When's the next "We are all Hezbollah" march?

Nasrallah calls on his Hezbollah followers to topple the Lebanese government, an anti-Syrian government minister is assassinated, and the prospect of civil war looms large.

Flashback (via Moonbat Media):

Not on the BBC...

Tuesday November 21:

An injured Israeli man is tended to by a paramedic after being wounded by a rocket fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, in the town of Sderot, Israel, Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006. Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired a rocket at the Israeli town Tuesday, seriously wounding at least one person, Israeli rescue services said. Militants (sic) have fired more than 25 rockets at Israel since Monday evening(AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)

Wednesday November 22:

School day in Sderot begins: A Qassam rocket landed Wednesday morning near an elementary school and a kindergarten in the southern town of Sderot.

The rocket landed in a northern neighborhood of the city at around 7:30 a.m., shortly before the start of the school day. Another three rockets landed inside the city at around 9 a.m.

The Magen David Adom emergency services reported that several people suffered from shock

Yaakov Yaakobov, who was hit by a rocket in a factory in the Sderot industrial zone on Tuesday morning, died of his wounds Tuesday evening.

Hamas' military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, claimed responsibility for the rocket fire. Sappers evacuated the remains of the rocket from the school's parking lot.

UN priorities:

UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Louise Arbour has decided not to meet with the families of the kidnapped soldiers during her visit to Israel. The families of Ehud Goldwasser, Eldad Regev and Gilad Shalit have approached the commissioner two weeks ago already, but after a series of evasive answers, the negative and final answer came Tuesday.

"The decision of the Commissioner Arbour not to meet with the families of the kidnapped soldiers during her visit to Israel should set off red lights in Israel and the other 15 countries that are signed on UN Resolution 1701. The UN is not interested in the fate of the soldiers, and maybe it doesn't even stand behind the resolution," said Benny Regev, brother of kidnapped soldier Eldad Regev.

Glenn Beck's "Exposed - The Extremist Agenda"

Surprised? No, not really.

Reuters:

KOLKATA, India, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of communists marched in the Indian city of Kolkata on Thursday demanding that Saddam Hussein's death sentence be lifted.

India's left parties, which won a record number of parliamentary seats in the 2004 elections, have a long history of opposing American foreign policy and have held huge protests in recent years against U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Protesters shouted "Hang Bush and Blair, release Saddam" as they marched in the heart of Kolkata, capital of the communist-ruled state of West Bengal.

Ed Richards seems like a bit of a twat to me

Some quotes from Media Guardian today:

"Ed Richards, the Ofcom chief executive, has defended the new wide-ranging restrictions on junk food advertising to children…"

"Five chief executive Jane Lighting: 'The long-term future of UK-produced children's programming outside the BBC is bleak.'"

"Mr Richards, of course, is the architect of a potentially big intervention into the media market - the public service provider."

More tax-funded media, more restrictions on the free market. Who is Ed Richards? Here's his CV:

Prior to Ofcom Ed was Senior Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister for Media, telecoms, internet and e-govt. Before that he was Controller of Corporate Strategy at the BBC. He also worked in consulting at London Economics Ltd, as an advisor to Gordon Brown MP and began his career as a researcher with Diverse Production Ltd, where he worked on programmes for Channel 4.

Ah, that explains it.

Milton Friedman RIP.

Dutch Cabinet Backs Burqa Ban

Er... Wow!

The Dutch cabinet has backed a proposal by the country's immigration minister to ban Muslim women from wearing the burqa in public places.

The burqa, a full body covering that also obscures the face, would be banned by law in the street, and in trains, schools, buses and the law courts.

"The fiasco of Tony Blair's terror strategy"

Fraser Nelson in The Spectator (registration required):

The fiasco of Tony Blair’s terror strategy has been one of the best-kept secrets in Whitehall. As a matter of principle, the Prime Minister never answers questions about MI5 or MI6 — although he enjoys flaunting what he claims is his close relationship with the ‘professionals’. Those affected by his years of indecision have tended to keep their counsel…

The head of MI5 came as close as she could to making this exasperation in the intelligence community explicit last week. In a rare public speech, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said she wished her job was as simple as fiction would have us believe — the spook dramas in which a small team of people hunt a known enemy, one at a time. In reality, MI5 is monitoring 1,600 suspects, with 2,800 staff trying to distinguish serious plots from youthful fantasy. They have scored several successes, most notably disrupting the alleged transatlantic airline plot this summer. But the jihadi menace, Dame Eliza concluded, will be with us for a generation.

Nelson states that the current strategy, ‘Project Contest’, which was designed in 2002, “reads like the woolliest sociological lecture by Sir Ian Blair into the causes of crime”. Last year a confidential report into Project Contest made the following observations: "The strategy is immature… Forward planning is disjointed or has yet to occur. Accountability for delivery is weak. Real world impact is seldom measured." And yet Project Contest survives. Ministerial dithering and the legacy of Gordon’s Brown freeze on the budgets of intelligence agencies when Labour first came to power have left the security services playing a life-or-death game of catch-up.

According to Nelson, Manningham-Buller’s intervention last week had nothing to do with a desire to see suspects detained for 90 days without charge; in fact, she resents government ministers making such suggestions. Sir Ian Blair may want 90 days, but Manningham-Buller would prefer a change in the law to allow continued questioning of terror suspects after they have been charged.

Nelson says that insiders have told him Dame Eliza was trying to make two points with her speech last week:

The first is that the typical homegrown Islamic terrorist is far more dangerous than the public understands… the suspects categorised as ‘essential’ by MI5, the highest risk of the three categories, are more likely to be trained by al-Qa’eda professionals — and seeking chemical weapons. Qualitatively and quantitatively, the threat is of a different scale. The deadly sophistication of the plans hatched by Dhiren Barot — the al-Qa’eda terrorist sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court to at least 40 years in prison earlier this month — shows how right Dame Eliza is on this score.

Her second point was to prepare the public for a terrorist success.

There’s a cheery thought.

The Gore Effect

Al Gore turns up in Australia with his "travelling global warming show". Result? The coldest minimum temperatures in over a century.

Journos sacked in Hong Kong

Press Gazette:

Irreverent farewell front pages are as much a part of journalistic culture as messy desks and bad pay.

But the new editor of the South China Morning Post, Mark Clifford, didn't see the funny side when colleagues prepared a front page for Sunday Morning Post editor Niall Fraser headlined: "You're a c**t, but you're a good c**t."

Two subs — Trevor Willison, who is British, and Australian Paul Ruffini — have been sacked over the affair. Now around 80 newsroom staffers, including many expatriate Britons, have signed a no-confidence motion in Clifford, an American who has been in charge of Hong Kong's biggest English-language daily for seven months...

One insider said: "The leaving page (as they usually do) included a number of digs at the management but was seen as generally pretty harmless. "What apparently upset Clifford was the use of the word c*** under the SMP masthead (with asterisks included, I should point out) and some mildy derogatory references to the newspaper's deputy editor, a Chinese woman by the name of Fanny Fung."

Anti-EU = anti-surrender

Richard North connects some important dots:

...because of the billions we have already wasted on the European defence project (to say nothing of all the other billions squandered) we are being forced to fight our real wars on the cheap. Because of that, we are in grave danger of losing...

Effectively, pro-war is anti-EU. On the other hand, support for the EU and all it stands for can only ensure our eventual surrender to the fanatics.

"The people all around me hate America"

Joshua Muravchik at foreignpolicy.com :

The silver lining in the cloud of anti-Americanism is that every stuffy orthodoxy inspires some bright, independent-minded people to rebel. Like many of you, I receive a steady stream of messages from behind enemy lines, so to speak—from France, Germany, Arab countries, and even the BBC — saying, “The people all around me hate America, but I love America.”

Azerbaijan Paper Investigated For Criticizing Islam

Radio Free Europe:

November 15, 2006 -- Azerbaijani prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into an Azerbaijani newspaper, after it published an article that said Islam was blocking humanity's development.

The article also argued that the Prophet Muhammad had only created problems for Eastern countries.

The small-circulation newspaper "Senet" published an article this month that compared European and Muslim values and asserted that Islam was sham religion that suffocated people, pulled them away from freedom, and hindered humanity's development.

The article also asserted that Muhammad was responsible for all misunderstandings of Islam.

Blair tries the Abu Hamza Defence

From The Telegraph:

Downing Street has instructed lawyers to challenge any prosecution based on the cash for honours investigation because ministers believe it has been compromised by unauthorised leaks. [Says Downing Street!]...

The lawyers have complained to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that the investigation, which began in March, has been undermined by dozens of leaks to the media which they blame on Scotland Yard...

Hamza claimed a fair trial was "impossible" because of a campaign against him by the media and politicians. Judgment will be given later.

Downing Street is coming to the same view that if there is to be a prosecution it will be almost impossible for there to be a fair trial because of the volume of stories in newspapers and on television and radio which have linked key Labour Party figures to the first political corruption investigation involving a serving Prime Minister for more than 70 years.

It’s already becoming known as the Abu Hamza Defence. I hope that phrase sticks - it'll really piss them off at Number 10.

"The primrose path of appeasement"

Melanie Phillips:

Do the core aims of al Qaeda to restore the medieval Muslim caliphate and call the infidel world to Islam lead inescapably back to Israel and Palestine? Do the ravings of Syed Qutb, the arch-ideologue of murderous Islamism who wrote well before Israel was created that the west was a conspiracy to destroy Islam, the Jews were the people of the devil and Muslims must recognise no secular authority whatever, lead inescapably back to Israel and Palestine? Do the Islamist attacks from Bali to Madrid to Chechnya to Indonesia to Nigeria, the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the murder and mayhem following the re-publication of the Mohammed cartoons, not to mention the 20-year genocide in Sudan, all lead inescapably back to Israel? Whoops – 40 civilians killed in Darfur in the last few days by Muslim Arab militiamen. So sorry…let’s talk moral outrage.

Yes, we damn well know where the causes lie: in genocidal religious totalitarianism. And we also damn well know that this is where the world divides: between those who will defend the civilised world against this monster, and those who seek to propitiate it by tossing it the remnant of the Jewish people that survived the last totalitarian genocide.

Into this sewer now stumbles none other than Prime Minister Tony Blair, determined that before he leaves office he will pull off his dream of solving Israel/Palestine. Convinced that he has the ability to persuade anyone of anything, his initiative exemplifies the greatest liberal hubris of all: the conviction that every problem in the world is driven by rational interests and is thus capable of peaceful and harmonious resolution if only the most gifted impresario of rationality in the world – one T Blair — gets involved. This fundamental delusion is causing Blair, a friend of Israel and famously a supporter of America and doughty defender of the west against attack, to put Israel, America and the west in great peril by tripping down the primrose path of appeasement.

Newsnight reports on radical British Muslims

Extract from a BBC (!!) item on Islamic extremism taken from Radio 4's PM. The full report is on Newsnight this evening.



Update. The Times:

A SENIOR member of the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is working as a computer technician at the Home Office, despite calls by Tony Blair for the group to be banned.

The activist, named as Abid Javaid, is said to be an official at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in Croydon, one of the department’s most sensitive branches...

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said... "If this individual has access to sensitive immigration details, can ministers still claim they can maintain the integrity of their ID card database?"

Thousands choke on their cornflakes...

Jim Naughtie introducing an item about Tory-supporting online broadcasters on this morning’s Today (13:15 in):

Their founders say they’re proud to be partisan. Is objective news on the way out?

That's a bit bloody rich.

Race hate laws

Lord Goldsmith has joined the chorus of Labour politicians who think that the race hate laws need to be toughened. I still haven't heard anything from the Tories yet.

Still, it gives me an excuse to post this old South Park episode.

"Cartman's Silly Hate Crime 2000"

"Tough on crime"

BBC: 'Cold turkey' pay-out of £750,000

Race Hate Laws

From Conservative Home:

I have found no Tory reaction to the BNP's latest publicity coup.

Nor I. The LibDems have condemned Labour politicians' calls for further restrictions on free speech. The Tories, to their shame, have been silent.

Update. Talking of LibDems...

Racist Murder and the BBC

Excellent post by Laban on the BBC's reporting of racist murders.

Jon Snow

Jon Snow on why he doesn’t wear a poppy on air: "I do not believe in wearing anything which represents any kind of statement."

He didn’t mind making a statement with his Make Poverty History wristband: "I had it on as I was about to interview Michael Howard on election eve. My producer suddenly asked: "Do you think you should be wearing that?" I said I should because it was beyond contention." (Via Michael Hoskin).

And here he is making another kind of statement - "Look at me, I’m a pretentious, cringe-inducing twat":