Anders Behring Breivik posted links to the Atlas Shrugs website of the Tea Party’s Pamela Geller. Here you can see him under the name of Anders Behring (his middle name) posting links to Geller’s “Atlas Shrugs” site. That cache page is bing translated from Norwegian.

Here is a video of Pamela Geller addressing the Tennessee Tea Party convention. This is a list of links I just copied off her Atlas shrugs website to a stream of virulent anti Norwegian-Muslim articles Geller has been publishing:

January 2009: NORWAY: Jewish children are not allowed to play outdoors –

April 2011: Norway: Muslim Taxidrivers Refuse to Drive Jews to Synagogue

May 2009: More Jewish Graves Desecrated in Norway

2009: OSLO: ANTI-ISRAEL RALLY TURNS VIOLENT

2011: Norway: ALL Rapes In Past 5 Years Committed By Muslims

2008: Jewish Genocide watch: Jew Hatred in Norway Part II

2009: JIHAD ON THE JEWS: Something rotten in the state of Norway

2008: ISLAM ATTACKS – Death for Writer! Norway Hides

2007: Massive Islamic Terror Plots: Germany, Norway, Denmark

2007: Email from Norway

2006: Norway calls for Israel Boycott

The links themselves appear to have been disabled. You could still see the links on Atlas Shrugs here as I type this. Someone more technically proficient than me might want to grab a screenshot before the list vanishes.

Geller has been actively promoting links between the Tea Party and the English Defence League. Geller states on her website that she had been in Oslo to attend a pro-Israel rally. It would be interesting to know whether Anders Behring-Breivik was also on that rally.

We are told that Behring Breivik acted alone. In truth he had ideological and communication links with organised far right networks every bit as solid as the comparable connections of Islamic terrorists.

Hateful lying racist propaganda. That’s the real reason.

I watched the disgraceful Islamophobic rantings on the BBC and Sky News last night in mounting disbelief. Security correspondent and security expert vied with each other to tell us that the dreadful attacks in Norway were the work of al-Qaida. One extraordinary American, introduced as from a Centre for Combating Extremism, explained that these Norwegian jihadists had international links and plans to attack London and the New York subway. Norway was a target, we were repeatedly told, because of its NATO membership.

There was at least six solid hours of this poisonous bullshit. I did not pick up on one single person who said that this probably was not Islamic terrorism – despite the glaringly obvious fact that the atrocity had a Norwegian domestic political agenda, being an attack on the Prime Minister’s office, and on a youth camp of the governing party. The internet was buzzing for hours with the news that the attacker on Utoya Island was blonde, without the broadcast media mentioning it. The American security expert I mention above had that base covered – he had obviously seen those reports, but did not mention them. However he said that jihadist groups had probably recruited European looking operatives to carry out the attacks, because they were aware that security services “consciously or unconsciously operated racial profiling.”

This morning Al Jazeera and Russia Today were carrying the news that the attacker was Anders Breivik – and even a picture of him – while the BBC and Sky still were not, and while they had stopped the blatant Islamophobic ranting, had still not admitted it was not an Islamic militant attack.

I would love to believe that this incident would cause the media to reassess the value of the numerous “security experts” whose companies, institutes, funding, profile and standards of living have been spectacularly boosted by the “War on Terror”. But I doubt it.

All terrorism is terrible. Islamic extremist terrorism is terrible. But not all terrorism is Islamic extremist. To presume it is, is just as valid as to assume that any shooting in the UK is carried out by a black person. If the BBC reacted to the next news of a shooting or stabbing, by six hours about crime in the black community, when it turned out the perpetrators are white, there would rightly be outrage. This is no different.

UPDATE

The mainstream media and those “Security experts” are now struggling to cover up and justify their blatant Islamophobia. The New York Times was right at the forefront of the Islamophobic ranting, attributing the bombing to a non-existent Jihadist group and then being quoted all across the airwaves as the authority for that attribution. It has now published this amazing self-justificatory bullshit:

Norway has about 550 soldiers and three medevac helicopters in northern Afghanistan, a Norwegian defense official said. The government has indicated that it will continue to support the operations as long as the alliance needs partners on the ground.

Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause of Friday’s assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking Al Qaeda’s brutality and multiple attacks.

“If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from Al Qaeda,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington. “One lesson I take away from this is that attacks, especially in the West, are going to move to automatic weapons.”

All the mainstream media are rushing to take down their crazed Islamophobic rantings from their websites this morning – the BBC did it just twenty minutes ago, and had a short period in consequence when they had nothing up on Norway. I expect newspaper sites will be doing the same. Print editions, of course, do not have that ability.

Mainstream media – all the hate and lies they can peddle. What would really be an interesting public inquiry, would be the links between “security” and “defence” correspondents and the security services whose propaganda they spread. I should love to know what security service briefings were behind yesterday’s Islamophobic lies.

“What’s a Grecian urn? About 20,000 euros a year plus another 30,000 in EU subsidy scams.” – The Catholic Orangemen of Togo, p.7

Amazing the gems of wisdom you find scattered through my books! That variation on an old joke reflects an important truth. Most of the EU, including us, have been subsidising Greece ever since it joined the EU, through regional funds and the CAP, but mostly through the cost of massive scams and fraud perpetrated in Greece on those and indeed all other EU budgets, not to mention VAT fraud. The euro bailout is only an extension of the EU’s continuing and expensive commitment to drag Greece along with it.

The world likes a narrative of goodies and baddies. The current narrative popular with left-leaning people is that the Greeks are plucky little Keynseans being hammered to disaster by evil governments and bankers led by the IMF and EU. That is simplistic nonsense. There are no goodies in the power players on any side. Ordinary Greek people are indeed the victims, but so are ordinary German people and ordinary British people.

Greece, just like Italy (and quite probably the other Club Med countries, though on them I don’t want to claim more knowledge than I have) never actually met the EMS and euro convergence criteria. Everyone is suddenly astonished that Italy has a national debt of 140% of GDP – it was that level when I was working on the European economies in 1985, and it has never really changed. Redefinition of terms allowed a fudge to let Italy enter the Euro (that particular criteria being 40%). Greece has never produced any vaguely credible national statistics anyway. Lawlessness, tax evasion, money laundering and systematic corruption are the warp and weft of the Greek economy – it is difficult to capture that in a statistical yearbook.

These countries were brought into the Euro because of the political dynamic of European Union, which was bought into by political elites across the continent, (and which I would say has a lot of very good aspects, but that is a long argument for another day). The idea was that momentum was extremely important; that it was OK in this context to ignore reality, because the beneficial influence of the European Union would enable reality to catch up quickly to fit the framework.

Therefore Greece and Italy were allowed into the Euro even though they plainly did not meet the convergence criteria, exactly as Romania and Bulgaria were allowed into the EU even though they plainly did not meet the acquis communitaire –
reality was suspended in the interests of ever greater union. The effects of that in the Eurozone are coming home to roost now. The effects of Bulgarian and Romanian EU entry haven’t really worked through yet, but I predict tremendous problems in five years time.

I write as a supporter both of the Euro and of EU expansion – but not of the crazy decisions to abandon genuine adherence to the criteria required to make them work. I also write with the humility of knowing I have been wrong on these things in the past. Around 1995 I wrote a paper for the Cabinet Office strongly supporting Polish EU membership, in which I argued strongly that we should not join Germany in seeking a delay on the right of Poles to come to the UK. In it I predicted that at most 200,000 Poles would want to come. I was wrong by a factor of over four! That paper was very influential on UK policy.

I do not regret it in the least – I am delighted so many Poles have come. They make Britain a much better place and are a huge boost to the economy. Germany will lose out from having given us the chance to host them first.

The Euro has always been a system of subsidy from Germany to Greece; the bailout only makes that more obvious. Greeks have been paying themselves much more than they earn for a great many years. That is not stopping or starting now. Levels of public spending are a tiny bit of the problem. The Euro is a massively overvalued currency as related to the Greek domestic economy. Greece’s economic problems are much more related to lack of rule of law, massive corruption, an elite super rich paying no tax, and a gigantic black economy, than they are related to public spending.

Greece’s total debt will actually be reduced under this bailout package, plus payments delayed and maturity dates postponed. Do not be too impressed by the news that the banks are taking a haircut, variously reported at 20% or between 30 billion and 50 billion Euros. Look at it this way. These banks have lent money to Greece, at interest rates of over 10% higher than those they can charge elsewhere. If you are making 10% extra interest a year over ten years, and you have to lose 20% of your total to secure that, you are still coming out way, way ahead.

Actually the net effect of this bailout is not European taxpayers paying more to help Greeks, it is European taxpayers paying more to secure super-profits for the banks. What a surprise!

In test match nostalgia mode recently. For my readers from non cricket playing countries, a cricket ball is solid and hard. They can and do break bones, can fracture a skull and in those days before helmets and padding would very occasionally kill.

I was hoping to find the point a little earlier in this innings when Close fronted up and just deliberately let the ball bounce off him, which was incredible. Again to explain, if the ball is not going to hit the stumps behind you, and you keep your bat out of the way, you are very unlikely to get out. But not raising your gloves and bat to defend yourself against a lethal projectile hurtling at your face and neck at 90 mph plus is an incredible discipline, especially as you need to play it if it is heading towards your stumps, and you have a millisecond to make that decision.

About 40% of the readership of this blog is from non-cricketing countries, which is why this is explained in non-cricketing language. Cricketers can just enjoy the video.

I am not sure there has ever been a more beautiful sight in sport than Holding running in to bowl.

Geoffrey Boycott just reacted on Test Match Special (Radio 5 Sports Extra) to the announcement that Mervyn King will be the teatime guest:

The words of Saint Geoffrey: “Ask him why the bankers aren’t all in jail. Ask him this: if it’s private enterprise, how come when they make a profit, they get the money in their pocket, but when they make a loss, we all have to pay for it. The bankers should all be in jail.”

Boycott immediately replaced by Tuffers. I think Boycott should replace Vince Cable.

Real Drama on the Fringe

I really do hope some of you will come to see Nadira play Medea in Edinburgh this Festival August. The producers are making a determined attempt to run full production value, professional, straight classical drama on the fringe – something which has become harder to find in recent years. There really are some brilliant actors in the cast, and the technical and creative directors are absolutely first rate.

Stella Duffy has reworked her translation especially for the show, and has been personally attending rehearsals. I have hardly seen Nadira this last couple of months of rehearsal, and I think this could all be a bit special.

I watched a 30 year anniversary documentary last night about Botham and the 1981 Ashes series, which for people of my generation will always be the Ashes series. I was somehow relieved to see John Major, Elton John, Mick Jagger and Stephen Fry, among others, talking obsessively about it, just as I do. It is probably hard now to explain that a sporting event could have such a profund grip on national consciousness.

I thought the documentary ought to have mentioned Graham Dilley in the Headingley test, without whom Botham’s great innings could never have happened. Indeed my recollection is that it was a couple of sparkling cover drives from Dilley that sparked Botham into what I am sure, at the start, was just the idea of having some fun, rather than slowly grinding to grim defeat. Dilley eventually got out when caught at cover off a drive as truly hit as any ever was, just short of his fifty. With the Aussie attack visibly on the ropes I was hopeful that Chris Old, the hook nosed Yorkshireman with a reputation for really belting it, would also go to town, but he never really got going – after thirty years I remember him as having made 26, not sure how accurate that is, but I don’t want to change any particle of my memory of this particular occasion. But the genius, the aura of Botham!

Then the great Bob Willis and those knackered knees, which didn’t get mentioned last night either – sorry for the cavilling, it was a brilliant documentary.

I watched it all with my friend Martin on a tiny black and white TV, on a narrow boat on the Oxford canal, with Blenheim Palace shimmering in the heat haze. Our two lovely girlfriends were doing all the boating and loch opening work, and cooking the meals, while wearing very little and looking wonderful, while we drank wine and watched cricket. Aah, the days when such unabashed sexism was considered strange by nobody, how I miss them!!

It its thirty years since that Botham summer. Happy memories. A couple of weeks after the Headingley test, of course, we had the Charles/Diana wedding. The truckload of royal bilge that must be in preparation by the media will soon clear my nostalgia.

The insurmountable problem for those who categorise any accusation of the state acting deliberately wrongly as a “conspiracy theory”, is truth. There is, beyond any doubt, a police operation to infiltrate left wing groups in the UK with spies.

The case of the extraordinary Ratcliffe Power Stations convictions shows how very wrong this can go. The courts have ruled not only that the police acted as agent provocateur, but that police colluded with our supposedly independent prosecutorial service to withhold vital information from the court.

The lord chief justice was among the appeal court judges who published this yesterday:

“It is a case which has given rise to a great deal of justifiable public disquiet, which we share. Something went seriously wrong with the trial. The prosecution’s duties in relation to disclosure were not fulfilled. The result was that the appellants were convicted following a trial in which elementary principles which underpin the fairness of our trial procedures were ignored. The jury were ignorant of evidence, helpful to the defence, which was in the possession of the prosecution but which was never revealed. As a result justice miscarried.”

The court here is making a stand against the contempt for political liberty that emanated from the very top of the Blair government and spread to affect the policy and operations of all governmental institutions in the UK. The mindset that made it OK for the government to set up young environmental activists, was no different from the mindset in which MI5 agents thought it was OK to collude in the torture of Binyam Mohammed.

But here lies the rub. The appeal court is trying to right the wrongs done to middle class white people. The amount of infiltration and agent provocatuer activity against “Muslim extremists” has been of a much higher order. The “fertiliser bomb plot” is one example of an attempted crime by deluded people who had been penetrated and very probably egged on from the start. The “airline bomb plots” and “Manchester Easter bomb plots” both involved the shadowy double agent Rashid Rauf.

Furthermore, precisely that openness by the prosecution the appeal court demands is deliberately denied to Muslim defendants on terrorist charges, who are frequently not allowed to see and thus to challenge the provenance of “Evidence” against them by the security services.

There has, thankfully, been a steady stream of overturning of crazy “terrorist” judgements on appeal, including the truly appalling conviction of the woman for writing “terrorist poems”. But it nonetheless remains true that we are yet to recover sufficiently from the Blair poison to give the full benefit of law to Muslims in the way we have just done to middle class white people.

The police investigation into bribes to police officers by News of the World is called Operation Elveden. It has not identified, suspended or arrested a single bent cop.

What’s in a name? To Norfolk people Eleveden is a notorious bottleneck on the A11, the main road into and out of the county. You can, literally, queue for miles and for hours to get through Elveden in either direction. It is a place notorious to Norfolk for frustration, obstruction and never getting anywhere. I myself have spent a huge amount of time being stuck by Elveden; it is extremely difficult to avoid or get round. Elveden means no progress.

Andy Hayman was Chief Constable of Norfolk before moving down to the Met.

Did the Met name Operation Elveden as a grim in-joke to indicate they would make sure the accusations never went anywhere?

UPDATE

I have just realised I am definitely right. Operation Weeting is the investigation into the News of the World phone hacking itself. Weeting is the village at the southern end of the notorious Elveden traffic jam.

Watching an hour in the Commons today and hours of select committee yesterday, not one mention of Sean Hoare and his eyewitness evidence of Coulson’s direct involvement in phone hacking. The whistleblower has been wished out of existence.

For all those complaining that the Murdochs had been carefully coached in presentation before the Select Committee, I say this is much worse. You do have to watch to the end to understand what I mean:

By their own admission, the Murdochs’ media empire is too large for effective corporate governance. The fact that Rupert, James and Rebekah claim they had no idea who authorised thousands of illegal phone hacks, and had no idea who authorised tens of thousands of pounds of bribes to policemen, and still say they have no idea even after all the hullabaloo, is positive proof that such concentrations of media ownership become unaccountable and should be banned by law.

They are condemned from their own mouths, by the line of defence they have chosen. Whether it is true or not doesn’t matter in terms of the policy that must be adopted – the prevention of multiple media ownerships.

Hertfordshire Police have issued a statement on the preliminary post mortem results:

There is no evidence of third party involvement and the death is non suspicious. Further toxicology results are now awaited and there is an on-going examination of health problems identified at the post mortem.

Please note, toxicology reports can take some weeks and we cannot make any further comments at on the post mortem, including the problems at this time

If I was the family I would call in an independent pathologist quickly. We all remember the first pathology report on Ian Tomlinson. Sean Hoare may indeed have died from natural causes, though it is unusual with modern communications for someone in their forties to do that with a suddenness that precludes a call for assistance. But unfortunately, the lies police told about Jean Charles De Menezes, the far too convenient first post mortem on Ian Tomlinson, and the lack of any inquest on David Kelly, means that it is no longer possible in this country simply to accept the word of the authorities on such things.

If ever proof were needed that our political system is a pretend democracy, the abysmal performance of today’s select committees should remove any doubt. The lack of any tenacious or forensic questioning on just what people knew and just when they knew it, was startling. Rebecca Brooks apparently very seldom visited the paper she edited and had no idea what happened there. Nobody had any idea why they might be meeting the legal costs of assorted criminals. Nobody asked Brooks straight out exactly how much she knew about payments to coppers.

Most sycophantic of all was Louise Mensch, in her helpful attempts to ask questions revealing that all the News of the World did was the same as the rest of Fleet Street, and it had some good effects, like combating paedophiles. I lost count of mentions of Sara’s Law and paedophiles – no mention of the mob they incited to attack a paediatrician, though. These MPs are so used to asking servile questions at Prime Minister’s Question Time, they don’t seem to realise how they look to the rest of us.

If anybody had any doubt that most MP’s, News International and the top people at the Met are all part of the same corrupt governing political class, the scales must surely have dropped from the eyes now. What a pathetic bunch of parasites.

Pretty stupid and unhelpful. But Murdoch’s wife may be the only realistic challenger for the Klitschko brothers…

I find it hard to believe that anybody can watch today’s clutch of Select Committee hearings without coming away with one overwhelming impression; the extraordinarily low quality of the UK’s Members of Parliament. With the noble exception of Tom Watson, I don’t think anyone has enhanced their reputation today. I have often blogged about the fact that for centuries Parliament contained many of the intellectually brilliant, of a whole variety of political persuasions, but beyond doubt amongst the most outstanding minds and extraordinary people of their generation. This was still true in my earlier lifetime.

Parliament nowadays is full of dull party hacks of a middle management mentality. The number of parliamentarians I would enjoy sitting next to at dinner, is tiny. How many parliamentarians would you enjoy a dinner with? Most of them are in it, not to serve their country, but as a career. What really agitates them is anything affecting their expenses and their pensions.

The Murdochs could bat away these pompous blunderers all day. Even the dull transatlantic management speak of James Murdoch baffles them. It is humiliating for this country that these dullards are our representatives.

The continuing hubris of the News International lot is really quite astonishing. These people do not seem to have realised they no longer have the world in their pocket. I thought this one really took the biscuit; Rebekah Brooks’ lawyer complains that the police have damaged her reputation. To which the reply is, what reputation?

When you consider how Hayman, Coulson and Brooks conspired to trash the reputation of newly murdered Jean Charles De Menezes by publishing deliberate lies about him, that is sick. Even more sick when you consider that Cressida Dick, who orchestrated Menezes’ murder, is now in charge of the anti-terrorist squad as a result of all the resignations.

It is particularly fascinating that the squad of police in direct charge of pumping out years of lies to bolster the “War on Terror”, in close collusion with Brooks and Coulson, was put in charge of the investigation into those two. I have yet to see a convincing explanation of why the News of the World investigation was given to the anti-terrorist squad, as opposed to any of the Met’s many thousands of other detectives. Was this Ian Blair keeping it in politicially safe hands who would not progress it? Almost certainly yes, I would say.

The most obnoxious policeman of all time has not yet come under the spotlight in all this. He will.

The best whistleblower so far from inside News International has just been found dead. Hertfordshire Police, either incredibly stupid or incredibly corrupt, have just been quoted on Sky News as saying there are “No suspicious circumstances”.

Whaether this is a convenient heart attack or a Kelly type “suicide” remains to be seen. Maybe the Met mistook him for a suicide bomber and pumped several shots into his head. With the exception of Kelly, this is possibly the most suspicious death of my lifetime. “No suspicious circumstances”. WTF!!

Sean Hoare’s testimony that Andy Coulson knew of individual phone hacking operations is pretty well certain to be true. I have written many times for national newspapers, and wherever I have written disparagingly about anybody, I have had to give my evidence. I have even, for example, been called in actually to meet the legal advisers at the Mail and discuss my evidence. The idea that journalists were not telling Coulson where they got their stories, or for what purpose they were laying out tens of thousands of pounds, is simply not practically possible. Same goes for the period when Rebekah was editor.

Sean Hoare’s testimony was plainly, absolutely true. His death discourages other whistleblowers a bit, doesn’t it? If the inquiries into News International are going to have any credibility, they are going to need a witness protection programme – from which the Met are totally excluded.