Zionism is bullshit. Three thousand years ago my Celtic ancestors were casting sacred swords into the lakes of Switzerland. Can I go back and claim Switzerland? No. Of course not. It’s nonsense.
I am rather proud of that critique, which still seems to me a short and elegant refutation of the basis of Zionism. I have never seen it answered with anything approaching intellectual success. I am especially proud as it came to me in a moment of inspiration, in the final 12 seconds of an allocated three minute speech to a crowd that stretched further than I could see.
A Ghanaian came up to me in an Accra hotel yesterday and said “Craig Murray. Zionism is bullshit. I miss London.” He then dashed off. It reminded me what a small and interconnected world we live in, as well as leading me to dig out the reference.
I have another motive in posting it. This blog now has a much larger regular readership than it did a few years ago. In particular, following the referendum campaign, it has a much larger readership in Scotland. Since I returned to Scotland to campaign in the referendum and then decided to stay until we achieve independence, which I am determined will be before I kick the bucket, a number of voices have been raised to query who I am and where I come from, in the wider sense of the latter. Sometimes those voices have been hostile or suspicious. I shall therefore give the odd riffle through the back catalogue. You could of course buy my autobiography Murder in Samarkand, thus helping us to eat.
Do They Think We’re Idiots? Officals Say No Indication that NYSE Trading Halt is a Cyberattack.
Apparently the Web sites for the Wall Street Journal and United Airlines also went down this morning. (And there’s no reporting that any of them are back up.)
Fedup.
If what you say is true then of course Iran has the right to seek contractors who’ll complete the job at hand, I couldnt care less who builds the reactors, but you must be by now familiar of how suspicious Western governments become when Russia is involved, and vice-versa.
Of course countries around the world employ foreign contractors to build these plants, even China got in on the act, so it should come as no surprise that Russia is building Iranian power plants.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9AF05A20131116?irpc=932
@Lysias, apparently the Wall Street Journal web site has also crashed and United Airlines planes are stuck on the ground due to computer problems.
I’ve no idea if it is in any way connected to this…
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/06/1399647/-China-is-having-a-stock-market-crash#
Lysias, we cross-posted.
Speaking of a people without a country of their own, could the Kurds be placed into such a category?
I predict this thread will run to over 1,000 in a short space of time.
Once a country has power reactors it is more problematic to “bomb the infrastructure back into the stone age”, as the West did to Iraq and Libya. The rest of the world would object to the nuclear pollution released; charges of wanton recklessness would be raised. When Israel has destroyed its rival’s reactors it has done so before they were fuelled.
Here’s how the Guardian are reporting it…
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/08/new-york-stock-exchange-halts-trading
… and the Guardian doesn’t seem to be making any connection to the United Airlines stuff…
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/08/united-airlines-flights-grounded
Ironic that it all seems to be kicking off on the day that a posh twit announces the UK budget.
Once a country has power reactors an attacking country can’t just smash the place with air-strikes – ground troops have to be sent in; there has to be confidence that the reactors can be militarily taken and secured such that a nuclear disaster doesn’t ensue. This follows even if the reactors aren’t directly attacked; reactors need to be tended.
But sending in ground troops is unpopular with the voters back home.
But Clark (18:08 above), isn’t that precisely what the Israelis did to Iraqi nuclear stations back in the early 1990s? I was quite surprised at the time, because we’d been given to believe decommissioning a nuclear plant was very expensive and time consuming. All that was needed, however, was a “surgical strike” by fighter jets, and that’s that.
Glenn, Israel carried out strikes on an Iraqi nuclear reactor that was still under construction. The fuel rods were not yet in the reactor.
Sorry, I meant the early 1980s. Here’s the reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera
Daniel
“Silence from Habbabkuk.”
________________________
Mes excuses, Monseigneur, but I’ve been at the beach.
But I’m touched that you seem to have missed me.
Shalom!
“Glenn, Israel carried out strikes on an Iraqi nuclear reactor that was still under construction. The fuel rods were not yet in the reactor.”
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Thereby saving the Iraki regime some money, surely?
Anyway, you know the saying : a strike in time saves nine (potential nuclear missiles.
“There would have been an excellent case for giving East Prussia to the Jews (perhaps as a constituent republic of the USSR) at the end of World War Two.”
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I offer the author of that fsscinating (but vexatious and unproductive) bit of speculation the following name : Birobidzstan.
Founded on the orders of genial Uncle Joe (the Great Father of the Peoples) in 1934.
Not, apparently, a grear success.
Craig
” Frankly I am surprised at your intellectual laxity”.
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Cheeky sod! But were I inclined to plead guilty in this instance – which I’m not, of course – I’d have to plead beach fatigue. 🙂
The Huffington Post is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security has also come under cyber attack…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/08/nyse-halt_n_7753934.html
and that should have been Birobidzhan
habba, rest assured, you weren’t missed. Next time, take your sidekick, anon1 with you. We can only hope you get in a dinghy, float towards Gaza and get mistaken for innocent fishermen.
and Uncle Joe was probably the Little Father of the Peoples (our Transatlantic Sage to confirm, please).
Twoleftfeet
I don’t do dinghies.
Tell me – did the good Lord give you a second left foot as recompense for the lack of a left ball?
You are revealing your ‘Ziva like’ understanding of the English language again.
Here’s how the Guardian are crisis managing the event…
http://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2015/jul/08/new-york-stock-exchange-wall-street
To see how GCHQ, et al, are crisis managing the event just look at some of the utterances from a certain poster on this board.
NYSE hacked? Anonymous warned of trouble on Wall Street hours before New York Stock Exchange computers taken offline.
At the beach when this was going on? I don’t believe the government’s denials. I believe the Resident Invigilatory’s denials even less.
CMBC: NYSE pres: Plan to reopen at 2:45-3 p.m., ET:
Trading in all symbols was halted on the New York Stock Exchange floor Wednesday due to an apparent technical issue. The NYSE tweeted that it did not suspect a cyberattack.
“There is no indication that there are malicious actors involved,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, adding that the White House is monitoring the situation.
. . .
Trading stopped around 11:30 a.m. ET. The exchange attributed the halt to an “internal technical issue.”
The NYSE plans to reopen the market by 2:45 or 3 p.m. ET, and getting it back up before the close is “critically important,” NYSE President Thomas Farley told CNBC. He noted that the floor was “not quite ready to open yet.”
Why do I not believe them?
@anon
” It was obvious to the world that Jews needed a homeland after WW2 . Now they have one and are safe from persecution ”
Too true, and perhaps we should not forget the many Jews who left the Soviet Union after WW2 because of the unofficial anti-Semitism of the comrades. But what is also not appreciated is that a majority of Jews now in Israel have their origins outside Europe – being in no small part driven out of Arab and other Moslem countries. Where should they go? Answers from the Hamas Charter are not acceptable.
Would those Jews have been driven out of Muslim countries if Israel had not been established? Didn’t Islam have a centuries-long history of toleration of Judaism?
“Zionism is bullshit. Three thousand years ago my Celtic ancestors were casting sacred swords into the lakes of Switzerland. Can I go back and claim Switzerland? No. Of course not. It’s nonsense.”
ALL nationalism is bullshit – including Scottish nationalism. No, actually that analogy is unfair: unlike nationalism, bullshit in the form of manure can be useful in nurturing living organisms and helping them grow. All that nationalism does is confine people to artificial borders and all that it nurtures is irrational, ultimately damaging hate.
Nationalism is a dead ideology and in the great scheme of history was relatively short lived anyway. It came about as a confused by-product of the American and French Revolutions, intensified after the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and passed away in shame amongst the ruined streets of Berlin (May 1945). In between that time, this poisonous ‘philosophy’ was responsible for the deaths of countless millions of people, notably causing two world wars in the last century alone. The last thing we need in the 21st century is an ideology like nationalism – whether Israeli, Scottish, German or indeed..er…Puerto-Rican! As you say, “it’s nonsense” in a world that is rapidly becoming smaller every day and where barriers are breaking down via communication through the internet, the availability of worldwide travel and migration and the consequent inter-marriage of any number of different nationalities and races. It’s utterly stupid to think that because you are of a certain nationality you are somehow superior to others because nationality is purely an accident of birth. The borders and populations of many countries have changed so many times over the centuries that many of them hardly resemble the countries they once were. An earlier poster suggested East Prussia should have been used as a homeland for the Jews feeling that it was the Germans who were mainly responsible for the holocaust (which it actually wasn’t as there was virulent anti-Semitism in most other European countries to). However, few people realise that the majority population of Prussia was actually Polish not German.
Similarly, anybody who thinks they can trace their ancestry back to “Celts” who lived 3,000 years’ ago is seriously deluded! Even the NSDAPs entry requirement for SS membership only set itself the relatively modest task of prospective candidates obsessively probing meticulously kept German parish records having to prove an un-broken Teutonic (erroneously termed ‘Aryan’) ancestry back 250 years and they frequently became unstuck and found themselves in the anachronistic position of having to bend the rules somewhat. State Certificate of Aryan Purity? Oberreichscommandant (or whatever) of the Luftwaffe Erhard Milch please take one! Nevertheless, if you really did trace your ancestry back 3,000 years – well done, Craig. There’s me thinking I’d done well getting back as far as 1739! Apparently, somebody in the Daily Mail claimed that he can trace his ancestry back to a dinosaur…well, tbh if he’s a columnist in the Daily Mail he probably is a dinosaur.
Truth is, referring to Celts of 3,000 years’ ago is problematic anyway – particularly so since any evidence so far for their possible existence has only been traced as far back 2,500 years. Moreover, the “Celts” as such may not have even existed as an actual people, but purely as a set of languages spoken by many different peoples. Thus, certain historians (some of whom have received death threats from the usual assortment of deranged nationalistic fantasists), have even gone as far as to say Celts (particularly as far as Scottish Celts are concerned) are a fictional people invented by 17th century romanticists for various aesthetical and political reasons.
Taking a look at Craig’s features, hair and eye colouring, from a gut reaction I would say that his ancestry is overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon (basically Danish and German) – I would say not overtly Scandinavian, either which would rule out ancestors who settled in Scotland as late as 1000AD his lineage is more likely to be English. Going on the appearance of people who have actual evidence that their ancestors have lived in so-called ‘Celtic’ areas of the world – such as Brittany, Wales, Ireland and Scotland – they tend to be a lot shorter in stature, dark-haired and swarthy. If these are the “Celts” that nationalist ideologues imagine – as opposed to the descendants of Roman invaders (who were already by then a multi-ethnic force) then I am of more Celtic ancestry than Craig through my mid-Wales Welsh-speaking maternal line of descent. As the people who spoke the Celtic languages have been found as far east as Turkey it’s not inconceivable that many modern Israelis (or Zionists as you call them) are ancestors of these people you call the Celts too.
Don’t get me wrong, if it’s your fantasy to imagine yourself as some fit looking ancient warrior running around stark bollock naked save for a few dabs of woad (and, moreover, Nadira is kewl with that) then far be it from me to take your play time away from you. If we’re going down that road though, I’m a Disney Princess, but as my maternal line is gentile, realistically I’m not even a Jewish Princess! LOL:)
Yeah, think *Global Village*, man;)
“Though only a DNA test would shed any real light on the matter.”
We don’t need DNA, just simple mathematics. We each have two parents, four grand parents, eight great grandparents it doubles every generation and there are about four generations each hundred years. Go back a thousand years and we each have 2^40 ancestors, three thousand years 2^120. As there weren’t anything like that many people it stands to reason that we must all be related not only to each other but also related to ourselves many many times over, even those of us not born in Norfolk. We all had ancestors throwing swords in Switzerland just as we all had ancestors living in Palestine.