Quotations

"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting." 

George Orwell

Caitlin Johnstone today: Empire Managers Explain Why This New Protest Movement Scares Them

During a vitriolic rant about university demonstrators at the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security on Tuesday, Palantir CEO Alex Karp came right out and said that if those on the side of the protesters win the debate on this issue, the west will lose the ability to wage wars.

For those who don’t know, Palantir is a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with intimate ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling

Israeli holocaust survivor from Sighet thinks there will never be peace in Israel

Ha'aretz carries an interview with Liku Rifca Carmi (née Marcovici) who grew up in a rich Jewish family in Sighetu Marmației, a Romanian town, now on the Ukrainian border, that had been assigned by Hitler to Hungary. 

In April 1943 all the Jewish families in Sighet were ordered to report to the town's train station in ten days' time. Her father, Shlomo Marcovici, turned to a coal miner he knew who took them to an abandoned gold mine in the forest, with potable water running through it.

"We sat on the stones, and the ceiling was full of flecks of gold glittering like stars. But there were leeches and

Israeli Minister of Justice gets his news from Al Jazeera, as the cabinet is 'told nothing'

At a recent meeting with hostages' families, the very right-wing Israeli Minister of Justice Yariv Levin told them, "I know little about the management of the war and the negotiations. We're told nothing and they don't share with us. Most of what I know is from watching Al Jazeera, because I speak Arabic."

I get my news about the war from Ha'aretz which is well informed and very critical of the Israeli government, unlike the British Daily Telegraph, Times, etc. I probably should follow Al Jazeera too.

'The end of a superpower'

Googling, I just saw 'Masha Gessen: The end of a superpower' and thought it referred to the USA, but then saw that it was a video about the collapse of the Soviet Union.W Documentary

Masha Gessen: Biden is sacrificing the election for Israel

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American who once wrote a brilliant book about Putin.

Gessen told a Ha'aretz interviewer today that Biden's support for the attempts to suppress student demonstrations in favour of Palestinians will cost him the election.

"If he doesn't have the youth vote he has no hope of beating Trump. So that's another brick in the case for the incredible support for Israel. That Biden and his administration are willing to sacrifice the election to ongoing engagement with Israel is heartbreaking, shocking."

There is little point in reading the papers. Twitter is a much better source, now that the CIA no longer controls it

The silly idea that Ukraine can push Russia out of Crimea, as opined by a Chinse 'expert' is relayed uncritically in the Economist, where it is read by people who matter. 

Reuters tells us that 

US intelligence believes Putin probably didn't order Navalny to be killed, Wall Street Journal reports

I had the gravest doubts at the time. It was not in Putin's interests just after the successful (from his point of view) interview with Tucker Carlson.

Values are not a reason to go to war

Two very good articles, worth your time.

This from the wonderful Arnaud Betrand, whom God preserve:

'I won’t retell the history of the Ukraine conflict with NATO expansion, the Maidan coup, the non-respect of Minsk, etc. The fact is that history will be extremely clear: the Ukraine war was anything but “unprovoked”, as you always hear. Same thing with Oct 7th: you have 70+ years of history leading up to it, and first and foremost a dereliction of duty by the West with its largely unconditional backing of Israel against the Palestinians. And guess what: when you back one actor vs another in a confrontation, both wrt Ukraine and Gaza, it obviously heightens tensions and ultimately leads to hot conflict where the party whose adversary you support sees you as an adversary too… It’s basic common sense. As such this “ring of fire” Europe is surrounded by is of its own making to an immense extent.

Quotations

"Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.” Malcolm Muggeridge


“Life is like the Vīṇā, when it is strung too taut, the strings break, when it’s too loose, no sound comes out. The string that produces a tuneful sound is not too tight and not too loose.” The Buddha

Swiss magazine Blick spoke to half a dozen anonymous commanders on the Ukrainian Eastern Front

'The tenor was that Ukraine would lose the war. “The Russians will conquer the Donbass by October, then the conflict will freeze and we will have to negotiate with Putin,” predicts Serhiy*, an officer in a brigade that is holding out in the embattled Chasiv Yar. “The Russians will force us to attack you Europeans as part of their army,” says Ihor, commander of an engineering company in Donetsk.

Students could once borrow the Book of Kells

The student protests against Israel could be the most important consequence of the Hamas attack and Gaza slaughter. We shall see. 

Trinity College, Dublin fined its students' union €214,000 over the protests, to cover the loss of revenues from visitors who come to see the Book of Kells. 

Karl White tells me rhat the Book of Kells was available in the 17th century for borrowing by students against a surety of £3 10s.

Do these things apply to Romania too?

From an interesting article in today's Daily Telegraph by Jeremy Warner.

Poland's GDP could for various reasons overtake that of Great Britain, France and Germany. Could is the key word but Poland has already has a Western standard of living.

"If we instead take purchasing power parity as the measure, which attempts to adjust for the fact that the cost of living is substantially lower in Poland than Britain, then Poland is already richer than the UK – $49,000 per capita against $47,000. That gap is forecast by the IMF to widen further over the next five years to $63,500 against the UK’s $50,000.

Quotations

"It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you."
John Updike

Sir Gerald Kaufman `My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza'

 

'My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. Madam deputy speaker, my grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.'

Please do watch an excerpt from Anglo-Jewish politician Sir Gerald Kaufman giving the speech of his life on January 15, 2009 (a pity he was reading from notes) or read the transcript below. It really is worth it.

My previous low opinion of him has shot up to the ceiling. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

He was on the right of the party, by the way, a lifelong Zionist and stalwart of the Labour Friends of Israel.

Vanity Fair plot spoiler alert! Please do not read this until you read the book.

'It isn't difficult to be a country gentleman's wife,' Rebecca thought. 'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.'

I just finished rereading Vanity Fair, which I found superficial at twenty. I felt the same about all the many books I read by Thackeray, but Vanity Fair this time was electrifying. 

I have always admired and sided with free spirits, as did Thackeray when young, when he was one, but a lot of them are parasites, crooks or whores. Becky Sharp is all three and a murderess. 

'The enormous death and destruction the IDF is leaving behind in Gaza aren't currently bringing us any closer to achieving the war's goals.'

Amos Harel in Israeli left-of-centre  newspaper Ha'aretz on April 8, 2024 - nothing seems to have changed in the last 3 weeks.

'The IDF and Shin Bet did find tunnels where Sinwar hid during the war. In those tunnels they found Hamas command posts, Sinwar's personal documents and gear, and cells and cages where the hostages had been held as human shields. Since then, he has apparently been moving among other hideouts in his complex deep under the ground of Khan Yunis.


'It's reasonable to assume that Sinwar and Deif will eventually be killed or captured, given the effort being invested in this. Hamas' No. 3 in Gaza, Marwan Issa, was killed in an airstrike last month after he violated the rigid security protocols adopted by senior Hamas officials. It's even still possible that there could be a breakthrough in rescuing the hostages.


'But the public should be told the truth: The enormous death and destruction the IDF is leaving behind in Gaza, alongside quite a few losses on our side, aren't currently bringing us any closer to achieving the war's goals.

The good old days, consule Planco

King Abdullah I of Jordan had been a member of the Turkish parliament and won the parliamentary seat of Mecca in a contested election before the Great War. I wonder if you could get a drink there. He became king of an impoverished scrap of land, lost Mecca and was outraged by the Jewish settlement in Palestine. 

How can one not but miss the Ottoman empire?

Is England moving away from our traditional close friendship with the Arabs towards siding with Israel? 

I suppose we have to obey American orders.

What a shocking story but the US press asks no questions

I came across this curious story by accident. This so called Syrian terrorism group is apparently allied to Nato member Turkey. America and England have both had men in Syria illegally for years trying to bring down the legal Syrian government but this woman gets 18 years inside. Surely there should be protests?

"Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria,” Jake Sullivan wrote to Hillary Clinton in 2011, as revealed by Wikileaks. This poor woman however is on the side of terrorists who are out of favour. 

What they said

'The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.'

Aldous Huxley

“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.”

Chicago sports writer Hugh Keough, quoted by Damon Runyon. 

Hengist and Horsa were illegal immigrants and look what happened to them

Hengist and Horsa arrived in Kent as mercenaries at the invitation of the British King Vortigern (though here history and myth elide) and became the first English kings - I am astonished that many English people do not know this

Even the least educated Romanian knows about the earliest Dacian kings, Burebista and Decebal, but an English friend who took a First at Cambridge in Modern History asked me who they were. Which shows you Romanian National Communist schools taught pupils better than English pupils who care nothing for their (key word) medieval history.

The American empire dates from just after the end of the Second World War

American historian Howard Zinn was a Communist fellow traveller and exposed as a KGB agent, but these words of his on the Allied victory in 1945 are accurate. 

"The victors were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work – without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but under the cover of 'socialism' on the one side, and 'democracy' on the other, to carve out their own empires of influence. They proceeded to share and contest with one another the domination of the world, to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to. They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques – crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States – to make their rule secure."

England, France and Nationalist China's victories were, of course, Pyrrhic. Since 1991 only the United States' empire remained but now, as was inevitable, it is being challenged.

Quotations

Dud: 'You're a loony.'

Pete: 'They called Galileo a loony.'

Dud: 'They also called a lot of loonies loonies.'

What is so very depressing is that the EU vote - and the Scottish Referendum before it - has revealed how "patriotism" (my god, I feel old fashioned and archaic just typing that word) has not only been expunged as a virtue in the public consciousness and is now seen positively as a vice. This has been the relentless work of - in my opinion - left-wing politicians and academics since the war who have always recognised that by breaking up the unity of one community into smaller, sometimes artificial groupuscules ('working class', 'youth') they can then create political majorities which can be used to give them power. I mean who today can say, loudly, 'I am proud to be British' except old ladies in racist rants on buses or Sun columnists or madmen on the internet?

Quotations

"If she measured her own feeling toward the world she must have been pretty well able to gauge those of the world to herself and perhaps she reflected that it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody."

Miss Crawley in Vanity Fair by Thackeray, which I am rereading.

“Change your conception of yourself and you will automatically change the world in which you live. Do not try to change people; they are only messengers telling you who you are. Revalue yourself and they will confirm the change.”

Neville Goddard, Barbadian mystic

Quotations from De Maistre and Burke in praise of prejudice

"Nothing is more vital to Man than prejudices. Let us not take this word in bad part. It does not necessarily signify false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, any opinions adopted without examination. Now, these kinds of opinion are essential to Man; they are the real basis of his happiness and the palladium of empires. Individual reason is, of its nature, the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it gives birth only to divergent opinions." Joseph De Maistre. I remember my supervisor Robert Tombs looking askance when I told him that I found De Maistre's ideas attractive, all those years ago at Cambridge before life began.

Quotations from J.R.R. Tolkien

“The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air."

Treebeard in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

'Military idiot and bar'

It is tempting to think that retired army officers are stupid. The ones who become British Conservative MPs, for example, or the ones who write for the papers. The explanation for the things they say must be more nuanced, that they are trained to be soldiers not geopolitical analysts. 

Colonel Richard Kemp was in charge of the British troops we sent to Afghanistan (why didn't we know better, after losing three Afghan wars?) and writes in the Daily Telegraph  In February of last year he hoped that Ukraine could take back the territory lost to Russia the previous year and part of Crimea, 'but only with our support'.

A total Russian collapse is surprisingly close

Will Zionism self destruct?

Alistair Crooke, formerly of MI6, in a talk he intends to give at the HSE University, Moscow, this month will say that Saudi Prince Bandar persuaded Donald Rumsfeld in 2006 to reduce Iranian power, increased by overthrowing their enemies the Taliban and Saddam, by overthrowing Assad. This is very interesting.

Putin put a stop to that game.

Now Israel is increasingly ruled by Middle Eastern Jews and is on the road to becoming another country in the region ruled by religious fanatics. The American evangelicals won't mind but liberal Democrat Jews will.

I wonder whether Israel will exist in 2100 but think it will not disappear without a world war. Seriously. I do not want it to cease to exist for several strong reasons, including wanting to avoid America launching a world war, but what a world of pain that languid dilettante Arthur James Balfour has caused.

Are these the end times, like the rustic American Evangelicals thought all along? And it's all England's fault.

"Sunak unveils biggest military spending increase in a generation"

Why is Rishi Sunak increasing defence spending massively when Great Britain is not threatened by any state actors? Why should we care what China does or what happens in the Middle East? Does no British politician understand anything about foreign affairs?

Will there always be an England? No.

For Saint George's Day a tweely expressed but devastating thought by Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, former Telegraph and Spectator editor (and former boss of Boris Johnson), Charles Moore. "Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years."

Quotations

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Only press on : no feeling is final.”
Rainer Maria Rilke


"In a general way it's very difficult to become remarkable. People won't take sufficient notice of one, don't you know." Joseph Conrad, quoted by Anthony Powell as the epigraph to his memoirs.

Patrick Cockburn is always interesting

Patrick Cockburn on February 24 in the i newspaper, tweeted that day by Peter Hitchens.

"As an unforced political error, Biden’s mistake over Gaza vies with President George W Bush in invading Iraq in 2003 and President Vladimir Putin ordering Russian troops into Ukraine in 2022. As a military conflict, Gaza might be small, but it has an infinite capacity to destabilise the region and the US itself.

"Israel, helped by the US, has wrecked a status quo in the Middle East that favoured them both and whose destruction they may already rue."

Patrick Cockburn today.

My country right or wrong

Patriotism is always a good thing. The problem nowadays is that so many people are very patriotic for foreign countries. I am one of them in the sense of loving Romania passionately. But with one's own country the rule should be "my country right or wrong". With other countries this rule should never apply, but it does. Especially when the other country in question is Israel. 

Americans' patriotism and lack of irony are two of their strengths but American patriotards are very annoying.

Equally annoying, and perhaps equally dangerous, are the people who think patriotism is all right in small doses, like an infection. Western Europe and England are full of them. These people are often globalists.

Patriotism is required by the Fourth Commandment. (Protestants call it the fifth.) Thou shalt honour thy father and mother. 

Of course it applies to immigrants whose mother and father are from another country but it is connected to ancestor worship.

'The least eventful war ever'

This is how wars generally begin, rather than because of plots by evil men. 

The Portuguese banknotes scandal of 1925 and the end of the first Portuguese Republic

This is the fascinating story of Alves Reis that could have been written by William Le Queux, Edgar Wallace or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, never dreamt of BUYING the Bank of Portugal with forged notes.

I am staying in the Hotel Metropole in Lisbon where Reis stayed until he had enough "money" for the Hotel Alvenida Palace.

In the story of Aladdin the Chinese empire is gripped by massive inflation because Aladdin was turning so many things into gold. Reis's forgeries created a boom and bust in Portugal which led to a coup against the First Republic and the benign despotism of Dr Salazar. 

Reiss became converted to Protestantism in gaol and converted many other prisoners.

The pursuit of happiness

Five suggestions for how to be happy, based on replies to questionnaires by people who had completed the Bristol University 'science of happiness' course:

Talk to strangers

Spend more of your money on others

Spend time in nature

Count your blessings

Be kind to others.

Quotations

"Real love simply means being able to say to someone else, 'What are you going through right now?'" Simone Weil

“Everything about this [English] society is disagreeable to me – from its limited way of thinking to its indecent manner of cooking vegetables”. Portugal’s greatest novelist, José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900), was a Consul in Newcastle and Bristol. He was one of the fairly few famous men to have lived and died in Queen Victoria's 63 year reign: Oscar Wilde and Charles Stewart Parnell are two others that spring to mind.

Franklin Foer says the Golden Age of American Jews began in 1967 and is drawing to a close

Subscribing to centre-left Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz provides me with a critique of IDF actions and the Israeli government that is absent in the UK and Romanian press and leads me to all sorts of interesting things.

Like this very interesting audio discussion with Franklin Foer about how liberalism benefited American Jews after 1967, as set out in his recent Atlantic article The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending. The Ha'aretz interviewer and he agree that American Jews believe in liberalism as a creed but also as a means to protect Jews.

This sense of security ended when Donald Trump became President. This was despite Mr Trump being the most philo-Semitic and Zionist of American president ever, President Biden possibly excepted.

From the Atlantic article:

10 Commandments of Propaganda

A summary by Belgian historian Anne Morelli of Lord Ponsonby's 'Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War' (1928).

1. We don't want war, we are only defending ourselves!

2. Our adversary is solely responsible for this war!

3. Our adversary's leader is inherently evil and resembles the devil

4. We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!

5. The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention

6. The enemy makes use of illegal weapons

7. We suffer few losses, the enemy's losses are considerable

8. Recognized intellectuals and artists support our cause

9. Our cause is sacred

10. Whoever casts doubt on our propaganda helps the enemy and is a traitor

Quotations

"I do not believe a word that comes out of your mouth. Your entire policy consists of provoking the Palestinians." Jacques Chirac, 'red with anger', talking to Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant." Sir Roger Scruton

"Love and do what you like." St Augustine

Before progressives were progressive about race

The Progressive movement in the USA in the first quarter of the last century were not like modern progressives. Carrie Chapman Catt was an American Emily Pankhurst - a leading suffragette who founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904. She argued that "White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage" because more white women than black ones would vote.

Quotations

Amnesic 

@_amnesic

It may be slightly inconvenient to remember Extraordinary Renditions, or US ambassador to Tashkent John Herbst being "livid" at the rogue UK ambassador, Craig Murray, for publicising the "not uncommon" practice there of boiling people to death

"Modern man is painfully confused.
He spends his vacation visiting the wonders of what the old world built, yet hates the beliefs that inspired them to build it."
I,Hypocrite (Twitter/X)

Christ is risen!

 

I wish all my Catholic and Protestant readers Happy Easter!

The Jesus Seminar, a group of liberal, publicity hungry New Testament scholars who were very fashionable in the USA around the turn of the century, disbelieved most of the Gospels, thought Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God and his corpse was probably thrown into a shallow dirt grave, where it rotted away or was eaten by wild dogs.

In fact few non-Christian historians doubt the crucifixion happened (the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus records it) and that something happened very shortly afterwards to create a movement which swept the civilised world.

The non-Christian New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann said ‘It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.’

These experiences were also enough to lead Peter and Paul to suffer death rather than renounce their faith that Jesus had risen from the tomb and was the Son of God. Their martyrdom under Nero is not questioned by any historian, as far as I ever heard. Peter is said to have been crucified upside down at his request because he did not believe himself worthy of the same death as Jesus, but this seems to be a legend.

The resurrection is the most significant event in the history of not only the West but the world, whether or not you believe it happened.

Talleyrand met a young man at a party who asked him for his advice about how to start a new religion. The renegade bishop turned pagan replied, 'First die and on the third day come again'.

This is a slightly adapted version of what I posted at other Easters.

Western media do not invent the facts but they invent the news. They are the great threat to peace.

Why is the big story on the BBC and world newspapers the collapse of a bridge in America, a day after it happened? 

If it happened in Pakistan or Chad it would be forgotten at once.

Why did people care about the death in custody of a petty criminal in America three years ago? 

Why was September 11 such a huge story, come to that? 3,000 people died the previous weekend in a natural disaster in Central America.

I allow myself only to skim the news each morning in a few minutes but I was very sad when a friend told me that the Princess of Wales (it is not polite to call Her Royal Highness Kate) has cancer. I wish her a swift recovery. 

Lots of stories, jokes and conspiracy theories had been circulating about her disappearance but I was angered that an Observer writer complained that 'On X, the influence of its “free speech absolutist” owner Elon Musk has been palpable. Among the more publishable conspiracies are the insistence that the footage of the princess was a body double, or that she was in a coma, or recovering from plastic surgery or was, in fact, dead.' 

I was angry because why shouldn't any silly theory be published, if not defamatory or obscene?

I don't remember believing in any conspiracy theory, though after everyone else I realised that Epstein was obviously in some way a blackmailer, working for some nefarious organisation. I don't know for whom. I have no idea if he worked for the Israelis (whom I recently learnt sought to use Monica Lewinsky to blackmail Bill Clinton). 

But what is wrong with people believing in conspiracies? 

I am more worried about people who believe the media.

Such innocent people believed the Ukrainians had a chance of driving the Russian army out of the Crimea and that anyone who suggested a negotiated peace was a Putin apologist and an appeaser. 

They think, unless stopped in Ukraine, Russia will invade NATO countries. 

They think the Houthis were impeding world trade before the Anglo-Americans intervened in the Red Sea. They were only impeding Israeli vessels (with possibly one exception) but thanks to the intervention the Red Sea is closed to traffic.

They think Iran and China endanger the West. They don't, but America does, by exporting Woke and seeking to overturn regimes (including the governments of Nato allies like Hungary and possibly Turkey). 

They imagine Israel was a democratic country going about her business blamelessly on 7 October when, for no reason, evil terrorists suddenly struck, beheading babies and raping women. Evil they may well be but this story starts in 1917. What AJP Taylor said of Hitler applies to Hamas too. "Hitler was a rational, though no doubt a wicked, statesman." 

They think people demonstrating against Israel or shouting 'From the river to the sea' (which is a crime in England) are antisemites. 

They think the Pope is trying to reform the financial and sexual corruption in the Catholic Church. 

Stories of what has been and is happening in the Vatican sound like the insanest conspiracy theories but most have been proven!

But can a cardinal, in order to cover up his financial crimes have tipped off the Australians to arrest Cardinal Pell who was conducting an audit? Cardinal Pell then went to gaol because of untrue allegations of interfering with a boy. I want to say no, of course not, but....

Yet the media do not talk much about this and nor about very many other Vatican scandals, because the liberal Pope is their hero. During Pope Benedict XVI's reign it was very much otherwise. 

And so it goes.

The Western media are controlled by Washington DC and the British secret service and make the world very much more dangerous than it would be without them. 

Rather like NATO.

Quotations

Interviewer: If you lived in the West Bank or Gaza, what would you do?

Ami Ayalon, former director of Israeli Security Agency Shin Bet: I would fight back, I would do everything in my power to secure my liberation. They know they’re the oppressors, they just don’t care.

An outside caterer preparing the nave ⁦of St Edmundsbury Cathedral ⁩ for a Masonic fund-raising dinner tonight

 

This is normal now in Protestant cathedrals in England. A silent discotheque took place in Canterbury Cathedral recently, which was the shrine in Catholic times of St Thomas a Becket, and the nave of the ancient Rochester Cathedral was used for crazy golf in 2019.

The World Crisis

'Not even a faint reservation was heard from the IDF's general staff in November, when the commander of the army's 36th Armored Division, Brig. Gen. David Bar Kalifa, issued a handwritten battle directive to his troops, calling on them to take revenge on the Palestinians.

'...Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram not only ordered his troops to open fire on Israeli civilians and blew up a Palestinian university in Gaza without permission, but also stated in an interview with journalist Ilana Dayan right as the war started that Israel's political leadership should refrain from any prospect of a political solution to the crisis. The IDF's chief of staff didn't say a word then either.'

Yagil Levy in Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz today

'Israel Is on the Brink of the Abyss'

'The Shin Bet security service and Military Intelligence "completely failed" to detect what Yahya Sinwar, Hamas' leader in the Gaza Strip, had planned, one defense official acknowledged. "It's also true that a few days before October 7, the consensus of all the intelligence agencies was that Hamas was growing only moderately stronger and hadn't found an alternative" to the cross-border attack tunnels Israel blocked.

'"Nevertheless, the defense establishment's expectation was that if the government continued the judicial overhaul, Bezalel Smotrich continued his life's work of erasing the Green Line [between Israel and the West Bank] and Itamar Ben-Gvir heated up the Temple Mount and the West Bank, it would end in rivers of blood," he added.'

Vladimir Putin at the Valdai International Discussion Club in September 2010

'But I would like to remind you that in the wake of Kosovo we did not recognise the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. We stopped short of that. As I said in public quite recently, we "swallowed" it. The only thing that I did at the time was to sign a decree on the development of economic relations with these territories. By the way, that was in line with United Nations requirements, because the UN was against the economic isolation of these territories. That was all. In principle, we were prepared for further dialogue.

'And yet armed forces were used. Some quarters are so fond of shooting and bombing that they thought they would succeed here too. Why did they think that they would succeed here when they had no success elsewhere, in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East? They failed here as well, and those who believe that it is the most effective instrument of foreign policy in the modern world will fail again and again.

'...One cannot behave in the world like a Roman emperor.'

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.

“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.

Tweets

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 partly 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. 

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. 

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. 

NY Times reporter Anat Schwartz, who wrote articles about Hamas rapes, was in Israeli military intelligence

Mondoweiss has published an article that everybody interested in the horrors in the Holy Land should read, regardless of which side they are on, if either. 

New York Times reporter Anat Schwartz, who wrote articles about rapes by Hamas, is an Israeli who has served in military intelligence.  

'There are screenshots of her “liking” certain posts that repeated the “40 beheaded baby” hoax, and that endorsed another hysterical post that urged the Israeli army to “turn Gaza into a slaughterhouse,” and called Palestinians “human animals.”' 

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

Admiral Collingwood is right

 

A still from the film ‘The Zone of Interest’, showing Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’s garden and, beyond the wall, the camp

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. 

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.

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.

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

Quotations

Caitlin Johnstone

@caitoz

So it turns out the US president can be an actual, literal dementia patient and the US empire will trudge on completely unhindered by this. Literally anyone could be president and it would not matter. A coma patient could be president. A jar of kalamata olives could be president.

"This world is concrete – it cannot be described in the abstract unhistorical language of the socialist or liberal theorist without removing the skin of significance that renders it perceivable" Sir Roger Scruton, How to Be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative