Dear President Ahtisaari,
I had the pleasure of meeting you on a number of occasions over the years, including when I was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and I recall your genuine concern for democracy and human rights in a region where they are sadly neglected.
Like a great many people in Scotland I was shocked that CMI is employing Jim Murphy. Of course, in a democracy there are always losers as well as winners in elections, and both are genuine and valid participants in public life. It is not the fact that CMI employs a politician who has been so recently, comprehensively and humiliatingly rejected by his national electorate that will do any damage to CMI. In a sense I think it does you credit.
What shocks many people here is that Mr Murphy is by any standards a dedicated warmonger. He was a major and important proponent of the invasion of Iraq, and is the strongest of supporters of the massive increase of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, in breach of the Non Proliferation Treaty.
Mr Murphy is a member of the Henry Jackson Society, which as you know is a body which exists to promote United States neo-conservative foreign policy in its most aggressive sense, and openly and actively supports and condones extraordinary rendition and the use of torture by the CIA. It has supported every single military action by the USA since its formation, and defends United States exceptionalism in international law, including US non-membership of the International Criminal Court.
Mr Murphy’s belief set is therefore fundamentally at odds with the stated aims of CMI. Indeed, his employment by you can only lead to the suspicion that CMI’s stated objectives are not its real objectives, and that like Mr Murphy and the Henry Jackson Society your overriding goal in the regions where you operate is to promote the interests of the United States.
As you are funded by charitable donations and by governments, I think some explanation of your employment of Mr Murphy is in order, particularly when you have employed him as a conflict resolution expert in the Caucasus and Central Asia when he has no relevant experience of conflict resolution at all, virtually none of the Caucasus, and absolutely none of Central Asia.
I was the Head of the UK Delegation that negotiated the Sierra Leone Peace Treaty, and certainly under no circumstances would I let Jim Murphy anywhere near that kind of negotiation.
With All Best Wishes,
Amb (rtd.) Craig Murray
Hi Clark good to hear from you.
Wahabism underpins the make up and tribal relationships of the Saudi regime, it is also the basis for the stricter interpretation of Sharia law, resulting in more beheading’s than that of the sponsored IS/Daesh mercenaries, who now have to make do without their magic pills for a wee while.
Wahabism is an unreconstructed religious interpretations/sect from the 14th century, its ruthless towards those who live under it, bar the elite and it is supported by our politicians and our royal establishment, for its fickle western needs to sell arms.
I have not read any paper today and don’t intend to do so. I’d like to hear and see more evidence. Two Syrians are mooted to have recently come from Syria as part of the refugee exodus, which was expected. Registering refugees once they reached the country of destination, the Dublin agreement seems dead in the water and Schengen is about to go, finding out about their previous life’s, is a thankless task that underpins our future safety.
Cameron will not get any of his so called reform wishes agreed to, he shows no willing, concerns or compassion for his partners and his mouthpiece the BBC helps him to amplify the messages of self cent red fascists, erecting fences, burning refugee centers and now, injecting the fear of terrorists hidden amongst them.
There are 2600 people who have volunteered ton take Syrian refugees in this country, some 600.000 plus empty homes. So where is the Government that decrees a percentage of housing within urban conurbations that offer services and jobs to refugees, must be used for this purpose?
Putin has been strangely quiet over the past two weeks and its to be noted that the French and Russian flags look similar, so last nights Europe wide emotional hysteria could be mistaken or applied to both Russia and France.
This analysis about his silence and new strategy in Syria.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/vladimir-putin-and-his-secret-strategy-for-syria-a-1062726.html
ISIS is also said to be run by the Bathist party’s former generals, who were presumably distinctly not fundamentalist in outlook before 2003.
How do we make sense of this?
What have Bathist generals to do with Wahabis and Saudi Arabia?
@Resident Dissident
“In a 16th round of airstrikes in Syria on October 9, the United States carried out nine airstrikes in the areas in and around the border town of Kobanî that is under siege. The US carried out six airstrikes south of Kobanî that destroyed two ISIL-held buildings, one tank and one heavy machine gun along, a fighting position along with one large and two small ISIL units. Along with strikes south of Kobanî, the US carried out three airstrikes north of Kobanî which struck two small ISIL units and destroyed two ISIL-held buildings.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in_Syria#October_2014
Sorry, Nevermind, but I’m not happy about accepting any of these so-called refugees. If there is even the slightest chance of one of them carrying out a Paris-style attack then we would be better off having none of them at all. Aside from terrorist attacks there has been a huge increase in all sorts of crime, not least gang-rape, in your native Germany, to the extent that authorities in some parts of the country are being advise to keep their daughters indoors. Chancellor Merkel has a lot to answer for.
Israel’s Culture Minister Miri Regev used the attacks[Friday the 13th] to criticize the European Union for removing Hamas from its list of terrorist organizations in December last year, while she praised France for fighting the decision.
Noted from Maan.
The facts, deciphered and dismantled, are Putin’s youngest daughter Katerina, 29, is ‘married’ to Kirill Shamalov, son of Nikolai Shamalov a shareholder in Bank Rossiya, which U.S. officials have described as the personal bank of the Russian elite. Her ‘wealth’ is therefore implicit.
Please relive the timeline of Chechnyan affiliated attacks 19XX and early 20XX. Astonishingly the CFR draws near to truth.
http://www.cfr.org/separatist-terrorism/chechen-terrorism-russia-chechnya-separatist/p9181
@Anon1
The little boy came from the Syrian town of Kobani, which has been repeatedly bombed by the Americans – not just the instances I cite above. Follow the link I’ve given and search the entire page for ‘Kobani’.
*authorities in some parts of the country are advising parents
How angry little Habbakunkt is today! She’s a whirling, twirling tasmanian divvil of sissy invective. And how incisively she addresses Gladio! Clearly that upsets her. She’s just too huffy for arguments with silly facts or inductive logic or deductive logic, for that matter. How dare they not believe what the government says? Hard-ons. Q.E.D.! Perhaps America’s Sweetheart can rebut what I said on al-Maydeen? Kissy, kissy!
Rob G
In vino mendacium i’m afraid – so the US were helping the Kurds recover Kobani – good for the US I say. Of course it had nothing to do with the poor little boy ending up on a Turkish beach.
Rob G
The little boy and his family were in Turkey as a result of fleeing from Assad – and however much you lie you cannot cover up this basic fact.
Nevermind squawks
“So keep to your flaccid self and stop threatening people.”
_________________
Threatening people, Ingo? Can you back that up or are you just paranoid?
Impressive Nevermind – Matthias Schepp has revealed an extraordinary understanding of the rationale in the mind of President Putin where listening, motivation and compassion must transcend wealth and power.
“You know that, of course, so perhaps you were just hoping no one else would notice?”
—————
Yes I know, how could anyone not know, prior to Jihadi John, and Friday nights event that’s all the media droned on about relentlessly.
It got to the stage that I even contemplated listening to Krishnamurti drone on.
“the rationale in the mind of President Putin where listening, motivation and compassion must transcend wealth and power.”
As Goebbels said…………
When one reads the comments on here one sees that this blog is awash with subversive, paranoid bilge; one could borrow a word from another discussion and say that this blog is being “swamped” by such bilge.
The reassuring thing though, is that when one looks carefully all of that bilge is being produced by a mere handful of nutters – generally known as the Eminences and Old Trolls – ie, by at most 20 people.
The amount of noise they produce is out of all proportion to their number, given that they are, in essence, just talking to each other. A captive audience, so to speak! LOL
Anon 1, as a prescribed ziofascist here, one would not expect you to like Syrian refugees. Be rest assured that the overwhelming masses of refugees are being registered in Germany and that extra vigilance is given to those who try to slip through borders on the quiet, whatever your not so clever UKIP smiler proclaims.
I agree with you that the constant drain of services in this country, such as border control and HMRC, has left us unable to cope with refugees here, add to that your inbred unwillingness to share your fancy isle with anybody but your ilk is underpinning all the establishment machinations that only let rich criminal rogues into the country, hallo Alisher Usmanov et al., so you are not opposed to immigration, your choice has a monetary as well as racial undertone to it.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/london-property-boom-built-on-dirty-money-10083527.ht
“When one reads the comments on here one sees that this blog is awash with subversive, paranoid bilge; one could borrow a word from another discussion and say that this blog is being “swamped” by such bilge.
The reassuring thing though, is that when one looks carefully all of that bilge is being produced by a mere handful of nutters – generally known as the Eminences and Old Trolls – ie, by at most 20 people.
The amount of noise they produce is out of all proportion to their number, given that they are, in essence, just talking to each other. A captive audience, so to speak! LOL”
——————
There’s only two explanations for your above inane comment, one, you’re doping and you haven’t been caught yet, or two, you’ve been listening to Krishnamurti for extended periods.
Eithe way, seek medical attention immediately.
“The fact that malcontents, ideological saboteurs and stooges for Britain’s enemies are allowed to post their poisonous drivel on the internet is the best evidence that Britain is not the fascist state claimed by those same malcontents.
It is not enough that these people are known – they should also be made to pay the correct price for seeking to undermine the state and the collectivity.”
So they should be made to pay? explain your threat to us Habby, how should they be made to pay? Have you invested in the 9 new prison we so dearly need? with reduced police numbers, closing courts and resigning magistrates, how could these possibly be filled?
Two from the JP. A mad old rabbi and Israeli intelligence
Far-right settler rabbi: ‘Paris attacks are payback for the Holocaust’
The quote from Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, was first reported by the Walla! news agency.
‘”The wicked ones in blood-soaked Europe deserve it for what they did to our people 70 years ago,” Lior said.’
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Far-right-settler-rabbi-Paris-attacks-are-payback-for-the-Holocaust-433084
!!!
and no surprise
Israeli spy services are monitoring Syria and Iraq which may have yielded intelligence on the organization of the Paris attacks, Army Radio said. http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Report-Israel-spy-services-helping-French-intelligence-on-Paris-attackers-433116
‘Citing an unnamed senior Israeli official, Channel 2 said Israel saw a “clear operational link” between the Paris attacks, Thursday’s Beirut suicide bombings and the Oct. 31 downing of a Russian airliner in the Egyptian Sinai.’
“Matthias Schepp has revealed an extraordinary understanding of the rationale in the mind of President Putin where listening, motivation and compassion must transcend wealth and power.”
Or motivation meets wealth and power with both arms open. Pockets and discreet bank accounts too!
“There’s only two explanations for your above inane comment, one, you’re doping and you haven’t been caught yet, or two, you’ve been listening to Krishnamurti for extended periods.
Eithe way, seek medical attention immediately.”
______________
Another childish comment from RadioScotland whose rear cheeks are RoSy after having been caned again and again by Habby.
Btw, have you watched Bernard Levin’s interview of Krishnamurti yet? I presume you know who the famous and erudite Levin was, especially since you are Master-Copy-Paster, iow a second-hand human being.
Habbakuike, like all manipulative people, is easy and fun to manipulate. Random reinforcement makes her go berserk. But nothing drives him up the wall like facts. Watch her frantic generalizations as he runs from facts that contradict his monarchist ass-kisser’s creed. As if he can make it go away by effort of will. Subversive, paranoid bilge! Must… condescend… oof puff ugh… LOL! Mark of a fist-class mind, to be sure. No wonder you’re so enormously influential in the halls of power.
“That morning, the emergency services in Paris had actually done a training exercise for a major terrorist attack”
Well I never. They’ll be telling us next that key CCTV cameras weren’t working that night.
“Israel saw a “clear operational link” between the Paris attacks, Thursday’s Beirut suicide bombings and the Oct. 31 downing of a Russian airliner in the Egyptian Sinai”
Well I never. Who would Adam and Eve it?
“Sorry, Nevermind, but I’m not happy about accepting any of these so-called refugees. If there is even the slightest chance of one of them carrying out a Paris-style attack then we would be better off having none of them at all. Aside from terrorist attacks there has been a huge increase in all sorts of crime, not least gang-rape, in your native Germany, to the extent that authorities in some parts of the country are being advise to keep their daughters indoors. Chancellor Merkel has a lot to answer for.”
———————–
Typical Anon1, pretending not to see the bigger picture as to why the refugees are fleeing to Europe in the first place, though I think he/she knows fine well why they’ve took flight.
Prior to August 2nd 1990 better known as the Gulf War, most Middle Eastern countries were reasonably stable, not particularly democratic, but stable nontheless.
Prior to the West inciting civil war (a much used tactic by the West) in Syria. The country was well know as the “Jewel of the Middle East” now it’s a pile of rubble and shrapnel, consequentially the people have fled, as Western forces try to break Assad and his long link to Russia.
Iraq, backed and flooded with weapons by the West, the goal to defeat Iran, was later goaded into invading Kuwait, probably due to unfair boundry changes by Percy Cox, and unfair financial practices preferential to Kuwait.
This gave a green light to Western forces including (Blair, and the Labour party) to pound Iraq with DU shells, UN sanctions went on to cause the deaths of thousands of women and children.
Madeline Albright, a one time US Secretary of State, said the deaths were justifiable,
Iraq is now torn by civil war, and many people are fleeing to Europe.
Libya, ran by the tyrant Gaddafi was pretty stable before the West attacked it. Gaddafi who was compliant to Western demands, met Blair and Mandelson, over BP ‘s attempt to extract oil in Libya, known as the deal in the desert.
Libya is now a lawless civil war torn country, whose people to a certain extent have fled for their lives to Europe.
The exodus of refugees to Europe, in other words the humanitarian crisis was/is caused by us, of that their is no denying.
Yes there is some gender confusion on Haddakok, but one thing is certain; almost lascivious in exchanges with anon and very protective of her so it’s apparent who’s the pitcher and catcher.
RadioScotland
” The exodus of refugees to Europe, in other words the humanitarian crisis was/is caused by us, of that their is no denying. ”
Wow RoSy, what a revelation! So we’ll just say you are such an Original Man that you might just be Adam himself! Man, what a second-hand human being you are.. Are you really all-growed up or are you a fourth-grader posing as an adult here?
Rx More caning by Habbabkuk.
Ben, also apparent who is the Ganja Gnasher here.
From the interwebby –
———-
I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard. I am not going to say that what happened in Paris on Friday night was unprecedented horror, for it was not. I am not going to say that the world stands with France, for it is a hollow phrase. Nor am I going to applaud François Hollande’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance, for I do not believe it. I am, instead, going to tell you that this is exactly how civilisations fall.
Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410AD: “. . . In the hour of savage licence, when every passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed . . . a cruel slaughter was made of the Romans; and . . . the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies . . . Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless. . .”
Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night? True, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, represented Rome’s demise as a slow burn. Gibbon covered more than 1,400 years of history. The causes he identified ranged from the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the rise of Sassanid Persia. Decline shaded into fall, with monotheism acting as a kind of imperial dry rot.
For many years, more modern historians of “late antiquity” tended to agree with Gibbon about the gradual nature of the process. Indeed, some went further, arguing that “decline” was an anachronistic term, like the word “barbarian”. Far from declining and falling, they insisted, the Roman empire had imperceptibly merged with the Germanic tribes, producing a multicultural post-imperial idyll that deserved a more flattering label than “Dark Ages”. Recently, however, a new generation of historians has raised the possibility that the process of Roman decline was in fact sudden — and bloody — rather than smooth.
For Bryan Ward-Perkins, what happened was “violent seizure . . . by barbarian invaders”. The end of the Roman west, he writes in The Fall of Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”.
In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. “The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single generation.
Peter Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire emphasises the disastrous effects not just of mass migration but of organised violence: first the westward shift of the Huns of Central Asia and then the Germanic irruption into Roman territory. In his reading, the Visigoths who settled in Aquitaine and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted to the Roman empire by its wealth, but were enabled to seize that wealth by the arms they acquired and the skills they learnt from the Romans themselves.
“For the adventurous,” writes Heather, “the Roman empire, while being a threat to their existence, also presented an unprecedented opportunity to prosper . . . Once the Huns had pushed large numbers of [alien groups] across the frontier, the Roman state became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.”
Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today, though few of us want to recognise them for what they are. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defences to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.
The distant shock to this weakened edifice has been the Syrian civil war, though it has been a catalyst as much as a direct cause for the great Völkerwanderung of 2015. As before, they have come from all over the imperial periphery — from North Africa, from the Levant, from south Asia — but this time they have come in their millions, not in mere tens of thousands.
To be sure, most have come hoping only for a better life. Things in their own countries have become just good enough economically for them to afford to leave and just bad enough politically for them to risk leaving. But they cannot stream northwards and westwards without some of that political malaise coming with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire.
It is doubtless true to say that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent. But it is also true that the majority hold views not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies, including our novel notions about sexual equality and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilisation within these avowedly peace-loving communities.
I do not know enough about the fifth century to be able to quote Romans who described each new act of barbarism as unprecedented, even when it had happened multiple times before; or who issued pious calls for solidarity after the fall of Rome, even when standing together meant falling together; or who issued empty threats of pitiless revenge, even when all they intended to do was to strike a melodramatic posture. I do know that 21st-century Europe has itself to blame for the mess it is now in.
Surely nowhere in the world has devoted more resources to the study of history than modern Europe did. When I went up to Oxford more than 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that in the first term I would study Gibbon. It did no good. We learnt a lot of nonsense to the effect that nationalism was a bad thing, nation states worse and empires the worst things of all.
“Romans before the fall”, wrote Ward-Perkins, “were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.”
Poor, poor Paris. Killed by complacency.
A judge in Spain has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and seven other former and current Israeli officials over a 2010 fatal raid by the Tel Aviv regime forces on a Gaza-bound aid ship.
According to reports by Spanish media, the group could be arrested if they set foot on Spanish soil, the Jerusalem Post reported on Saturday.
On May 31, 2010, Israeli commandos attacked the Turkish-flagged MV Mavi Marmara that was part of the Freedom Flotilla in the high seas in the Mediterranean Sea, killing nine Turkish citizens and injuring about 50 other people who were part of the team on the six-ship convoy. A 10th died after four years in a coma.
A UN panel that reviewed the case later denounced the Israeli attack on the vessel as “excessive and unreasonable
Let’s drive Habbakuke to impotent fury with more facts! Ram em up his floppy sphincter.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/11/the-first-question-to-ask-after-any-terror-attack-was-it-a-false-flag.html
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/11/15/us-apache-helicopter-herding-isis-toyotas/
He kneels for the Queen but he sucks off the NCS