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463 thoughts on “And in next week’s Guardian, Joseph Goebells reviews Mein Kampf.”

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  • ingo

    Thanks Duncan for your valid critic of Cohen, even on such a human rights issue he can’t leave his own emotional agenda out.

    I fully agree that with the UN’s backward vote, which was fully to be expected, the reactions to homosexuals in Africa will sharpen.

    It suited the US who’s highest courts rejected that homosexuals in the armed forces be allowed their sexual freedom without being bullied by the US state.

    This in a way is the point of the Youth Parliament. In their letter they ask William Hague to show clemency to Tariq Aziz, include our human rights values into his considerations.

    But, like a hall mark of western perception forming within our media, we use the inhumane treatment of homosexuals, for instance in Iran, as a political beating stick and point to moralise upon ad nauseum.

    Just because we depend on the DRC’s resources for our mobile’s tec. does not mean we have to be quiet about the killings rapes and persecution of homosexuals there, our dependency and greed ignores the issue that matter to us and the greed agenda wins hands down, talk is of who gets what ,to smooth the ways of business and resource exploitation, sadly South Africa is not an example of how to do it.

    Our own diplomatical relationships fosters exploitation, mainly, never addresses human rights on the main page, elevate it to something that matters, too important to be ignored or brushed under the carpet, not just for HIV reasons, but for human rights reason, should not need any explaining.

    How can a globalised world ever work without us getting into a debate over what matters, religions aside. If people want to make this a religious issue, and it is not helpfull at all, then debates will become bogged down, personal emotional values enter in it and the chances of success are diminished.

    Ergo the lesson our diplomatic service seems to follow,is, if you want to do business, do not talk of human rights or religion.

    The relationships we foster are relevant and can change human rights, but articles like Cohens will not nudge them up the scale, its setting examples, as Craig did, that makes makes people react and sit up. But has he changed much of diplomatic practise?

    I think only other diplomats could tell us.

    Thanks for the other link Dreolin, shall check it out later.

    Don’t know the exact results of blood tests, but from our last conversation he seems to be fine and planning his literary snoop of Mazari Sharif, cleverly disguised as an Afghan wind hound.

    After last weeks gaff of the FCOP, apparently leading a ‘Taliban’ (shopkeeper from Pakistan disguised as Taliban) they knew, nudge nudge wink wink, to a meeting with Karzai from which he returned laden with dollar bills.

    There are absolutely no indication that the british diplomat involved, or our Government, who have helped to advance these bakshish negotiations has in any way benefitted from this terrorist hoax/hyst.

    If Craig has some spare time, there might be a chance of a reversed hustle here, should he feel inclined to press the flesh of Karzai, lol, he could easily pretend to be a british diplomat who can make something happen with the Taliban, its not that he has not got any experience is it?

    he might walk away with a tidy sum,

    prezzies allround for Easter.

    So looking forward to Lord Gibsons inquiery, how wide will his brief be? 2mm or 4mmlol?

  • alan campbell

    Labour’s problem with the media

    Nick CohenFriday, 26th November 2010

    On the Today programme this morning an incredulous John Humprhys could not believe Ed Miliband’s suggestion that the “squeezed middle” consisted of people earning a bit above or a bit below £26,000.

    The Institute of Fiscal Studies might have told Humprhys that this was indeed the band in the middle of British society, and that only the richest 15 per cent or so of people pay the 40 percent tax rate. When I last spoke to the IFS, it told me that it makes as much sense to look household income as individual salaries. By this measure, families bringing in £30-£50,000 a year make up the broad middle class, which fills so much of Britain. Exactly the people Miliband was talking about, in other words.

    The financial crisis is hammering them. Their services are being cut ?” and they cannot afford to go private. Their taxes are about to go up, their benefits are about to be withdrawn and ministers are about to tell their children they must take on vast debts if they want to go to university.

    Humphrys did not seem to know it. Miliband’s definition of the middle class exasperated him. “It’s about as vague as it gets” he cried. “The squeezed middle is what? I don’t know… I’ve no idea what you mean.”

    I thought Miliband made perfect sense, but Humphrys illustrated the problem that Labour faces now and the Coalition faced when it announced the abolition of child benefits for higher rate taxpayers. Star journalists ?” the presenters, columnists, editors and political correspondents, who set the agenda ?” are rich men and women. (The hacks below them are anything but as this wonderful post from Chris Dillow shows.)

    Their success, however, depends on them believing that they are the voice of ordinary folk when they address their audience. They are elitists who must play at being populists. They must convince themselves they are middle class, even when their earnings put them among the richest 2 percent of people in the country.

    They will hammer politicians from all parties who point out that the British middle class is not like them because they undermine the illusion on which their careers are built by

    Take the case of John Humphrys. If he told me he earns less than £150,000 I would eat my hat. If he told me, he makes less than £200,000, I would ask for a recount. In 2000 when I was young and foolish, I phoned his agents posing as the representative of Pelf.com, an exciting, if fictitious dot.com startup, and asked how much it would cost to hire him as an after dinner speaker. The going rate was £8,000 for an hour’s talk, I was told, about 2,000 times the minimum wage rate.

    I don’t want to sneer at Humprhys, the way he sneered at Miliband. He is a fine broadcaster, who deserves every penny he earns. I only want to say that journalists will never understand Middle England until they realise that it is nowhere near as affluent and nowhere near as secure as they imagine, and that is about to become a bleaker and more frightened place.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    Thanks Suhayl – developing the case.

    Team ‘B’ IS the dangerous cabal that levered Communism to support the industrial military complex and went on to develop the Islamic threat and the ‘war on terror’ propaganda.

    Exposed here by ‘Jason Vest’ a supporter of Children of Iraq Association and the journalist who investigated and exposed the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal.

    Jason’s story here:

    http://www.alternet.org/story/13990/

    The Zionist support for the Iraq war was

    a hawkish think tank called the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). JINSA and Team B are overlapping bodies, funded by a network of conservative foundations and public relations entities underwritten by far-right American Zionist organisations, together with money from defence contractors such as Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Alliant Tech Systems, Boeing, Ball Aerospace and Technologies, and Hewlett Packard (who supply missile-defence computer systems).

    [Jason Vest, The Men From JINSA and CSP, The Nation]

    Back-ground video:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77TRrr6YHFs&list=PLC96874279E78AD85&index=7&playnext=6

    JINSA organised Team C an Israeli group that was behind the subversion of 911 terrorists and the demolition of the towers.

    The fundamentalists in the White House:

    http://www.socialismtoday.org/70/usright.html

    Team ‘C’ assassins are the ‘death squad that stole the identities of British passports to murder Mr al-Mabhouh.

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article7029553.ece

  • Parky

    Humphreys, Paxman, The Dimblebies and the rest all live in another world but they don’t just get it ! I had to laugh at the Today programme too this morning..

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    When I write the word Zionism I refer to the IDF and the ideology of ‘Defence’ or ‘Hashomer’ or ‘HaHagana’ (as described to me 20 years ago by an Israeli friend and a true Zionist in the sense of the real meaning) that Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu perpetuates in the same DNA as Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Rehavam Zeevi, Dov Hoz, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

    People say to me, Mark get real, the stern gang are gone, the murderers of Lord Moyne are gone, the Irgun demolition team that bombed the King David Hotel are gone – they have NOT – they have evolved and diversified, infiltrated, pervaded and contaminated – they are masters of deception and their diplomat spies, handlers and saboteurs cost Britain millions in anti-subversion activities and British citizen and asylums protection against for example ‘ambush’ such as the lure of nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu and also deliberate lies such as Azhari Husin intended to hide their evil activities.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    I agree, Parky, Alan. It’s a good article at 12:49pm; I agree totally with it. As I, and I think Duncan McFarlane, may have suggested, Cohen (and others) remain very good on esp. domestic and some other matters. Paxman esp. embodies ‘the loud act’. But it’s really just mini-opera and he’s a soprano. Personally, I just can’t watch or listen to these TV/ radio ‘actors-singers’ anymore.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    Suhayl,

    The ‘Kidon’ are a ‘white’ team whose motto is in English, ‘we do not forget of forgive’ and their operations have inspired our own secret services. The ‘black team’ ‘Team C’ are IDF members.

    Team A are British and I have no information right now.

  • dreoilin

    How many documents are they threatening to release? I think it’s 2.5 million. The US has warned every single one of its Ambassadors to be prepared. Looking forward to it …

  • somebody

    No laughing at the back. Peter Power (of terrrrrr rehearsals on 7.7.2005 fame) has just been on BBC TV South News talking up aspects of terrrr threats at the 2012 Olympic events taking place in the region, ie. sailing at Weymouth and rowing/canoeing at Eton. Dorset police have estimated their costs at Weymouth to be £30m but the Home Office have not signed off on it due to the ‘ Cameroon Clegg cutz’. Dame Pauling Neville Jones came on with a lot of hand waving but saying absolutely nothing of worth.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Eton already is replete with the sons of terrorists. They have nothing to fear but their stiff upper lips, which do now show up on airport scanners. Peter Ah-got-the-Powwa! and Pauline-Ah-Got-The-Hyphen! are the Tweedle-Dum and Teedle Dee of this particular adventure through the looking glass.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Well, dreolin, that’s just a couple of nights’ bedtime reading for the likes of us on this blog, isn’t it?

    What we need now is ‘Wikileaks – The Musical!’ with music by Andrew Lloyd-Webber and lyrics by Elton John. Featuring Zac Goldsmith as Julian Assange and George W. Bush as George W. Bush. Tickets available from the George Soros Foundation.

  • Anonymous

    yes that’s quite a few documents to get through, no doubt written with MS Orifice. Even the Nazis couldn’t match that work-rate and they were typically germanically anal with documentation of their war crimes. good to know all that investment in pc skills helped eh ?

  • Clark

    “Several hundred thousand cables”. How many stories are there to find in that lot? More complex stories may need to be followed across many messages.

  • technicolour

    In the meantime this small local piece of reporting made me feel sicker than even the sight of our students being charged by horses (though this was to come): Police force children down Whitehall and into kettle; are unable to explain what law they’re using:

    http://london.indymedia.org/videos/6120

  • Duncan McFarlane

    Alan – completely agree with every word that Cohen wrote on the problem with the media in the UK. He could have added that as large businesses they want to keep corporation tax and wages down too – and keep tax havens open. Sorry for going off topic on your previous article.

    Ingo – completely agree about the DRC. The fact we rely on resources from a country is not an excuse for collaborating in using them as slaves at gunpoint or allowing the civil war to keep going at any cost in lives just because it keeps the price of Coltan etc down.

    technicolour – i agree the mounted charge was not necessary and simply brutality. Many of the demonstrators were, as you say, school-children. The charge also seems to have taken place after dark (meaning after about 5pm in London at this time of year i’d guess – from it being dark by 4.30 in Scotland)

    That means long after any serious trouble was over – and after the police had “kettled” demonstrators for hours on end (which has got to be detention without trial if it goes on for 7 hours as reports say it did).

    angrysoba – I’d say Zionism means Israeli nationalism. I’m not much in favour of nationalism in general, but it’s legitimate when it’s kept to a minimum, when it just says “our state has a right to exist and defend it’s people if they’re attacked”. That’s fine and fair enough and the history from pogroms to the Holocaust shows Jews have been under threat and had reasons to think they needed their own state. I may think it was a mistake to found Israel in the then British mandate of Palestine (plus a betrayal of previous pledges to the Arabs) but, as with the British plantation in Northern Ireland, it’s now too late to reverse it without it being another great injustice against people born there or who’ve now lived there most of their lives.

    The trouble is that right from the start this has been used as an excuse for aggression, for targeting Arab civilians in “self-defence” from the 1948 war on. Everything from targeting civilians to torture and occupation or annexation of other countries has become defended as “legitimate self-defence” to supposedly “prevent another Holocaust” by successive Israeli governments. Israelis are supposedly inherently good and incapable of oppressing others because they were once the oppressed. This is the same kind of extreme nationalism that led to the rise of fascist regimes and to the genocides in the former Yugoslavia. I think it’s this extreme version which most of the people criticising “Zionism” are referring to – and it has been criticised by Holocaust survivors like the late Primo Levi too.

  • Anonymous

    Europe’s Alliance with Israel – Aiding the Occupation by David Cronin

    Has anyone read this book?

    “Irish journalist and author David Cronin has just published his excellent expose of the nature of the relationship between the European Union and the Apartheid State of Israel. The book, Europe’s Alliance with Israel: Aiding the Occupation, will become essential reading for all those concerned with a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

    Cronin argues that in carefully crafted official statements, the European Union presents itself as an honest broker in the Middle East. In reality, however, the EU’s 27 governments have been engaged in a long process of accommodating Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

    The book interrogates the relationship and its outcomes. A recent agreement for ‘more intense, more fruitful, more influential co-operation’ between the EU and Israel has meant that Israel has become a member state of the Union in all but name. Cronin shows that rather than using this relationship to encourage Israeli restraint, the EU has legitimised actions such as the ill-treatment of prisoners and the Gaza invasion. Concluding his revealing and shocking account, Cronin calls for a continuation and deepening of international activism and protest to halt the EU’s slide into complicity”

  • anno

    Zionism.

    Firstly, all -isms are distortions, e.g. Islamists and Islamism Or capitalism, which has come to mean the western usury-based financial system.

    Secondly, what does Zion refer to? It’s a longed-for place. But is that place heaven, or the place of pilgrimage at Mecca, or Jerusalem? The psalms date from David who lived in around 1000 BC to other writers who mourned for Zion when they were in exile in Babylon after 500 BC.

    If Zion is a combination of spiritual destinations, Zionism is a distortion of those wishes. The Zionists sponsored the holocaust in order to cause migration to Palestine. The writer of Psalm 137 understood the religious duty of fervent repentance and proselytising their religion of monotheism, but the Zionists disobeyed that instruction, to teach monotheism and set a good example to non-believers, and turned to usury, and ultimately terrorism, and then from nationalistic to ultimately globalistic acquisition of raw power.

    Whatever Zionism may have meant before, it has now become a caricature. Self-disgust and repentance has changed to self-defence, and self-justification. By their fruit shall ye know them. In the last decade, Zionism has become synonymous with genocide of Muslims, as the arrogance of the heart has delivered the violence of the hands of Western governments who have become ensnared in the grip of usury and other worse forms of blackmail.

    Let the Muslims beware, because the reason for the inclusion into the Qur’an of the many sins of the Children of Israel, was undoubtedly to serve as a warning for the people of monotheism , not to go there, where their predecessors had deviated little by little, into a metaphorical place which is far from the concepts of heaven, or pilgrimage, or a holy or peaceful city. Yes, the Zionists have returned to the physical location of Al Quds/ Jerusalem, but in doing so they have become the opposite of the meaning of Zion. When you think of Zionism, you think of phosphor weapons and Bush crusades, of false body counts and false flag operations.

    Is that enough of an explanation for you twat aNGRYSOBA?

  • dreoilin

    This is hilarious:

    Sky News foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall said: “Potentially this is diplomatic dynamite.

    “(It involves) 2.7 million emails that have gone between the State Department and various embassies across the world with candid remarks about world leaders, about ambassadors, about foreign leaders.

    “We think that three leaders might be in the firing line, because we know the Americans have criticised (Afghan president) Hamid Karzai, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, of Russia.

    “Those are just three names that we’re hearing that may be criticised. There are many, many more and it is very embarrassing for the Americans.

    “The Americans have spent the last four months poring through these documents and they will have thought ‘oh dear, look what we said about X’.”

    Sky News

    http://tinyurl.com/3xdmc3e

    Oh dear indeed.

    There’s also this:

    “JERUSALEM: Several of the documents set to be published by WikiLeaks this weekend are believed to show the US has been helping Turkey’s Kurdish separatist movement the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers Party.

    “The PKK is listed as a terrorist group in Turkey, the US, the European Union and Australia”

    http://tinyurl.com/38ewl6f

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