Wednesday 27 March 2024

Western media 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. 

Friday 22 March 2024

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.

In Catholic churches the Blessed Sacrament is reserved and a red light shines over It to tell Catholics where to genuflect, but there is nothing specifically sacred in a Protestant church. It's just a place.

My friend Bunny Sheffield said that 'People who don't believe in their own religion are destined to be conquered by people who believe in theirs.'

A silent discotheque sounds very strange and reminds me of Nietzsche's remark 'And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.'

Tuesday 19 March 2024

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


'Iran has shown caution. It has made it known that, at least for now, it wants to avoid a wider war. One reason is that their nuclear programme is not too far from developing a weapons capability but is not quite there yet. This is another legacy of Trump’s foreign policy as he pulled out of a deal that had been negotiated under the Obama Administration that held back Iran’s uranium enrichment. Trump promised that he had better ways to deal with the threat, which unsurprisingly he didn’t. Part of the Iran’s response to Soleimani’s assassination was to announce that it would no longer restrict its uranium enrichment. The Biden Administration was trying to revive the deal, but this needed Russian cooperation and it all fell away in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.'

Sir Lawrence Freedman in The New Statesman a month ago


11 million Haitians are the victims of the dogma that every nation on this planet can govern itself. Their plight under the gross misrule of successive presidents could be ignored more easily than the present anarchy. No remedy predicated on a return to self rule can succeed.

Sunday 17 March 2024

'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.'

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.

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.

Saturday 9 March 2024

A footnote to the massacres in Gaza

Volker Beck is a former Green Party Chief Whip in the German Bundestag who wants the people of Gaza permanently relocated outside the Holy Land. 

Here is an exchange on Twitter translated into English.

Israel calls on civilians to leave the area of ​​operations. This deserves international support: Egypt should enable an orderly evacuation of the civilian population to Sinai by the UN with return after the end of the war. UNHCR sets up camps.


How did the return of the Palestinian population go in the past?
What return? There won't be one.