Thursday 14 March 2024

Quotations

“Hamas leaders know they cannot defeat the IDF militarily. Their only hope is to provoke Israel into killing enough civilians to defeat Israel politically. This is a classic terrorist strategy of provocation. Israel has fallen for it, hard.” Professor Virginia Page Fortna of Columbia University, writing today in Ha'aretz. She is an American political scientist and a specialist in the study of peace negotiations.








"I remember when British people used to say things like “They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong,” or “They can’t do that; it’s against the law.” George Orwell noted in 1941 that a vague belief in law being above power, expressed in such sentiments, was part of the English character. We also used to say that an Englishman’s home was his castle.

"But night after night, local TV news bulletins show police in body armor with special battering rams, smashing down the door of some alleged drug dealer’s home. And we are expected and intended to approve, even though these events, plainly done for show, have less than no effect on the vast levels of drug abuse in our society. In fact, although we have had a Bill of Rights in England since 1689, on which much of the American Bill of Rights is based (including, amazingly, the right to bear arms), we are very poorly protected from the state if it wishes to start pushing us around."

Peter Hitchens in the American Conservative yesterday. The article is worth reading. The UK no longer has free speech.

Sunday 10 March 2024

“Six times in the past 12 years Netanyahu rejected plans to eliminate the Hamas leadership”

“Six times in the past 12 years [Benjamin Netanyahu] has rejected plans proposed by the heads of Israel’s secret security agency, known as Shabak, to eliminate the Hamas leadership.” 
So writes former Israeli PM and general Ehud Barak this month in the American defence establishment's house magazine, Foreign Affairs

A tale of two rabbis: Eliyahu Mali and Elhanan Beck



From Anadolu Agency (AA), the Turkish state-owned news news agency.

1. Eliyahu Mali

An Israeli rabbi urged the killing of women and children in the Gaza Strip and said he considered it a response to the teachings of halakha, or Jewish law.

Wednesday 6 March 2024

Saudi Arabia's missing princes

'For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.'
Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2.

I missed, in August 2017, these astonishing accounts on the BBC site - they read exactly like a thriller - of three Saudi princes kidnapped in Europe, taken back to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and probably executed.

They scarcely made the news and I don't remember them being mentioned when Adnan Khashoggi was murdered.

This is England and America's gallant ally, whom we armed to fight the Houthis.

That sometimes silly former British Ambassador Craig Murray wrote about the cases well.

As he says, Mohammed Bin Salman no doubt thought the death of Khashoggi, in a Saudi consulate in Turkey, would go equally unnoticed, but he wrote for the Washington Post and journalists do not like their colleagues being killed. Meanwhile Erdogan, unlike his European allies, was not prepared to tolerate Saudi political murder in his country.

The Yinon Plan is not important, but Israel wants to be surrounded by failed states and with US help has achieved this goal

Ten days after declaring the existence of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion told the Jewish army's general staff: “We must immediately destroy Ramle and Lod. ... We must organize Eliyahu’s brigade to direct it against Jenin in preparation for the Jordan Valley. ... Maklef needs to receive reinforcements and his role is the conquest of southern Lebanon, with the aid of bombing Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. ... Yigal Allon must attack in Syria from the east and from the north. ... We must establish a Christian state whose southern border will be the Litani. We will forge an alliance with it. When we break the strength of the [Arab] Legion and bomb Amman we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria falls. And if Egypt still dares to fight, we will bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.”

Israel did some of those things eventually. 

Sunday 3 March 2024

A 'western military source' quoted by John Helmer, the senior Western journalist in Moscow

“I’m not so sure, as some of the Russian milbloggers are, that the broad front approach [Russian General Valery] Gerasimov is taking heralds a new approach to modern warfare – or operational art, if you like. The push at different points, conserving men and materiel in favour of firepower is being done as much, or more out of political considerations, which include those of a domestic character (Putin’s public support, domestic stability); and also the military objective since Day One of the Special Military Operation — to draw in and destroy as many and as much of the US-NATO manpower and equipment in the Ukraine as possible.”

1984

The body charged by the European Union with restricting freedom of expression on the internet is called the  Agency for Fundamental Rights.


George Galloway and the Decline of the West

I really must not read the British or American newspapers. I have almost given up but I skim and wish I hadn't.

The British Labour party deselected its candidate in the Rochdale by-election for saying that Netanyahu knew beforehand about the Hamas attack on 7 October.

This was anti-Semitic, said the Labour Party, without explaining why. 

Predictably the seat which Labour could not contest, because it was too late to nominate someone else, was won by the pro-Palestinian ex-Labour firebrand George Galloway. 

This is said to be a dark day for democracy because now there will be a pro-Palestinian member of the British Parliament. 

Thursday 29 February 2024

Today is February 29th

Today is February 29th, the day when in England by tradition women are permitted to propose marriage to men. 

I intend to stay home and not answer the telephone or read messages until the danger period has passed.

It must have been on 29 February 1976 that I read in the Peterborough column in the Daily Telegraph, over breakfast before school, that it was the 21st birthday of Frederick, hero of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Pirates of Penzance or The Slave of Duty

Saturday 24 February 2024

We have met the enemy and he is us

"The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding. In Afghanistan, Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Kosovo, Ukraine, and far beyond, the needless deaths, instability, and destruction unleashed by CIA subversion continues to this day. The mainstream media, academic institutions, and Congress should be investigating these operations to the best of their ability and demanding the release of documents to enable democratic accountability."

Jeffrey Sachs, a distinguished America economist. The whole article is

Saturday 17 February 2024

Massacres in Palestine have continued since 1921, thanks to A.J. Balfour


The Jews lost 6,373 people, about 1% of the Jewish population of Palestine, in the 1948 war. 

I read that 4,000 were soldiers and the rest were civilians but elsewhere that Arabs killed 346 Jewish civilians and POWs.

According to leading Israeli historian Benny Morris the Yishuv (which became the Israeli army) committed twenty-four massacres in which they killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war. 

I read that 1,732 Arabs civilians were killed by Jews but I have no idea if this is true. The total number of Arab soldiers and civilians who died is said to be somewhere between 4,000 and 15,000. 

More than 500,000 Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed.

There were between ten and eighty massacres committed in total by both sides, according to Wikipedia, which is not very precise.

Dreadful war crimes were committed by Jews in the 1948 war, including murdering babies, to which people who sympathise with the Arabs rightly draw attention, comparing them with the false stories of babies beheaded or burnt alive spread recently by Israelis. 

Such people are disingenuous if they do not add that Arabs also did plenty of dreadful things. 

The massacre by Hamas of up to 600 or more civilians in October last year and the slaughter of at least 2,000 Arab civilians in Gaza since are part of a story that goes back to 1921. 

This is what the media do not mention and which the public does not understand, unless they have looked into and studied the tedious issue.

One country is completely to blame - mine, England, and the all too languid, over-intelligent Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour. 

Friday 16 February 2024

Israel-Hamas conflict quotations

Chris Van Hollen (Democrat Maryland) addressing the US Senate: “Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food ... That is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it, war criminals.” Then the senator voted for military aid to Israel.

Thursday 15 February 2024

The words of 102 year-old Franco-Jewish philosopher Edgar Morin, a distinguished French savant who fought in the Communist resistance

 The film clip is here.

"I am both astonished and outraged by the fact that those who represent the descendants of a people who were persecuted for centuries for religious or racial reasons... That the descendants of this people who are today the decision-makers of the State of Israel, that they could not only colonize an entire people, partly drive them out of their land and seek to expel them for good... But also, after the massacre of October 7, engaged in a real massive slaughter on the populations of Gaza and continue, incessantly, hitting civilians, women, and children.

Sunday 11 February 2024

Quotations

"The war in Ukraine is just a diversion from the real war against us." Laura Ghisoni, last summer

"Every day is once in a lifetime." Ayesha. No, I don't know who she is. Also coined by 
Mac McAnally

“I think that Meghan must have been incredibly envious and then jealous of Kate. I heard Meghan actually thought she was going to be a princess and live in Windsor Castle. Instead, there’s William and Kate with this beautiful house, while they are stuck in Nottingham Cottage which Harry used to call ‘my hovel’.” Ingrid Seward, editress of Majesty magazine and royal biographer