Beeb’s Newsnight Brings on Actress and Internet ‘Pastor’ to Promote May’s Brexit

More Tory bias from the Beeb, which is now angling to be the channel that hosts the debate between Tweezer and Jeremy Corbyn. On Monday, 26th November 2018, Newsnight held a studio debate over Brexit. Taking the government’s side was Lynn Hayter, wearing a dog collar, who, we were informed, was a vicar. She declared that she had been a Tory all her life, and believed the government was far better informed than we are, and so backed May.

However, the people on the Net, including Evolve Politics, soon found out that Hayter wasn’t quite what she appeared. She was an actress, who had appeared in various bit parts in EastEnders, Dickensian, The Dresser and The Chronicles.

As for being a vicar, well, no, she wasn’t. She was the Pastor of an internet church with a congregation of 69. The Rev Stevie pointed out that Pastor just meant that she was head of a church, which anyone can set up without any official registration or accreditation. And her church was ‘Seeds For Wealth Ministries’, which describes itself as a religious organization which can help people “realize, release and walk into your financial freedom in Christ. To Educate, Equip and Empower the saints.” Yes, it’s more Prosperity Gospel.

This is the name given to the type of theology which appeared in the 1980s, along with Thatcherism, Reaganomics, Yuppies and all-out corporate greed. It’s best described as a Gospel for the rich. In my experience, it’s mostly been pushed by the Evangelical, non-denominational churches. You know, the type whose members say they’re just ‘Christians’, as against all the other churches from Roman Catholics, the Orthodox churches, right down through Anglicanism, Methodism, Lutherans and the Reformed churches as all counterfeit. The idea is that if you’re a Christian, God will reward you with wealth and material goods. There’s also a New Age, pantheistic version, called Prosperity Consciousness, pushed by Deepak Chopra among other snake-oil merchants.

The Rev. Jim Bakker was also peddling this pernicious nonsense in the US before he got sent to the slammer for financial irregularities at his church. Apart from the fact that he was also having affairs with various female members of his congregation. Bakker was released from jail a few years ago, and wrote a book, denouncing Prosperity Gospel as a heresy. One of the priests at my local church here in Bristol had zero time for it. He was a prison chaplain, and he was disgusted with the way the Pastors preaching this stuff turned up, and promised the inmates that when they got out they’d have expensive cars, good housing and loads of money. But when the cons were release, they’d find there was no car, no fine house and no money waiting for them. And then somebody from the mainstream churches had to clean this psychological and theological mess up after these dodgy Pastors had done their pernicious work.

Christ doesn’t promise His followers wealth and possessions. He promises that the Lord will listen to their prayers, but He consistently condemns the rich for their greed and neglect of the poor, and champions the poor against them. As did the prophet Amos in the Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible. Other passages in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments also praise the poor against the rich, like this verse from the Psalms, which used to be recited during Evensong in the Book of Common Prayer.

He hath exalted the humble and meek
The rich he hath sent empty away.

Not a verse that would appeal to the Prosperity Gospelers, I would imagine. And some mainstream theologians will argue that Christ had very different intentions for His community and its moral life, which was at 180 degrees to the materialistic values of Roman society. As demonstrated by Christ Himself washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper, this was supposed to be a faithful community where indeed to be the first was to be the last, whose leaders were meant to serve their followers in humility, as against the kings and princes of the Roman world, who lorded it over their peoples. In fact the morals of the early Christian church were so different from that of the pagan Roman world that one Christian writer has talked about ‘the Christian Revolution’.

Back to Lynn Marina Hayter, Newsnight responded to these revelations by saying that

Claims that Lynn appeared on #newsnight as a paid actor are false. Lynn is a pastor and was a genuine participant of our Brexit debate. She carries out work as an extra using her middle name but this is not relevant to the capacity in which she appeared.

But Mike on his blog rightly described her as

So: Not a genuine priest, if by that we mean a member of a recognised church. But a genuine actor, and one known to the BBC. And the BBC is unlikely to admit trying to deceive us, so we have reason to doubt its claims.

And the internet made great sport of the fact that anyone can get themselves ordained as a Pastor over the Net, including George Galloway. Galloway described himself as ‘Monsignor’ George Galloway, parish of nowhere, diocese of Brigadoon. In this respect, Hayter’s credentials as a member of the clergy remind me of one of the characters in the Illuminatus! conspiracy novels by Michael Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, who sends out to people cards declaring that they are a genuine Pope or ‘Mome’, according to gender, and so should be treated right.

Tom Pride and others argued that such deception was a matter for resignation, and destroys any confidence that the Beeb is impartial. And Brexitshambles made the point that this was only one such incident. They said

Week after week we have a procession of scam artists appearing on @BBCNewsnight @bbcquestiontime and @SkyNews under the guise of audience participants or official commentators from opaquely funded lobbyists masquerading as educational charities….who checks these people out?

And Mike concluded his article about it by stating that following this, he doesn’t think the BBC will be at all impartial if it wins the decision to host the debate between Tweezer and Corbyn.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/11/30/the-strange-tale-of-the-vicar-of-brexit-why-the-bbc-shouldnt-host-the-brexit-debate-part-1/

As for Prosperity Gospel, I would strongly advise anyone with a Christian faith, or feels a calling towards Christianity, to give this fraudulent theology a wide berth. It’s not traditional Christian doctrine and the churches pushing it are, in my experience, very right wing. They do want the welfare state destroyed and the NHS privatized. And I’d go so far as to say that the Pastors running this theology are scamming people.

For proper spiritual nourishment, go instead to one of the mainstream churches, like the Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Reformed, Quakers, whichever church, doctrinal theology and form of worship appeals to you. But make sure they teach the traditional Christianity doctrine of genuinely taking care of the poor. The Non-Denominational churches despise the traditional churches in my experience, saying that they teach ‘a social Gospel’. Well quite. This means that they hate them because they’re socially engaged, with a left-wing view of empowering the poor and minorities through state action.

If you go to a church that tries to tell you that joining them will make you rich, and you shouldn’t use the welfare resources of the state, walk out, and go to someone better.

There are plenty of churches, which are working to transform our world for the better, which haven’t swallowed and thoroughly reject this Thatcherite rubbish.

Maoist Rebel News on Nazi Coup Plot in Germany

I’ve absolutely no respect for Chairman Mao. Far from being a liberator, the former Chinese dictator was a ruthless butcher, who killed and brutalized millions during the ‘Cultural Revolution’. Over 60 million people died in the artificial famine his regime created. He and his comrades were also vandals and barbarians, who tried to destroy China’s millennia old culture by smashing monuments and priceless art treasures, as well as the ruthless persecution of religion, including Buddhism and Taoism, as well as Christianity.

But Jason Unruhe of Maoist Rebel News says some very interesting things and makes some very acute observations of contemporary capitalism. In this piece, he discusses reports, found only in the Mail and RT, that the German authorities discovered a Nazi plot by serving members of the armed forces to overthrow the government. The plot including 14,000 soldiers, who were members of Nazi organisations. It’s a trivial number compared to the vast numbers in the German armed forces, but it’s serious because they were genuine Nazis. In the event of widespread unrest, the plotters in the military planned to leave the civilian government to its fate, and start re-opening concentration camps, in which they would incarcerate leftists and members of ethnic minorities.

Unruhe notes that this story seems to have been comprehensively buried by all of the media, with the exception of the two above, because of its explosive nature. He also states that we don’t know how many people have been arrested. This is a serious threat to democracy and justice in Germany. It means anti-Fascists have to become better organized and equipped, with German antifas now in a dangerous position. This plot means that they are Europe’s first and best line of defence against a real Nazi resurgence.

I can’t say I’m surprised at the high number of real Nazis in Germany’s military. The Baader-Meinhof Gang in the 1970s were spurred on to carry out their terror attacks from the realization that the denazification campaign after the War had only affected a comparatively small number of those serving Hitler’s vile regime. Many others had escaped, and despite their horrific crimes were living peaceful, comfortable lives. The British and Americans recruited Nazi agents and collaborators, including men responsible for vicious pogroms and massacres against Jews, for the intelligence agencies during the Cold War. It thus really wouldn’t surprise me if they let many Nazi members of the armed forces keep their jobs in the Cold War as part of Europe’s defence against Stalin. Just as they set up Gladio, a left-behind resistance network that would fight Communism if the Warsaw Pact successfully invaded and conquered the West. The feared invasion mercifully never happened, but various elements of the Gladio network were involved in far right-wing terrorism. It’s possible something similar could have been behind the persistence of real Nazism in the armed forces. Also, the neo-Nazi papers on sale in the eastern parts of the Federal Republic after the War styled themselves as the newspapers for soldiers and peasants.

Fascism is now a very real threat in Europe, with the election of Far-right wing parties to power in Poland, Hungary and other countries in eastern Europe, Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, and the Fascist Alternative fuer Deutschland on the rise in Germany. The leaders and senior members of the latter do have Nazi, or neo-Nazi connections. They’ve made speeches denouncing Germany’s Holocaust memorial as a ‘national shame’, and declared that if they got into power they’d open an underground railway to Auschwitz.

But I’m not as pessimistic as Unruhe is here. I got the distinct impression that young Germans are very anti-totalitarian, and that German anarchists, who are very ready to fight Fascism on the streets, are very well organized.

This is, of course, if there’s anything to this story at all. I think it probably is true, but it may be fake news concocted for some strange reason, and released only by those two sources. I also wonder about the figures involved. 14,000 sounds very high. I’m not sure that the National Democrats or the German Republican Party, two of the main neo-Nazi parties before the AfD a few years ago, had anywhere near that number of members. They certainly didn’t have much popular support, as they always came very low down the list in German elections, although the NDP did manage to get something like four members elected to the Reichstag or somewhere in Germany before they were banned.

But if this is true, then it’s a frightening demonstration of how serious a threat Fascism now is. It has to be fought wherever it’s found, right across Europe, before it seizes power again and begins another Holocaust.

Frankie Boyle Jokes about Israel

I found this short video of about 5 1/2 minutes long posted by Foam Chomsky on YouTube. It’s a series of jokes about Israel by Scots comedian Frankie Boyle, intercut with footage of Israeli soldiers beating, shooting and killing unarmed Palestinians.

As you would expect from Boyle, some of the jokes are coarse and nearly all of them savage. He starts by saying that he’s learning the Israeli military martial art, and now knows various ways to kick a Palestinian woman in the back. Female porn stars are now calling their pubic area a ‘Gaza Strip’, because it’s been viciously pummeled and there’s no hope of children getting out there alive. The monarchy also gets a drubbing. On Prince William’s visit to Israel, Boyle quips that he’ll be the first British royal to go there who wasn’t leading a crusade. He shreds the Israeli claim that the Palestinians use people as human shields. He talks about how you have to visualize Palestine as a cake. It’s a cake that’s being pummeled by an angry Jew. Netanyahu’s name spoken with a Glaswegian accent sounds like a rubbish Scots internet provider. They should call comb-overs Netanyahus, because they’re an attempt to colonise territory they’ve no right to.

One of the jokes was cut by the Beeb from Boyle’s appearance on stage at the Palladium. There’s also a series of tweets by Boyle attacking Israel, including caustic replies to American comedian Bill Maher and former Tory MP David Cameron. The latter gets it for his hypocrisy wishing Muslims a happy Eid al-Fitr at the same time he was bombing their countries.

I don’t know if Boyle has been accused of anti-Semitism yet. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had. But there’s also an element of irony here, in that Boyle also appears to have swallowed the media lie that Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitic, even though Corbyn isn’t, and the people making the accusation are the same apologists for Israel that Boyle himself has torn into.

Private Eye Criticizes Israel, But Continues Smearing Labour as Anti-Semitic

Here’s another example of Fleet Street’s double standards over Israel and the Labour party. In last fortnight’s Private Eye for 16th to 29th November 2018, there was an article in the ‘Street of Shame’ column attacking Israel and its attempts to censor criticism. But the magazine continues to spread the smear that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party are anti-Semites, as shown very clearly in a review of Jonathan Coe’s Middle England.

The article, ‘Value Judgment’, was about the Israelis’ refusal to let British journalist Sarah Helm, the author of an article on suicide amongst young people in Gaza, enter the country. It ran

Foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt announced this month that media freedom is at the heart of his new “values-based” foreign policy. “Democracy, the rule of law, and freedom of expression mean nothing unless independent journalists are able to hold the powerful to account,” he declared, “however inconvenient this might be for those who find themselves on the receiving end.”

Hunt’s promise is being put to the test at once by the Israeli government’s refusal to give veteran British correspondent Sarah Helm a press pass to enter Gaza.

In the 1990s Helm covered the first Gulf War and the Oslo accords as diplomatic editor of the Independent, and later served as its Jerusalem correspondent. She has reported on the Middle East regularly ever since. But her latest application produced this reply from Ron Paz of Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO): “It has not been proven to the satisfaction of the GPO that your primary occupation is News Media. Therefore the GPO is unable to issue a GPO card for you.”

Shome mishtake, shurely? In the past four years Helm had applied seven times to enter Gaza through the Erez checkpoint, and had never been turned down before. She reported on these visits for the Observer, Sunday Times, Guardian and Indy as well as Newsweek, New York Review of Books and New Statesman – all of which look remarkably like “News Media” to anyone except Mr Paz.

Last month Hunt said he was “very concerned” by the Hong Kong authorities’ rejection of a visa for Victor Mallet, Asia editor of the Financial Times. “in the absence of an explanation from the authorities,” he said, “we can only conclude that this move is politically motivated.” The same applies to the banning of Helm, since the official reason is so patently absurd. Was it something she wrote? Such as, perhaps, a harrowing 5,500-word long read for the Guardian in May this year on the rising number of suicides inside Gaza, particularly among the young and bright?

Helm has hired the Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard to challenge the ban. Following Hunt’s announcement that he is now a global champion of press freedom, the Eye asked the Foreign Office if he would be taking up Helm’s case with the Israelis. At the time of going to press there was no answer. (p. 8).

All good stuff, showing the Israeli state’s determination to silence foreign reporting of its gross maltreatment of the Palestinians, and the double-standards over this by Jeremy Hunt at the Foreign Office. And the paper has many times in the past satirized the Israelis over this. But like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, they too have joined the rest of the press in attacking Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party as anti-Semites, simply because Corbyn does stick up for the Palestinians.

The Eye’s ‘Literary Review’ in that same issue carried a very critical review of Jonathan Coe’s Middle England, ‘Remoans of the Day’. The novel, one gathers, is a fictional description of the state of modern Britain in the run-up to Brexit. The Eye’s anonymous reviewer attacked it for its pro-Remain bias, in which all the Leave characters are described as racists and no discussion is made of those who voted Leave on the issue of sovereignty, rather than immigration. It also criticizes the book for its sympathetic portrayal of a female supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, despite her anti-Semitism. The review states

Coe’s sole attempt at balance appears to be a portrait of Doug’s daughter, a vindictive Corbynista. His heart isn’t in it. Coe explains away her “knee-jerk antisemitism: as the product of “passionate support for the Palestinian cause” rather than, say, two millennia of racial prejudice. He forgives her and reflects that the young were right to be angry “at the world his generation had bequeathed”. Nowhere, of course, does Coe explain away knee-jerk Islamophobia among Leave voters as the result of “passionate opposition” to the oppression of women or righteous anger at being bequeathed a world where Islamists murder schoolgirls at Arianna Grande concerts. (p. 34).

But as the Eye should know, Corbyn never has been an anti-Semite, and nor are his supporters. Corbyn has always stood up for people of all races and religions against persecution, as Mike has shown on his blog, where he listed the number of times Corbyn supported Jews against what he perceived as prejudice and intolerance. And Corbyn’s supporters not only include decent, anti-racist non-Jews, but also entirely self-respecting Jews, who are far from being ‘self-hating’, as they are smeared by the Israel lobby. But the Eye’s determined to maintain the lie that they are.

Coe also seems to believe this lie, despite his apparent sympathies with the character. Which suggests that Coe, despite his liberalism, appears to have swallowed all this bilge about anti-Semitism absolutely uncritically. Unless he, and his agent and editor were also afraid of the Israel lobby and what might happen to his literary career and their book sales if he really told it as it is and also got accused of anti-Semitism.

And it’s more than possible that the Eye is also afraid to debunk the anti-Semitism smears, because they fear being smeared as anti-Semites in turn. The Eye has frequently been hit with libel suits, the most notorious being Cap’n Bob Maxwell’s attempts to shut them down in the 1980s. All of the pieces in the Eye are anonymous, and while the magazine has attacked Israel and the British secret state in the past, there appears to be lines that the magazine definitely isn’t prepared to cross. Perhaps there also afraid that if they reveal that, er, Corbyn and his supporters ain’t anti-Semites, a similar smear against them will close the magazine down. Quite apart from the issue of the magazine’s own political bias. Even before the anti-Semitism smears erupted, the Eye was attacking Corbyn for being ‘far left’, especially in its ‘Focus on Fact’ cartoon.

It also casts doubt on the political convictions of the Eye’s deputy editor, Francis Wheen. Wheen, like Hislop, is another public schoolboy, but appears to be firmly left. He’s written biographies of both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as publishing a collection of the Eye’s literary reviews in the 1990s as Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion. But his magazine’s determination to smear Corbyn and prevent a future Labour government on the basis of accusations of political extremism and anti-Semitism suggests that his heart is very much with the Neoliberal Thatcherite wing of the so-called ‘Moderates’.

‘I’ Columnist Wants MPs to Defend Palestinians After Joining Anti-Semitism Smears against Labour

The I’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is one of the few Fleet Street columnists, who I respect. She writes about racism, but acknowledges that it is not confined to Whites hating Blacks, but affects people of all races and colours. She’s also a genuinely moderate Muslim, fiercely critical of the bigots and preachers of hate in her religion, and condemns the White, non-Muslim politicians who pander to them in the hope of garnering votes.

Tweezer’s Denial of Asylum to Asia Bibi, Pakistani Persecuted Christian

A few weeks ago, she attacked Tweezer for refusing sanctuary to Asia Bibi, the Christian Pakistani woman acquitted of blasphemy in Pakistan. Other companies have offered to take Bibi in, but not May, who feared that it would upset this country’s Muslims. Alibhai-Brown then described the case, showing how dubious the accusation was, and the prejudice and hatred Pakistani Christians face. She also stated that the country was also unsafe for Shi’a Muslims like herself. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, had intended it to be a secular state with separation between state and mosque. But this had swiftly been overturned, most notoriously by the military dictator General Zia ul-Haqq, who ruled the place in the 1970s. Everything she said was correct. The Beeb has also screened documentaries about the arrests of people in Pakistan for blasphemy. It’s a crime that carries the death penalty, and Bibi has spent over a decade on death row. Most of those accused, however, are Muslims, and it looks very much like the majority of accusations are false, being used as a weapon in family and clan disputes. In the case of Bibi, she was accused of blasphemy by a group of women with whom she was working. They sent her to fetch water for them to drink. She stopped to take a drink herself, so they accused her of ‘polluting’ it before going to accuse her of blasphemy. Everything about it says to me that this is all about caste. Islam in Pakistan has a caste system like India, though not as severe. Many of Pakistan’s Christians are sheikhs, one of the lowest castes, working as bonded labourers in the brick kilns. It looks like Bibi was one of these low caste workers, and the Muslims for whom she fetched the water were outraged at her taking a drink from it because they believed that the touch of a low caste person polluted it. Just like high caste Indians at one time would throw away their food if even the shadow of one of the Dalits, the Untouchables, fell on it.

There’s more to be said about the case, but Alibhai-Brown was right to attack the vicious, murderous bigotry behind the accusation and Tweezer’s own cowardice in refusing to give Bibi asylum. I’d go further, and say that while there is a danger that the preachers of hate in British Islam would try to capitalize on Bibi being given asylum, that’s no evidence for not admitting her to Britain. And it also shows Tweezer’s low view of British Islam, if she thought the intolerance of bigoted minority was worth capitulating to. Not all Muslims are fanatics and bigots by any means, but Tweezer’s refusal to take in Asia Bibi suggests that she feels that nevertheless, enough of them are. It’s a decision which would delight the Islamophobes, who believe that all Muslims are a threat to traditional British religious freedom, and that liberal governments are too afraid to confront them.

Alibhai-Brown on Israel’s Persecution of the Palestinians

In yesterday’s I for the 27th November 2018, Alibhai-Brown tackled the plight of the Palestinians and their oppression under the Israelis in an article entitled ‘The Holy Land needs some goodwill: Plight of the Palestinians should be remembered by all’, on page 15. She began the article by stating that Christmas is the time when devout Christians turn their minds to the places where Christ lived, preached and died, and that there is a massive tourist industry in the Holy Land. It is a country which contains sites sacred to all three of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and that for centuries the religions coexisted in peace.

This is true no longer, as Israel increases its dominance. She states that Bethlehem has been turned into an open air prison, and that last year Palestinian Muslims were denied entrance to the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam. Netanyahu’s oppression of the Palestinians is supported by Donald Trump and American Christian fanatics, whose decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem shows that Muslim Arabs mean nothing to him and his government.

Shalhoub-Kavorkian and Dimbleby on Oppressed Palestine

She then goes on to quote Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kavorkian of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the routine brutality and second class status of the Palestinians. The prof. wrote

Violence is central to the political logic of the Israeli state and its occupation of Jerusalem. Enacted in the hundreds of daily acts of harassment perpetuated by heavily armed soldiers, police, settlers, and undercover security personnel belonging to the state of Israel, much of the violence occurs routinely and it goes largely unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Palestinians, native to and residing in Jerusalem, are categorized by Israeli law as ‘permanent residents’ or as foreign residents who hate to prove to the Ministry of Interior that their ‘centre of life’ – where they live, go to school, get medical care and pay for utilities are all taking place in Jerusalem.

She then moves on to discuss a ‘poignant’ book on Palestine, published by Jonathan Dimbleby, now the presenter of Question Time in 1980. This was when he was the maker of foreign documentaries, and the book was accompanied with photographs by Sir Donald McCullin. The book apparently shows the great diversity of Palestinian life and culture as well as moving tales of dispossession and pain. Re-reading it now, she realized how much worse their plight had become. She quotes the book as saying

The struggle is still presented in a woefully lopsided fashion: a small embattled, occasionally obstinate but usually admirable democratic state (Israel) under challenge from a despicable, occasionally pathetic, but usually brutal gang of desperadoes (the PLO).

Defending Palestine and Anti-Semitism Smears

She is very aware that simply discussing the plight of the Palestinians is met by accusations of anti-Semitism. She writes

Now the reporting of Israeli injustices brings on instant accusations of anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, she also swallows the line that Israel was created in response to the horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. It wasn’t. Jewish colonization began long before, after the Balfour Declaration during the First World War. She states that Israel exists and must exist as a safe homeland, before going to make the point that the horrors of the Nazis’ persecution don’t give Israel the right to break international laws and violate the human rights ‘of those whose land was taken to create their homeland’.

Pro-Palestinian Pilgrimage to Jerusalem

The article then goes on to discuss the book, Walking to Jerusalem, by Justin Butcher, a playwright and activist, whose launch she attended. This is the record of a pilgrimage made by hundreds of ordinary people, who went on foot to Jerusalem, funded by a small charity, the Amos Trust. The pilgrims arrived just before the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, in order to ‘change the record of a hundred years of injustice to the Palestinian people.’ She states that the marchers included Jews, which should surprise no-one, who knows how very many Jews are critical of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and the crimes committed in their name by Netanyahu’s thugs.

She also notes that over 200 Gazans were killed by Israeli forces, some of whom were medical workers and journalists. Settlers were stealing more land and homes. Although some Israelis were also wounded and killed, and too many live in fear, this was an unequal clash.

Alibhai-Brown’s Call for the Public to Contact their MPs

She concludes the article

Maybe one thing we can all do this Christmas is to ask our MPs to be more openly critical of Israel and do what the walkers did – support peaceful Palestinian men, women and children who have for so long been denied rights, livelihoods and dignity. Sometimes goodwill is the best present.

Alibhai-Brown and the Anti-Semitism Smears against the Labour Party

It’s a good article, but marred by Alibhai-Brown’s own behaviour towards Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. When the Israel lobby and Conservative media and Jewish establishment once again attacked Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour for not signing up to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, Alibhai-Brown was one of the hacks denouncing the Labour party as full of anti-Semites. But this article suggests she know how false at least some of those allegations must have been. But there is no retraction. The Fleet Street Groupthink about the Labour party, and the bias of the I’s editor and proprietor apparently appear to be too strong.

She also must realise that with the Israel lobby holding power in both the Tories and the Labour party through their ‘Friends of Israel’ groups, and the Jewish Labour Movement in the Labour party, any chance of MPs stepping out of line to risk their careers defending the Palestinians is remote. Not while there’s a chance that someone at the Israeli embassy will pick up where Shai Masot left off and start deciding that they’re a person, who shouldn’t be in the next cabinet. And although the media may claim that the affair’s all over, their haste to do so shows that the conspiracy – and the accusations of anti-Semitism against people like Mike who correctly called it that – has had the desired effect. MPs aren’t going to risk being sidelined or thrown out as anti-Semites if they dare confront the lobby.

The Israel Lobby and the Suppression of Pro-Palestinian Reporting

As for Dimbleby and his book, I very much doubt there’s much chance of anyone at the Beeb now being so courageous in criticizing Israel. Ten years ago Peter Oborne made his documentary on the Israel lobby for Channel 4’s Despatches. This showed not just the extent of the lobby in the parliamentary parties, but also how they bullied and intimidated journalists with accusations of anti-Semitism. This included Graoniad editor Alan Rusbridger, and several very well respected Beeb journos, who dared to describe the atrocities committed by Israel and the massacres by its allies, the Lebanese Christian phalange, in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. These accusations were found by the broadcasting regulatory bodies to be without foundation. But that tactic is still being used by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the other thugs and bully-boys in the Israel lobby.

And this tactics will continue to be made, unless more people stand up to it. Corbyn and his supporters aren’t anti-Semites, but they were smeared as such simply because they defended the Palestinians. The Israelis are afraid that there just might be a foreign prime minister, who doesn’t defer to them, and won’t tolerate their persecution of the indigenous Arabs. Alibhai-Brown must surely realise this, but she joined their attacks on Corbyn and Labour anyway.

And those attacks on Corbyn and politicians like him will continue, unless journos like Alibhai-Brown practice what they preach and actively support and defend him and other Israel-critical politicos in their columns against such mendacious and false accusation of anti-Semitism.

Ex-CIA Head Michael Scheuer States America Should Not Support Israel

I found this short clip of Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA, speaking at a debate held at Georgetown University. He was answering questions about his view that America should not support Israel.

The panel are incredulous at this, and raise the old canard about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East.

He makes it clear that he believes that America should be indifferent to whether Israel survives, and that democracy is a silly foreign policy goal. This has been proved in Afghanistan. Against the response that democracies are less likely to wage war on democracies, he replies that he spent four years when two of the world’s greatest democracies managed to kill 640,000 of their own people. He states that democracies will fight like other people, but it is not the business of the US to install democracy anywhere. ‘We don’t do it very well. We do it ridiculously badly as a matter of fact.’ He goes on to say that it is a canard that countries have a right to exist. No, they have a right to defend themselves.

He then denies the charge that Israel and its representatives corrupt US politics. No, it’s Israel-supporting Americans who do that. As for his evidence for this, he points to what they did to Ambassador Freeman. The panel states that that was not corruption, it was a lobby doing what a lobby does. The panel then compares the Israel lobby to the tobacco lobby and the gun lobby. And Scheuer replies by saying that none of these lobbies rebound to America’s harm, while the Israel lobby does exactly that. They then ask him about the harm the Israel lobby has done. Scheuer responds by saying that they have convinced Americans that Israeli interests are identical with US national security interests. When the chairman of the panel says that a lot of people would agree with that, Scheuer says bluntly that a lot of people are foolish, and leading America into defeat.

I think Scheuer’s an old school American Conservative of the type who believes that America has no business telling other countries how to run their affairs. It’s classic isolationism. He isn’t alone. One of the American servicewomen voicing this objection was a senior Pentagon officer, who despise the Neocons for dragging America into a series of pointless wars in the Middle East.

And no, America is not good at installing democracies. It has always instead installed Fascist dictatorships. The democracies it has installed, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are artificial and very dependent on continued US military support.

As for Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East, that’s rubbish. Lebanon is also a democracy, though very carefully limited in a system of consociality, so that the different religions occupy particular posts in a very careful balancing of sectarian power. Iran’s a theocracy, but it’s people also vote in elections, so it has a democratic component. The democracy the Neocons wanted to bring to Iraq was similarly limited, in that they wanted the only parties to gain power to be those standing for complete free trade, low taxes, and so on. The constitution the Americans imposed on Iraq has written into it that the Iraqis’ own oil industry cannot be nationalized. It has remain in private hands. Which means those of the western multinationals. And Israel itself is very dubious as a democracy. The Palestinians are very much second-class citizens and the Israeli state only acts on behalf of the European and American Jewish colonists.

And it should be absolutely axiomatic – a clear, fundamental true political principle – that one major reason why so much of the Arab and Muslim world hates America has absolutely nothing to do with hatred of democracy or western civilization per se, but because America backs Israel, the persecution of that nation’s indigenous Arab and Muslim population, and invades and plunders other Arab and Islamic states.

Scheuer’s a brave man for pointing all this out, and I’m surprise the Israel lobby hasn’t smeared him as an anti-Semite. Perhaps they have. But he’s right. As are all the other decent critics of Israel, that the country and its foreign lobbies have smeared.

Jeremy Corbyn Calls on MPs to Reject Tweezer’s Brexit

Mike’s put up several articles pointing out that Tweezer’s Brexit deal is incredibly desperate. No-one wants it, whether they’re extreme-right Leave supporters, or left-wing Remainers. Or even left-wing Leave supporters, who certainly exist and were one element in the vote to Leave last year. Tweezer has thus been running around trying to get the British public to support it, and has appealed to the Labour party to do so as well. 26 Labour party MPs turned up to the Tory briefing, and at present they’re undecided. Only half of them will vote for it, if that. And if they do, then they will earn the hatred and resentment of the voters, who put them in parliament for their betrayal of ordinary working people to the Tories.

Here’s a video RT put up showing Jeremy Corbyn’s speech in which he urged the House to reject it. Corbyn says

(The) Prime Minister says that if we reject this deal, it will take us back to square one. The truth is, Mr Speaker, under this government we’ve never got beyond square one, the botched deal is a bad deal for this country, and all yesterday did is mark the end of this government’s failed and miserable negotiations, there can be no doubt that this deal would leave us with the worst of all worlds, no say over future rules and no certainty for the future.

Ploughing on is not stoic, it’s an act of national self-harm. The Prime Minister may have achieved agreement across 27 heads of state, but she’s lost support of the country. This deal is not a plan for the future of Britain, so for the good of the nation, the House has very little choice but to reject this deal.

Massive applause and uproar.

I hope the whole deal collapses, along with May’s government, they have to call a new election and Corbyn wins. If Tweezer gets kicked out tomorrow, it won’t be too soon.

‘Chicken Theresa May’ Excerpt from Have I Got News For You

As I commented earlier on a piece by Cassetteboi taking the mick out of Tweezer, May has form when it comes to challenging Corbyn to debates. The last time she did so at the election last year, she ran away from him and said Amber Rudd instead.

This massive cowardice did not go unnoticed. Here’s a clip from Have I Got News For You in which Ian Hislop, Paul Merton, Victoria Coren-Mitchell and guests, including the priest, who used to be a member of the Communards way back when, talk about May.

They remark that it’s just been confirmed that she wouldn’t appear on Woman’s Hour either, sending someone else there instead. Victoria Coren quips in response to May’s comment that the Brexit negotiations will need a ‘bloody difficult woman’ that there is one already in Angela Merkel. There’s also a dig at the Fuhrage. May said that if Corbyn got in, he’d go ‘naked and alone into the debating room’. Coren states that so far this has only happened to a drunk Nigel Farage.

And then there’s a very good description of Tweezer. In response to May being called ‘chicken’ by the Mirror, Coren comments that you can get chicken Theresa at a restaurant near her. It’s thin-skinned, boneless and can’t be grilled. Oh yes, and another true word said in jest!

Two of the Candidates for the Fifty Pound Note: Alan Turing and Thatcher

Mike today put up a piece about the two candidates the government is considering sticking on the back of the fifty pound note. They are Alan Turing, the wartime mathematical genius, who broke the enigma code and helped shorten the war. One of the machines Turing designed, or helped design to break the code was programmable, and Turing is respected as one of the founders of modern computing.

He was, however, gay at a time when it was very much against the law. He was convicted of gross indecency, and chemically castrated, which led to him taking his own life.

Thatcher, on the other hand, is the woman whose policies have inflicted nothing but misery on this planet for nearly forty years. She started the Tories’ and New Labour’s privatization programme, including that of the NHS, the destruction of the welfare state and deliberately made signing on for unemployment benefit as humiliating as possible, in order to deter the poor from doing so. She was also determined to break the unions, manufacturing a strike by the NUM through the gutting of British coalmining, purely to break the union that had brought down Heath’s government years before. And she used the police has her army to attack and beat the miners, aided by a complicit media, including the Beeb. These ran the footage of the strike at Orgreave colliery backwards to make it appear that the miners were attacking the police, while it was the other way round.

Exactly as the great peeps on Twitter, whose comments Mike quotes in his piece about it.

Ah, but Thatcher was a chemist! She worked for Walls, inventing the process that injects air into ice cream to make it appear that there’s more of it than there is.

Well, if the government wants to put scientists, and especially women scientists, on the fifty pound note, I’ve got a few suggestions of my own. Female scientists they could choose include:

Dorothy Hodgkin. She’s the woman who should have got the prize for discovering the structure of DNA, as Crick and Watson were looking completely in the wrong direction until they walked past the door of her lab, and heard her talking about her work. She lost the Nobel to them, but did get another prize for another great discovery she made. If she hasn’t been already, it’s the right time to have her commemorated on our folding stuff.

Jocelyn Bell Purnell. She was the astronomer, who discovered pulsars. These are tiny, dense stars at the end of their lives, which send out a radio signal. They spin very quickly, so that the signal sweeps across the sky, so that they appear as a regular beat. At first it was believed that they might be signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. Some astronomers also believe that, while they’re natural, space-traveling aliens could use them as lighthouses to navigate their way across the Galaxy.

Helen Sharman. She’s another chemist, though at Mars, rather than Walls. But she is know for being the first Brit into space when she joined the British-Russian space mission to Mir in the 1980s. Since then, she’s been something of a science educator, appearing at events to encourage children to take up science.

Caroline Herschel. She’s the brother of John Herschel, and daughter of William. She and her brother were astronomers in 18th century Bath, making telescopes and discovering new stars.

I’m sure there are many others. These are all astronomy and space related, because that’s the area I’m interested in and know most about. All of these ladies have a better claim to be on the Fifty pound note than Thatcher.

But if you want another bloke, how about Dr. Jacob Bronowski. He was another mathematician working during the War. He was also the presenter of the 1970s Beeb science blockbuster, The Ascent of Man. He was also a Fabian socialist with a hatred of war. In The Ascent of Man he makes his view of armed conflict very clear by saying: ‘War is theft by other means’. It’s parody of Clausewitz’s famous phrase ‘War is politics by other means’. Bronowski’s description of war is very true, especially now when we’ve seen that the humanitarian interventions in the Middle East have all been about conquering them in order to despoil their oil reserves, loot their state industries and stop any kind of Arab and Islamic support for Israel. And Iran appears to be next on the hit list.

However, I do like the suggestion of Raab C. Brexit that it should be the sage of Govan, Rab C. Nesbitt on the notes. Having his mug staring out at them might just put a few of the really filthy rich off when they get it out to pay for their bottle of Krug.

Remember, it was Nesbitt who predicted that there’d be a war between the Toffs and the Scum. The Toffs would win initially, because they’ve got the army. But the Scum would be the victors, because they have all the Rottweilers.

See also Mike’s article at: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/11/27/whose-face-do-you-want-on-the-back-of-the-50-note-alan-turing-or-margaret-thatcher/

Cassetteboi Versus Theresa May

Here’s another satirical video taking a swipe at Tweezer from YouTube. This time it’s those jolly funsters Cassetteboi editing May’s speeches to make her sing about how stupid, evil and ridiculous her government is.

The lyrics they make her sing are

The government should be able
To say more than
‘Strong and Stable’
And it’s wrong
To believe the fable
That I belong
At the negotiating table
And how can I negotiate
If I can’t face Corbyn
In a debate?
It’s easy to investigate
Precisely why
I won’t participate
I want to make sure
I can ignore
The public concerns about
U-Turns
You have to learn
There is no proof
That I will tell you the truth
I don’t know why
People vote for me
It’s like
The more policies
I talk about
The more problems
You see
And let’s not forget
It’s me you elect
It means a harmful
Far-right Brexit
Everything we do
As we leave the EU
Will be not for the many
But for the few
I know whose side I’m on
Ordinary people are easy
To dismiss
And yes
The message we’re sending them
Is this:
I could go
Into a lot more detail
Explain why this government
Continues to fail
We’ve had cuts
On an industrial scale
And it’s plain
We must not prevail
We cut police spending
By more than a fifth
And lives are being put at risk
But I will lie to you
And say
We’ve made life safer
In the UK
There are other plans
You might have to confront
Think of one man, Jeremy Hunt
And surprise surprise
Yes, we want to privatise
The NHS
Have we made the Health Service
Better or worse?
You can’t trust me
Ask a nurse
And our new rules
For education
Will underfund schools
So that they need donations
That is the absurd situation
We’re facing
That’s how
Right now
It’s difficult
For schools and hospitals
And if we win
It will be
Impossible
Only trust the Conservatives
If you don’t rely on
Public services
And remember
At the heart of our agenda
We’re making life harder
For people with dementia
It doesn’t have to be this way
And
These things don’t have
To stay the same
You can use your vote to say
‘Not in my name’
I don’t know why
People vote for me
It’s like
The more policies
I talk about
The more problems
You see

The video ends simply with the word ‘Vote’ against a black background.

It was put up last year, 2017, and clearly refers to the election, which put May in power. And it’s still very relevant. She didn’t turn up to a debate with Jeremy Corbyn, sending Amber Rudd instead. Now she’s challenged him to another debate, but it’s still questionable whether she’ll turn up for that one. After all, she doesn’t like turning up for anything that it isn’t very carefully stage managed and packed with her supporters and no-one else.

And Tweezer and her cabinet of horrors are still aiming at a far-right Brexit, they’re still cutting public services, privatizing the NHS and making life very difficult for people with dementia, as well as everyone else who is sick, disabled, unemployed or simply poor. And our schools are horribly underfunded, because Tweezer and the rest would like to privatise them as well.

We do need a vote on this one. We need her Brexit vote to fail spectacularly, and her government to plunge into crisis.

We nee a new election. One that will get Corbyn into government, and the Tories out. Hopefully for a very, very long time.