I can’t be bothered watching Brown at Chilcot any more. Mildly interesting but unsurprising that Blair kept him out of the loop on dealings with Bush,
Brown’s primary concern is to deny that Treasury constraints cost British soldiers’ lives. He has therefore said six times in the first half hour that, as far as the Treasury were concerned, cost was never an issue.
It bloody well should have been. To all those unemployed and steeped in debt, does this feel like a country that had £100 billion to throw away on a totally needless aggressive war?
Gordon Brown. Unquestioning writer of cheques for a psychotic warmongerer.
What a tosser.
“mature debate”, eh ?
If Hurt Locker wins Best Picture tonight at the Oscars, you may remember that I brought it up here and CheebaCow replied. It’s a very well-made and tense film, but it invites all of your sympathy for the bomb disposal unit of an invading army, and the Iraqis in the film are cardboard cut-outs. It’s worth watching — but only if you want to see a portrayal of addiction to war.
Tea, vicar?
dreoilin, you do realize that Anno has repeatedly made reference to a cabal of secret Zionist bankers, don’t you? He’s also said a number of other things about Jewish people straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
What would it take for you people to think slightly poorly of a Muslim fascist?
Craig, Last night Larry from St. Louis posted another derogatory smear against me as a comment to your BLOG dated March 3, 2010 headlined “Rare TV Appearance”. My comment in response to Larry was removed, yet Larry’s slanderous comments remained. I have now put my comment in again under “Rare TV Appearance”.
I should mention that the Larry Smear Team has no knowledge of me whatsoever. They don’t know me from Adam, so they have no basis for making any of the defamatory smears they have made, except that they are paid to make their filthy accusations. I have been asking for some months now for Larry’s contact details, and I note that the Larry Team are too cowardly to supply them.
Larry’s comments are not just one crank spouting off. They are part of a very nasty professionally run campaign against my family, using tactics developed by the former DDR Secret Police “The STASI”. I have reposted my comments since I believe that I should have the right to respond to their smears.
dreoilin, are you saying that the people who lay bombs to murder innocent people are somehow sympathetic characters?
And yes, the focus was on the American soldiers, but I’d hardly call the young boy and the professor cardboard cut-outs.
You really do see the world with quite simple anti-American eyes.
And once again I’ll just bet that no one here will attempt to disabuse Roderick of his paranoia that the secret services of the world are terrorizing him because he quit his job.
Roderick, get help. No one is following you. A “hang up” call is occasionally just someone with the wrong number.
Read the WIKI. Note the number of incidents that are independently witnessed – Shots fired at my son, death threat calls (recorded and witnessed), vehicles smashed into property, etc. etc.
Of course we all know that this is coming from the very high establishment (look at the WIKI) who seem able to operate above the law. Thats why it is being covered up, and that’s why they have hired low lives like Larry to conduct a smear campaign.
If the Larry Smear Team were honest they would provide their contact details. They don’t know me from Adam, so they have no basis for making any of the defamatory smears they have made, except that they are paid to make their filthy accusations.
It does beg the question ?” Where is the human rights industry, and why are they scared to look at all this?
Roderick, if that were a true WIKI I’d be able to edit every ENTRY because it’s all a load of BULLSHIT.
Three coaches to the demonstration from Ludlow! Agreed, that is impressive. Shows that Middle-England were not only represented, but providing a lead…
I have never understood why the 2 million demonstration wasn’t used to bring Blair to his knees in February/early March 2003? Yes, he wriggled about for a week or so, but then carried on as normal. It seems that the antiwar movement lacked leadership at a crucial time.
Charles Kennedy could easily have provided that leadership… as a libdem supporter, I remember being very disappointed. think he must have been badly advised at that time. Once the second resolution didn’t get passed (and his voice should have been at its loudest), he went quiet.
And of course, there was Clare Short…
peacewisher – I remember a friend of mine, her daughter hung a humongous great banner out of her window the day after we heard it had started – “Just because it’s happening, that doesn’t mean it’s right”.
What I mean is, a lot of vague feeling of obligation to ‘rally round in time of crisis’. Or even ‘argue the rights and wrongs later, but for now we’ve provoked a lot of people to want to kill us so there are more urgent things to worry about’.
But, yes, it is a shame there wasn’t someone in Kennedy’s position to pick it up. Perhaps he thought the fuss would die down & there wouldn’t be the votes in it, come a couple of years later ? Even bought the stuff about what a glorious rosepetals-and-candy success it was going to be, and everything successful ?
I guess there must have been monster amounts of behind-the-scenes pressure, too, on people who thought they had things to lose.
@ peacewisher
Tony Benn was the de facto leader of the anti-war campaign in his capacity as president of Stop the War Campaign.
I said this –
Not totally distinguished company. It’s a pity Benn did not support the move to have Blair arraigned as a war criminal. He also canvassed on the phone for Blair in the last election. He is just a phony and a windbag.
‘A letter was signed by over 4000 people, including this author, which sought the arraignment of Blair and his cabal for war crimes. It was addressed to Kofi Annan and headed by Tony Benn, president of STWC. A meeting to make a final decision is recorded thus in Tony’s new diary:-
‘Lindsey German and Nicholas Wood came to see me about the next stage in the campaign on the war crime question, about how we could advance the cause of the letter. There’s been no coverage in the press, although Kofi Annan has replied. We went on to discuss the whole question really of whether we were demanding a war crimes tribunal. My view is that you shouldn’t do that. I think it’s a complete waste of effort trying to put Blair and Bush on trial : (a) it won’t happen; (b) it’s so negative: ( c) it’s all about personalities.’ –
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8141
Posted by: mary at January 8, 2009 8:58 PM
on Craig’s piece In Distinguished Company of the same date.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/in_distinguishe.html
“I guess there must have been monster amounts of behind-the-scenes pressure, too, on people who thought they had things to lose”.
This must have concerned the whole of Parliament–since the “immediate threat” from Iraq was so poorly debated in the Commons, as to its truth–they might have been deciding the date for a Boy Scout Jamboree.
Yes Richard, I also got a lot of “verbal” for daring to protest the war after it had started. Someone even stopped their car and asked us not to be so silly, because “we are winning…”
I also remember staring at at the TVs on display in a shop window showing live video from that eerie green Baghdad skyline, and the blasts going on right across the city. Others stared… and stared… almost in disbelief. Later, I heard on a news report that no civilian casualties had been reported… it was a very dark day.
But only a month earlier, I remembered clambering onto a half empty tube train in the suburbs, and watching it fill with people as it clattered towards Embankment. There were a few banners in evidence, but not too many. I assumed most were shoppers or sightseers.
Then, at Embankment, the doors opened, and the whole trainload seemed to pour out, and we all took our places at the back of what would be a massive demonstration of people power. Yes, the people took over London that day, and they shouldn’t have budged until Blair responded (the Ukranians showed us how to do it the following year…)
I was disgusted to hear Blair lying his way through the next few days, presumably while the troops were in final preparations. The people could and would have stopped British involvement in that war, at that time, but it seems that politicians lacked the guts to lead us.
Brown has now willingly joined Blair. As with the former, short-term glory and he may even win an election – but long term he’ll join Blair’s place in history.
Charles Kennedy has also been a patron of the Jewish National Fund as have been and are most leaders of the main British political parties.
http://www.nion.ca/jnf-forum-zayid.htm
He said on November 4 2004
2004 – November 4 , Charles Kennedy, Leader of the Liberal Democrats
“We believe in the Liberal values of equal human rights for all, regardless of gender, sexual orientation or faith. Only Israel, of all the countries in the Middle East, underwrites these values by law.”
LOL
Although I disagree with his views, I concede that John Rentoul sums Brown up correctly in his column in The Independent today. Not sure if URLs are shown here, but if in case they are:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/john-rentoul/john-rentoul-brown-puts-a-tick-by-war-and-moves-on-1917418.html
LOL big time, Mary!
That was of course just after Bush had won the 2004 election, and operations were beginning against Fallujah.
As you have probably realised I don’t give a toss if anyone thinks I am mad.
As strange as it may seem, not only have I seen a band called happystate, I have also done a video of them.
It was about 5 years ago, when they were about 15 years old
I sent them the DVD, but they never said thanks
From what I can remember they were all girls, and my daughter knew them but she wasn’t old enough to go to gigs without being arrested on the way home.
A google search reveals nothing, so they probably did something else instead or changed their name.
I still have the original tape
Tony
Why don’t you set up your own blog, tony ? It might work a lot better as a main article in its own right than it does as a comment on war funding.
“I was disgusted to hear Blair lying his way through the next few days, presumably while the troops were in final preparations. The people could and would have stopped British involvement in that war, at that time”
Good lord, do you really think so ? We couldn’t stop the avalanche while it was little, but if only we’d had a leader down in the valley and shouted louder …
Seems to me, the more the carefully-timetabled moves kick in, the more investment and the harder to stop.
Hey, the kaiser got second thoughts and told his army to call the whole thing off, in August 1914. The army staff replied that they couldn’t do that because it would break the railway timetables and cause national disaster … wonderful thing, hindsight, eh ? (It’s not as surreal/obsessive as it might sound, disappointingly. The railway timetables were entirely militarised, and all about troop movements).
I can see why Larry is getting more and more desperate.
Norman Finkelstein has a very good article on the demise of support for Israeli fascism and war crimes, even in the US amongst Jews.
http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein03032010.html
Looks like the smear tactics and anti-semitic drivel just aren’t working any more.
You people keep expanding the issue to include the entire question of Jewish existence.
I was simply pointing out that Anno is a racist nutter who echoes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the charter of Hamas. I was also pointing out that EVERYONE at this blog (save Angrysoba, of course) seems to support Anno in what he writes.
I would also argue that the Jews did not do 911.
I have no idea what this has to do with Israeli domestic and foreign policy.
“Looks like the smear tactics and anti-semitic drivel just aren’t working any more”
Joe, I read an article within the past week, saying that this is being recognised in Israel. About ‘anti-semitic’ accusations, and Israel losing in the PR battle – so to speak. I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes trying to remember where it was and searching in my History, even checking out Twitter. I remember thinking to myself, “It’s about time”.
“I was also pointing out that EVERYONE at this blog …”
You’re bored, aren’t you ?
Gee I think the issue of anti-Semitism is alive and real when someone who echoes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is met with approval at the blog of a former UK ambassador.
This blog is a good example of anti-Semitism; I’ll point others here.
Hi again Richard. Yes, I do think that, and I thought it at the time. But you are probably right that the people would never have stuck their necks out far enough… in our misguided British way, we’d think we’ve got to much to lose.
But there was a chance… and it wasn’t really tried.
we learn from Norman Finkelstein’s article that Robin Shepherd, director of international affairs at the London-based Henry Jackson Society, the central thrust of the Conservative Party’s foreign policy, asserts that Israel has come under strong criticism in the West not because of its human rights record but because it is a democratic, capitalist state fighting on the front lines alongside the U.S. against the “civilisational” threat posed by radical Islam: The “primary energizing platform in the West” for this “tidal wave of hysteria, deception and distortion against the Jewish state” consists of totalitarian Marxists and left-liberal fellow travelers who, disappointed by the Western proletariat and Third World liberation struggles, have made common cause with “militant Islam” to destroy the liberal-capitalist world order.
I challenge Shepherd’s assertion that Israel IS a democratic state, and indeed the only example of one in the Middle East. In recent times Israel’s racism is enshrined in the law of return by which any Jew born anywhere in the world has the right to emigrate to Israel and acquire automatic citizenship, whereas the Palestinians expelled in 1948 are denied the right of return.
The Palestinians have become a minority, strangers in their own land. Israel is the only post-world war two state that was established on the basis of the exclusion of the majority of its indigenous inhabitants.
Budgetary discrimination in health, education, housing, culture, and so on, results in Palestinians being relegated to fourth class citizens.
As a result of these policies, one out of every two Israeli Palestinian children lives below the poverty line, with half of all the children in poverty being Palestinian, according to figures released by the government in December 2000(Ruth Sinai in Haaretz, December 20th, 2000).
Beyond the law of return, the concept of “democracy” surely includes some notion of inclusiveness, of equality before the law and of opportunity regardless of class, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity.
For over fifty years, the Israeli state has pursued a policy of systematic discrimination against its Palestinian minority, one rooted in a profound institutionalized racism.
There are huge differences in the amount of state funds allocated to Jewish and Arab development and welfare.
Discrimination against Palestinians is also rife in employment, being particularly marked in public administration.
If one includes the Occupied Territories as part of the area ruled by Israel since 1967, its total population is now over nine million. Of these, the 3.5 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have no vote. Hence, one third of the people do not enjoy a series of basic rights which make up the pillars of liberal democracy.
Craig, do yourself a favour, do everyone a favour, block Larry from access to your site. He gives you nothing but mindless abuse.
Angrysoba also disagrees with most of what you say, but, he often puts forward some sort of rational argument, so, we should all be willing to read it.
Occasionally, people like me try to put forward an argument that is prepared to see both sides of a difficult issue. We shouldn’t just get shouted out of existence by the likes of Larry!
“We shouldn’t just get shouted out of existence by the likes of Larry!”
Whine whine whine.
I do get paid to do this. My superiors will be impressed.
“My superiors will be impressed”
Then they have pitifully low expectations.