The Left’s very own anti-Semitism

THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT) is our Guardian newspapers very own sister paper from across the pond. Between them they share, almost every dot and comma in fact, of whatever the other is thinking and printing. No matter what the subject; they are as entwined as two twins, each being the perfect replica of the other.

            So when the website Newsmax drew my attention to a printed report by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eastern Reporting in America (CAMERA) of anti-Israeli bias within the NYT, the results would probably follow the same result if the Guardian were subjected to CAMERA’s glaze.

            

CAMERA exposed the following regarding the NYT anti-Israeli bias,  and thanks to Newsmax and no other source on the internet;  the CAMERA report is being shown and bulleted:

            Among the findings of the CAMERA[1] study:

·  The [New York] Times presents criticism of Israel more than twice as often as it criticizes the Palestinians. Of 275 passages in the news pages classified as criticism, 187 were critical of Israel while 88 criticized the Palestinians.

·  Of 37 articles mentioning Israel’s border policies and naval blockade of Gaza, just six cited Israel’s goal of preventing weapons from entering Gaza and even fewer noted that weapons in Gaza often are fired into Israel.

·  When the Times reported on the Israeli military boarding a Turkish ship carrying pro-Palestinian activists, only eight of 37 articles mentioned the activists’ violence that precipitated the use of firearms by the Israelis.

·  Twelve headlines mentioned Palestinian fatalities in the conflict, while none explicitly mentioned Israeli deaths, even though 14 Israelis were killed during the study period.

·  Israeli actions frequently were cited as obstacles to peace, but the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to recognize a Jewish state was never described as an obstacle.

            

              These findings should blow away  the liberal panache for  ‘progressive’ politics and their ‘objectivity’. The whole body of liberal impartiality has fallen foul of the Palestinian cause which has heaped destruction upon the liberals lack of prejudice: to such an extent that they are fully prepared to see the state of Israel brought to its end.

            The liberal lack of prejudice takes its final bow when it allows the Israeli state to become the property of the Palestinians, which they seek to do by trying to declare Israel, an apartheid state. Israeli bias exists not only in the Western liberal media, but also among the ever increasing doubts of the conservative media.

            But at the moment the liberal press and television media are anti-Israel; which of course includes the BBC. Like the NYT and the Guardian ; the BBC are all too ready to promote the Palestinians over the state of Israel. The BBC, unlike the Guardian or the NYT, is guaranteed a yearly income from the taxpayer; millions of whom, like myself who values a nation state as much as does Israel itself, resent the BBC’s bias toward a United States of Europe.

            The BBC must change its liberal culture, employing not only readers of the Guardian  as seems to be the case, but also providing a better understanding of what they mean as being objective. The BBC tilt is liberal; while the whole country is not. Yet the whole country has to pay a license fee. Should this not be a warning to the BBC to change its liberal dominance. After all those millions like myself who are forced to pay a licence fee should see it placed in better hands than those who are currently disposing of it.

The age of liberalism  in the form of political correctness has been upon us for over 20 years. It has dominated our culture. Today our liberal culture is being dictated to by their seeking of a Palestinian homeland; by seeing that the Palestinians have a state of their own.

            
            But the Palestinian state can only be at the expense of the Israeli state. The Jewish state must survive at all cost. To seek to eliminate Israel as the liberal ‘progressives’ seek in order to bring Palestinian tranquillity to the region, will do no such thing. The Jewish state of Israel must continue and override the trespasses of Palestinians.

ADDENDUM Tuesday, 29 January 2013

RUPERT MURDOCK has issued an apology to the Israeli people after the Sunday Times published a cartoon by Gerald Scarf depicting Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, as a stereotypical  Jew of anti-Semitic creation, building a wall whose bricks are cemented together with Palestinian blood, while the arms and faces of Palestinians are seen protruding through the brick work.

            
            The 27^th of January is Holocaust memorial day and the cartoon was timed to make some kind of comparison between what the Nazis did to the Jews, and what is happening to the Palestinians. It is an unworthy comparison; one which you could only normally find in an Islamasist or extreme Right-wing publication in Europe.

            
           That a serious liberal left of centre news paper could publish such a hideous piece of anti-Semitism and see it as legitimate astounds common reason. If Gerald Scarf believes the point he is making is a worthy and true representation of history, then he has little knowledge, but a whole stored up resentment for Israel; and has coupled this with anti-Semitic resentment that goes beyond the trouble between the Jews and the Palestinians.

           
            It was, you may remember, that Israel was forced to build such a wall separating the Palestinians from gaining easy access to Israel, because of the Palestinian suicide bombers raiding parts of Israel and killing 1,000 Jews in a decade. It was a purely defensive measure, perhaps likened to the walls separating the two communities in Northern Ireland which we Brits built for same reason of protecting one community against the terrorism of the other.

            
           The editor of the Sunday Times should speak out, either in support of Scarf, or do the decent thing and do what the paper’s owner has done, freely, and without pressure. Murdock is a businessman first. He will not do what  liberal prejudice expects him to do; he will not make demands of the paper’s editor. Murdock knows the commercial and political demographic of  the Sunday Times readership and would not risk losing it by interfering in editorial decisions. But whether, at some point in the future he decides to ditch this title (after all, it is being kept afloat financially by  profits from the more commercially successful Sun) is also commercial decision.

WHATEVER ACTION is undertaken by the state of Israel; it is to keep a Jewish state in existence. She is surrounded and is far outnumbered by her enemies, as were parts of Europe when Hitler’s blitzkrieg got under way. Hitler wanted a Greater Germany that encompassed the whole of Europe; while Islamists want to create a Greater Islam by encompassing the whole of the Arab world, and as far into the Christian one as they are able to reach… while Israel only wants to exist as a nation.

            
              Yet Israel is seen as the villain in the liberal West. Gerald Scarf is a cartoonist whose instincts are, as an artist of sorts, to create controversy. So his depiction of Netanyahu as a greedy, miserly clawed nosed Fagin or Shylock, was guaranteed to do the job. But like all liberal creative types, Scarf picks easy targets. Usually they take a swipe at Christianity, but  Israel is similarly obliged to take it on the chin. Islam, on the other hand, is a wholly different computation. Scarf would never depict Mohammad in any way, let alone in anyway critical of what is happening in his name; which Israel, in terms of cruelty and torture, would never want to match, after its own history of persecution and the Holocaust.

               
              I fear for the state of Israel. I do so because it is not only the historical anti-Semites with their blood libels who are now threatening the Jews. But now we have the Left joining in; but doing so hypocritically, as is their nature. They declare themselves anti-Zionist and not anti-Semites. Fearful of being regarded in the same breath as the Nazis, the Left are weaselling their way to a principled liberal position that is politically correct, and anti-Zionism is the fig-leaf.

THIS PIECE BEGAN by trying to draw the attention of the many thousands of my blog readers to the bias of the liberal press toward Israel. The New York Times, the Guardian, and now the Sunday Times, have all succumbed to wearing the great anti-Zionist fig-leaf in order to defend the Palestinians.

            
            Far more Palestinians have been killed at the hands of fellow Arabs than were ever killed by the state of Israel. Some 20,000 were slaughtered in the 1960s-1970s while in exile in Jordan: followed by more within Lebanon. They have been considered a source of trouble for whatever Arab nation whose boarders they sought exile within. Why, up to recently, those Middle East nations which are demanding Israel’s compliance with a two state solution, were in fact glad to see the back of them. They were trouble and wanted to pass the trouble on to the hated Jew in Israel.

            
          The liberal media in the West will go to any length to report on Palestinian oppression by Israel… and here I now include the BBC, who once had, would you believe it a, Gazan correspondent, who was briefly taken captive by the forces the BBC were helping.

THE BBC is the primary visual source of support for the Palestinians in this country; as well as the Guardian, much of whose daily circulation is bought up by the BBC. This institution is paramount in its support for the Palestinians. It should not of course give support to any faction; but it does. It cannot help itself as a liberal institution paid for by the taxpayer; the majority of whom hold no such liberal remit. But the BBC has created a liberal conclave drawn from the Guardian jobs pages.

            
             It is my bet that the majority of the British people support Benjamin Netanyahu in his attempt to hang on to an Israeli state. I believe that once the British people understand the Jews need for a nation state; it will fit neatly into their own need to hang on to their own nation state, which the EU seeks to take from them.

            Israel, like Great Britain, is facing its loss of nationhood. Britain, through its relationship with the EU: Israel through its relationship with the Palestinians: and neither should fall foul of either pressure. Each nation state should be allowed to remain a nation. India and China would never tolerate their own demise under such circumstance.

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[1] Bullets taken from Newsmax

Rachel Bull and Mary Beard

“Many of the postings are aggressive and sexual and include a photo of her face superimposed onto a picture of female genitalia.” Such has been the fate of professor Mary Beard’s

MARY BEARD, THE CAMBRIDGE classics professor has been the victim of internet trolling after appearing on the BBC’s  Question Time. She has now become the heroin of the liberal feminist sisterhood who are appalled at the way she has been treated – especially by the likes of A A Gill and Rod Liddle.

            On Question Time the topic of immigration in Boston, Lincolnshire, caught the programmes attention. Ms Beard had looked into the problem by studying an academic report which seems to have said everything is hunky-dory in Boston, and the local economy had prospered by the influx of East European immigrants.

As an academic, this was all that Ms Beard needed to know about the subject because of  her residency in a Cambridge University Ivory castle, which, being a short journey from Boston; she has never been to see for herself - she has never felt the need to see for herself if this report she had read bared any resemblance to the truth of a truly empirical investigation conducted by herself.

            No, for Ms Beard, an academically produced piece of research says all there is needed to be said on any subject; and so it prove when she used it to reassure the Question Time audience. But unfortunately, sitting before her in the audience, there was a an empiricist who told a different story to that of Ms Beard. Someone who had lived and breathed Boston and the county of Lincolnshire; someone who had experienced for herself, over months, years, and decades, the reality of immigration on Boston.

            Rachel Bull spoke up for those whose ivory castle is an housing estate, not a nice escape from reality that Oxbridge  provides for its academics. Rachel Bull spoke for many other parts of the country when she said, “Go down to Boston high street and it’s just like a foreign country”. She spoke of immigrants overburdening the NHS: she could have added schools and housing.

Boston is not unlike many other parts of the country, and Rachel bless her, told of what many millions of indigenous people already experience…a deliberately socially engineered over population that puts pressure on our NHS, education and housing. The reason, or the one the liberals like Ms Beard trot out, is that the indigenous population in these areas would not do the poorly paid work.

The great influx from Eastern Europe occurred (due to Tony Blair’s good office) in 2004. Before then, we are supposed to believe, the nation was left bereft of cabbages, sprouts, Swedes, and a whole greengrocery of vegetables, because our indigenous  people would not work for the minimum wage by doing such backbreaking work, often in a dirty and cold environment; so such tasks were meted out to East European immigrants.

Until 2004, I am supposed to believe that I cannot ever remember eating so much as a Brussels’ sprout…even at Christmas. But of course, there were never any shortages before 2004 due to a shortage of indigenous labour willing to do the job: and if there were, it would have been because of the last Labour government’s willingness to reward those who turned their backs on such employment with an unemployment pay cheque.

What happened I guess, was that those willing immigrants were being paid by unscrupulous farmers below the minimum wage, illegally – either that or the gang masters were taking their cut. Either way it produces a liberal dilemma  when it came to exploitation. The only possible commercial use that such immigrants have, is to be exploited; yet the liberal, in seeking to object to such a use of human labour, would face the only course left to them; to send them packing back to Poland; or from wherever else they  emerged upon our shores. But they cannot bring themselves to do so as adherents of the canon of political correctness.

MARY BEARD is scooping up her support not for what she said on Question Time, but for the way she has been treated since as an aged women of little practical use to the modern youth orientated media.

Trolling is an ugly practice. It uses the personal over the rational and can cause terrible mental and physical damage to those targeted. So as far as those who used such vile rhetoric in attacking Ms Beard; then I condemn them wholeheartedly as any sane person should.

            But I do not include in this, as many liberal journalists do, either A A Gill or Rod Liddle in this attack. They are not to be compared to the venal cruelties of the truly bigoted that is the hall mark of trolling.

            My critique of this woman has nothing to do with her gender or age; but with her liberal arrogance that sought, in the BBC programme, to say to the audience that it is all right: I have read this report and it agrees with my liberal views in almost every detail; and given that I am an academic, and you are the audience, as well as the viewer, you should all feel reassured by the report’s result.

            No wonder Rachel Bull felt herself driven by anger to reply to Ms Beard. For her experiences demolished Ms Beard’s  argument. Why does Ms Beard not escape briefly from her academic entombment and visit Boston to see for herself rather than rely upon the statistical conundrums conjured up by academia into a world they have little understanding of apart from spending a day or two among their samples?

            My guess is that Ms Beard fits most comfortably into the cosy academic climate in which she sits; only emerging to drill into the proles and plebs the apotheosis of  her liberalism as she displayed on Question Time.

BUT THE LIBERAL feminists in the media who took Ms Beard to their breasts; had better concentrate upon Rachel Bull and her objections: for hers are the objections of all the indigenous  British people: and as Rachel Bull is a women determined to slay the ghost of political correctness when giving vent to her feelings; she has opened up and challenged the liberal academic conclusion that multiculturalism is in some way seen as ‘progressive’.

            Mary Beard may comport herself as a misogynistic victim; but she is no such thing. Rachel Bull is a women; a woman riddled with experience of the kind of world that Ms Beard seems to need some academic study to fully comprehend. She does not have anything of value to say on the subject of immigration into Boston or any other part of the country. Her idyll are her books, which, as I have found, are a major part of life’s reason to be alive. But she needs to take a holiday from the comfortable cloisters of Cambridge and expose herself to Mary Beard’s world.

            To the Guardian,  Ms Beard’s experience after her appearance on Question Time mattered far more than what she or Rachel Bull said, and more to do with the trolls; and in particular, about what A A Gill and Rod Liddle had written about her. The argument about the way immigration was impacting on Lincolnshire was never entertained by the Guardian.

            Rachel Bull did a service when she spoke out. No liberals could have possibly described her as  a ‘bigot’ or ‘racist’; or, for that matter, any other element of the liberal nomenclature that seeks to put what they regard as none-progressive types, into their thesaurus of  right-wing demonology.

            We have a major catastrophe on our hands as a nation. We are over-populated; and such bounty is down to Mary Beard’s soul brothers and sisters on the Left, whether in academia or parliament . Only Rachel Bull spoke for the indigenous people of these isles, and it is her contribution to the immigration debate that the feminist’s should be applauding. But unlike the many feminist journalists that jumped to Ms Beard’s defence, Rachel Bull was not part of the liberal elite and therefore could be ignored.

                                                                                                           

The new elite

LORD MANDELSON was, you may remember an EU trade commissioner. He was appointed to this well paid and lucrative position by the last Labour government; and from the age of 65 he will be rewarded further to the tune of a £31,000 a year pension. He will also receive a parliamentary pension, as well as a nice little earner from being a peer.

            It all mounts up; the gravy train has thousands of carriages and will always remain full of people of Mandelson’s pedigree. He is part of the new upper class which is no longer tied to any particular party, only to a particular genealogy that makes his type a cut above the rest of us; as was the case with the old aristocracy. The new aristo usually has had (like the more familiar type) a parent, uncle, aunt or grandparent involved in politics at either local or national level. In Mandelson’s case, it was his grandfather Herbert Morrison, who, like himself, enjoyed two seats on the gravy train, in Herbert’s case, as government minister, and the leader the Labour group on London County Council.

            Mandelson is a modern professional politician; he exemplifies the type. He worked in public relations as well as for the media. Not for him Aneurin Bevan’s proletarian advancement from the Welsh valley. He had a more patrician upbringing that stood him well as a contender for parliament, as a New Labour candidate…and his constituency? Hartlepool no less; was as far away from the new aristocracy as one can get in terms of an ideal setting on which to climb the greasy pole – but it was a safe Labour seat where a monkey could stand wearing a red rosette.

            Labour had no Surrey constituencies, although Mandelson would no doubt have preferred to be among such people, just as others like him in New Labour would have preferred similar watering holes rather than representing safe constituencies up north, a journey that even overcame much of  the talent at the BBC.

MANDELSON REPRESENTED the first of a new class of politician. In the Conservative Party, Cameron and Osborn are his equivalent. Blair led the charge toward the professional politician -a beast which grazed rather than hunted meat. A bourgeoisie to whom political ideology mattered less than power. Power was the only purpose of politics. The political class had a compass, but it was not the same ideological one that had driven the country for well over a century.

            Blair turned his back on the socialism that had kept the Labour party from power from 1979 to 1997. In its place something called the ‘project’ was set in motion. Using the skills of the spin doctor and by bullying the media, as well as harnessing the Labour voters thirst for a return to power; Blair turned everything around for Labour. His success has had its impact on Cameron to this day. The Nasty Party, like the Marxist Party, has reinvented itself; and to prove itself, the Cameron government ring-fenced overseas aid.

            Politicians may have naively entered their chosen profession for idealistic reasons in the past. But I doubt that many of them today enter parliament for any other purpose than to advance their careers through the publicity that the modern media advances them. There is so little that now divides the two great parties, that the third party can feel comfortable ruling in tandem with either.

            We have an elite as class based as it has always been, directing our country. But the elite are the professional politicians who have had no experience outside of a law firm or university. The real world to them is either an ivory tower, or a lawyers practice, usually dealing with financial matters that can advance the rewards of a firm of lawyers considerably: or human rights legal activists like those who front Liberty.

            This elite have no longer any ideological boundaries. They operate, both here and in Europe, their very own party political Schengen agreement whereby political boarders are no longer closed to each other. Now all the main parties throughout the continent share the same liberal ‘progressive’ outlook. They are all pro EU, pro multiculturalism, and pro political correctness. They all believe in a public sector, a public sector which has unfortunately caused an imbalance in their economies with the private.

LORD MANDELSON exemplifies the argument. He is a perfect case in point of the type. To his name you can add those of the Kinnocks who has also lived of the public tit all their working lives. They, like Mandelson, will have more than one generous pension to live on, and in Neil’s case also a peerage.

            At least many in the Conservative party have, unlike the Kinnocks, worked in the private sector before they entered parliament. The career politicians are, on a continental scale, the elite of which I write. They duck and dive; they are opportunists. There is no great ideological chasm now separating them, so they are freer than ever to look to their own self interest. In Europe, as in Westminster, but on a far larger scale, the lobbyist seeks out, like some modern day Mephistopheles the professional politician; and promises him a generous remuneration of some kind for representing his cause, whether commercial or charitable, within the European parliament.

            Outside of the European parliament, they have even erected a small monument supporting the lobbying profession. If political and monetary union goes ahead, the EU will become the Mecca of corruption, attracting what were once national politicians. The European parliament will be, for them, the goose that will lay the golden egg.

A true professional politician will carry no ideological baggage. They will seek only to enter their particular kingdom of heaven, by, in the first instance, getting elected to the European parliament. Once this has been accomplished the position offers all sorts of extras and palm greasing, that surpasses even that of the Westminster parliament during the   scandal.

            The so-called ‘duty of loyalty’ pension that the retired commissioner is given, is on the understanding that they keep their mouths shut upon leaving office. In the case of Mandelson and the Kinnocks, they have nothing to fear. As was shown earlier this week when Mandelson appeared on the BBC’s Today programme to rubbish Cameron’s Europe speech.

IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING  entering politics in the very near future you must first of all adapt to the liberal agenda in every aspect. From then on its is up to you. The public purse is there for you to command: as you advance to becoming an unelected commissioner remember, only the most faithful and enthusiastic Europhiles can have any kind of chance; and even then, they have to be put forward by an appreciative prime minister…so, always remain a loyal servant to your party leader, and serve an apprenticeship as a servile government minister - I am sorry, but this is your only hope.

            A much easier way of getting a seat (in comparison that is) on the gravy train, is to be selected by your party as a candidate for the European parliament in a safe seat. It is true that only a few are given such an easy passage; but remember, you are professional politicians in the making and should be open to the challenge. For if successful the remuneration is great indeed. If you play to the rules in your first term, but are un-chosen by the electorate for a second one; then at least, if you have not wasted your time; you will have a nice little earner to help soften the blow via a generous pension in terms of the rest of the population; and also, if you have worked the lobby system to your advantage, further recompense for your ‘civic duty’.

THE ABOVE REPRESENTS an embryo of  the future, which  if we allow the professional politician to govern our lives in Europe after political and economic union in Europe, we will have sealed this nation’s fate; leaving only the European political vultures to hover over the tax payer’s carcass without any input by the once proud nation states.

            But I bet you one thing. If we are driven by political events into becoming a part of a Greater Europe, where decisions about our future are taken at the European centre; we will have entered a period compared to the later stages of the Roman Empire. Europe will have signed away its future. If a Greater Europe was to be successful and all conquering, economically that is. Then southern Europe will have to be set adrift to find its own way back. But such a ruthless attitude ill-befits a liberal ‘progressive’ elite in Europe. Not because of any sense of compassion for the Greek and Spanish people; but because the European project (like that of Communism which preceded it in  the 20^th  century) is of such importance.

Compassion is supposed to be at the centre of liberalism. But they will ignore the unemployment and its consequences in terms of human suffering in Greece and Spain because of their eternal faith in the euro. As with the liberal left generally; they would sooner see human suffering on a scale of that suffered within the Soviet Union rather than deny us the euro. To such people the euro is almost Christ like in its importance.

THE POLITICAL elite have no particular political identity any more. What they have  is a voter they believe is willing to be bullshitted by meaningless rhetoric: telling them what they believe they want to hear. This is why UKIP is making such an impact. David Cameron would never have made such a speech on Europe if his party’s many supporters had not started to drain away to UKIP.

            If Labour thinks such a seeping away of support effects only the Conservatives, then they had better think again. I and my brother are in our sixties and have been life-long supporters of Labour, but have been voting UKIP for the past two years. A long standing friend and his wife, also lifelong Labour supporters, have also turned to UKIP.

            Many traditional Labour supporters also share the same antipathy to the EU as many Conservatives do. For there is one thing both supporters have in common; they are both nationalists, and are deeply in love of their country. The United Kingdom is the bottom line. We are a small c conservative people and long may we remain so.

           

           

           

           

Arm the people!

“Do not patronize the passionate supporters of your opponents by looking down your nose at them”

Bill Clinton to fellow Democrats who want gun controls

THERE HAVE BEEN PROTESTS against gun control all over America; but they have been ill-attended events. Whether this is because Obama is wining the argument or, as with other issues, the Right cannot rally in any great number the silent majority, whose intellectual instincts and sympathies are, as in the UK, small c conservative.

           

The liberals enjoy, as a social activity, demonstrating. They have done so since the Vietnam war, and the habit has been, almost genetically, handed down since. The Left in America will always bring out the numbers which are visually impressive to the liberal media. Hundreds of thousands of liberals can be called upon at any one time to protest against any cause considered (or even ill-considered) by them as illiberal and ‘anti-progressive’. But they represent a mere segment of the 315 million population.

Under the Second Amendment to the American Constitution, every American citizen has the right to bear arms. As a result there is (as there once was in the UK) a culture of  gun ownership. It was understood that the law-abiding gun owner could not be associated with the criminal or some demented soul who massacres the innocent.

           

Gun ownership in the UK was criminalised after the First World War when soldiers returning home were at first allowed to keep their guns; but after the revolutionary events in Russia and other parts Europe; the British establishment quickly backtracked. Up until this moment any British citizen without a criminal record was given the right to own a gun.

GUN OWNERSHIP is as much, if not more, of a human right than the many examples of such a phenomenon of our liberal culture who, on a daily basis, take to the European Court of Human Rights for favourable judgement.

           

            In America the constitution guarantees such a right and this has managed to  keep modern liberalism at bay. But under Obama this is about to change after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. He will see this issue, along with his reform of America’s health care system, as the pinnacle of his  presidency, if, that is, he can outlaw certain calibres of weaponry.

           

            Who knows, it may lead to a third term. An event unknown since another Democrat president was so honoured. But Obama is no Roosevelt: yet while he still lacks the opportunity that a world war gave Roosevelt for extending his presidency; Obama has the colour and liberal charisma to convince his party and the American people on the back of his tint, and his health reforms, to give him a third term.

            The average European liberal sees the average American gun owner as a Red Neck or survivalist waiting for the end of the world. This is not the case. The vast  majority of American gun owners believe they have the right to protect their families from criminal intrusion. Gun ownership gives them an equal match with the burglar or any other criminal; or even with the maniac who walks onto a school campus and seeks to annihilate the students.

           

            In Newtown, if a teacher or a security guard had had a gun, then 26 people may be alive today; but such liberal lateral thinking does not acknowledge such a prospect because they think gun ownership bad under all and every circumstance – even, no doubt, if their country were invaded.

IT SHOULD BE THE right of every law abiding citizen to own a gun. In this country the only restriction should be on the calibre of the weapon. Every  British citizen (without a criminal record) should be allowed ownership of a hand gun. I am not talking about assault weapons, but the minimal calibre needed to secure his or her family and their property.

           

            In America, if Obama disarms the law abiding American citizen; he will still have no power over the criminal’s ability to own a gun. He will put the law abiding and voting US citizen at the mercy of criminals who sneer at Washington’s laws in their daily activity.

            Newtown was bad and there will be worse to come. But to blame gun ownership for such tragedies, is like blaming the government for floods, as well as any other natural catastrophe that manages to kill.

Guns are dangerous. They can intimidate to gain reward with the threat of death. In a household that carries at least one gun; that one gun presents the victims with an opportunity to rid themselves of their persecutor.

            Gun ownership in America should remain as it is. In the UK gun ownership should be restored to the period before the First World War. In Britain today, burglary is treated as a mere consequence of modern living unless a murder is involved. The theft of property seems to matter little to the modern police service. If the police cannot respond to such crimes with the same level of urgency they do to a murder; then the law must allow the victim in such cases to protect themselves with a hand gun.

           

            If the police have no wish to become armed; this does not mean that the law-abiding citizen should be denied such protection. After all, the police in the UK have never been armed, even while the rest of the law abiding citizenry were allowed to be. There have been many reordered examples in the past, of unarmed British police, in pursuance of an armed criminal, seeking the loan of a weapon from a passerby while in pursuit of a criminal.

            If Obama proves successful in either disposing of or reforming the Second Amendment; I hope the constituency such a law would effect would challenge it in the courts. The National Rifle Association (NRA) should dip very deeply into its no doubt lucrative pockets to finance such an action. This is a constitutional matter and deserves to be challenged. As Edmund Burke said “ Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny”.

           

           

Algeria’s handling must be praised

THE TAKING OF hostages at a gas field in the Algerian Sahara; is being talked of as being a consequence of France’s intervention in Malawi. While this may not be the sole motivation for the terrorists, it is certainly being described as such by the terrorists themselves.  An Algerian hostage was told by one of his kidnappers  not to worry, as they only wanted the foreigners, the crusaders; and also to warn America.

           

The West must not continue in denial before it is too late. The Arab Spring was seen by the West as a force for good. Cruel and bloody dictators like Mubarak, Gaddafi, and Assad were either overthrown or put in peril by popular uprisings. The West thirsted for Arab democracy and supported the departure of the despots. In the case of Libya, we even leant a hand by destroying Gaddafi’s heavy armour from the air.

           

In Egypt today the Muslim Brotherhood bides its time, until Egypt can be fully Islamised under sharia and all the architecture of a democratic state is disposed of. In Syria we have armed the opposition who are daily proving themselves worthy competitors to Assad when it comes to cruelty and malevolency.

In helping to defeat Gaddafi, those mercenaries he employed to buttress  his regime are now fighting in Malawi. All Cameron and Sarkozy did was throw a bloody great brick into the pond causing ripple after ripple of Muslim radicalism to increase its diameter throughout North Africa; while in the Middle East, once Assad’s fate is sealed the Syrian and Tunisian Islamists will link up with Hezbollah and Hamas and turn their attention toward Israel. By which time Egypt itself will be radicalised and no doubt prepared to join battle. A time will come when many in the West will have realised what friends they had in Saddam, Mubarak, Gaddafi and Assad.

I still do not believe that our leaders fully comprehend the danger that is unfolding from within the Muslim world. If they did, instead of imperilling our armed forces through defence cuts, they would have increased expenditure. In the case of the UK it should have been secured. We have within our military all of the intelligence and fighting skills needed to successfully conduct a modern war on land, sea, and in the air against the most sophisticated opposition. This has been history’s greatest legacy to this country and it should have been given primacy – if not over health and education; then almost certainly over foreign aid.

THE SITUATION IN MALAWI has been advanced by the events in Libya. We should have stood back from intervening in Libya, as we should be today in Syria. Those coming to power in those nations that were part of the Arab Spring are no friends of the West; yet our politicians cling to nothing more than hope to the belief that they will all become good democrats.

           

            Turkey has a population of  over 74 million people, and is seeking to become a member state within the EU. But the EU is less than eager to agree to such an accommodation: and the reason why? Well, Turkey is a Muslim nation, and Europe already has 15 million Muslims living within its borders. In the UK we have over 2 million. If the EU had no concern over the religious status of the Turkish state, they would have already allowed it entry. But despite their protestations that Turkey’s religious demographic has played no part in their decision making, Turkey remains out in the cold.

            In the UK over past 45 years; the citizens have never been so ill-represented by their politicians. Think of them as a class; study their liberal upbringing and education; as well as their teachers and lecturers who moulded them and prepared them to become politicians. Great Britain was once the world’s greatest empire that did much more good than harm to those who fell under its wing.

           

            Yet harm was done and, since the 1970s in the UK, academics, teachers, and pupils, have all been circularly coerced into feelings of guilt for the way their country managed the empire; or even having an empire in the first place; and all the tutorials have been modified by such guilt to create a liberal hegemony of the type we are living under today.

            As an act of liberal guilt we allowed wave after wave of ex-colonists to live among us. Despite them hating British colonialism; there was no shortage of supply to the shores of their ‘colonial masters’ during and after the 1950s. In the greatest act of patronisation, liberal Britain paid great attention to multicultural sensitivities and created a new law to make themselves feel guiltless and to punish those indigenous peoples who sought to be impolite to the various other cultures.

ONE PARTICULAR CULTURE has, however, been seen as a threat. Not by politicians, but by the likes of myself. The Pakistani community accounts for something like 80 per cent of the Muslim population of this country. According to the Guardian, of Tuesday 8 April 2008, the Muslim population had risen to 2 million. Four years on I doubt it has moved in any other direction than upwards.

           

            The Islamic world is far more of a threat to Europe than it was in the 16^th century. The threat is greater because, unlike its earlier intrusion; the latest one will see its mission already accomplished by the Muslim demographic throughout Europe. What was it the ‘demonic’ Enoch once said; to paraphrase, ‘they will [all minorities] eventually get the upper hand’; something which set the liberal pulses beating and lead to the great man’s wilderness years from which, unlike Churchill, he never re-emerged.

            Throughout the Muslim world great changes are occurring; all to the detriment of the Christian West. The Muslim world is rejuvenating its past, and ever more people are rallying to the prospect of Sharia being spread throughout, if not the world, then at least Europe, because of its liberal tolerance, and 15 million Muslims.

           

            As far as the Islamists are concerned, the Islamic invasion of Europe has already gained a head start because of liberal guilt. In the UK, for instance, London has always been described on the European continent as Londonistan. Because of the radical clerics in London’s mosques who have been allowed to cultivate young people into the Jihadist movement.

           

            The events in the Sahara desert  should not have shocked anyone who smelt the coffee at the time of the Arab Spring. Our guileless politicians whose liberal instincts helped bring about the Islamic threat to the West and made the Muslim world believe that it could succeed, are today shell-shocked by the latest attack by Islamists seeking to attack the West; but even more so by the actions of the Algerian government.

            But even now I doubt whether much will change in terms of the psychology of our leaders regarding the perceived threat to the West by the Islamists. When, to their credit, the Algerian government acted ruthlessly to end the kidnapping without getting into long weeks of bargaining with the terrorists, Western leaders took exception. They would have preferred liberal reason to have been  tried first, leaving future hostage takers with the belief that a deal can be struck with the degenerate West

THERE IS A PART OF me which would like to see the Islamists succeed, if only to help rid the West of its liberal complacency, and in the hope of readdressing the imbalance between us and the Islamists. We have all the military might on our side but we lack our enemies ruthlessness, and until we bite the bullet as we had to do in the Second World War, our military might will account for very little in the upcoming battle.

            

Celebrity after Savile

THE CASE OF JIMMY SAVILE shows what can go wrong when the cultivation and promotion of a celebrity culture grips a civilization. Savile was all powerful. He went unchallenged for so long because he held command, through his celebrity status, over all of those around him. Whether it was within the BBC, who saw him as its biggest asset and turned a blind eye to the many rumours about his conduct for fear of killing the golden goose; or the many hospitals for whom his charity work allowed him on to the wards to cultivate his predatory perversions.

           

The millions of people who almost worshiped this man did so because of his ‘good works’ and ostentatious presence, which seemed to find so much favour with  the 1970s and 80s generation. Everyone from BBC executives, doctors, police officers, and prison officers, right down to the general public; all wanted to bask in his celebrity.

Then there were other celebrities who, in their time, used their celebrity to cultivate and abuse their vulnerable and besotted worshipers. Gary Glitter and [Simon?] King took full advantage of the opportunities their fifteen minutes of fame allowed them. But they were not alone: there were dozens, if not hundreds of such hedonistic egos travelling the country, feeling god-like as they turned up to a gig in some seaside theatre where hundreds of screaming teenage girls were reduced to tears by their melodic Rasputin’s. They would crowd the stage door after every performance hoping to breathe the same air as the subject of their wet dreams. They were emotionally vulnerable and would go to any lengths to hold on to the attention of such half-wits.

In terms of celebrity, the likes of Savile were allowed to prosper because he held power over his victims, while he used Sue, Grabbit, and Runn[1] to threaten any investigative journalist if he was asked the wrong questions… while he must, because of his sense of self,  have had the utmost contempt for those who saw, but chose to ignore his perversions. Among whom were many within the BBC.

CELEBRITY CULTURE has expanded its web. We now have access to hundreds of channels, because of digital transmission from either a set-top box or a satellite dish. More means less, and so it has proved with the digital age. Such over consumption of channels leads to more and more banal ideas being manufactured to entertain the public.

           

Reality television is the nearest the modern age comes to a Roman circus. It does not leave our TV screens emitting blood (yet) as the ancients sought to do with their idea of gladiatorial sport and animal butchery. But it follows the same principles of popular entertainment that many a Caesar  put in force to endear themselves to the citizens of Rome. This time however, competition rather than the populism of emporia is the justification for such facileness.

We now have celebrity this and celebrity that. The celebrities are often past their sell by date, or are being put on the first the rung of the ladder to celebrity status via some trivial newsworthy appearance, perhaps on You Tube?           

Celebrity is like a drug that grips the individual into believing they are something  that their ambition leads them to believe is unique. They want and yearn for the kind of popularism that Jimmy Savile won. Such people will use whatever device the media allows them to use, and if in the process they are humiliated, as they invariably are on reality TV; then they at least become part of the spotlight of failure, which can also make them a few bob during the pantomime season.

THE EVEREST OF celebrity is America. If you make it there, you can make it anywhere: and this is the desire of all the ambitious entertainers  that  seek to win the X-Factor. Once they arrive, they can, if they wish, follow Jimmy Savile’s example of sexual inebriation. They will have public backing in the form of the emotional syrup that deems celebrity unassailable, providing they do not allow their sexual extravagantness to ever reach the public’s ear.

           

Celebrity has replaced religion in our fast becoming secular society: something which the secularists never meant to happen, but they will have to come to terms with. Celebrity has also replaced science, maths, and engineering as the prime motivation within youth culture. No other activity has gripped the conscience of our youth since the 1960s than seeking to become a pop celebrity, ruling the entertainment world, and having done so, turning their support to charity knowing that the media will absorb their every banality and treat their opinions as in some way profound.

John Lennon took the lead in gifting  a generation of his trite observations. He and Yoko took to their bed and invited the media to study their ‘love in’… a concept that even those of us of his generation found embarrassing at the time. He then composed an anthem to peace which amounted to repetitively demanding that we give peace a chance; followed by asking us to Imagine his dystopian view of reality and find it as worthy of our consideration as Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy

           

In the years to come Bob Geldof and Bono  would also take themselves seriously enough to believe they had far more to their celebrity than being mere entertainers. They believed their celebrity status included being paid attention to for something other than their music.

It is not only pop stars but also actors and actresses who believe their chosen profession is a mere hobby and international politics their true vocation. Vanessa Redgrave is an extreme example among luvvidom, but she is only unique in the sense that she is extreme. We all know of the habit of celebrities giving their support for a particular political party at election time.

CELEBRITY CULTURE is dangerous. First of all, in the  power it can give to an individual such as Savile; but secondly, the power it gives to those elevated to A and B list status who can suffer from a delusional consideration of themselves as being uniquely gifted by  God or fate to expand their talents politically. To believe themselves to have a gifted insight  into the world’s travails, and therefore give us lesser mortals the benefit of their wisdom (sic).

            In the past, in communist countries, we in the West derided what we described as the ‘cult of personality’ that leaders such as Mao, Stalin, Castro and Che Guevara enjoyed…the latter two, in particular, among the student culture in the West.

            We now have a ‘cult of personality’ in the West which surrounds, of all people, public entertainers, and elevates them to iconic status; a branding that allows them to advise the rest of us on correcting the problems in the world; which the media, like flies hovering over shit, treat as profundities, as they have always done whenever a celebrity pontificates upon a given subject outside of their professional remit as entertainers.

            I am sorry to say that the celebrity culture is here to stay no matter how many Jimmy Savile’s,  in the coming decades, it throws up. Celebrity culture is a decadent obsession that will eventually have its consequences for society. It will continue to blossom and celebrities will command the same status as statesmen. They will be elevated to the House of Lords upon reaching a certain age and will have more influence than a minister who has actually served in government and knows  the ins and outs of international politics.

            Celebrities should be kept in their place by politicians by not rewarding them with even a MBE. But of course politicians being politicians, they will promote a celebrity merely as a popular gesture and nothing more. Nothing in fact, has changed since the days of Rome.

           

           

             

           

           

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[1] Private Eyes favourite firm of solicitors