What comes out to me from the “Black Spider letter” correspondence of Prince Charles published today is how utterly obsequious Tony Blair and New Labour ministers were to him. No sign whatsoever of radicalism from the former “People’s Party” as they fell over to ingratiate themselves with the heir to the throne. I rather enjoyed Charles quite sharp tone to Blair.
I am fundamentally opposed to the existence of the monarchy. It will hopefully be replaced by a better system, but no human system is perfect. Given that we have a monarchy at present, you will perhaps be surprised to learn that I do not see anything wrong in Charles’ letters, which put forward views which are much what we would have expected him to hold. Of course there is interaction between the monarchy and government, and of course we should get rid of this hereditary element. But Charles’ lobbying is hugely less damaging and pernicious than the corporate lobbying I witnessed throughout my Whitehall career. At least Charles is not lobbying them for corporate advantage and giving large political donations at the same time.
While in my view he did nothing wrong in writing the letters, he and government are both very wrong in arguing they should be private. It is when it is secret that such attempts to wield influence between two branches of government – and monarchy is a branch of government – can be most simply perverted to ill ends. That such publication will not occur again because government has legislated to keep it secret, is an example of the privileged arrogance that prevents this from being a genuine democracy.
Altogether not that big a story and it gives Rusbridger and the Guardian the chance to pose as radical. I find the fact that what is published is so anodyne and unobjectionable rather suspicious – what has not been published? Rusbridger is of course the editor who complied enthusiastically with a GCHQ instruction to smash the Snowden hard drives. The existence of other copies does not justify this any more than it justifies book-burning.
By coincidence, a very worthwhile article by Michael Gillard that had been excised from the net has recently been republished, setting out how Rusbridger in 2002 conspired with Andy Hayman of the Met to bury an investigation into police corruption, including the burglary of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. By a further coincidence I was having a pint with Laurie Flynn in Sandy Bell’s four days ago.
Hayman went on to be the promoter of the stream of lies about the murder of Jean Charles De Menezes and the publicist of numerous fake terrorist plots, before having to resign in a scandal involving nubile police officers at public expense in tropical islands.
Rusbridger and his extraordinary wig go on and on as a pretend opposition outlet, their reputation much dented by recent hysterical unionist output which exceeds the Daily Express. But Rusbridger’s continued usefulness to the establishment is not in doubt. The pose of publishing the most harmless of Prince Charles’ letters does little to help a threadbare disguise.
Republicofscotland
23 May, 2015 – 2:32 pm
“What on earth has this group of nations come to when HRH may have to pour and stir her own tea, scandalous.”
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Yes RoS and they will have to wipe their own bottoms.
Prince Charles will be particularly disappointed as, I understand, he was rather partial to that daily experience.
Life is a bummer!
“Fred, it is now accepted that the contents of the memo were untrue; therefore the contents of the memo were false; get it now?”
The inquiry found that the memo was genuine therefore the memo was genuine.
Get it now?
“Why????? Are you suggesting that Carmichael’s lack of protocol is more worthy of condemnation than Sturgeon’s lies? Well the question is rhetorical since you have demonstrated that you think that it is. Are you seriously suggesting that the investigation which concluded that the memo had not been falsified, are somehow part of a conspiracy to discredit Sturgeon? Oh, I almost forgot, you are a 9-11 Truther, so that would almost certainly explain it.”
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Daniel.
Your persistent proclivity,surrounding a lie that has no basis nor foundation,seems to be the mainstay of your posit.
Do you or don’t you have any evidence that Nicola Sturgeon lied,or are you rather bitterly I might add obsuficating.
As for 9/11 the official story for me anyway is nothing more than a apocryphal.
But no doubt for you the memo on 9/11 is overflowing with veracity.
ROS, what evidence do you have that the investigators who claimed that the memo had not been falsified were wrong?
Suhayl, check this out….Buckethead , Nottingham Lace:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYxrdrzmuUw
I believe that’s an eight-string guitar, more difficult to play but more given to a wider range of tones. Turn it up!
How many times must I publish this link to Carmichaels apology,which clearly states that the details of the account are not true.
http://wingsoverscotland.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/carmichaelgate.jpg
Now in the interests of parity,would the main protagonists in here,you know who you are,for the love of God,provide evidence that either Nicola Sturgeon or the French Ambassador lied.
Constantly reiterating a memo from a duplicitous office is bona fide,is unconvincing to say the least.
ROS, so the 1.4 million investigation was a fraud? Thanks for your insight.
“RoS, so the 1.4 million investigation was a fraud? Thanks for your insight”
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I don’t Daniel if you followed the Scottish referendum,during the 2 years campaigning the Scotland Office then under Michael Moore vehmently opposed the SNP,Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon,dirty trick were used then as well by Moore.
Fast forward to Carmichaels tenure at the Scotland Office and nothing has changed.
Nor can the Treasury investigators no matter how high ranking be trusted to be impartial.
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/editors-picks/528229/undefined-headline-763/
Insight no just experience over 2 years of watching and listening.
Macky
Don’t worry about it or anything, it’s just another anti-Semitic loon site and anybody could have fallen for it. That said, would you mind if I call you Gordon Duff from now on?
Anyway, we’re on to 9/11 and having already enjoyed some robust defence of North Korea it’s looking like we may get the treble…
Yes, it’s getting late on a Saturday night and I think it might be time for some Holocaust denial!
RoS – over to you!
Villager
23 May, 2015 – 3:15 pm
“Despite Craig’s attempts to educate these bigots, this kind of subtle, and (sic) to some of us not-so-subtle, form of anti-Semitic racism sadly remains perceptibly and consistently palpable here.”
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Villager,the Jews who settled in Palestine in the mid-20th century were not and are not descendants of the ancient Hebrews and so are not Semites.
Jewish racism against Arabs has long been a factor in Zionism:
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimetre of Eretz Israel…Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”
(Rafael Eitan, April 13, 1983)
“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
(Rafael Eitan, April 14, 1983)
Remember Villager, it was Jewish terrorism that paved the way to the creation of Israel (to the detriment of millions of Arab men, women and children).
After reading the various posts in this thread over the last day, I’m afraid I’ll have to go into cliche-land (but good if you’re trying to learn Spanish)…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7NmUS7UWNQ
“What you really want, of course, is for there to be no word to describe hatred of Jews, and it is hardly surprising that some of the anti-Semites on this blog would wish for that to be the case.”
What I would really like is for their to be no word for the hatred of any human beings. Jews are human beings like Palestinians. Israel racially segregates itself from fellow Arab semites (apartheid) and wages genocide on Palestinian Semites (a gross anti-Semitic violation of human rights).
It seems to me more that you wish for there to be a word for hatred of Jews, which excludes Palestinians and other Arab countries whose languages were Semitic. Tough-titty.
“Anyway, we’re on to 9/11 and having already enjoyed some robust defence of North Korea it’s looking like we may get the treble…
Yes, it’s getting late on a Saturday night and I think it might be time for some Holocaust denial!
RoS – over to you!”
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Oh I rather thought we could glorify Ho Chi Minh,the holocaust is so played out.
But if you persist here’s a good article from last year.
A group of Holocaust survivors and descendants of those targeted by Nazi Germany have harshly criticized Israeli actions in Gaza and called for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
Following a letter from survivors of the Holocaust printed in the New York Times on Saturday, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, which helped coordinate the letter, organized a press call Monday, where some of those who signed the letter spoke out against the assault on Gaza.
Participants in the press call included Edith Bell, whose parents died in concentration camps and who was taken to four camps herself; Suzanne Weiss, whose mother was murdered in Auschwitz and who was hidden by French peasants; and Liliane Kaczerginski, whose father Schmerke was a Jewish fighter against the Nazis in Lithuania.
Also joining the call were Monadel Herzallah and Hani Jamah, two Palestinians with family in Gaza who expressed appreciation at the descendants’ and survivors efforts to stop the killing.
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/holocaust-survivors-palestinians
“What I would really like is for there to be no word for the hatred of any human beings. . . “
ROS. I’m not saying that the dirty tricks during the referendum did not take place, not at all. Brian May was on QT the other night saying that there is a direct correlation between the amounts political parties receive by way of funds from private sources and the level of false propaganda and hence the impact it has on election results. His is totally correct in that assessment. If I were living in Scotland, I would have voted SNP so this is not an anti Sturgeon snipe. I am just not convinced in this case.
What does occur to me with the etymological attempt to apply Semitism and anti-Semitism to Jews alone is very much stealing from the Palestinians and other Arab countries, and little different from the land-grabbing in that part of the world.
Villager
23 May, 2015 – 3:47 pm
“I wish someone would answer my questions re: why the Arabs have failed their Palestinian brethren?”
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The Arab people haven’t failed the Palestinians; it’s the Western-supported dictatorships in the Arab world that have failed them.
It is also down to:
Western “divide and rule” policy (setting Shia against Sunni); western oil interests and the role Israel plays in the maintenance of these dictatorships in the interests of its Zionist ambitions.
How’s that for starters Villager?
Another goodly and humanitarian act by the very oppressed and downtrodden land stealing mass murdering genocidal bastards armed with nuclear and thermonuclear bombs and the relevant devilry systems.
if you disagree with it, then you are a palpably racist and antisemi,…..
These aggressive ziofuckwit cretins can go on calling Mary all the bitches under the sun, to which none of the usual defeders of the right and proper; techniwhotist/villager/habbashit (these characters are one and the same cretin) dreo, residentmoaner etc have no problems with.
Furthermore evidently this conduct is tolerated and condoned by the mods on this board presumably because they don;t get paid and are working for free!!!!
PS the stuff above is from that very antis….. website haaretzt
.
Daniel
23 May, 2015 – 3:49 pm
“It goes without saying that it’s not Jews per se that are the problem…”
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Excellent post Daniel; I couldn’t have put it better myself; well said.
“What does occur to me with the etymological attempt to apply Semitism and anti-Semitism to Jews alone is very much stealing from the Palestinians and other Arab countries, and little different from the land-grabbing in that part of the world.”
I agree. Historically, Zionism feeds of antisemitism and vice versa. The one reinforces the other:
The founders of Zionism were even prepared to ally themselves with the most vicious anti-Semites. Herzl approached Count Von Plehve, the sponsor of the worst anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia: “Help me to reach the land sooner and the revolt [against Tsarist rule] will end.” Herzl and other Zionist leaders offered to help guarantee Tsarist interests in Palestine and to rid Eastern Europe and Russia of those “noxious and subversive Anarcho-Bolshevik Jews”–in other words, to get rid of the people who wanted to fight anti-Semitism rather than capitulate to it. Von Plehve agreed to finance the Zionist movement as a way of countering socialist opposition to the Tsar:
“The Jews have been joining the revolutionary parties. We were sympathetic to your Zionist movement as long as it worked toward emigration. You don’t have to justify the movement to me. You are preaching to a convert.”5
The founding of a Zionist state is often justified as a response to the rise of fascism and to the horrors of the Nazi holocaust that exterminated six million Jews. But far from fighting against fascism, Zionists frequently collaborated with the fascists. In 1933, the Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum of support to the Nazis:
“On the foundation of the new [Nazi] state which has established the principle of race, we wish to fit our community into the total structure so that for us, too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible.”10
Later that year, the World Zionist Organization congress defeated a resolution for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43.
Leading Nazis like Joseph Goebbels wrote articles praising Zionism, and some Zionists received Nazi funds. A member of the Haganah, a Zionist militia in Palestine, delivered the following message to the German SS in 1937:
“Jewish nationalist circles…were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs.”11
The Zionist movement went so far as to oppose changes in the immigration laws of the U.S. and Western Europe, which would have permitted more Jews to find refuge in these countries. In 1938, David Ben-Gurion, who was to become the first prime minister of Israel, wrote:
“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael [greater Israel], then I would opt for the second alternative.”12
This philosophy was put into practice. As the author Ralph Schoenman notes in The Hidden History of Zionism:
“Throughout the late thirties and forties, Jewish spokespersons in Europe cried out for help, for public campaigns, for organized resistance, for demonstrations to force the hand of allied governments–only to be met not merely by Zionist silence but by active Zionist sabotage of the meager efforts which were proposed or prepared in Great Britain and the United States.
The dirty secret of Zionist history is that Zionism was threatened by the Jews themselves. Defending the Jewish people from persecution meant organizing resistance to the regimes which menaced them. But these regimes embodied the imperial order which comprised the only social force willing or able to impose a settler colony on the Palestinian people. Hence, the Zionists needed the persecution of the Jews to persuade Jews to become colonizers afar, and they needed the persecutors to sponsor the enterprise.”
http://isreview.org/issues/15/israel_colonial.shtml
Anon1 is begging for some holocaust denial because that’s better than people talking about the real turd in the punchbowl: Zionists exacerbating the holocaust to drive Jews to settlements in Palestine:
Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest, p. 37: “Commenting, author Erskine H. Childers, wrote, “one of the most massively important features of the entire Palestine struggle was that Zionism deliberately arranged that the plight of the wretched survivors of Hitlerism should be a ‘moral argument’ which the West had to accept. This was done by seeing to it that Western countries did not open their doors, widely and immediately, to the inmates of the DP (displaced persons) camps. It is incredible, that so grave and grim a campaign has received so little attention in accounts of the Palestine struggle – it was a campaign that literally shaped all subsequent history. It was done by sabotaging specific Western schemes to admit Jewish DPs.”
A number of authors have discuss Zionist connections with Nazis; for example:
– Ben Hecht, Perfidy
– Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine
– Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis
– Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
– Sami Hadawi, in Bitter Harvest 1914-79, pp. 35-39, discusses the use of manipulated, sometimes invented, anti-Semitism in promoting
– Zionism, e.g.: “Ian Gilmour [wrote] ‘In the Arab countries, Jewish difficulties and emigration to Israel were the result not of anti-Semitism but of Zionist activities and the existence of the state of Israel.’”
http://ifamericaknew.org/history/ #_edn3
Eichmann, excellent post.
John Spencer-Davis
23 May, 2015 – 4:01 pm
“Fred, I agree with you. On the evidence I have seen so far, I believe that Nicola Sturgeon said at that meeting that she did not regard Ed Miliband as Prime Ministerial material, and that, somehow, that got garbled into her endorsing David Cameron.
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John, what is the “evidence” you have seen so far that leads you to that conclusion?
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“…But I believe that Nicola Sturgeon said something which is at the root of all this.”
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Yes John she said something; which is what people do when they talk to each other. So what do you suspect she said that was “at the root of all this”?
You have to bear in mind John, that the civil servant taking notes and Carmichael who authorised the release of the memo are pro-union, anti-SNP officials.
I smell a rat but perhaps you are afflicted with anosmia.
Fred
23 May, 2015 – 4:27 pm
“…if Nicola Sturgeon was saying one thing to the people of Scotland and another to the French Ambassador then the people of Scotland had a right to know.”
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Absolutely Fred but it does appear that what Nicola Sturgeon said was not recorded accurately by the civil servant so it is not a document that you can describe as true.
In other words; the civil servant “misheard” and in all “innocence” wrote down what he thought was said.
What he thought was said was not said.
Come on Fred! (and others).
Republicofscotland
23 May, 2015 – 4:30 pm
“It was noted in the civil servant’s memo that his/her understanding was suspect, and possibly the result of something having been “lost in translation”, though as far as is known both the meeting between the FM and the ambassador and the conversation between the civil servant and the Consul-General were conducted wholly in English.”
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Yes RoS, Nicola Sturgeon does not speak French or any other foreign language as far as I know. So the possibility of what was said being “lost in translation” is a non-starter.
There are some jerks on this blog.
Eichmann: choosing the notorious name of a chilly mass murderer of Jewish people in a discussion about anti-semitism is an interesting choice, what prompted you to do it?
Vermin like this will be swept away very shortly…
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/23/iain-duncan-smith-cabinet-row-welfare-cuts-12bn
The GCHQ scum will all be twitching at their keyboards.
Good, because very shortly you will not be passing GO, but instead will go directly to Jail.
You are total vermin and a curse on my country.
Fred
23 May, 2015 – 4:41 pm
“I’m telling you that the inquiry found that the memo had not been falsified.”
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Fred FFS!
The memo was real but the contents were untrue!
Fred, I think when you moved to Scotland the average national IQ plummeted.
“Yes” to gay marriage.
@doug scorgie
Please don’t edit my posts to make it look like I said something I didn’t say. You edited out the “some people might say” to make it look like I was expressing my own opinion.
That is dishonest.