jews who arrived in the early part of the 20th century.)


In past eras, spiteful Muslim leaders and mobs gave expression to their ugliest sentiments by unleashing violence against defenseless Jewish communities. Until Iran gets the bomb, the closest they can come to replicating this in our own era is by way of occasional bouts of suicide terrorism and missile volleys -- which is why those acts are encouraged and fetishized in such a lurid manner and why so few Middle Eastern Muslims regard them as a disgraceful or even regrettable part of their culture. However self-destructive such acts may seem to our eyes, they faithfully reflect a hateful pathology rooted in 14 centuries of Muslim history.'

Originally here and on many emails that are doing the rounds.

"Not a good result" - More BBC bias

BBC Radio 5Live at 16:05 and Peter Allen links to Aasmah Mir in Florida with the words "Not a good result".

Not "not a good result for the Democrats" or "Not a good result for President Obama", just "Not a good result".

Surely it was a very good result for the Republicans so why "Not a good result"? Is the BBC so tied in with the Democratic party in the USA that "Not a good result" is acceptable language? Is the BBC officially allied with the Democrats in the USA as they are with the Labour party in the UK?

"Impartiality is in our genes"; really?

What causes / prevents cancer

The Daily Mail seems to know and here's the list so far... My favourites? The one's like alcohol, calcium and tanning that both cause and prevent cancer!

Why do the left have to see the Republican gains as a race issue

Barack Obama's party didn't lose because he's black, it lost because it took too many people too long to see that Barack Obama was not the Obamamessiah but a very naughty boy...

Facebook predicts when you are most likely to get dumped

More at Gizmodo:

'You're very likely to get dumped on Mondays, right before Spring Break, two weeks before Christmas, and at some point before the summer holidays.

The good news about the whole mess is that it seems that people feel quite bad about dumping someone right on Christmas Day, so you can breathe a bit easier while unwrapping your presents.'

Sharia Law in action

AKI reports that:

'An Iranian woman who was sentenced to death by stoning after being found guilty of adultery and helping kill her husband, will be executed on Wednesday, according to a statement by a group that opposes stoning in Iran.

"The Islamic regime of Iran plans to execute Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani immediately," said a statement on the International Committee Against Stoning (ICAS).

The group didn't give details on the method that will use to execute Ashtiani, but following an international campaign , Iran in July said a stoning sentence had been suspended.

Ashtiani was convicted of adultery in 2006 and according to human rights activists forced to confess after being subjected to 99 lashes. She later recanted that confession and has denied wrongdoing.

Ashtiani's son and lawyer have been arrested and tortured by Iranian authorities, ICAS has said.'

Is it too late to hope that the protests of the civilized West are heard. Is it also too late to wonder where the United Nations are on this, or do they only protest if Israel are 'at fault'?

'The campaign'; whose campaign?

20:33 and the BBC's Matt Frei tweets:

'The campaign starts tomorrow to stop Sarah Palin, the patron saint of the Tea Party, who may or may not be planning a presidential run in 2012.'

Whose campaign? Will you be playing your part in that campaign Matt or is impartialiity in your genes? Biased-BBC and myself will watching you really hard...

The Tea Party, the liberal media and UK politics

Something just doesn't add up; some months ago the left-wing media (including the BBC) just weren't covering the US Tea Party movement at all, then they started covering them but ridiculing them and then the left-wing media moved to characterising them as a small number of racists, idiots and angry hillbillies. Fine but if these are just a 'very angry' minority, how come they have just taken so many 'safe' Democrat seats?

The reality is that the grassroots of the Republican party, not the 'hard-right' as I have heard them described, but ordinary Republicans who did not fall for the media's portrayal of Barack Obama as the saviour of the USA have partially taken control of their party - now can this be done in the UK, taking back the Conservative party from the liberals who currently lead it.

The polls have been showing the true unpopularity of the Obamamessiah for some months now but the BBC have been hiding this behind endless reports in favour of the 'first black President'. The fact that he's not black but mixed-race seems to always escape a media whose obsession with race and righting the wrongs of the past knows no bounds.

An exit poll in Kentucky said that around 41% of people were casting their ballot to show opposition to Barack Obama but the BBC couldn't even report that without provisos and excuses:

'Early exit polling in Kentucky suggests that strong anti-Obama sentiment is fuelling votes - around 41% of people claim they are casting their ballot to show opposition to the president'

Let's examine that sentence:
'Early exit polling' - Surely all exit polling is by definition is 'early'
'suggests that strong anti-Obama sentiment is fuelling votes' - Why 'suggests'?
'around 41% of people claim they are casting their ballot to show opposition to the president' - 'claim'? Reality is hard isn't it?

I believe this is called getting one's comeuppance

I see that seven-term Bob Etheridge has lost his seat to the 'Sarah Palin-backed Republican candidate' Renee Ellmers. Do you think the video of Bob Etheridge assaulting a questioner on the streets might have negatively impacted his chances?



For all those people who think Fox News is biased, take a look at part of MSNBC's coverage of the Bob Etheridge 'incident'; desperately looking for excuses or what? I like the suggestion that it might have been a Republican set-up... Your man assaulted someone on the street for asking some questions, regardless of who the cameraman was he was assaulted.

The New Black Panthers are back...

Lonely Conservative has news of the first sighting of a New Black Panther at a polling station for the mid-term elections.

Hey what's the downside for them after Obama's Justice Department dropped charges re previous New Black Panther activity?

I have no vote in the US mid-term elections but if I did...

After seeing that video I know which way I would vote; I hate being told what I am because I don't agree with the left wing intelligentsia. Just watch those bewildered lefties, upset because they've been rumbled. They call people racists because people dare not to support Obama regardless of his performance, they call people stupid because they don't believe in what they believe.

So vote Republican and Tea Party Republican if you can and watch the lefty media weep into their lattes.




Thanks to Biased BBC for the video spot.

The most boring job in the world circa 1950

'This is an excerpt from a recording I found on an old wire spool (pre magnetic tape recording medium). On April 23rd, 1950, a New Jersey man by the name of Fred Weber was setting his wire recorder up to record a phone conversation, and to test the signal he called the local Time Bureau. On the surface this would appear to be a rather mundane recording, but it isn't until you hear the time lady sneeze at 1:43 that you realize - this is a LIVE person reading off the time in 15 second intervals!'

Thanks to Boing Boing for the spot.

'A case will be made for the abandonment of both of them (“Medieval Warm Period” and “Medieval Climate Anomaly“)

Those warmists have been at it agian trying to fit facts to their world view and thus ensure their income stream. Watts Up With That has the details of this mostly unreported gahering in Portugal.

Here are some extracts from the meeting's abstracts, Watts Up With That has many more:

'The trajectories of these two concepts (“Medieval Warm Period” and “Medieval Climate Anomaly “) will be traced. A case will be made for the abandonment of both of them, on the grounds that they are inappropriate, uninformative, and that they very probably divert attention from more revealing ways of thinking about the Earth’s climate over the past two millennia.
...
...there is little utility in picking over definitions of the geographic and temporal extent of putative epochs, especially in the Late Holocene. The pressing questions concern the dynamics of the climate system, and the relative roles of free and forced variations, whether the forcings are anthropogenic or not.'

And then there is this comment from MBH98 co-author Malcolm K. Hughes on the MCA/MWP:

'A case will be made for the abandonment of both of them, on the grounds that they are inappropriate, uninformative, and that they very probably divert attention from more revealing ways of thinking about the Earth’s climate over the past two millennia.'

The warmists are going nowhere they have an industry to fund and a world view to spread. And until such time as the warmists are proved wrong and ridiculed, governments will seize on their research as a basis for raising consumption taxes.

Why is Israel being a Jewish state 'racist?

Why is Israel called racist for wanting to be a Jewish state and vilified for trying to get the Palestinians to agree to this in the latest talks? I only wonder because the draft constitution of the planned Palestinian state includes the following:

"This constitution is based on the will of Palestinian-Arab people" (Article 1)
"the Palestinian people are a part of the Arab and Islamic nation" (Article 2) "sovereignty belongs to the Palestinian Arab people" (Article 10)
"the legal character of the Arab-Palestinian people will be embodied by the state" (Article 13)
"Islam will be the official religion of the state" (Article 6)'

I wonder if the BBC will cover this aspect of the story... No I don't really, I know that they won't.



Thanks to Daily Alert for the spot.

A bit late for Trafalgar day but I just found this...

'The Battle of Trafalgar,.. Today

Admiral Nelson: "Order the signal, Hardy."

Captain Hardy: "Aye, aye sir."

Nelson: "Hold on, that's not what I dictated to Flags. What's the meaning
of this?"

Hardy: "Sorry sir?"

Nelson (reading aloud): "England expects every person to do his or her
duty, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation,
religious persuasion or disability.' - What gobbledygook is this?"

Hardy: "Admiralty policy, I'm afraid, sir. We're an equal Opportunities
employer now. We had the devil's own job getting 'England'
past the censors, lest it be considered racist."

Nelson: "Gadzooks, Hardy. Hand me my pipe and tobacco."

Hardy: "Sorry sir. All naval vessels have now been designated smoke-free
working environments."

Nelson: "In that case, break open the rum ration. Let us splice the
mainbrace to steel the men before battle."

Hardy: "The rum ration has been abolished, Admiral. Its part of the
Government's policy on binge drinking."

Nelson: "Good heavens, Hardy. I suppose we'd better get on with it ...
full speed ahead."

Hardy: "I think you'll find that there's a 4 knot speed limit in this
stretch of water."

Nelson: "Damn it man! We are on the eve of the greatest sea battle in
history. We must advance with all dispatch. Report from the
crow's nest please."

Hardy: "That won't be possible, sir."

Nelson: "What?"

Hardy: "Health and Safety have closed the crow's nest, sir. No harness; and
they said that rope ladders don't meet regulations.
They won't let anyone up there until a proper scaffolding can be erected."

Nelson: "Then get me the ship's carpenter without delay."

Hardy: "He's busy knocking up a wheelchair access to the foredeck,
Admiral."

Nelson: "Wheelchair access? I've never heard anything so absurd."

Hardy: "Health and safety again, sir. We have to provide a barrier-free
environment for the differently abled."

Nelson: "Differently abled? I've only one arm and one eye and I refuse even
to hear mention of the word. I didn't rise to the rank of
admiral by playing the disability card."

Hardy: "Actually, sir, you did. The Royal Navy is under represented in the
areas of visual impairment and limb deficiency."

Nelson: "Whatever next? Give me full sail. The salt spray beckons."

Hardy: "A couple of problems there too, sir. Health and safety won't let
the crew up the rigging without hard hats. And they don't
want anyone breathing in too much salt - haven't you seen the adverts?"

Nelson: "I've never heard such infamy. Break out the cannon and tell the
men to stand by to engage the enemy."

Hardy: "The men are a bit worried about shooting at anyone, Admiral."

Nelson: "What? This is mutiny!"

Hardy: "It's not that, sir. It's just that they're afraid of being charged
with murder if they actually kill anyone. There's a couple of
legal-aid lawyers on board, watching everyone like hawks."

Nelson: "Then how are we to sink the Frenchies and the Spanish?"

Hardy: "Actually, sir, we're not."

Nelson: "We're not?"

Hardy: "No, sir. The French and the Spanish are our European partners now.
According to the Common Fisheries Policy, we
shouldn't even be in this stretch of water. We could get hit with a claim
for compensation."

Nelson: "But you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil."

Hardy: "I wouldn't let the ship's diversity coordinator hear you saying
that sir. You'll be up on disciplinary report."

Nelson: "You must consider every man an enemy, who speaks ill of your
King."

Hardy: "Not any more, sir. We must be inclusive in this multicultural age.
Now put on your Kevlar vest; it's the rules. It could save
your life"

Nelson: "Don't tell me - health and safety. Whatever happened to rum,
sodomy and the lash?"

Hardy: As I explained, sir, rum is off the menu! And there's a ban on
corporal punishment."

Nelson: "What about sodomy?"

Hardy: "I believe that is now legal, sir."

Nelson: "In that case... kiss me, Hardy." '

Thanks to Doin' the Time Warp for the spot.

'Israel Urges UN not to Build Palestinian School Next to Hamas Arms Base'

After my story of earlier this morning can you see why 'Israel Urges UN not to Build Palestinian School Next to Hamas Arms Base'? For more details please read Hudson New York...

'Israel's Defense Ministry is pleading with the UN agency UNRWA not to build a new school for Palestinian children next to a Hamas military installation in southern Gaza.

In recent weeks, the Israeli defense ministry, which coordinates materiel entering Gaza from Israel, has approved 70 international projects – including the renovation of a sewage treatment plant, the construction of 151 housing units and eight new schools. (Gaza needs new schools because it has one of the highest birth rates in the world, combined with a low infant mortality rate due to the excellent health facilities Israel helped build there before the Israeli withdrawal in 2005.)

Whereas the Israeli Defense Ministry says it fully supports plans by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency to build new schools, it says that to build a school adjacent to a Hamas military installation would be "shocking and highly irresponsible."

"Israel attaches great importance to the UNRWA education system in Gaza and will continue to cooperate and assist as much as possible in helping UNRWA," one senior Israeli official said. "But we will not help Hamas use schools and turn the people of Gaza into human shields."'

Nothing on the BBC website yet...

Racial profiling at airports

The Mail amongst other news outlets, reports that the government are to consider allowing the security services to use racial profiling in the fight against terrorists getting onto a plane, exploding a device and killing a couple of hundred or more people. Apparently

'Passenger profiling would see selected travellers given tougher security checks before a flight.

Those behaving suspiciously or having an unusual travel pattern could be picked out
Other factors might include racial or religious profiling. This has sparked concern Muslims will be disproportionately targeted.

The profiling could be carried out by airport security staff or through computer analysis.

A passenger could be given extra screening if they ‘tick boxes’ such as arriving from a high-risk country, being alone or not having a return flight or luggage.

Currently, airport staff act on suspicious passenger behaviour or specific intelligence instead of profiling.'

'This has sparked concern Muslims will be disproportionately targeted.' - Disproportionate to what? Disproportionate to the number of Muslims in the UK population? Probably. Disproportionate to the number of Muslims flying out of the UK on any particular day? Probably. Disproportionate to the proportion of terrorists who are members of the 'religion of peace'? Probably not.

Racial profiling is not racist, it simply recognises who are likely to pose the greatest threat to the population in general. Racial profiling does not mean only searching Muslims, it does not mean ignoring the threat posed by such as Richard Read. It does mean concentrating more resources on the six young nervous looking Muslims sitting together with one way tickets to Detroit, Chicago and New York and less on the family of four flying to Alicante for a week's package holiday. Yes it also means not concentrating on searching the two eighty year old nuns flying to Rome but maybe giving the two Imams flying to Washington DC a second look.

Yes this may mean that totally innocent Muslims get searched more often and/or more thoroughly than totally innocent non-Muslims. It may mean that totally innocent Muslims find travelling by air more onerous than do totally innocent non-Muslims. But I am afraid that whilst a sizable proportion of Muslims both within and without this country are fixated on killing as many Westerners, including Muslims, as they can; security needs must be prioritised.

I presume that totally innocent Muslims would rather be subjected to stricter security checks than risk dying in an Islamic terrorist attack.

One story of injured Palestinians that the BBC will not cover

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights:

'calls upon the government in Gaza to seriously investigate the circumstances of an internal explosion, in which 16 persons were wounded, including 17 children, and 3 schools and a number of neighboring houses were damaged. The explosion occurred in a training site of the 'Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades (the armed wing of Hamas) in Rafah town in the southern Gaza Strip.

According to investigations conducted by PCHR and testimonies of eyewitnesses, at approximately 10:15 on Wednesday, 20 October 2010, three successive explosions took place in a training site of the 'Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas Movement, which is located in a densely populated area in Abu Baker al-Seddiq Street in Tal a-Sultan neighborhood in the west of Rafah. Before the explosions had taken place, the site caught fire, smoke billowed and some persons were seen fleeing from the place. The explosions left 26 injuries, including 17 school children, as the children were in front of and inside their schools. The wounded persons were transported to Martyr Mohammed Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah to receive necessary medical treatment.

The training site is located in a densely populated area, where a street of approximately 20-meter width separates the site from the buildings and 3 UNRWA primary and preparatory schools. Dozens of houses, the 3 schools and the electricity network were damaged due to the explosion. The schools are located within a housing project established by UNRWA to accommodate people whose houses had been destroyed by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) earlier.

On Thursday, 21 October 2010, the "Rafah Media Network" website, affiliated to the Information Bureau of Hamas in Rafah published reported that: "Hamas started estimating the damages caused to a number of houses adjacent to the resistance site where the internal explosion occurred on Wednesday morning, 20 October 2010. In his statement to Rafah Media Network, a local official of Hamas said that the Movement will immediately reconstruct the houses that were damaged due to the explosion after assessment of damages."

It should be noted that an internal explosion occurred on 2 August 2010 in Deir al-Balah refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, as a result of which, 58 persons, including 14 children and 9 women, were wounded, 7 houses were completely destroyed and another 30 ones were damaged. PCHR called upon the government in Gaza then to seriously initiate an investigation and publish its results. However, PCHR has not so far learnt of conducting any investigation or taking any measures to ensure the recurrence of such incidents.

In light of the above, PCHR:

1. Calls upon the government in Gaza to seriously investigate the circumstances of the explosion in Rafah and publish its results; and

2. Points to the seriousness of the continued storage of explosives by the Palestinian resistance groups in civilian-populated areas, which poses a constant threat to the lives of civilians, and constitutes a violation of human rights and international humanitarian law; accordingly, such behavior must be banned. Storing explosives in such a way becomes more serious under the IOF's public and continued threats to attack such sites.'

So when an Israeli injures one Palestinian boy who was involved in an ambush the BBC leads the news with the full story, but when more than a dozen Palestinians are injured by a Hamas weapon going off accidentally not a word. Why? Do the BBC not want people to know the truth about Hamas? Do the BBC not want the people to know the truth about what is really going on in Gaza? Do the BBC just want to ramp up the hatred aimed at Israel?

Yahoo do report the story in the form of a picture of an injured child and this text:

'A injured Palestinian schoolboy receives treatment at 'Al Najar' hospital in the southern Gaza strip town of Rafah, Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2010. A Hamas security official said a blast in a Gaza military compound has wounded women and children. The spokesman, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue, says five children, three women and another five residents were lightly injured by the explosion which shook through densely crowded neighborhood of the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah. He did not give a cause for the blast.'

What a telling line that is - 'The spokesman, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue'

Meanwhile, on 2 August this year another Hamas "work accident" severely injured 58 Palestinians, including 14 children and 9 women, completely destroyed seven houses and damaged another 30. I can't say I noticed any coverage of this story on the BBC either.

How postal voting works

Paul Weston at Gates of Vienna explains how Labour's massive increase in the availability of postal voting works to their advantage and how it links with immigration from Pakistan. Here's a few extracts form an article that I doubt the BBC will ever reference:

'It is routine practice for dual-nationality Pakistanis residing in Kashmir to sign thousands of proxy vote forms for the British General Election, in order that their Pakistani brothers in Britain may use them to subvert our democracy.

One “British” Mirpuri resident described the blind signing of the electoral proxy votes thus:

“They said I didn’t have to fill in any details, just to sign my name at the bottom of the form,” he says, smiling. “So I signed two…I personally know 25 other people who did the same thing, lots of people just on this street, but everybody does it.”

Having collected thousands of forms, Pakistani politicians such as Sultan Chaudry hop on the Kashmiri red-eye to Britain, where they distribute said forms amongst the many Muslims in our vibrantly diverse, exotic and eclectic multicultural cities, whilst advising them where their fraudulent vote should be cast to best represent their decidedly un-diverse and un-vibrant 7th Century mono-culture.

...

In 2004, Judge Richard Mawley QC presiding over an electoral vote-rigging case in Birmingham had this to say: “The (postal vote) system is wide open to massive, systematic and organised fraud that would disgrace a banana republic.”

Shortly before the 2010 election, the police were investigating upward of 50 cases of electoral fraud, principally in Labour-controlled areas. Since the election this number has climbed to 81 cases, but little has happened since, because the alleged fraudsters were invariably Muslim and the police are loath to prosecute for fear of appearing “racist.”

...

Before the Labour Party came to power it was impossible to register to vote once the election had been called. Labour changed this to allow registration up to 11 days after the election was called. This time-frame allows people to register and vote before any checks to prove their existence can feasibly be carried out — which is exactly what was intended.

The result of this has been an upsurge in postal voting applications, sometimes up to 200% higher than in the previous election. In ex-Home Secretary Jack Straw’s constituency of Blackburn, postal voting was running at 30% of all votes cast compared to only 15% as a national average. In the month before the election, some half a million new “voters” registered with the Electoral Commission, representing an increase of almost one fifth since the election of 2005.

One voter of Pakistani origin, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, told The Independent newspaper that postal vote fraud in Blackburn was widespread. “It’s worse than Birmingham, the mosque committee is 100 per cent Labour. They control the mosque. They frighten the people.” Teams of Muslims were seen distributing and collecting sheaves of postal ballot papers which were picked up on street corners en-route to the “sealed” ballot box.

This assertion is backed up by Craig Murray, Britain’s former ambassador to the central Asian republic of Uzbekistan, who was campaigning in Blackburn to unseat Jack Straw. The challenge was rather unsuccessful as it transpired because Mr Straw allegedly achieved 90% of the vote, a margin unheard of outside North Korea.

...

Just in case these fraudulent postal ballots could be detected after the election, the Labour Party allowed them to be mixed in with the ballot papers from local polling stations, where, although identification is not required (why not?) at least faces are recognised and names crossed off a list. As such, any individual attempting to cast multiple ballots in a polling station would be quickly recognised and rumbled, so the vast majority of these ballots are therefore legitimate.

This is not the case of course for the postal voters, which is precisely why postal voting has experienced such a massive upsurge and precisely why Labour Party officials were so keen to lose the fraudulent postal ballots amongst the legitimate polling station ballots.

This destruction of British democracy, although appalling in itself, is not of the highest importance unless the fraud actually affected the election results, but now we learn that it has. In the May 2010 British General Election, the Conservative Party failed to gain a majority by the slimmest of margins, with only a handful of constituency seats swaying the result. This recently led Conservative Party Chairman, Baroness Warsi, to make the extraordinarily explosive claim that The Conservative Party failed to win a majority because of “Asian” electoral fraud.

Just before the election, ex- MP Martin Bell suggested that the result could be decided by electoral fraud. And so it has been proven. It is not a surprise that by importing the Third World you become the Third World, but what is surprising is our reaction to the very real subversion of our ancient and bloodily defended democracy — which is that of total appeasement and dhimmitude.

The idea that British democracy has been subverted by Socialist enabled Muslim fraud is an enormous front page story. Or it should be, yet having broken the potentially biggest story in Britain so far this century, Baroness Warsi and the press have become strangely reticent. Her appearance on BBC “Question Time” has been cancelled and the MSM, although not exactly in deep denial, are hardly giving this astonishing claim the attention it deserves.

Even liberals must be starting to realise why Islam, when translated, means Submission. If Muslims can illegally alter the course of a British General Election with barely a word of criticism or investigation — based on our fear of them — then we are in terrible, terrible trouble and that trouble can only become worse.'

Shocked? Angry? Convinced that David Cameron will do anything about this?

What a great song and performance

Eric Burdon and The Animals and - 'Please Don't let me be Misunderstood'.

Jesus doesn't want us to eat figs!

Mark 11:12-14 (King James Version)

'12 And on the morrow, when they were come from Bethany, he was hungry:

13 And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.

14 And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it.'

Thanks to Boing Boing for the spot.

Get well Candyman

The Candyman, Danny Baker, is fighting cancer and I send him my best wishes. Danny Baker is a giant of radio broadcasting, his programmes are a must-listen and he seems a really nice bloke. Digital Spy have the details of his illness and treatment. But I just want to wish him well through the treatment, "Hoy Hoy" and good luck.

I have lost too many friends to cancer over the past few years to lose Danny as well. For although we have never met, his voice is so well known to me that he seems like a friend.

The Server Room Nightmare Challenge

A subject close to my heart at Tech Republic - The worst Server rooms... Above is the winner, but do take a look at the rest...

Massive Labour 'fail' - ignored of course by the BBC

The Labour party's 2010 general election manifesto included this on page 2:3 (page 20 of pdf):

'Our goal is to make responsibility the cornerstone of our welfare state. Housing Benefit will be reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford. And we will continue to crack down on those who try to cheat the benefit system.'

Let's look at the central part of that again in bold:

'Housing Benefit will be reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford.'

Does the phrase 'bloody hypocrites' begin to describe the Labour shadow cabinet, Labour MPs, Labour supporting columnists and the BBC who have attacked the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition for doing just what Labour promised to do?

Are the BBC unaware of this extract from the Labour manifesto? If so then why are they so out of touch? If they are aware then do they not consider it to be newsworthy?

Apple 'fail'

The internet is afire with complaints that Apple's iPhone alarms did not work over the clocks going back one hour this weekend. It seems that despite promising to fix the bug after users in Australia and New Zealand experienced similar issues a few weeks back, Apple have not. So anyone with one or more repeating alarms set to anything other than "every day" will be affected. So alarms have been going off an hour late if set for "weekdays" or "weekends" or "Monday." Alarms set for a one off (set to "never") or set for "every day" work fine.

Well done Apple another masterpiece of programming and yet the 'sheeple' who would support Apple even if their equipment killed the first born of every family, are out and about excusing Apple...


A reminder that it is iOS that also has a bug allowing people to bypass the 'lock screen' and allow people so so see iPhone's address book etc.

Apple quality control?

More Palestinian anti-Semitism that the MSM will not cover

Jordanian 'scholar, Arafat Hijazi on Palestinian Authority TV (10 October) explaining how Jews' money lending "Shylock" behavior caused Antisemitism

Note the lies from the start:
"150 years ago, when there were no jews in Palestine, the Jews were in Europe, Eastern Europe" - That's odd I thought almost half a million Jews were expelled form Muslim Middle Esater countries in or soon after 1948, in the great expulsion that the MSM refuse to mention as it would spoil their narrative in which only the Palestinians suffered in 1948. How many Jews were living in 'Palestine' in 1948? I believe the figure was around 806,000.

"but the Jews suffered from persecution by the European nations." - True: pogroms, rampant anti-Semitism and the rise of the Nazis make it hard to think of Europe as jew friendly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

"The reason was that they would harm the people of the lands in which they lived." - Ah the old it's the Jews fault line. A line that many still use today, inclusing many useful idiots amongst the Jews.

"They had a problem: wherever they went they were expelled and were imprisoned" - Not sure how one can be expelled and imprisoned so maybe substitute an 'or' for the 'and'.


Another Jordanian 'scholar, Muhammad Dohal: "The Jews are hated in every society in which they have lived, because of their behavior relating to their great love of money." - You cannot beat a good stereotype and here it is, used a means of showing that the persecution of the Jews is their fault.

"Their behavior led to Shakespeare's famous story, the story of Shylock which clings to the Jews." - Indeed it does but is that the fault of the Jews or that anti-Semitism was so prevalent in Elizabethan England?

"This is how they harmed the societies that embraced them" - Hold on, I thought he said that "The Jews are hated in every society in which they have lived". Were the Jews "hated" or "embraced"? Not very consistent for a 'scholar' is he?



Thanks to Palestinian Media Watch for the video and translation and Israelly Cool for the spot. No thankd to the MSM for not picking up on any of these videos.

A little late for Halloween

I don't really get Halloween but, albeit a little late, for Mrs NotaSheep here's Tom Lehrer with 'I hold your hand in mine'