An Apology 2256

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I am so committed to getting my book finished I really don’t have time or energy to blog at the moment, and realise it has been very desultory the last few weeks. I am well and happy, it is just that writing a properly researched history is incredibly intensive. I realise there is much of great interest happening in the world, but I must sometimes cut myself off from it.

This is why I don’t ask for donations for the blog…

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2,256 thoughts on “An Apology”

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  • Ba'al Zevul

    Still a media blackout on Blair’s Sri Lanka vacation. However, this from Lankaweb is interesting:

    http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2015/08/15/do-not-vote-ranil-led-party-which-has-history-of-evil/

    In which:

    Secrecy + hypocrisy = Ranil Wickramasinge who has now assigned the globally most hated man Tony Blair as advisor to retain his power and loot the country and the innocent people.

    While that’s entirely plausible, in keeping, and has plenty of precedents, I can’t yet find any support for its truth. The elections are on Monday. Blair will be moving to Amanwella, possibly tomorrow, and will be blairing for money in Colombo on the 24th. His lovely consort will be blairing in public on the 25th, and they will then pay -or have paid for them – the bills and bugger off.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Considerably more detail on the Blair/Milken/Israel nexus here (Iranian source – jell, you wouldn’t expect an Israeli one to report this, would you? Looks checkable aanyway):

    http://www.irna.ir/en/News/81718979/

    Our investigations show that while Blair was serving as the special Middle East peace envoy of the Quartet, representing the UN, Russia, US and EU, the American fundraising arm of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation accepted money from a family that finances illegal Israeli settlements via the earnings of a convicted felon.
    While conducting research on the transatlantic funders of the occupation in Palestine, to be published by Public Interest Investigations later this year, we uncovered tax documents revealing that the California-based Milken Family Foundation donated $1 million to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation in 2013….

    …In recent years, the Milken brothers have focused their attention on philanthropy, working on a wide range of causes, several linked to pro-settler and Islamophobic groups. For example, between 2009 and 2013, the Lowell Milken Family Foundation funnelled $607,000 to the Ariel settlement in the central occupied West Bank, either through the tax-exempt charity American Friends of Ariel or directly to the Ariel University Center of Samaria.
    Indeed, Lowell Milken’s contributions to the illegal settlement are so important that the Friends of Ariel website has dubbed him ‘Ariel’s Celebrity’.
    Also between 2009-2013, the Milken family foundations donated $555,000 to Aish HaTorah, an international Jewish Orthodox organisation that staunchly defends Israeli policies and features pro-settlement articles on its website. Ronn Torossian, a spokesperson for Aish HaTorah in New York, once told writer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine, ‘I think we should kill a hundred Arabs or a thousand Arabs for every one Jew they kill,’ adding that: ‘If someone from a town blows himself up and kills Jews, we should wipe out the town he’s from, kill them all.’

    According to the Tampa Bay Times, Aish HaTorah has close ties to the virulently anti-Muslim Clarion Fund, which is behind the notorious anti-Islam film Obsession: Clarion’s address, according to Manhattan directory assistance, is the same address as Aish HaTorah International, the group’s fundraising arm.

    Also CAMERA, the old neocon favourite MEMRI, the JNF, Friends of the IDF and the rest.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    It’s unusual for Tony Blair to spend as much as a week on holiday, without someone grabbing a pic of him and his entourage and flogging it to an agency. Neither his Italian break a fortnight ago nor his week to date in Sri Lanka has produced anything harder than an un-illustrated press release issued on his arrival, though. Which leads some parties, in the frenetic runup to Sri Lankla’s parliamentary election, tomorrow, to wonder wtf he’s doing there anyway. Both the timing and the background to the visit indicate a political agenda, probably on behalf of the UNP. Neither the more political Tamils, many Sinhala Buddhists nor most Muslims are terribly happy with this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBJZnQvgmxI

    He also mentioning that Mr. Tony Blair brought $25 Billion for this purpose. …would seem to be stretching credulity, however. The SL Rupee is worth 0.0074 US dollars right now, so that’s perhaps what was intended.

    Moral: The invisible sleb is an obvious target for rumour. Mind you, the visible sleb in SL (where the FCO has issued a travel advisory) might be a target for something else…and there’s always dengue.

    https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/sri-lanka

  • Ba'al Zevul

    As noted above, Tony Blair will be blairing on the 24th.

    The Board of the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute invited former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to deliver the Lakshman Kadirgamar Memorial Lecture on 24 August, at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Centre. Kadirgamar was assassinated* in Colombo 10 years ago.

    http://www.ceylontoday.lk/51-100923-news-detail-tony-blair-to-address-forums-kadirgamar-centre-basl-confirm.html

    Which would appear to be monumentally inappropriate as Kadirgamar was a supporter of the UN and wholly against the Iraq invasion:

    http://www.pressreader.com/sri-lanka/sunday-times-sri-lanka/20150816/282140700112962/TextView

    *allegedly by the Tamil Tigers, but this has been disputed. It might have been some of his government colleagues

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Legacy Curse of Blair:

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/the-majority-of-uk-graduates-are-being-forced-into-nongraduate-work-says-study-10461206.html

    Edukashun X3 involved the Dear Headmaster proposing to get 50% of school leavers into university. This had nothing to do with keeping them off the dole for a bit, obviously. That target has been achieved, but half of them are stacking shelves now. And there’s a critical shortage of skills in the building industry…

    Research for the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), which represents human resource managers, shows 58.8 per cent of UK graduates have ended up in non-graduate jobs – a figure exceeded only by Greece and Estonia.

    Around one in twelve of those working in low skilled occupations – such as in coffee shops, bars, call centres and front of house at hospitality events – are now graduates, according to the figures.

    “Your skinny latte, Sir. And would you like to read my thesis while you’re enjoying that, Sir? Please?”

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Some badly-needed clarity about the much-reported and Israeli-denied talks taking place between Hamas, Blair, probably Egypt and Turkey.

    https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/are-israel-and-hamas-really-talking-about-ending-gaza-siege

    “Every time we reach an advanced stage in the negotiations on Mavi Marmara, Israel attacks Gaza again and things go back to zero.”

    Unsurprising.

    The newspaper also revealed that while Blair is not officially regarded as an intermediary by Israel, his efforts have received the blessing of Netanyahu.

    “Senior Israeli officials and unofficial Israeli figures involved in the issue said that Blair has made no significant progress so far in his two meetings with Meshaal,” Haaretz reported.

    Ditto.

    The distance from these opaque manoeuvers, on the one hand, and an to end the catastrophic situation on the ground for 1.8 million people in Gaza, on the other, still looks vast.

    Quite.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    An additional engagement for Tony Blair on the 24th in Colombo will be to accept a splendid and probably free meal as he opens Nirajan Deva Aditya’s new upmarket restaurant there.

    Aditya was Brentford’s Tory MP until 1997, when he lost heavily to the Labour candidate. Now they’re all friends again. Aaaah. He’s currently an MEP, and has a fascinating past and present – he chaired the Bow group and initiated the Transatlantic Conferences between it and the Republican Party/Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C…etc.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    The activities of the Dear Global Leader during his Italian break have been revealed by the Daily Mail’s Sebastian Shakespeare. Investigative journalism is alive and well.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3206662/SEBASTIAN-SHAKESPEARE-FINALLY-moneybags-Tony-Blair-forks-hire-yacht.html

    One interpretation of which may be that no Mediterranean bling-boat owner now wants to be seen with Blair, and he had to charter his own. Four security men? Who paid?

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Couple of points of order – in the Mail piece above, the two males the Blair pair were eating with may have been Blairs too. Both the sketchy reports, Italiam and Sri Lankan, announcing the arrival of the Dear Global Leader in those countries, refer to family members in the entourage. Which ones, is presently unknown. And G-CEYL, the black/gold Bombardier jet mentioned, doesn’t seem to have been used by Blair in around a year. Too, too conspicuous, is my guess. Mail, please copy.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    As the blessings of the Blair presence in Sri Lanka will shortly, as all good things must, come to an end, the political phase of their visit begins. Today, former foreign affairs minister Mangala Samaraweera is paying:

    http://lankanewsweb.net/news/special-news/item/498-mangala-hosts-dinner-for-blair

    I admit defeat as far as my effort to understand Sri Lanka’s politics is concerned. But I am reaonably certain that Samaraweera doesn’t talk to terrorists like the LTTE (as defined by the Great Negotiator among others), loathes Rajapaksa, with whom Mr. Tony used to be pretty close, and is looking away from China for investment. Oh, and the media are now free to report anything but what the Blair entourage is doing there…lol.

    http://colombogazette.com/2015/08/07/mangala-says-media-now-free-to-write-anything/

  • Ba'al Zevul

    The Dear Global Leader laid the base for a lucrative advisory contract withthe newly elected president of Sri Lanka today. Apparently his children were there too. Which ones, it is still forbidden to say:

    http://colombogazette.com/2015/08/24/blair-hails-peaceful-conduct-of-parliamentary-polls/

    The first and possibly only comment, before it is taken down, alleges that Blair’s been doing a lot more than taking a tropical break…

    We are not happy about Blair presence during Parliamentary Election in 2015 August 17th.

    In our reports says Blair has been interfere and intervene that time of conducting election period by many ways means.

    Therefor is violated rules and law of election of an appointment New Members of Parliament by citizens is political crime of democracy.

    What ever the reasons country big or small no foreign power or their leaders has NO right advice People’s Independent decision . That will apply to Blair too.

    Which is undermined sovereignty of democratic country..

    Real and honest political leaders of democratic world must maintain morals and ethic of political democracy.

    Blair is far from democratic norms and morals.

    I wonder if more will emerge?

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Ah. Pix of the happy couple. Also Nicky and its new missus, which was pretty well Mystic Ba’al’s prediction. Is Nicky being groomed for international political/charidee stardom, or was this a freebie and they couldn’t get anyone else to make up the four places offered?

    http://www.dailymirror.lk/84657/i-ll-speak-on-behalf-of-sl-blair

    Blair will now speak up on behalf of SL and correct everyone’s misconceptions*. The topic of cash is delicately elided, but if there were shares in Windrush Ventures (and there aren’t) I’d be tempted to buy some.

    * Like, Blair wasn’t anxious to talk to the LTTE and Rajapaksa was a thoroughly good egg whom Tony was happy to meet and discuss genocide with.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Forthcoming visits:

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/25/tony-blair-to-attend-chinas-second-world-war-victory-day-events-report

    Tony Blair will fly into Beijing next month to take part in high-profile Chinese commemorations of the end of the second world war, which observers say are mainly designed to boost the domestic political standing of President Xi Jinping…

    …Vladimir Putin, to whom Xi is close, will attend the event and 1,000 foreign troops will also take part, Xinhua, China’s official agency, announced on Tuesday.

    Other leaders are said to include Sudan President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has an ICC warrant out against him, and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

    The parade – the first Beijing has held to mark the end of the war – is widely seen as an attempt to project China’s growing military and political might at home and abroad. It is also viewed as an attempt to attack Japan, with which China is engaged in a slow-burning territorial feud.

    For those reasons western leaders including Barack Obama, David Cameron and Angela Merkel are understood to have declined invitations.

    Blair’s lust to be associated with power is evident. However, that advisory contract to Ukraine, mooted in Kiev recently, must be receding into the distance.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    A few more names with which the Dear Global Leader will be proud to be seen in Tiananmen Square:

    President of Myanmar Thein Sein … Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang and Choe Ryong-hae, a senior official of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (…)former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and former Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama.

    http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-08/25/c_134553225.htm

    Cameron, Merkel and Abe won’t be going. But former premiers of all three countries will. See what they’re doing there? It’s called having your diplomatic cake and eating it. Bypassing any awkward questions of national policy or political principle.

    Expect also Paul Kagame and a Clinton, on past form.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Another interesting anomaly:

    One of the very few reports on Blair’s visit to Sri Lanka concerned Cherie’s scheduled blairing of the Bar Associatioon of Sri Lanka, on the subject of human rights in business, today at 1600 local time:

    http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=130288

    Yet the latest from the island (dated, presciently, 0710 today, local) reports:

    The Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair left Sri Lanka early this morning, concluding his two week’s private visits to the Sri Lanka.

    Tony Blair left the island nation from the Katunayake Bandaranaike International Airport @ 12:10 a.m. on a special plane.

    http://www.lankasrinews.com/view.php?22IMM303lOe4e2BmAca25YKdd2Y5Vac3mB5e43Old022gAU3

    As Cherie’s monologue was to be in Colombo, and Bandaranaike is Colombo’s airport, it seems unlikely that she was getting to the event by plane. So, will hundreds of SL’s lawyers be told this afternoon that the star attraction decided on a whim to leave early? Or has she stayed an extra day while Mr. Tony buzzes off to solve the Middle East, Burma and Ukraine before having a nice hot mug of cocoa and a quiet night watching a boxed set of his own speeches? Watch this space. A special plane, too. Who pays?

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Unaccountably omitted this from the current archive:

    https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/08/kezia-dugdale-got-just-5217-votes/comment-page-5/#comment-545519

    Confirmed by the man himself here:

    http://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/archives/42900

    I’m just back from the Middle East, which was the one break in my holiday. I went back to try and contribute to its peace process there. This was actually my 150th visit to Jerusalem since leaving office,

    3 (? Perhaps) visits to Gaza in the same time…

    And the rest is platitudes interspersed with the bleeding obvious, in the register of a headmaster addressing the 4th Form.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Neocons and hedge funds do education in China. Tony Blair’s on board. And so’s BP:

    http://www.echinacities.com/expat-corner/Conquer-China-Become-a-Schwarzman-Scholar

    The New York Times reported, “The program’s creation underlines the tremendous importance of China and its market to Wall Street financiers and corporate leaders, who have become increasingly anxious as security and economic frictions grow between China and the West

    As China effortlessly absorbs the lessons of the globalisers, and does a bit more globalising itself, in the long term the fat cats anxiety may well increase…

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Thoughtful commentary on Blair’s increasing interest in China:

    http://karl-naylor.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/tony-blair-pivots-to-asia.html

    Blair is both in contact with the Foreign Office gets to rake off the fees that come from advocating energy projects in Kashgar in Western China. These are known as “strategic cooperation deals”. He also drums up investment interest in Xinjiang’s mining industries.
    None of this is surprising as it fits in entirely with Blair and the FO’s reasons for advocating military involvement in both Afghanistan and Iraq:energy geopolitics. Blair ‘believes’ that a world in which resources are used to connect undeveloped regions to the rest of the world is a way to bring peace, even through war.
    Blair’s essential outlook is that economic growth and getting control over natural resources for the greater good of regional and global development can be done even under dictatorships so long as they serve the interests of greater good or great and good powers and help enhance “stability”.

    Naylor has got inside Blair’s head here, I think. But does Blair seriously believe that promoting globalism – levelling down most peoples’ chances, squandering resources and homogenising cultures – is likely to result in longterm peace? Or not to result in resentment and the kind of puritan reaction which gives ISIS its motive power? It certainly can’t be achieved without what he himself has advocated as “firm” government, or, indeed, without corruption (as we now regard it, but the red line recedes daily) on a global scale. What Blair envisages, then, is a world in everything and everyone is subordinated to the whim of the market, and their subordination is mediated and policed by regional autocrats, or at best, one-party states.

    And that’s the way things are going anyway. Blair doesn’t actually ‘believe’ anything. Belief is too vague a term. He knows that he is riding the wave towards a hyper-Orwellian future which will be deeply unpleasant for the majority of life on this planet. And he doesn’t give a fuck.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    The Bank Holiday finds Tony Blair back in the Middle East, his authority for meddling with which is now nonexistent. Two days with his chums in Tel Aviv, and today in Cairo:

    http://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2015/8/31/dahlan-tony-blair-discuss-hamas-with-egyptian-intelligence-officials

    Interesting setup. Blair’s getting intimate with Dahlan, who is ex-Fatah and an opponent of Abbas, as well as his reported contacts with Hamas. Is he intentionally sidelining Abbas? That would possibly mean that Israel’s pretence that Abbas has any autonomy has now been abandoned, and that the new puppet will be Dahlan.

    And Blair’s relationship with Gaddafi has resurfaced:

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/08/if-tony-blair-thought-that-gaddafi-wanted-to-cut-a-deal-why-did-no-one-follow-up/

    It may be necessary to acknowledge that Cameron may come out of this looking worse than Blair.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Analysis, in detail, of Tony Blair’s recent discussions with Hamas, Egypt and of course Israel:

    http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/blair-gaza-and-all-gas-145656094

    According to Hearst’s sources, this initiative is now dead on its feet. He asks, pertinently:

    What was in it for him? This has everyone scratching their heads. But there are some clues.

    Last year months before the start of the Doha talks, an academic with access to Khaled Meshaal was approached by Israelis at a conference in Europe. They wanted him to pass on a specific request. If British Gas developed the gas field in Gaza Marine, (a field between 27 and 33 km off the coast of Gaza thought to contain a trillion cubic feet of gas) would Hamas attack it? The academic wanted to know who was asking the question – the Israeli government? No, the reply came: “It was Tony Blair.” The academic refused to pass the message on and told them Tony Blair should contact Meshaal himself.

    How curious. Blair privately claims he got involved in the talks at Hamas’ request – as a result of a letter Hamas sent to UN peace process envoy Robert Serry. But his interest in the gas off Gaza’s coast predates that. British Gas Group are clients of JP Morgan, for which Blair was paid as a senior advisor.

    This field is, in the words of the Foreign Office, by far the most valuable Palestinian natural resource. Revenues from its output were estimated in 2007 to be worth $4bn. Ariel Sharon was always against its development, and when he pulled out of Gaza, British Gas signed a memorandum with the Egyptian company Egas to sell it there in 2005.

    The deal was cancelled a year later when Blair intervened at the behest of then-Israeli premier Ehud Olmert. Thirty times as much has now been discovered in a field off Egypt. Who knows what the fields of Gaza could contain. No conflict? Plenty of interest.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Today’s rags report that Blair has now realised he was wrong. Epochal or what? The latter, considering he wasn’t wrong at all, this being Scottish devolution rather than the Iraq war or kissing Gaddafi. Also today, a Clinton email revealing that Blair’s man Powell asked Hillary to ask Bill to write something for the papers promoting Blair as EU President. Didn’t happen, showing Bill’s gag reflex , however attenuated, exists.

    Tony Blair is currently in China promoting his business interests in the company of the likes of Putin and Sudan’s al-Bashir. (Sudan’s part in the Far Eastern portion of WW2 is unknown, but that is what Bashir will be celebrating.)

  • Ba'al Zevul

    An informant advises me that during Blair’s visit to Sri Lanka, he headed north to Jaffna, while Teresa Cara aka Cherie, with Nicky and wife-of-Nicky, went to the Amanwella resort in the south. In Jaffna, Blair is said by a local paper, to have held talks with Tamil leaders. I cannot yet verify this. In other news, Cherie co-ordinates her business interests, as usual, with Tony’s:

    http://www.uktamilnews.com/?p=15761

    I would always be delighted to help, particularly a country like Sri Lanka,” the wife of Tony Blair replied, when asked whether she had offered assistance to the Government. Pressed on whether she had directly indicated this, she laughed and said, “Obviously. We don’t talk about our clients in that way, because there’s legal confidentiality.”

    There was no immediate evidence of the Government having accepted her offer. Mr. Blair has separately assured President Maithripala Sirisena “to appear on behalf of Sri Lanka in eliminating misconceptions in the world”, according to a report published on the Government Information Department’s website.

    Ms. Blair said she was “very keen on capacity building”. “You have a lot in the African continent, for instance, who have not been targets for international business,” she related. “But now everyone’s going to Africa. Everyone’s looking for the natural resources of Africa.”

    In a nutshell, Cherie.

    Meanwhile the UAE, no doubt coincidentally, in view of the employment by its sovereign wealth fund of Tony Blair, has just sent its foreign minister to Sri Lanka too.

    http://colombogazette.com/2015/09/04/uae-to-improve-the-welfare-of-sri-lankan-workers/

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