The claims that some of the comments made by critics of Israel are anti-Semitic because of their imagery and language used also reminds me very strongly of the claims made by some of the paranoid conspiracy theorists themselves. For example, Israel has constructed a wall around itself designed to keep the Palestinians out. This is very controversial, and the great British caricaturist, Gerald Scarfe, drew a cartoon of the Israelis building it using the blood of the Palestinians as mortar. The picture was published either in the Independent, or the I. The Israeli ambassador, an odious creep called Mark Regev, immediately declared that the cartoon was anti-Semitic. The inclusion of blood in the picture was a reference to the Blood Libel, the murderous lie that Jews kill Christians and use their blood in the matzo bread at Passover.
In fact, the cartoon contained no reference to this vile libel. There were no references to either the Passover, matzo bread or ritual murder. It was purely about the wall, and the Israelis’ butchery of the Palestinians. But the accusation had the intended effect. The I or Independent caved in and made an apology. But blood and its imagery is a very common image used to portray the brutality of oppressive, violent regimes and groups of all types around the world. It is certainly not confined to Jews. Regev was, of course, making the accusation of anti-Semitism to close down a graphic portrayal of the Israeli state’s brutality, as the Israel lobby has been doing to its critics since the 1980s. But his accusation bears less relation to objective fact than to some of the really paranoid theories that have circulated around America about secret cabals of Satanists plotting to destroy American society from within.
One of these, which surfaced c. 1982, concerned Proctor and Gamble and their logo, as shown below.
As you can see, this shows a ‘Man in the Moon’ surrounded by thirteen stars. According to the rumour, which was boosted through its inclusion by several Southern fundamentalist Christian preachers in their sermons, the imagery reveals that the company is run by Satanists. The thirteen stars represent the thirteen members of a witches’ coven, and the ‘Man in the Moon’ is really Satan himself. Especially as the curls of the figures hair is supposed to show the number 666, the number of the Beast, the Antichrist, in the Book of Revelations. See the illustration below, where I’ve circled where I think these ‘Satanic’ curls are.
Now if you applied the rule adopted by the lawyers for the Israel lobby to the imagery here, you could argue that it is fair to accuse Proctor and Gamble of Satanism, because that’s how its logo and its imagery has struck thousands of Americans. But you be ill-advised to do so, because the company vehemently denies any Satanic connections. It’s actually a patriotic symbol, with the thirteen stars representing the thirteen founding colonies of the USA. The company has also redesigned the logo to iron out those curls, so that they no longer appear to show 666, and engaged the services of other right-wing fundamentalist preachers, like Jerry Falwell, to show that the company is not run by Satanists. They also have a very aggressive legal policy, so that if you do claim that they’re a bunch of Satanists, they will sue. And I very much doubt that the court will be impressed by claims that the company must be Satanic, ’cause somebody can think that looking at their logo.
This is real, Alex Jones, tin-foil hat stuff. And stupid rumours of Satanic conspiracies have real consequences for ordinary people, just like the smears of anti-Semitism have been used to damage the lives and reputations of decent people. We have seen people falsely accused of child sacrifices and abuse, based on no more than fake recovered memories, in scenes that could have come out of the Salem witch hunt back in the 17th century. Some of them have even gone to prison. This is why it is absolutely important that people are always considered innocent until proven guilty, and that accusations of Satanic ritual abuse, and anti-Semitism, should always be held to objective, not subjective standards. The rule that such accusations must be believed, because somebody may think that a person is a Satanist or racist, simply on the way a comment subjectively strikes them, only leads to terrible injustice.
The Israel lobby here are showing the same paranoid psychology that permeates the racist, anti-Semitic extreme right. The type of people, who search the newspapers and other texts looking for proofs that the Illuminati really do run the world. Or that the Zionist Occupation Government really has taken over America and the West, and is attempting to destroy the White race through racial intermixing. Or that Communists have burrowed into the American government.
One of the proofs of this last conspiracy theory was the tiny lettering on the Roosevelt dime. Just below FDR’s neck and extremely small, were the letters ‘JS’. According to the rumour, the letters stood for ‘Joe Stalin’. This rumour first appeared in the Cold War, in 1948, when the scare about ‘Reds under the bed’ was just beginning. But it’s completely false. Oh, the letters are there, but they don’t stand for Stalin. They’re the initials of the coin’s designer, John Sinnock. You can claim all you want that the claim is subjectively true, because liberalism and the welfare state = Communism, or some such similar right-wing bilge. But it wouldn’t stand up in a court of law.
And some Christian fundamentalists in America have also seen in the colours used by state roads signs evidence of a conspiracy to put them in concentration camps. Back in the 1990s there was a rumour panic going around about the colours used in spots adorning the highway signs in Pennsylvania. These were supposed to show the location of the concentration camps, in which true Christians would be incarcerated when the Communists or one world Satanic conspiracy came to power. In fact they showed no such thing. The state’s highway department used the dots as a colour code to mark the year the sign was first painted. This was to show how old the sign was, and so indicate when it should be repainted.
This is another, very well-informed rant by Richard ‘the Dick’ Coughlan. Coughlan’s a stand-up comic in his other job, and his videos on YouTube presumably are in the same style as his comedy shows. As you can tell by his signature farewell at the end ‘May God be less’, he’s also quite a militant atheist. I don’t support his atheism, but I am reblogging this because, like many of his other videos on race, it has some very important things to say about prejudice, and how things are really different from the way they’re presented by the Right.
In this video, he’s mostly concerned with attacking Nigel Farage for confusing American Jews with Zionism and the Israel lobby. Farage has his own show on LBC. The other day he took a call from ‘Ahmed’, who said that it was peculiar that everyone was talking about the way Russia interfered in the American elections, but no-one was talking about AIPAC’s and the Israeli’s interference. The man parodied in the Judge Dredd strip as ‘Bilious Barrage’, agreed, and said it was down to the fact that there were 6 million Jews in America. He then went on to talk a little more about how powerful and influential the Jewish lobby in America is.
Coughlan points out that this isn’t very much as a piece of racial prejudice, but it is nevertheless dangerous, as Farage has confused American Jews and the Zionist lobby. He’s afraid this will act as a kind of dog-whistle to promote anti-Semitism further amongst those with racist and far right-wing views. So Coughlan goes on to show how profoundly mistaken Farage is. Most Jews in America are profoundly liberal politically, and many are deeply critical about Israel’s religious and political constitution, and the treatment of the Palestinians. Israel’s biggest supporters aren’t Jewish Americans, but American Christians.
But before he gets on to this issue, he talks about some of the other news about the far right he finds amusing or irritating. Such as the fact that the blogger, Peter Sweden, has a YouTube channel, in which he devotes a nine minute video to discussing a kebab he bought in Norway. He also talks about Milo Yiannopolis briefly getting a job with the Daily Caller, presumably another right-wing media outlet. But he didn’t last there long. He was sacked, and the person, who hired him was also sacked. The Caller, Coughlan goes on to say, has some truly horrendous people working for it. But Yiannopolis was too much even for them.
I can’t say that I’m surprised Yiannopolis got sacked. But it probably has nothing to do with Milo’s own, very right-wing political views, where he’s attacked Blacks and non-Whites, feminism and ‘SJW’ – Social Justice Warriors – in general. No, it’s far more likely they got rid of Milo because of his comments defending paedophilia, comments which he later retracted. Sort of. Before recognising that he was also a victim through being abused by a Roman Catholic priest when he was 14.
Coughlan points out that Israel mostly attracts the support of very hardline, racist, anti-Islamic individuals and organisations like the English Defence League, Jihad Watch, Gert Wilders, Pamela Geller, and the hardline American Conservatives. The biggest organisation lobbying for Israel in the Land of the Free is the CUFI – Christians United For Israel. This was presided over by the Roman Catholic bigot, John Hagee, before his death, and had Jerry Falwell, the extreme right-wing Christian evangelist on its board. It has 2.5 million members. AIPAC – the largely Jewish Israeli lobbying group, is more influential, as it has more powerful and influential members. Here he runs through a list of American politicos. But its actual membership is much smaller -100,000. American Conservatives love Israel, because Israel’s a profoundly Conservative nation. In the 2012 elections, 65 per cent of Israelis favoured Mitt Romney. But extremely politically Conservative Jews, such as Pamela Geller and Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism, aren’t representative of American Jewry as a whole.
Coughlan points out that about 22 per cent of Jewish Americans aren’t religious. This is so high a percentage, that the census has had to create another category specifically for them. There are now two entries for Jews – one for religious Jews, and another for non-religious. American Jews are also overwhelmingly liberal. 65 per cent of them vote Democrat. The majority also support a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue, and 66 per cent believe that Israel and an independent Palestine could co-exist peacefully. It’s just that their leaders don’t want to. 44 per cent of American Jews are opposed to Israel building further settlements in Palestinian territory. As for the theological view that Israel was given to the Jews by the Almighty, only 40 per cent of American Jews believe this. Which contrasts with the 82 per cent of American Christian Evangelicals, who think this is the case. And 77 per cent of American Jews have an unfavourable view of the orange simian creature, now skulking in the White House.
Regarding Israel’s religious constitution, 43 per cent of American Jews want synagogue and state to be separated. A further 20+ per cent want there to be more separation between synagogue and state, but not a total separation. He also notes the rise in Jewish concerns about anti-Semitism. Last year, in 2016, only 21 per cent of American Jews felt anti-Semitism to be a problem. This year, 2017, it has risen to 41 per cent.
And on social issues American Jews are very liberal. 90 per cent of American Jews, whether religious or not, support gay marriage and LGBT rights, as opposed to 50 per cent of Americans in general. They are also for gun control, against global warming, and do not support the war in Iraq nor the War on Terror.
Coughlan then discusses the size of the various Jewish denominations in America, and the political stance of the largest, the United Reform Judaism Union. 35 per cent of American Jews belong to Reform Judaism. The next largest Jewish denomination in America are the Conservatives, with 18 per cent, and then the Orthodox, with 10 per cent. The president of the URJU is Rabbi Robert Eric Yoffre. Yoffre ran unopposed as leader between 1996 and 2012. He’s very much in favour of equality, social justice and tolerance and religious dialogue, having spoken at Christian and Islamic religious conferences. But most people probably haven’t heard of him. And despite the size and numerical importance of this gentleman’s denomination, when he goes to Israel he is not treated as a rabbi. Because Israeli law does not recognise Reform Judaism as a denomination.
Coughlan states before he begins his discussion of real political and religious views of American Jews that he doesn’t intend to say anything about Israel, either for or against. This is simply about the facts about American Jewish opinion, as gleaned by polling groups like Pew Research.
He then continues his attack on Farage by stating that his conflation of ‘Jews’ with the Israel lobby will act as a dog-whistle to anti-Semites with stupid conspiracy theories about Jewish power and influence. And while he’s at it, he also wonders why Farage is no longer talking about Brexit. He should, because he spent 20 years campaigning for it, as well as being massively in favour of Trump. But now it’s a complete failure, supported only by bitter, racist Little Englanders.
As for stupid conspiracy theories, Farage’s conflation of the Jews with the Israel lobby may only be a small piece of prejudice, but he wonders what’s next: Farage raving about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, perhaps? This is the notorious Tsarist forgery, which supposedly revealed that there was a massive Jewish conspiracy to enslave gentiles around the world. It was concocted by the Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, or Department 4, to convince the Tsar to increase the persecution of the Jews further. It’s a deeply malign document that has inspired racists and Nazis since its publication, such as Oswald Mosley in Britain and Adolf Hitler in Germany. Coughlan then concludes that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are so important, that he’ll probably produce another video debunking them.
This is video is really good, as it gives the facts and figures to support some of the arguments I’ve put up before now, stating that Judaism and Zionism are entirely separate, and that many Jews are deeply critical of Israel. The veteran Jewish critique of Zionism and the Israeli lobby, Professor Norman Finkelstein, has made the point that historically support for Israel was very much a minority opinion amongst Jewish Americans. Many Jews in America and over here support the Palestinians and the campaign for their civil and political rights, joining groups like the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign against Israel. And in Israel itself there are proud Jews, who also protest against the house seizures and demolitions, the construction of the illegal settlements, and the brutalisation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their ancestral lands.
This probably explains the sheer venom of the Israel lobby, and its organs in the Labour party, in persecuting them, as well as gentile critics of Israel. I’ve pointed out time and again how the majority of people suspended and expelled from the Labour for anti-Semitism were nothing of the sort. They were very largely decent, anti-racist men and women, who hated anti-Semitism as another form of the racism they detested. They opposed Israel, or at least the brutalisation of the Palestinians, because they saw Israel as a White, European settler state, based on the same racist, imperialist and colonialist attitudes towards indigenous peoples, that has led to the brutalisation of other indigenous peoples and the theft of their land by Europeans across the globe.
However, the Israeli lobby both here and in America has libelled and vilified these people as anti-Semites, even when its obvious to everyone else that they aren’t. Those so maligned have included self-respecting Jews, who have themselves been the victims of real, anti-Semitic abuse or assault. This does not matter. Zionist and pro-Israel organisations, like the horribly misnamed Jewish Labour Movement and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, have adopted a tortuous definition of anti-Semitism, which deliberately conflates it with opposition to Israel. And so it doesn’t matter how genuinely anti-racist a person is, whether they have a positive view of Jews, or simply have no strong opinion of them one way or another. Or if they’re Jewish, how observant they are, or otherwise self-respecting. Simply for denouncing Israel’s attack on Jews, they’re attacked as self-hating and anti-Semitic. And many people, including the British comedian Alexei Sayle, have noticed that the majority of the victims of the witch-hunt in the Labour party over this issue have been Jewish.
It looks very much like it’s because these organisations know how weak their position is, and how repugnant very many ordinary people, including Jews, find their persecution of the Palestinians. And so to keep up the image that Jew = Zionism/ Israel, as dictated by Likudnik doctrine, they have to try to marginalise and vilify those who deny it. And that means particularly persecuting Jews.
One of the books that was published a few years ago on the Israel Lobby noted that the lobby affected American elections through the funding of political candidates by organisations and Jewish businesses. AIPAC and similar groups give ample funds to pro-Israel candidates. And where an aspiring congressman or senator is critical of Israel, they will donate heavily to their opponent, thus ensuring that they will lose the election.
But as Coughlan has shown, not all American Jews support Israel, or at least not its maltreatment and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Some American Jewish businessmen even donate to Palestinian charities and organisations, as well as Israeli. One of them is featured in the book Bushwhacked, published a few years ago, which exposes everything nasty and corrupt about George Dubya. This gentleman is included because he stands out against the bigotry and intolerance of the Bush administration.
Others have pointed out that Christian Zionism is much larger, and has a very theological agenda. It’s adherents believe that in order for Jesus to return to Earth in the Second Coming, the Jews must return to the Holy Land and Israel restored. This will culminate in a final battle between the forces of good and evil. Twenty years ago the forces of evil were the Communist bloc. Now it’s Islam. These people are a real, terrifying danger to world peace.
And the Israel lobby also has a profound connection to real anti-Semites going right back to the Nazis and the Ha’avara agreement. As anti-Zionists like Tony Greenstein and very many others have documented, the pioneers and leaders of the Zionist movement were all too willing to deal with anti-Semites, because they believed that increased anti-Semitism against diaspora Jews would benefit Zionism by encouraging more Jews to emigrate to Israel. Hence the Judischer Rundschau, the main Zionist newspaper in 1930s Germany, hailed the infamous Nuremberg laws, and urged its readers to wear their yellow star with pride. This was before the Holocaust, which the magazine did not foresee, but it’s still chilling nonetheless. And the head of the Zionist movement in Hungary during the War, Kasztner, allowed the Nazis to deport a greater number of Jews to the Death Camps than may otherwise have occurred, because he hoped that they would also spare some and send them to Israel instead.
But if you dare mention these historical facts, you’re an anti-Semite.
And more recently, the real Nazis and anti-Semites connected with Trump’s administration, like the Alt-Right ‘White Zionist’ Richard Spencer, have very strongly supported Israel. Spencer’s even been on Israeli TV. And Sebastian Gorka, a former member of Trump’s administration with extensive connections to the Hungarian Fascist right, has also been one of the guests at the Herzliya conference, the annual jamboree for the Israeli military. Many real Fascists and anti-Semites support Israel because they see it as another way of getting rid of their domestic Jews, by forcing them to emigrate there.
Judaism is certainly not synonymous with Zionism. And some Zionists and Zionist organisations will collaborate with Fascists and anti-Semites against diaspora Jews, in the hope of boosting their country’s population.
This is probably going to be the reality behind the driverless cars the car industry and the media have been hyping. In this short clip from The Young Turks, the hosts Ana Kasparian and Brett Ehrlich report and comment on the story that Domino’s Pizzas are planning to replace their pizza delivery people with driverless cars.
It’s only a trial run at the moment. They intend to go through their customers at random, and ask them if they’re happy with their pizza delivered by a driverless car instead. The vehicle will take a maximum of four pizzas to them. To get their orders, the customers will have to punch in a code into a keypad on the car.
After a bit of silly banter about the number of pizzas people usually order, they get down to discussing what this really represents. Kasparian says that when they usually talk about American jobs being lost, they’re usually reporting on corporate outsourcing. But automation is the other way in which people are losing their jobs in America. Kasparian she states that she isn’t against technological innovation, but points out that not only are people going to lose their jobs as pizza delivery staff, but they’re also going to lose an opportunity to acquire useful skills to succeed in a very competitive jobs market. She also states that we also need to give young people proper, affordable college education as well.
Domino’s has released a statement saying that they have at the moment 100,000 pizza delivery people. They hope that when this comes in, they will be able to find other positions within the company. The Turks end by saying that they hope so too.
To be fair, the BBC has carried news and documentary programmes, which forecast that in the coming decades, 1/3 of all retail jobs will be lost to automation. Nevertheless, whenever you see driverless cars appear, the overwhelming message is one of boundless enthusiasm, with the presenters raving about the technology. Clarkson went on a driverless truck on Top Gear, and went almost berserk with excitement when it started to make its way without human guidance.
Driverless trucks are due to be trialed on roads in Britain, according to a report in the I newspaper. They’re going to be tested in groups of three. I talked about this technology and its threats to jobs with a friend a little while ago. He told me that there are about 40,000 truckers in Britain, so that’s 40,000 people, who stand to lose their jobs.
Counterpunch has run an article on this, stating that there’s no desire for the cars from ordinary people. They’re being hyped and pushed by the insurance companies, who hope that their appearance and promotion as being safer than human driving will allow them to put up their premiums for people, who won’t use them.
What also struck me was how cold, lonely and impersonal the future represented by this type of automation is. In much SF depictions of an automated future, the machines performing human jobs also have something like human cognitive abilities and personalities. Long term 2000 AD readers will remember Dredd’s little robotic companion, Walter the Wobot. The character had a lisp and was a gentle soul, providing a contrast with the brutal machismo of Mega City 1’s toughest lawman. Or the robots in the Robohunter strip. These were extremely strong characters with all the traits, foibles and psychological failings of the human creators, including stupidity, thuggishness and all-round criminality. Like the God-Droid, the automatated underworld boss, a machine version of Marlon Brando with a sign stamped across its stomach reading ‘Omerta’, or the incendiary temperament of Molotov, the automatic cocktail-shaker and head of the Amalgamated Androids’ Union, who lectures Spade on the evils of human exploitation. Or Ro-Jaws, a chirpy, bolshie, foul-mouthed sewer droid, and his more dignified mate, the war-robot Hammerstein, and the moronic and sadistic Mek-Quake, the main characters in the Robusters strip, and its spin-off, ABC Warriors.
These fictional machines all had real, authentic characters. They had minds and characters like human beings, even if their bodies and brains were of metal and plastic. And so the strips’ writers could use them to make serious satirical points amidst the cartoon violence and mayhem. From the first, the ABC Warriors strip included a bitter commentary on the horrors of war, and the way soldiers lives were sacrificed by an officer and political class insulated from the actual fighting. The fact that robots were machines, with no rights, also allowed 2000 AD to explore real issues like slavery, racism, and institutionalized discrimination with deliberate, and sometimes very obvious parallels to the experience of Black Americans before Civil Rights.
But the real machines taking our jobs won’t even have personalities, friendly or otherwise, with which we will interact. Admittedly, there isn’t much social interaction with the mail and other delivery people, who turn up at our doors. The conversation is naturally very limited. But with these machines, we won’t even have that. Just a car turning up, following by the customer trudging out to punch in a code to open the doors.
Silent, efficient, and coldly impersonal.
And this is going to make the atomization and despair of contemporary western, and particularly American society, much worse. I’ve also come across a series of videos Chris Hedges has also made, in which he talks about the new American Fascism, and specifically the Religious Right. I think Hedges is probably an atheist, from some of the things he has said about the religious right promoting magical thinking. But he has a divinity degree, his father was a politically radical Presbyterian clergyman, his mother was also a divinity student, and so Hedges doesn’t hate religion or regard the antics of the religious right and the frauds and bigots leading it as normal. Indeed, he is at pains to show that, for all that they scream that they represent traditional values, they don’t. He states in one video that they’re as far from traditional Christian religious doctrine and practice as the religious liberals they despise.
One of the points he makes in these videos is that these bigots have been assisted in their rise to power by the social atomization of modern American society. In places like LA there are no pavements, so people can’t walk down the street. You have to drive. And so people drive straight to work, and then straight home. They don’t really meet or interact with anyone else. And the religious right has exploited this atomization, this alienation, by offering people a community in the ideologically enclosed space of their megachurches. And the people they target are those who have suffered from the attacks of neoliberalism – people in the rustbelt, who have seen their jobs decline and their communities fall into poverty along with them.
Other observers of the American Right have said the same. One of the essays in the book attacking the Neo-Cons, Confronting the New Conservativism, states that these b*stards are able to get away with promoting bigotry and racism, because of the decline in genuine, working class communities. The jobs are going, and White flight has meant that Whites have moved out of racially mixed areas in the centres of town to the suburbs. Community centres have also closed, and the attack on trade unions has also destroyed this pillar of working class community. The result is that the individual is left isolated from both people of other ethnic groups, and similar people to him- or herself. He or she goes to work and comes home. This isolation leaves them vulnerable to the vile propaganda spewed at them by bigots like Jerry Falwell and the rest of the rightwing televangelists that were thrown up by the 1980s.
This atomization and alienation is one of the fundamental characteristics of totalitarian societies of the Left and Right. In the Soviet Union, society was arranged so that people were deliberately isolated from each other. The only way of keeping in contact and forming communities and relationships, at least officially, was through the party organisations. Ditto with the Third Reich. Hitler boasted that they would never leave the individual alone, not even in a poker club.
And the driverless cars also remind me of another dystopian vision of the future, that of Ray Bradbury’s The Pedestrian. This is a tale by one of the great masters of SF, in which a man walking late at night is stopped and picked up by a police car. The car’s not crewed. It’s entirely automatic. Bradbury describes the computer punchcards being processed as the machine thinks. The machine asks the man why he’s on the streets so late at night. He replies simply that he just wanted to take a walk.
Already there are places in some American cities, where you can’t walk. Mike found this out a few years ago when he visited friends in California. You had to drive everywhere, even down to the local stores. Which means that the cold future of The Pedestrian really ain’t that far away.
One of the points made by Jewish supporters of the Palestinians is that there at more Christian than Jewish Zionists in America. Indeed, Prof. Norman Finkelstein has pointed out that support for Israel amongst Jewish Americans was marginal until the late 1960s, when Conservative activists worked hard to engineer support for the country after its victories against the surrounding Arab nations. Mike made a similar point in his defence of himself and his commenter, Paul Mabbo, against the accusations of anti-Semitism flung by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Not everyone making the accusations was necessarily Jewish.
In fact there has been an alliance between right-wing American Christian groups and militant Zionists since before the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980s. Reagan’s election was partly due to his support from these right-wing Christian groups, brought about by the fundraisers and PR men Richard Viguerie, Terry Dolan, Howard Phillips and Ed McAteer. These men founded, led or advised a slew of conservative Christian organisations such as Conservative Caucus, Religious Roundtable, National Conservative Political Action Committee, Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Christian Voice, Young Americans for Freedom and the Moral Majority. The term ‘Moral Majority’ was coined by either Weyrich or Phillips when McAteer arranged for them to meet Jerry Falwell. McAteer was then the head of the Christian Freedom Foundation, which was funded by money from the Pew and DeVos families, who owned Sunoco and AmWay respectively. It isn’t surprising that Betsy DeVos has now popped up as Trump’s Education Secretary, with a militant right-wing plan to privatise all American public schools into Charter Schools with an explicitly right-wing Christian curriculum. Weyrich was also a member of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which was financed by money from the Coors and Richard Scaiffe. As well as being a member of Young Americans for Freedom, Phillips had also been a minor member of Nixon’s administration. They chose Falwell because he had helped Anita Bryant defeat the Dade County Gays Rights Bill in 1977.
Falwell was one of the most notorious of the right-wing televangelists of the 1980s. He was actually the least popular of them, became the most influential through his contacts with Ronald Reagan. He first came to public attention for his 1965 speech denouncing Martin Luther King. However, it was the series of rallies he conducted in 1976 and ’77 which brought him to the attention of the leaders of the American Christian right. In 1983 Reagan allowed Fallwell to attend National Security briefings on the possibility of nuclear war with Russia, and discussed theology and nuclear war with him in his presidential limousine. Fallwell was also active establishing links with the Israeli leadership to the point where he became the most influential gentile lobbyist for Israel and Israeli expansionism.
As part of this, Falwell began arranging tours to the Holy Land. One of these was attended by a journalist, Grace Halsell, in 1983. She noted the prominent role apocalypticism played in the tours, with many of her fellow tourists believing that Christ’s return, and the end of the world were imminent. These tours also had an explicit agenda in drumming up support for Israel. The Israeli guide referred to Palestinians as Arabs, following the official Israeli line set by Golda Meir that there were no Palestinians. He then went on to state that the ‘Arabs’ preferred to live in poverty, had repeatedly refused Israeli friendship and bluntly stated that ‘all Muslims were terrorists’. When the tour bus stopped at Nazareth, it was only to use the toilets there. Halsell suspected that they were being prevented from speaking to any Palestinians or Christians living in Israel. This is not unlikely. One of the ministers at our church said that if you go to Israel, you will be kept from meeting Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians. The tour finally met Falwell at a hotel in Jerusalem, where they were treated to a speech by the Israeli defence minister, Moshe Arens, boast about Israeli victories in the invasion of Lebanon.
Falwell was richly rewarded by the Israelis for his services to them. A forest was named after him, he was showered with free trips to the country, and was also given a private jet by the Israeli government. He became the only gentile to receive the Jabotinsky medal, named after the Zionist leader, who advocated waging a war of extermination against the Palestinians in order to set up an Israeli empire that straddled both sides of the Jordan. It was Falwell who turned Jesse Helms, another prominent Reaganite, from a militant anti-Zionist into an enthusiastic supporter of Israel.
Falwell also visited the West Bank, where he had his photo taken with a Jewish American family, who had recently immigrated there. He set up a convention in Annapolis in 1983 to organise support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This was attended by James Watt and Richard Allen, two members of Reagan’s administration; Yehuda Hellman and other Jewish leaders; Viguerie, Phillips and Weyrich; and former presidential sleazebag Richard M. Nixon. Falwell also told a Texan newspaper that same year that Israel had a divine mandate, through the covenant between the Lord and the patriarch Abraham, to parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan, and that the whole of Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait should also belong to Israel. This would have to be achieved through force. Falwell stated that ‘good intentions are acts of stupidity’.
Extremist American Christian groups have also given support to Jewish terrorists, such as Gush Emunim, who have attempted to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem in order to restore Solomon’s Temple, whose site they believe the mosque occupies. In 1984 18 members of the terrorist group were convicted of trying to blow up the mosque, with the covert support of the Shin Bet and other members of the Israeli army and police. The group also attacked three Palestinian mayor, wounding them.
The terrorists were received as popular heroes in Israel, including by the judge who sentenced them. There were pleas for mercy from Yitzhak Shamir, and American right-wing Christians and Jews began sending money to finance their defence. Wealth American Jews also fund Gush Emunim and Meir Kahane’s extreme right-wing Kach party. Gush Emunim is also funded by Marcus Katz, a Mexican arms salesman, who made immense profits from selling guns and other armaments to Iran and various South American countries. Ruben Mattus, the head of the ice cream firm Haagen-Dazs, is one of the major backers of Kahane’s Kach party in Israel and his Jewish Defence League in the US.
The foremost Christian supporter of Israeli terrorism, at least in the 1980s, was the Jerusalem Temple Foundation, headed by the self-declared new Nehemiah, Terry Reisenhoover. Reisenhoover’s an Oklahoma speculator in oil and land, and styles himself after the Biblical Nehemiah, who was the first governor of Jerusalem after the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon. The land Reisenhoover has speculated on, along with his Israeli partner, Shony Braun, includes land taken from Palestinians on the West Bank. Reisenhoover appointed as secretary Stanley Goldfoot, once implicated in the Stern gang’s 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem Temple Foundation aimed to raise $100 million annually to rebuild the Temple and establish a yeshiva to teach the future priests the correct way to sacrifice animals there. They also supplied funds to Gush Emunim’s defence lawyers after the 1983 attack.
Another right-wing Christian group funding Israeli terrorism is the International Christian Embassy, who lobbied their governments to move their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This group were also financed by South Africa.
The New Year is a time when the commercial channels look back over the events of the previous year. For example, in sport the Beeb broadcasts the Sports Personality of the Year, ITV has Jimmy Carr fronting the comedy quiz, Big Fat Quiz of the Year, Charlie Brooker casts his jaundiced eye over the years’ events in a special edition of Screenwipe. In its prime, News Quiz on Radio 4 did much the same with a special, Christmas edition of the show looking back over the previous year. So it’s in this spirit that I’m reblogging Kevin Logan’s compilation of his favourite bits of sheer ranting lunacy from Infowars’ Alex Jones for 2016.
Jones is a conspiracy theorist, who really does seem to believe that the world is being run by a secret cabal of Satanists determined to destroy everything good and noble, including and especially America. He appeared a few years ago on Jon Ronson’s documentary series, Secret Rulers of the World, in which he claimed that the global elite meeting at Bohemian Grove every year had sacrificed a baby in a Devil-worshipping ceremony. He has his own internet show, Infowars. His broadcasting style is completely unrestrained. He’ll go off on long, splenetic tirades against the ‘globalists’ he believes are wrecking the planet and enslaving its citizens. He’s also done it on British TV. On Jon Ronson’s programme, he went off on a rant about how Americans wouldn’t stand for the globalists’ Satanic shenanigans as this was the Land of the Free, and they were serfs tugging their forelocks to the landlords, like Europe. Andrew Neil had him on his show over here, in which, sure enough, Jones starting ranting again. This ended with camera cutting away from the infowarrior to show Neil making circular motions with his finger around his head in the internationally recognised sign for ‘nutter’. Piers Morgan also had him on his show for an intelligent, informed conversation about the issue of gun rights in America after another mass shooting. Of course, he didn’t get any such thing. Instead, Jones took great umbrage at the question, no matter how mildly Morgan tried phrasing and rephrasing it, and ended up, once again, ranting and threatening the former Mirror editor with dire retribution if he turned up on the other side of the Atlantic to try to take the American people’s guns away.
This short piece by Kevin Logan, who makes vlogs attacking the Alt Right and the disgusting denizens of the Men’s Rights movement, who are frequently part and parcel of the former, contains some fine examples of unbridled lunacy from Jones.
He starts off attacking James Randi, the notorious Skeptic, who specialised in debunking fraudulent mediums and psychics, before going on to claim that the world really is run by Satanists. He also rants about how men are being told that they’re redundant, but there will be a spiritual uprising of real men against the machine Satanist overlords. He also rants about how it’s now hip to fail and be a slacker, have pus and dead babies all over your face, smoke weed and worship Satan. There’s also moments where he mocks liberals, prancing around with exaggeratedly effeminate hand motions, while ranting about how liberals claim their nice and fluffy but really want to kill and enslave everyone. But they look caring and hip while doing so. He also mixes in with his ranting his personal, family history. In his diatribe against Piers Morgan, Jones screams about how patriotic his family has been, as they fought on both sides during the Texas revolution against Mexico. Which as Logan points out, would make Jones a traitor if he personally had done so. He quotes the Japanese WW II admiral, Yamamoto, as saying that they had ‘awoken a sleeping giant’ with their attack on America. He then claims that Oklahoma, and, by implication, the rest of the US, would have caved in without a shot if the Japanese had turned up in pink uniforms claiming to be ‘trannies’. There’s also a scene where he shouts at someone to shut up, and calls them an ‘authoritarian’, which is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black. He also rants about how he is being maligned as sexist and racist, and that Fox News will run a hit piece about a serial stalker of women. They will then show his face, turning red.
This is all highly amusing, but there is a deeply serious side to these rants. Jones was and is a very vocal supporter of Donald Trump. He had him on his show several times during the presidential election campaign and the nominations for the presidency. He claimed that Trump was just the man to stand against the globalists, and is still doing so, despite the glaringly obvious fact that Trump is stuffing his entire cabinet with them. I don’t know how many people take Jones or his show seriously. I suspect a large portion of Jones’ ranting is just theatre. He’s got an outrageous image, which he deliberately plays up to as he knows this will get the rubes watching. It’s the same attitude the great actor and drunk Oliver Reed adopted. Reed was notorious for his drinking, but said in an interview once a few years ago that he presented this persona because this is what the public wanted. They didn’t want to see Oliver Reed the actor, he opined. They wanted to see Oliver Reed the hellraiser. And the same’s true, I think, for Jones.
And his rants do show, in a grotesquely distorted form, many of the issues that do haunt the American Right, as well as wider society. When he talks about the threat of the machines taking over, he’s actually addressing a genuine problem that has been discussed by serious scientists. Kevin Warwick, the professor of robotics at Reading University begins his book, March of the Machines, with a scenario set 33 years from now, in which intelligent machines have taken over and enslaved humanity. He has said in interviews that at one time he was very depressed by this prospect, before he turned to exploring cyborgisation. Way back in the 1990s, the Astronomer Royal, Dr. Martin Rees, also discussed the possibility of robots taking over in a book he wrote, Our Final Minute, on possible threats to the future of humanity. And this is quite apart from the threat of massive job losses – about 2/3 are expected to go – from widespread automation during this century.
Since at least the 1990s, and going back even further to the 1960s, if not long before, there have been conspiracy theories about Satanists running the American government. This became particularly strong with the Gulf War and George Bush senior’s comments about a ‘new world order’. This conspiracy theory draws partly on older theories, in which America is being secretly run by the Freemasons and the Illuminati, following 19th century reactionaries, who tried to explain the American and French Revolutions as the actions of clandestine groups trying to destroy the monarchical, aristocratic order of the ancien regime. These theories were later revived by the Nazi and Fascist theorists in the 20th century, like Nesta Webster, and then entered the UFO milieu in the 1980s and ’90s with the emergence of the Abduction myth. This produced another conspiracy theory that the US government were allowing aliens to abduct and experiment on humans, and even create hybrid human-alien children, in return for technological secrets. Several of the people pushing this myth declared that the aliens’ human agents were the ‘Illuminati’, and tried to support this using passages from the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Now, I’ve seen no evidence that Jones is racist or anti-Semitic. It’s clear from some of the videos he’s posted that he has Black employees on his show. But there is a profoundly racist aspect to the UFO conspiracy theories he espouses.
As for the homophobia, very many people, particularly amongst the older generation in Britain and America are unhappy with gay rights. They’re also deeply concerned about feminism and changing attitudes to gender roles. This has left many men feeling emasculated. And this has been an issue in American politics with strongly anti-feminist activists like the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and Anne Coulter, to name just a few. And while Jones’ statement that the new, Satanic order wishes to make men obsolete is farcically grotesque, masculine obsolescence was the stuff of journalistic discussion back in the 1990s. Some of the female journalists in the 1990s did write articles wondering what was the point of men, now that women had shown they could do their jobs, and in vitro fertilisation made them unnecessary for procreation. A number of feminist SF writers published novels about worlds, in which women prospered after the men had all been wiped out by a disease. Now this was an extreme view. Most women, I think, see feminism as being pro-woman, but not anti-man. As for the newspaper articles about men being obsolete, this was a favourite topic of the chattering classes generally. Will Self and J.G. Ballard had the same discussion in one of the literature periodicals at the same time. There is a genuine issue there, but Jones is probably taking far more seriously than many of the hacks, who wrote opinion pieces about it in the ’90s. Apart from that, Science Fiction has been exploring the topics of sex and gender roles since it first emerged as a genre in the 19th century. One pioneering American feminist depicted a future feminist utopia in Herland, while Theodore Sturgeon described a secret community of hermaphrodites in Venus Plus X in the ’50s or ’60s.
There’s also a section of American society that equates masculinity with militarism and firearms. Not only has Jones ranted against gun control, he’s also spouted weird diatribes about the UN coming to castrate every male. This latter seems to be a skewed misinterpretation of the Indian sterilisation programme of the 1970s. Years ago Magonia, a sceptical UFO magazine, commented on how closely guns and masculinity seemed to be linked in part of the American far Right in an article on the spoof space conspiracy, Alternative 3. This was an April Fool’s Day hoax by ITV, in which a fake science programme, Science Report, uncovered the fact that the Earth was dying. In order to preserve the human race, the Russians and Americans were co-operating secretly to colonise Mars. Selected intellectuals were being sent to the Red Planet to serve as the ruling caste. Beneath them were a class of slave ‘batch consignments’, who were deprived of independent will and ‘de-sexed’ through surgery. The producers of the programme also brought out a book. In the American version, the ‘de-sexing’ of the batch consignments was replaced with a statement about them being deprived of the ability to carry weapons. Which seemed to show how at least some in the American conspiracy fringe equated the loss of gun rights with castration.
As for the ranting about liberals wanting to promote failure as being hip, this seems very much to be a product of the Social Darwinist casts of American politics. The 19th century belief that helping the poor through welfare provision was a waste of resources because the poor were clearly biologically unfit, while businessmen deserved their power and status because they had proved their biological superiority in the competitive world of business, comparable to the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’, is clearly very much alive and well. This also found expression in an SF short story. This described the racial deterioration of humanity following the decision of an American president not to follow the dictates of healthy ‘winner take all’ competitiveness. The result of this was that, millions of years in the future, humanity had degenerated to an unintelligent animal kept as a pet by the new dominant species, a form of Newfoundland dog.
And Jones’ hatred of globalism is clearly a product of American exceptionalism, which sees America as far more virtuous than any other country. As a result, America cannot allow itself to be bound by the rules it imposes on other nations. Hence the reluctance of the Americans to sign up to the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, and the long diatribes by the Republicans and particularly the Neocons against the UN. Again, much of Jones’ bizarre ranting seems to be based on conspiracies theories going back to the 1970s which saw the UN as being set up to produce an oppressive ‘one world’ government. This is a government which the American Christian Right sees as Satanic. This will result in everyone in the world being marked by barcodes at birth, and the institutional persecution of Christians.
Jones’ ranting and his bizarre conspiracy theories and political views are grotesquely funny, but they’re fears shared by a large number of people in America and beyond. A significant number of people are alienated from a political system that seems intent on ignoring and marginalising them, and to some these malign conspiracy theories provide a convincing explanation for the perceived hostility and indifference of the government, or for the shifts in sexual morality and official attitudes towards gender roles during the past decades. Not only are these fears and the issues that inspire them problems in themselves, they are also partly responsible for the rise of Trump and the Alt Right. In that sense, Jones and his ranting need to be taken very seriously indeed, even if what he says is stupid, farcical nonsense.
Yesterday, the world was shocked by the news that Omar Mateen from Afghanistan had gone into Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and opened fire with a gun. 50 people were killed and another 50 were injured before the thug was finally shot by the cops. Today, people have been lighting candles in remembrance, and sending their hopes, prayers and best wishes to friends, lovers and relatives of the victims and the people of Orlando. People around the world, whatever their sexuality, are standing with the gay community to show their hate and disgust at the crime.
Unfortunately, some morons over here have chosen to learn the wrong lesson. Mike put up two posts yesterday about the effect this would have on the Vote Leave campaign. In the first he expressed his fears that they would seize on it to promote more fears of immigrants. And in the second, he expressed his disgust at finding them realised. Some idiots in the ‘Leave’ campaign had stuck up a piece warning that if Britain didn’t leave the EU, something like it would happen here.
This last piece has an eye-opening, and eye-watering list of the stupid reasons some people gave for shooting others. These include domestic arguments in which one spouse has grabbed the gun, so the other grabbed it and shot the other one.
In fact, Britain already has had something like the mass killing in Orlando. This was 7/7, when four suicide bombers killed and maimed hundreds on a bus and in the tube. Those four butchers weren’t immigrants, however. They’d been born here, and were 2nd or 3rd generation. They certainly weren’t recent arrivals off the boat or plane. And many of the idiots, who’ve gone off to join al-Qaeda or ISIS, and so dedicate their lives to ending those of others in the name of a crazed misinterpretation of Islam, have been exactly like them: the British-born children of immigrants.
As for the crime itself, unfortunately there have been more than enough White Americans fouling the airwaves over the other side of the Pond with demands and exhortations for their compatriots to do something similar. One of the videos Secular Talk put up a few days ago was about a right-wing radio host – or politico – who asked why they didn’t shoot trans people anymore. Well, I guess there are a variety of reasons, but I would think that the main one was that people had sympathy with those, who felt they were of the wrong biological gender, because they had medical condition that was causing them distress, rather than that they were wicked or perverted.
Secular Talk also put up a piece from another right-wing talk radio programme, in which a frothing nutter ranted about how people should be rioting in the streets about gay marriage and the rise of gay equality in America. He seemed to think it was a cause for bloody revolution. My guess there is that many people have come to realise that whatever their own views on homosexuality, it’s with a consenting adult and doesn’t affect a person’s moral worth. Being attracted to one’s own sex does not mean that they don’t pay their taxes, support their local sports teams, give to charity and otherwise behave exactly like the rest of the population. One Christian American woman expressed her absolute lack of support for banning gay marriage by stating that she was in ‘a Christ-centred marriage’ with her husband. Now gays had the right to marry. So she had to check her own. ‘No,’ she said, ‘still in a Christ-centred marriage with my husband’. Another man from one of the Southern states put up a video in which he went poking around looking for any gays that might suddenly have fallen out of the sky, to inundate America with gayness. Nope, despite the passage of gay marriage, he couldn’t find any more gays suddenly materialising around the place. It was an ironic attempt to show what a non-issue it all was.
I’ve also no doubt that this atrocity would have delighted Jerry Falwell. Falwell was a right-wing televangelist with the usual hatred of anything to the left of Ronald Reagan. He also hated feminists and gays. When Orlando started holding gay pride marches, Falwell started frothing out the mouth and declared that they couldn’t shake their fists at God like that. Instead, the Almighty would punish them with an asteroid, or earthquake or tsunami. Or something. The local newspaper asked the town’s Roman Catholic bishop what he thought of it. The reverend gentleman opined that he thought, overall, the people of his fair city were decent, god-fearing folk. ‘If God was going to send an asteroid,’ he thought, ‘you’d think He’d start with Las Vegas’. Good point.
You can also bet that over the next few days and weeks you’re going to hear mass whining from the NRA and the gun lobby about how liberals are unfairly using this to deprive decent, law-abiding Americans of their right to have high calibre, military-grade firearms. When massacres like these have occurred, including those at schools, they’ve immediately seized on them to go on the offensive. Often highly offensive. Instead of depriving people of guns, more people should have them, including school children. Then the little mites could shoot back the next time a maniac walked in, or one of their fellows went berserk, and opened fire. We’ll probably here something similar now, with gun-nuts asserting that at least all the men in the nightclub should have been packing, ready to defend themselves and the women.
Given what human nature is like, is should be obvious that the last thing that makes places like schools and nightclubs safer is idiots coming in tooled up. Bullying and gang fights tend to be a fact of school life, which parents and teachers and school staff have to deal with. Now imagine what would happen if all of the little darlings involved had guns, and started blazing away.
It’s the same with nightclubs. Fights break out in pubs and nightclubs, when people have drunk too much, spilled someone’s drink, tried to move in on their partner, or simply looked at them the wrong way. People can get seriously hurt, but most of the time, they ain’t fatal. Now imagine what would happen if a boozed-up lout suddenly started to wave a gun around in a roomful of other drunken, gun-toting louts. You don’t have to be a genius to see how that could easily end in mass carnage, rather than the weight of overwhelming firepower forcing the other dude to put his gun away.
Quite apart from the fact that schools should be for learnin’, and nightclubs for dancing away the evening and generally having fun. Guns should have no place in either.
UKIP Supremo Nigel Farage: Sound Policies for a Happier Britain
UKIP is once more in the news. After a series of scandals by UKIP councillors and politicians, Nigel Farage has responded with a few scathing comments on his party’s membership. In an interview with the Times today (28th January 2014), Farage declared that the ‘wrong kind of people are in UKIP’ and urged the party not to elect Walter Mittys. This follows a series of highly offensive comments by UKIP councillors, such as asking a group of children from care homes how it feels to be ‘takers from society’. If that weren’t enough, another stalwart of the party of Eurosceptics declared that the recent floods in Somerset was God’s punishment for gay marriage. This last comment produced mixed cries of scorn and amusement all over the country. A female friend of mine told me that one of her gay friends had said about this prize piece of Right-wing idiocy, ‘They’re blaming me for the floods! I’ve never had such power before!’
In fact, this particular attitude to the floods is pretty much in line with some of the more ridiculous comments about pro-gay movements and legislation that have come out of the American Right over the past few decades. Way back in the 1990s Private Eye in their ‘Funny Old World’ column printed a piece from one of the local American papers covering Jerry Falwell’s attack on a gay pride march in Orlando, Florida. This most notorious of the Right-wing televangelists attacked the planned march with the statement that if the gay community continued ‘shaking their fists’ at the Almighty, then He would punish them with an earthquake, tsunami or perhaps even wipe the place out with an asteroid. The paper then asked the Bishop of Florida for his comment on Falwell’s diatribe. This man of God put the religious situation in his city into a broader perspective. Overall, he declared, ‘Orlando was a pretty god-fearing place. You’d think if he was going to wipe anywhere out, He’d start with Vegas’.
Yesterday the news revealed that one of UKIP’s MEPs for Somerset had the worst voting record in the European parliament. In a TV interview, the politico acknowledged in response to one of the questions put to him, that the allowance paid to him for attending the sessions were a factor in his turning up at sessions at all, thus adding idleness and venality to the party’s record of bigotry and contempt for the poor and vulnerable.
Hence Farage’s comments about the party having the wrong people in it.
This is a bit rich coming Farage. It reminds me of the proverb ‘A fish rots from the neck down’. Going further back a decade or so ago, Farage himself was also several time in Private Eye himself, after he was spotted having lunch with ‘Nasty’ Nick Griffin of the BNP. Farage has always tried to distance his party from racism and xenophobia, not entirely successfully, so perhaps the two were instead not discussing the politics of race, but the expanding power of the centralist state and the growing threat of Bolshevism in British society.
In fact, Farage’s remarks about his own people strongly reminds me of a comment the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht made about the East German authorities’ absolute contempt for their own people. There had been a popular uprising, and Honegger, or whoever was in charge at the time, responded by sending in the tanks. The man responsible for such masterpieces of Weimar theatre as Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui drily remarked, ‘The politburo has unanimously decided to dissolve the people and elect another’.
It also parallels another disparaging comment by an exasperated leader on the quality of his on a rather less elevated cultural level: ‘Clint Eastwood’s Any Which Way But Loose. In this flick, Eastwood stars as a trucker, who falls foul of an outlaw biker gang. After a fight in which the motorcycle maniacs are thoroughly done over by the star of Dirty Harry and his orang-utan companion, Clyde, their leader cries in despair ‘Oh, Lord! Other men you made of clay! Why did you make mine of sh*t!’ It’s a question Farage is clearly asking himself today, though with a less earthy vocabulary. Perhaps he should be a bit stricter in who the party recruits, and needs a better PR department. All the party’s now have extensive spin machines and press officers. Maggie, of course, had Bernard Ingham. From the way UKIP’s politicos act, I think Clyde would be a better choice for them. After all, in the film he had an excellent sense of humour, charisma, and never said anything embarrassing, unlike UKIP’s hordes of blunt Right-wingers.
Clyde the orang-utan expressing his penetrating analysis of UKIP’s grasp of EU economics and the question of the Britain’s position within it during filming with Clint Eastwood.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 