Petition to Have Mandelson’s Links with Epstein Investigated

Earlier today Mike put up a short piece on his site urging people to sign an online petition calling for Blair’s spin doctor, Peter Mandelson, to be suspended from the Labour party and investigated because of his links to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Mike has previously put up the petition calling for Blair to be stripped of his knighthood partly because, he explains, the Butcher of Iraq also appeared in Epstein’s wretched little black book. Well, so has Mandelson. Blair only appeared once. Mandelson has appeared ten times. This also looks like it needs investigating to me as well. I had a commenter send me a link to the petition, as well as to a Scum video showing Mandelson partying with Epstein. I’m not going to post the Scum video because I still have some standards left. I’ve signed the petition, and encourage anyone else who’s concerned about this do so as well.

Petition SUSPEND Lord Mandelson from Labour while carrying out probe into extent of his involvement with sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell

Conservative Guest on GB News Says Prince Andrew Should Renounce Royal Titles and Army Connections and Disappear

Oh dear, things are not going well for Prince Andrew and his fight against the allegation that he had sex with an underage girl enslaved as a prostitute by his mate, Jeffrey Epstein. Ghislaine Maxwell, another of Epstein’s close friends, has also been found guilty of child trafficking. I believe the woman, although 17 at the time, is nevertheless considered underage as in American law the age of consent is 18, rather than 16 over here. And whether it’s consensual or not,, I think it’s considered ‘statutory rape of a minor’. It may well be that Andrew isn’t guilty, just like Peter Mandelson, who also turns up in Epstein’s little black book. But as Mike has pointed out over at Vox Political, he’s undermining the monarchy by behaving as if he were. He has repeatedly tried to get the case thrown out of court, declared that a photograph of him with the girl is a fake, and claimed that at the time in question he was eating at Pizza Hut in Reading with his daughters. Does anybody really believe this claim? I can’t remember what I was doing on specific dates years ago, and I have trouble believing that his lordship would eat at a popular, downmarket place like Pizza Hut. It might be true, and there’s nothing wrong with the Hut. I’ve dined there with friends myself. But it just doesn’t seem to fit with Andy’s place as a member of the aristocracy. You expect he’d eat somewhere are little more exclusive. And nobody else seems to remember him there, despite the fact that the place would be alive with security guards and the mere presence of the man and his daughters would be a massive occasion and surprise.

And some Conservatives are getting sick and tired of his evasions and denials. I found a video today by GB News in which a very establishment guest, Rafe Heydel-Mankoo, described as a broadcaster and royal commenter, argued that Andrew should renounce his royal titles and army offices and links, and disappear for the sake of the monarchy. He believes that Andrew may be prepared to do this, as he served in the Falklands War and so has had the ideolog of service that animates both the British monarchy and the armed forces. When asked where he could possibly disappear to, Heydel-Mankoo suggests Scotland. This might help reinforce the union. His interviewer, someone called Brazier, replies that it could instead push them even further to independence. He’s got a point. I got the distinct impression that the monarchy is particularly unpopular over the border. Some of this may well go back to the Jacobites, but it may also be simply caused by the fact that they’re perceived as distant from Scotland and its affairs, despite the Bowes-Lyons family’s personal estates in Scotland and Her Maj spending her hols at Balmoral.

And Andy’s problems also don’t stop there. Another news report I found on YouTube, which I didn’t read, claims that the cost of defending himself is disastrously eating into his own personal finances. He has been forced to sell a £32 million chalet in Switzerland.

I don’t know if Andy is guilty. Like everyone else, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know how it works in American law, but over here you’re innocent until proven guilty. But his evasive behaviour, in my view, makes him look guilty and I believe it is undermining the monarchy.

I therefore agree with Mr Heydel-Mankoo that he should disappear, at least for a while. Or he should face his accusers and clear himself, if innocent, in a court of law.

Lobster Book Review on Corporate and Governmental Corruption in America

One of the fascinating book reviews Lobster has published recently is John Newsinger’s review of Sarah Chayes’ Everybody Knows: Corruption in America (London: Hurst 2020). Chayes worked for the western army of occupation in Afghanistan, during which time she came to realise that the American forces weren’t their to free the Afghans, secure democracy and defend women from a vicious and repressive theocracy. No, they were there to prop up Hamid Karzai’s massively corrupt government, whose members and clients were doing everything they could to screw whatever they could get out of Agha and Khanum Ordinary Afghan. This formed the subject of his first book, Thieves of State. In Everybody Knows, she turns to the subject of the massive corruption in America, most especially in Donald Trump’s administration.

The companies participating in this corporate looting of America and the rest of the world include the Koch companies, Goldman Sachs, one of whose former inmates is our own Rishi Sunak, the connections between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, and the connections between the mercenary outfit Frontier Services Group and Cambridge Analytica. The politicos involved include Mitch McConnell and Steve Mnuchin. McConnell was active trying to hold up increased funding for health-care and pension funds for retired miners, many of whom were his own constituents. He also managed to redirect $4 million of a grant intended to pay for the clean-up of a heavily polluted industrial so that instead it helped to pay for a new, $200 million steel plant ready for its Russian owners, whom McConnell also helped get sanctions lifted on the Russian company, Rusal.

These networks don’t just infect the Republicans, as you’d expect. They’re also heavily interlinked with Democrat politicos and Clinton’s and Obama’s governments. One passage of the review which I found particularly interesting described Madeleine Albright’s corporate looting of Africa. She owns a company that specialises in buying up Third World debt and then forcing those nations to pay it. Of course it comes out their hard-pressed budgets for healthcare, clean drinking water and education. Her hedge fund, Albright Capital Management, bought out a company specialising in pop-up electricity plants in developing African nations. These benefit the countries’ kleptocratic leaders at the expense of local people, who remain ‘mired in pollution and conflict’. It was Madeleine Albright, if I remember correctly, who told American women that there was a special place in hell for them if they didn’t vote for Killary. I’d say there was a special place in hell reserved for someone who enriches herself and her already overprivileged friends and partners stealing badly needed money from the world’s very poorest.

How to tackle this corporate corruption and exploitation? Chayes and Newsinger make it clear that the corporate elites have been able to get away with this because of the massive transfer of wealth and power away from the working class. The book describes how the corruption of the American Gilded Age of the 19th century was successfully fought and broken by a militant and powerful working class. Newsinger’s review concludes

Chayes celebrates struggle through to the great class battles of the 1930s. She clearly recognises that the kleptocracy that is swallowing the world will only be beaten back if there is a shift in the balance of class forces; and will require, needs to be based on, struggle in the
workplace. What is needed, therefore, is the revival of a militant labour movement. And this is absolutely urgent because ‘the Midas disease’ threatens environmental catastrophe on an unprecedented scale. (pp. 283-284) She has come a long way since Afghanistan.

How this can be done with corporatist like Biden in charge of the Democrat party and the country, and the nullity Keir Starmer as head of the Labour party, remains a very good question. But this book review, and the light it sheds on the military-industrial complex in America and its looting of the Third World, is particularly relevant now that we have Biden and the other G7 leaders meeting in Cornwall.

If you want to read it, the reviews at: Everybody Knows (Book Review) (Summer 2021) (lobster-magazine.co.uk)

Comedian David Baddiel Presents Show Attacking Holocaust Denial

Next Monday at 9.00 pm on BBC 2, the Beeb is showing the documentary, Confronting Holocaust Denial with David Baddiel. The blurb for this in the Radio Times runs

Despite being one of the most documented events in history, one in six people worldwide believes the Holocaust has been exaggerated or denies that it ever took place. Here, David Baddiel anatomises that denial, from the Nazis’ bid to hide what they were doing to the roles of the British establishment in downplaying the extent to which Jews were the victims and of social media in affording anti-Semitism a platform. David also visits Chelmno, where tens of thousands died, and meets Rachel levy, one of the Holocaust’s few remaining survivors.

I absolutely don’t have a problem with confronting and refuting Holocaust denial whatsoever. It was one of the most monstrous crimes of the 20th century, and the people who deny or minimise it do so in order to sanitise Nazism in the hope of some day getting it back into power. They’re despicable. But I do have issues with this programme, because I’m afraid of a hidden pro-Zionist agenda that will boost the anti-Semitism smear merchants.

Part of this is their choice of presenter. David Baddiel is a brilliantly funny comedian. I went to see him once at the Cheltenham Literary Festival talking about his new book, and he had the room in stitches. He’s also ferociously intelligent with a double first and doctorate from Oxford. But he’s also one of Groaniad’s commentariat, who pushed the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. He appeared on various TV shows making these claims. He also wrote a piece in the Guardian claiming that Corbyn was a terrible anti-Semite because he pronounced Jeffrey Epstein’s name ‘Epshtein’. This was supposed to be an attempt to make the deceased magnate and paedophile less English or, rather, American, by stressing his non-English-speaking origins.

It’s a rubbish argument. Unless you’re aware that Epstein, or others with the same name, are Jewish and pronounce it differently, the name looks German. And Corbyn gave it the German pronunciation. There’s nothing inherently racist in that. Consider the number of gentile Brits with foreign names, like the Eurosceptic politico Mark Francois. Presumably his surname is given the French pronunciation, but this is not taken to mean that Francois is less British. Although it is ironic that someone with a continental name should have such a hatred of the European Union. Similarly, Mike and myself have also had people pronounce our surname incorrectly as if it were French. It isn’t, and that’s not how we say it. But I don’t believe that the people mispronouncing our surname did so deliberately or were consciously trying to denigrate us as somehow not really British or English.

Also, Baddiel himself is hardly innocent of racism. Older readers of this blog may remember the show he and Frank Skinner had on the Beeb in the ’90s, Fantasy Football League. This was a bit of sport comedy. But one of the recurring ‘jokes’, in retrospect, seems at best tasteless, and at worse markedly racist. Baddiel used to appear in blackface wearing a pineapple and dreadlocks in order to mock the appearance of the Black footballer, Jason Lee, who was then playing for Nottingham Forest. He was taking the mick out of Lee’s hairstyle, which was a mixture of the corn rows and dreads. But this led to ‘pineapple head’ being used as a racist insult against Blacks with a similar hairstyle. Tony Greenstein included a piece about this from The Weekly Worker when he attacked Baddiel for pushing the anti-Semitism smears last year.

Baddiel invented the slur ‘Pineapple Heads’ for Black people with ‘Dredds & Cornrows’. Professor Ben Carrington details the strategic exploitative depths into which this campaign of the TV series Fantasy Football plunged and further extended its impact on other Black citizens. “David Baddiel ‘Blacked up’ (evoking the barely coded racist imagery of the minstrel shows) with a pineapple on his head out of which Jason Lee’s dreadlocks were growing – the ‘joke’ being that Jason Lee’s ‘dreads’ resemble a fruit on top of his head. This joke was then carried out with increasing frequency for the rest of the series, with young children sending in drawings of Jason Lee adorned with various fruit on his head. The pineapple joke was then taken up by football fans in the terraces who chanted songs about Jason Lee’s hair and significantly transcended the normally insular world of football fandom and entered into the public domain as both a descriptive term and a form of ridicule (‘Pineapple Head’) for any black person with dreads tied back”. 

Inevitably, many of those subjected to the abusive copy-cat street ‘ridicule’, Carrington identifies were children.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/11/david-baddiels-allegation-of-anti.html

Now I realise that this was a long time ago, and things were slightly different in the ’90s, but it was still pretty tasteless even then. I don’t know if Baddiel regrets the joke, but I doubt that he ever gave it much thought, to be honest. But with this on his record, he may not be the best presenter of a programme dedicated to exposing a particularly nasty form of racism.

And I really don’t want the programme to confer on him a spurious moral authority then next time he starts screaming about anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Because people will believe his lies and smears simply because he presented a programme about Holocaust denial, and because he was correct about that, so he must somehow be correct about anti-Semitism in Labour.

One of the issues the programme tackles is the way the British authorities tried to play down the Jews as the victims of Nazi atrocities, because they feared that if they included them gentiles would not believe it. There’s a long article about the documentary in the Radio Times, which includes this

More unsettling is the document Baddiel examines at the National Archives in Kew, a memo from a British official warning that stories of Nazi atrocities will only be effective in the eyes of the British public if the victims can be shown to be “indisputably innocent”. That, writes the official, means the victims must include no violent criminals, and no Jews. To Baddiel, “that was a very serious form of denial. It was laying the ground for a general sense of disbelief towards the Holocaust.”

But there’s also a Zionist double standard here. The Zionist organisations initially also didn’t want Jews singled out as the particular victims of the Nazis. They were afraid that if they did so, it would mean that the world would regard the Jews as being too weak to have their own state. By that same logic, Zionism is also guilty of laying the ground for Holocaust denial. But Baddiel and the Radio Times say nothing.

He also tackles the problem of Holocaust denial among the Palestinians in Gaza. The Radio Times says of this

He hears a Palestinian scholar explain that high rates of Holocaust denial in Gaza owe more to a desire to hurt Jews in their most sensitive spot than a genuine refusal to believe the facts. Baddiel understands that logic – then admits to the camera that his own understanding has made him “uneasy” because, as he tells me later, “Where does understanding shade into legitimacy, into saying “This isn’t quite so bad”? The next thing you know, you’re accepting Holocaust denial.In the film, that the point at which I’m most uncertain.”

But this also raises the issues of Zionist double standards and the way they have manipulated the Holocaust for their own political ends. The Palestinians have their own counterpart of the Shoah, the Hebrew term for the Holocaust. This is the Nakba, an Arabic word for disaster or catastrophe, which the Palestinians use to describe the foundation of Israel and its consequent massacre and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population. The Israeli state, in contrast to its historians, admits that some villages were massacred, but the reality is that there were many, many more. The victims included unarmed men, women and children, including those walking towards the Zionist soldiers with gifts of food, and seeking shelter in mosques. The Israeli state also maintains that the Palestinians were told by their own leaders to flee, but subsequent research has shown that this again is fake history, and these instructions or the rumours of them were manufactured by the nascent Israeli spy agencies. But this is also consistently denied by the Israelis.

And the Israeli state does exploit the Holocaust as a political symbol. In one Holocaust Day ceremony, Israeli troopers marched into the arena in which the commemorations were being held. But as soon as Orla Guerin, the Beeb’s Israel correspondent, mentioned this, she was attacked as an anti-Semite by the Zionist shills, including the Beeb’s former head of programming. Baddiel is right to call out Palestinian Holocaust denial, but it does need to be put in context as a reaction to their history of ethnic cleansing by the Jewish state. It is not simply an act of malicious spite just for the sake of it.

Baddiel and the Beeb are doing a good job by tackling Holocaust denial. But I am afraid that the selection of Baddiel as presenter, and the programme’s omission of Zionist complicity in it, and in ethnic cleansing in Palestine, will act to give it a pro-Israel, pro-Zionist slant. And Baddiel’s own racist jokes about Black hairstyles could be seen as showing the Beeb has double standards of its own. Racism against Blacks is acceptable, while anti-Semitism is not.

But racism is racism, whatever the colour or ethnicity of the person perpetrating it.

 

 

Corbyn Calls for Reductions in Membership of the Royal Family

I found this in yesterday’s I, underneath an article reporting that Buckingham Palace has denied allegations that Prince Andrew exploited his position as trade envoy. It’s a short piece reporting that Jeremy Corbyn has called for ‘cuts to the Crown’, as the title has it. The article reads

The number of Royal Family members should be reduced, Jeremy Corbyn has suggested.

The Labour leader said he believed that the public would agree with him following the furore surrounding Prince Andrew’s relationship with the convicted American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Mr Corbyn has previously insisted that he does not want to abolish the monarchy. Interviewed on Sky News’s Sophie Ridge on Sunday, Mr Corbyn said ‘I think the behaviour of individuals within the Royal Family is being looked at, shall we say.’

The Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, said ‘We need to be respecting the institution of the monarchy. If Jeremy Corbyn is saying he wants to cut the numbers he should come out and say he wants to cut.’

It’s a bit rich for the Tories to complain about attacks on the monarchy, as they used to do it all the time whenever Prince Charles criticised their awful policies in the 1980s and ’90s. I also know Tories who despise Murdoch and his papers, which they see as exploiting and denigrating the Crown. And I think they have a point. For all that the Scum plays up and celebrates the monarchy, it’s also ruthlessly exploited and publicised royal scandals. Some of this might simply be to sell more newspapers, but I’m also highly suspicious that there are more personal political reasons behind it. Like in the last referendum on whether Australia should abolish the monarchy and become a republican, Murdoch came out very strongly urging his former compatriots to do so. This may well have done the republican cause Down Under more harm than good, as Murdoch became an American citizen for commercial reasons. As a foreign national, he wouldn’t have been able to own, or at least not own quite so much, of the American press and broadcasting. Nobody likes being told what to do, not least by people who have flown their own country, and the Australians voted to retain the Queen as head of state.

Although there’s a sizable minority that would like Britain to become a republic – the I’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has made it clear several time she’d like the monarchy to be abolished – as a whole it’s not a sentiment shared by the majority of the population. But just listening to the people around me, it’s clear that people are fed up with the state having to support various members of the royal family, who are not in line for the throne and don’t perform any clear role. Like Princess Eugenie, who wanted the taxpayer to spend several million on her wedding as they did for Princess Beatrice. Or was it the other way around? Either, ordinary people were not impressed with this display of royal entitlement. At the moment, I don’t think it’s a particularly big issue, not with more pressing concerns like Brexit, the Tories’ determination to sell off the NHS and utterly destroy the welfare state and the lives that depend on it. But it’s certainly an issue that will return, and at some point they might have to cut the numbers down in order to restore the Crown’s popularity. Especially if there’s another scandal like that of the present.