Today I link to something that I did not enjoy reading, just to illustrate a point. It is a truly poor article by one Niles Gardiner in the Telegraph.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100041748/the-world-demonises-israel-once-again/
I point out merely in passing that the first few hundred overwhelmingly negative comments were deleted by the Telegraph. But the real reason I link is the significance of the strapline:
He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.
I bet he does. He has no international diplomatic experience, no knowledge of international law and very little experience of the hotspots of the world. But he is fully armed with the set of opinions those news outlets want their readers to hear.
Absolutely anybody can write this rubbish. Just string these elements together:
Poor little Israel. Threatened from all sides. Nazi Germany. Islamic terrorism. Hamas. Anti-semitism. Brutal Jihadists. Self defence. The right to return. Only democracy in the Middle East. Self defence. Iranian President threat to wipe off map. 8,000 Hamas rockets. Alliance of liberals, commies and islamists. 9/11. Chopping off hands. Subjugation of women. Taliban. Clash of civilisations. Existential threat. Self defence.
I could churn this stuff out easily and be on Fox, Sky and BBC as often as I like. I could pick up a fat salary like Nick Cohen for a weekly column of this stuff, and pocket the Rupert Murdoch TV fees as an extra. I could sit in a think tank. I would certainly be a great deal more qualified, and a great deal more convincing, than Niles pisspoor Gardiner. I write a lot better too.
But then I am handicapped by morality.
Which reminds me. Having followed the media coverage of the Israeli action very carefully, have you noticed what seems a complete absence on TV of bona fide experts in maritime law?
Normally live news brings in “experts” at the drop of a hat to fill in the 24/7 broadcasting, but despite the fact that professors of international law specialising in the law of the sea are not exactly hard to find, no TV station has asked one about the legality of the Israeli action.
That is because the martime law community is unanimous that the Israeli action is illegal.
Michael Petek
“The ethnic Germans knew it was time to stop”. I have no idea what on earth you mean – it sounds like very unpleasant gibberish. Please stop it.
Yuni referred to holocaust denial. I view the holocaust as definite fact – having lived four years in Poland and had occasion to be involved in camp commemorations. That is not an invitation to debate the subject.
In the telegraph article above, I see that Nile (sic) Gardiner hyperlinks the words “no less than 26 [UN] resolutions” to an article written by … himself!
alan campbell at June 6, 2010 9:34 PM
I’ve followed this blog for a while and there is definitely an infestion of organised pro-Israel trolling.
Craig did a post recently on his ftp stats – they don’t lie.
Best way to treat a troll, is to ignore it. It feeds on being acknowledged.
For this Petek shill to shed crocodile tears re-Turkish oppression of Kurds and Armenians depends on an entirely ahistorical suspension of disbelief on our part.
The Young Turks who ousted the sultan, secularized the state and then encouraged the same kind of paranoid nationalism under “Red Sultan”,Talaat Bey, we see today in Netanyahu’s Israel, that led to the mass killing of Armenians during WW1-were Rothschild-sponsored Zionist/B’nai B’rith proxies.
Kurds were enthusiastic participants in the long marches and atrocities committed against the Armenians.
The “Young Turk” op was the dress- rehearsal for the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that employed the same destabilization template to unseat and exterminate the Romanovs, later the kulaks and despatch other enemies of the revolution to the gulag.
The same forces employed identical tactics to make Russia amenable to Illuminati Wall St/City banking interests keen to invest and help develop Russia’s vast oil and mineral wealth.
Read the piece at Real Zionist News by Nathaniel Kampner and then follow this link to an incredible piece from The Times reporting the Armenian massacres in 1915.
I say “incredible” because you will never read anything like this in the paper since it was acquired by Zionists.
You can finally see why people USED to read the “top peoples’ paper!”
I always wondered why anyone with half a brain read it myself!
http://timesonline/co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2641064.ece?token=null&offset=0
Wait for the censor’s scissors…….
“…it feeds on being acknowledged”
The only good troll is a dead troll? Solving the troll-ish question…
Must say that much of the pro-boatnapping drivel chugged up on these threads is giving me plenty of material to work with. That said, I can definitely promise that recent events in the Med will feature in the novel I’m writing at the moment, disguised by space opera trappings, of course. Some wise skiffy writer said that even if our stories are set ten thousand years in the future we still cannot help but write about the present day. So true.
So you are Mike Cobley the author! I thought it was a coincidence of names.
Apostate at June 6, 2010 10:03 PM
Thank you.
At last, someone who knows their non-revised history.
Apostate,
your links have been doing some very funny things for some months now. That last one goes to a ‘Page Not Found’ error which redirects to, and I’m not making this up, the Beaver County Times…
With the focus on Israel’s most recent atrocities, the increased intervention here of Zionist apologists is understandable and, I suppose, validating.
Yet since Craig’s views comes with the imprimatur of both John Pilger and Noam Chomsky, one might have expected a better class of Zionist intervention. Maybe not the Alan Dershowitzs or Joe Bidens, but folks at least capable of mounting an actual argument.
But so far, there have been nothing but spewers of epithets and nonsense who reduce the conversation to inanity, despite Suhayl’s patient efforts to restore civility and rationality.
Perhaps, therefore, Craig should consider barring a few IP’s. I suppose that might include mine, but overall it would improve the signal to noise ratio.
Apostate,
are you typing your links by hand? You’ve put a ‘/’ where you need a ‘.’
An earlier link was like that, too; you’d missed out an ‘s’. Suggest you copy and paste.
Talking of bad links,
Steelback’s link (is Steelback also Apostate) is a dud. It should be:
http://americansjourney.blogspot.com/2010/06/united-states-of-zionist-america-im.html
Yes, that’s the one I said lacked an ‘s’, after ‘american’. I’m sure Steelback is Apostate, though I’ve no proof.
Clark
They arrived the same time and hold very similar views. They are certainly connected, though I am undecided if they are the same person.
Sometimes they worry me quite a bit. Very rational, ordered and well argued, but sometimes come out with stuff that would sit with the far right. Interestingly less often so than when they first arrived.
Suhail, you’re obviously not familiar with the history of eastern Europe, are you?
The whole of what is now western Poland, including the cities of Wroclaw and Szczecin, was once part of Germany and was solidly German-speaking for 700 years before 1945. So was the port of Gdansk (Danzig in German).
To the east of Danzig was East Prussia, again solidly German, where my mother came from. The northern half of it is now the Russian region of city of Kaliningrad, with the city of the same name (formerly Konigsberg).
That entire area comprised a quarter of Germany’s territory within the borders of 1937. After World War 2, it was comprehensively ethnically cleansed and resettled with Poles and Russians.
If, during the Cold War, Germans had crossed into East Berlin and blown themselves up among Russian soldiers or visiting civilians for the sake of recovering Konigsberg, how do you think the Russians would have responded?
If Germans had undertaken ‘martyrdom operations’ across the inner-German border, what then?
Endless, bloody war, that’s what.
Sorry, Suhail, I meant Craig.
Nichael,
I know that extremely well. I lived in Poland for four years. Norman Davies is a friend of mine. I was intimately involved in preparations for Poland’s EU accession, and Polish fears over returning Germans buying up the ex-German areas were a key factor of course.
Why it allows Israelis to shoot unarmed Turkish and US aid deliverers in the back of the head from close range is lost on me however.
Craig,
your assessment of Apostate is very similar to my own. Dreoilin and MJ have both pointed out the lack of a space after commas and full stops in the comments of Apostate, Freeborn, Juniper, Tungsten, and Steelback. You could tell from IP addresses in the logs, unless ‘they’ use multiple connections or a proxy server. I think you can look up proxy IP addresses somewhere.
Craig,
The reason why the hacks are paid such high salaries for nonsense, is to show and validate the ‘worth’ of their nonsense. Surely nobody would pay so much for so little? But they would and do.
They are paid small fortunes for rubbish because they are ‘good’ at it, producing nonsense, that is. It isn’t a mistake, but part of close to across-the-board policy of obsfucation and diversion from truth towards nonsense.
Are the press monolithic? Take Iran as an example. Aren’t all the national dailies, more-or-less, with slight difference in tone, peddling the same line, that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and is a threat to the West?
Second example, the total, absolutely overboard, positive reation to Obama’s election. No discussion of his actual policies but masses of adoration for the man’s personality, just like with Blair, but even more so, until we discovered what he really stood for.
I might say that I have twice in my life lived among communities where I have been taken aback by real anti-semitism, expressed as a heartfelt belief but one whic those expressing it evidently thought quite normal in their usual social circles:
I frequently came across anti-semitism in the Gujerati community of Blackburn and the Catholic community in Poland.
I have always objected to anti-semitism wherever I have found it.
Craig anything that diverts from the subject of shooting unarmed Turks allows Israelis to shoot unarmed turks.
Just as the fact that a bunch of Germans were kicked out of their homes allows Israel to kick a bunch of Palestinians out of their homes.
Michael Petek does not support Israel because of the reasons he has mentioned. Mentions those reasons because he supports Israel.
His support of Israel is unconditional and never ending. This is because he believes supporting Israel will bring the rapture forward, will speed up destiny as he sees it which includes the extermination of all Jews who do not convert to Christianity.
So his statements on Antisemitism, do not mean very much.
“Some wise skiffy writer said that even if our stories are set ten thousand years in the future we still cannot help but write about the present day. So true”
Mike Cobley, that’s true for me, too. I’ve been inspired by another extremely contentious subject which seems to render people incapable of rational thought, but it makes for such rich material, it might run to more than just the one novel. (It’s science fiction, as well.)
Craig, what happened on the Mavi Marmara was but one incident in sixty-two years of continuous war.
My point is that the ethnic Germans who were displaced from their homes suffered and died in vastly greater numbers, and in more gruesome ways, than the Palestinian Arabs did in 1948. For example, about half the women who stayed behind in East Prussia were deported to slave labour in the Soviet Union where approximately half of them died. No one knows how many were raped by their Russian captors, but a good many were found to have contracted sexually-transmitted diseases when repatriated.
My point is that the Germans knew when to accept defeat and to come to terms with the loss of their homes and their land. The Palestinian Arabs never have.
Look at the human cost their struggle has incurred, and speculate on the human cost that would have been incurred if the Germans had been as intransigent as the Arabs.
For goodness sake, Arsalan, my position regarding Israel is that no one – not even the UN Security Council – has the right to conspire with states to wage aggressive war to destroy it politically, which is what Hamas are doing.
It is unjust for anyone to wage jihad for any reason at all, because it is blasphemy to do so.
We non-Muslims refuse to accept the truth claims of Islam, we won’t abide an Islamic state, we don’t want shari’a law imposed on us and we don’t want to be your dhimmis, and if anyone tries to impose it on us by force, we’ll kill them.
I’m off to bed soon. Good night Craig, good night all.
Michael Petek,
seek help. Read the Bible less, it’s full of violence that can seriously disturb. And for goodness’ sake, chill out!
Night night.
Actually, Clark, some of my paternal (Slovenian) ancestors did seek help. They lived at what was in their century the Turkish frontier, so these peasant soldiers had to be streetwise and learn how to defend themselves against the periodic bother.
In 1683 the Turks besieged Vienna, so our lot – actually the Emperor – sought help and King John III Sobieski of Poland came to give it.
His army gave the Turks the mother of all hidings. That was on land.
In 1571 – at Lepanto – they got smacked about at sea.
Michael,
So the blacks in South Africa should also have accepted their defeat and subjugation like the Germans?
You are seriously crazy, you know.
Craig at June 6, 2010 11:35 PM
You haven’t lost your diplomatic touch – lol.