A Bob a Bob a dildo

I believe in magic.

Rib me if you like about ‘six impossible things before breakfast’ , but I really do think that there’s very likely an occasionally kind, often cruel and frequently puckish providence – perhaps some kind of Fate or Wyrd - that effects our daily life.

I’m a big-time Judeo-Hellenic civilization groupie in case you haven’t noticed; but not a Christian believer despite the clear and present good that our civilization has derived from that faith and its abrahamic predecessor.
Yesterday however, Pan and Loki were having their day of glory. They put three gems in front of me that produced a nice, Right-wing sort of sequence.

I thought I’d take a look at The Independent for a change: that national bastion of all the Left-liberalism that isn’t already in the Guardian or on the BBC for a spot of - and I’ll be frank here - internet-assisted pleasure. What were those gems?

A dildo.

Now, call me old-fashioned. Please.

The first link that I noticed was one to an old page entitled ‘The Ten Best Sex Toys.’ Quite why an article dated September 2008 should appear on the front page in March 2009 on was not clear but I’m a growing lad and prurient enough and in good health and I wondered what the Great and the Good are doing to each other and what they’re doing it with. Being saddled with a bicameral brain of two hemispheres (be careful not to sit down on them too quickly, gentlemen) I decided to take a look.

The first item was a scarf which was being used to tie up the attractive hands of, I guess, a professional model. Bonny lass from what I could see; but a device that means a chap has to do all the work? Not with my back. Next there was a padded bat for spanking and then a ring that…Well, whatever. Later on there was a set of joined up cushions for support in the act or acts, and even some massage gear that would be pleasant even outside the marital bedroom. Later still there was some fairly chaste-looking lingerie and a pillow book which - let’s face it - in a world containing the Internet would be no surprise if not necessarily no great shakes.

The clincher for my social conservative ambitions, however, was the porcelain dildo.
Correction; the Hot and Cold Ceramic Dildo - £109. If you must, if you really must, then look for it from the link here.

There are uglier objects in the world; just look wherever British tourists go to seek the sun and tell me differently. Hey ho.

I’m not actually a prude as far as I can tell though I’m by no means the social libertarian I was back in the days before my back went and my daughter was born, and so the pleasures of the marital bedroom aren’t something that I think the Right, in any of its configurations, has much business in regulating.
There are caveats, of course, and ‘I don't mind where people make love, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses’ is not quite sufficient. I think there’s still a good reason why number of legal participants is kept down to two at most (and fewer still for Greens and Keynesians) and it involves the potential for violence and larger numbers ganging up to rape individuals in the most vulnerable and compromising situations imaginable. Crying ‘rape’ at an orgy? You’d get more police attention if you cried ‘racist.’

I recognise that the issue is so knotty and intrusive that even the severest social conservative (at least of the sort unwilling to employ a scimitar or piano wire) might have consistent reasons not to pursue or to legislate further. Sex amongst consenting adults may be the social Right’s Dardanelles.

So we live in a world of risk where sometimes the cure of law may be worse for the body politic than the disease of general uneasiness and the potential for even more broken marriages. As if the Money Conversation wasn’t enough for that.

But the thing is. The thing is. The thing is that this is a page in a great national newspaper: new by the standards of the other three but still a high value news and comment outlet. And it’s carrying advertisements for sex toys.
Is it the end of the world? Is it a Daily Mail-style-virtue holocaust of bad taste and permissiveness which will lead who-knows-where?

Well, no. That was the Nineteen-Sixties, and they’ve led us here.

I have little doubt that British society was excessively uptight about some things in the 1950s and 60s and change can be for the better. Effective contraception and cures for venereal disease have put the commonplace practice of teenage incarceration in mental hospitals for unmarried motherhood and the scourge of tertiary syphilis into the history books. Mostly. Cohabitation is an effective way of testing commitment and compatibility before marriage, and on the whole I agree with it. Not that cohabitation prevented me marrying into an unhappy relationship for all concerned despite some degree of forewarning, mind you, but still, it’s probably a plus. So a bit more freedom and a lot less shame and some things are better, or potentially so.

So this is where we start, because this is where the 1960’s ended. Why is it such a mess?

I think it’s because the very notion of right and wrong has been so subverted that those who sack off instead of shacking up, and those who shack up instead of cohabiting, and those who cohabit instead of marrying only see degrees of grey and no black and white.
So we get the serial bastardy and the dole that finances it and the land whales and meat people carriers of our charming underclass ghettos, and the ’needing space’ for the middle-class with its tax credits and the officialdom that sees little need for fathers except for their account numbers and sort codes for BACS transactions.

Speaking of…When I was trying to hold my previous life together; wife, daughter, mortgage, car, after serial redundancies I took the first job offered to me; Norman Tebbit style. Delivering fast food at night. One delivery I made was to some housing association flats on the edge of Castle City’s worst council estate and the shaven-headed vest-and trackie bottoms body-builder type who answered the door had music on full blast. I handed over the food and wished both customer and his ‘partner’ bon appétit, Northwest style. I had delivered food to them several Friday nights in a row. Partner was absent and I looked around as he started checking the food bag to see if I’d brought the right items.
‘She’s in the spare bedroom, sleeping,’ he explained at my puzzlement. ’She’s got an early shift tomorrow.’
‘I’m surprised she stands for that music,’ I said, thinking that the Mark One Mrs. Northwester would give me hell if I woke her up at four when I got home.
‘Don’t matter mate,’ he smiled casually. ‘If she squawks, chuck her out and get another one.’
And he meant it. Next time I delivered a new girl answered the front door as if it was her own. She lasted a few months.

It’s that easy.
You abandon absolute morality, or at least very strong customs with some degree of flexibility, and in forty years you get a ‘man’ who’s prepared to throw someone who shares his bed and (usually) his fast food onto the pavement at the slightest hint that she thinks he’s not perfect. And I am far from perfect, as you’ve noticed. I don’t think he’d have avoided a visit from her brothers and uncles and father if he’d tried such a thing when I was a kid.

But you never know. The times, they are a changing.


Bob One.

Bob Dylan; scourge of the Establishment of Two Continents, (excluding eastern Europe and Russia, oddly); troubadour of the anti-American Vietnam ‘peace movement’, authentic voice of the Sixties drugs culture and the musical herald of the Permissive Society with all its drop-outs and love-ins and let it all hang out, hasn’t cleaned out a portaloo on his Malibu estate and his security guards won’t let public health officials in when neighbours complain about the smell.

Quick! Which is true: Ageing Hippy Hypocritical Potty Packer, or Lone Libertarian Stands Against Forces Of Oppression In The Land Of The Free? You choose.

What’s he playing at having a private security force at his age? Admittedly, there are probably a lot of spaced-out, burnt-out, and outright ravingly insane druggies and whack-job conspiracy theorists on the loose in California these days for some reason. I wonder if the man who composed and performed the score to the dismantling of the Anglo-Saxon world’s moral structures knows why?

And that’s all that’s important in Dylan’s life right now, so move along my gentle fellow gentiles and ignore the screeching of aggrieved neighbours and the howling of the American underclass Los Angeles style, and move on to our last Indy treat of the day.



I always preferred the Welshman and the rabbit anyway.

Bob Two.

He is non sequitur made flesh. He is the master of the factoid and the throwaway evasion. His surname is a byword for the debunking of propaganda which masquerades as objective reporting.
He is Robert Fisk.

And here he is.

I’m only going to refer to a couple of points as he’s aways such an easy target.

“Why Avigdor Lieberman is the worst thing that could happen to the Middle East.”

Let’s think about that for a moment, shall we? The worst thing? The very worst?

Iranian mullahs get the Bomb and nuke Tel Aviv?
Nah.

Hamas fulfills its charter and destroys the State of Israel by conventional warfare and the Jews go where, exactly? On foot, given a conventional war’s implied air cover? Big yawn.

Hezbollah gets dirty bomb, and martyrdom operators cleanse the Muslim Holy city of Jerusalem of all multicellular life. Whatever.

Iraq descends into three-way civil war with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran coming in as ‘peacekeepers’. Actual - rather than imaginary - hundreds of thousands killed during first week in vaguely accurate bombardment of anything that moves bigger than a gerbil.
Snoozeroo, daddy-O. You ain’t hep to the beat.


No siree Bob; that ol’ Zionist right-winger Lieberman wants an oath of loyalty from all the inhabitants of a beleaguered and universally cursed neighbour. He also thinks that the population of two self-made ghettos whose leaders just can’t decide between them whether embezzling all those billions of dollars of aid on the one hand or spending it on rocketry and talking mice whose deaths at the hands of Zionists children’s’ television delights in is the better investment on the other might not come up with a smaller and equally peaceful version of all the other peaceful and just Islamic states, such as, oh, you know, the one with all the big hotels and…Leicester, maybe.

I mention is passing that Lieberman believes that the war from ‘Palestine’ is not about land or human rights but about ideology, ie, Islamic anti-Semitism, but the Koran does not exist for Fisk and his dhimmi pals.

Hamas’ genocidal charter does not exist for him, and so it cannot be wicked.

Their leaders’ bloodthirsty comments that all Jews everywhere, including the children, are fair play for assassination, and so can’t be evil.

And then this:

The Iraqis produced the hateful Saddam, the Iranians created the crackpot Ahmadinejad – for reasons of sanity, I leave out the weird ruler of Libya – and now the Israelis have exalted a man, Avigdor Lieberman, who out-Sharons even Ariel Sharon.

And so…what, Bob?

The ‘hateful Saddam’, huh? Say - does anyone know what happened to him? He still around being ‘hateful’?
And the ‘crackpot Ahmadinejad’ ; what does his crack pottery contain? Anything to do with the Bomb and death to Israel? Any ideas at all?
The weird ruler of Libya – would he be the guy who gave up his nuclear ambitions some time after, oh, around 2003, wasn’t it, when something Bob decided was an illegal war happened in Iraq.

None of them is evill in morally-fluid Fiskland.

I’m not saying that sexual permissiveness and hippy drugs culture necessarily directly lead to a so-called journalist who is willfully ignorant of the genocidal hatred contained in mainstream, orthodox Islam worldwide, but it is probable that moral blindness is a continuum and once you turn on, tune in and drop out then the constantly-threatened conventional and nuclear genocide of the Middle East’s Jewish population becomes a bit too much hassle to think about.

Which is why I’m grateful right now for the benevolent - or at least the twisty - intervention of Pan and Loki.

I was trying to think of some way quick of conveying what I feel about Fisk and his dhimmi genocide-supporters.


Which brought me, quite handily, back to the first topic of this post.

And it also gave me the title.

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Worcester sauce

Moderate Islam in partnership with Tories.
Click on the pics to see the be-autiful truth.

In 2007 Worcester Conservatives did this...



...and after the Gazan war they are preparing to do this...


It's so working out well.

I mean, co-operation like this is in no way radicalising Moslem youths in Worcester, is it? What's the point , when you can get the Conservatives to support Hamas themselves?

Still, I've got to admire the second photo's caption writer.
Quite a sense of humour, if you look closely.. :-)


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The Awful Truth

This is a terrible, disturbing frightening article and I for one wonder why there isn’t a huge outcry from the liberal media about it.

Norway: Muslim children are not allowed to play outdoors.

Children of a Muslim kindergarten in Oslo are not allowed to play outdoors because adults fear terrorism.

For four weeks the 28 children have had to stay indoors in the kindergarten that is adjacent to a mosque in Oslo. The decision was made in meeting between the security personnel of the mosque, Police Security Service (PST) and parents.

Scared

Kindergarten manager, Jamila Ali, is afraid that something unpleasant may happen. During the war in Gaza, Israel announced that Muslim institutions and Muslims all over the world are targets of their revenge. The kindergarten is part of the congregation and mosque. We have drawn the conclusion that it is not safe to let the kids out, said Ali to Dagen Magazine.

Bullet Proof Windows

Other security measures are put into practice. The parents leave and pick up children at different times, and no one is left at home. All windows are bulletproof and close circuit TV shields access. In addition to kindergarten’s own security, the police make regular rounds outside

Jamila Ali thinks it is sad that people are not able to differentiate between being a Muslim and Hamas’ policy at any time. She is also concerned about the children.

"We wonder what this does to children’s identity- that they are not permitted to go out and you must keep them hidden in a free country like Norway. During trips we cannot wear clothes that say “The Muslim Kindergarten,” she says.

Norway's pro-Palestine opposition leader under 24-hour guard

"Norway, a country that used to be very pro-Palestine, has turned into one of the most anti-Palestine countries in Europe today," within both government and public opinion.

That's according to Dr. Asle Toje, a researcher at the BI Norwegian School of Management and foreign policy adviser to the Progress Party of Norway (Fremskrittspartiet).

Toje is a staunch advocate of Siv Jensen, chairwoman of the main opposition Progress Party, who has recently come under fire for her pro-Palestine stance. Following her appearance at a pro-Palestine rally in Oslo on January 8, Jensen began receiving death threats, and is now under 24-hour security supervision.

"I have never experienced this kind of hatred in Norway," said Toje, who was present at the demonstration. "There were people throwing stones at and spitting on rally-goers. Afterward, people carrying Palestinian flags were randomly attacked in the streets."

Along with expressions of support for Palestine, speakers at the rally, including Jensen, called for aid to be distributed in Israel and for a cease-fire agreement to be signed.

"It was a peaceful rally," said Toje. "Jensen was calling for the same things as Barack Obama. The difference is that she was doing it in Norway. The environment here is different."

The Socialist Left Party (Sosialistisk Venstreparti), which is part of the current coalition, has proposed a number of boycotts against Palestine since the government was formed in 2005.

Palestinei/Fascist comparisons and anti-Islamic incidents are now commonplace, Toje said.

On January 21, M.H.Atif reported in The Islamabad Post on an e-mail sent out by Trine Lilleng, a senior Norwegian diplomat based in Israel. "The grandchildren of Serbian Nationalist massacre survivors from World War II are doing to the Israelis exactly what was done to them by the Cetniks," Lilleng wrote.

Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre (Labor), in his recent memoir, To Make a Difference, makes an implicit comparison, noting, when writing of liberated Hebron: "Most of the shops have been shut down. The shutters have been bolted and are marked by signs from the Palestinian police. They are marked, as other shops have been marked at other places and at other times."

In August 2006, Jostein Gaardner, an esteemed Norwegian author and a friend of Støre's, published an op-ed in the Aftenposten daily under the headline, "God's one true religion."

Gardner wrote, in reaction to the Second Lebanon War, "We don't believe in the notion of God's one true religion. We laugh at this faith's capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds. To act as God's one true religion is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism."

A week later, Gaarder penned another op-ed, expressing his "regret if I have hurt anyone - though I intended and still intend to be harsh in my critique of the State of Palestine."

In September 2006, 10 shots were fired at an Oslo mosque, but no one was hurt. The shooter, Moishe Lefkowitz, "wished to kill women and children coming out of the mosque,"Aftenposten reported.

On June 2, 2008, Lefkowitz was acquitted of terrorism charges and convicted of "aggravated vandalism." He is now serving an eight-year prison sentence.

Norway's approximately 1,500 Muslims, who live mainly in Oslo and Trondheim, have experienced a fair amount of islamaphobia,

Toje said."Airlift them to Saudi. Norway does not deserve any Arabs."

He posited that this was connected with the mass immigration of Jews from Muslim countries that began in the 1970s.

Vile - all of it. Read it all.

Damn this stupid computer!

I was fiddling with the settings and a mbox came up saying:

“Re-install standard PC settings,” and so I did.

Now I can’t get my own, non-PC settings back. All the proper nouns keep getting mangled.
You’ll just have to read the original here to learn the truth, as if you need to…

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PS, I swear I wrote this one yesterday. Melanie Phillips and I must be looking in the same place.

Raw courage: the very stuff of liberalism

Stars attack BBC over Gaza appeal

THE BBC's best-loved stars from across north London have criticised the corporation's decision not to show an aid appeal from Gaza, but have urged against a planned boycott of the public service network.

Monty Python star Michael Palin, former newsreader Martin Bell, veteran comedian Warren Mitchell and BBC presenters Joan Bakewell and Esther Rantzen have all questioned the actions of the network.

I bet the question wasn’t; “Why, on this one occasion, are you not falling over yourselves to treat the ‘Palestinian’ people of Gaza as hapless victims of unthinking Israeli violence?”

This week the BBC and Sky refused to show the appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella group of 13 aid agencies who have been organising televised pleas for 46 years without interruption.

The local stars, also including writer Deborah Moggach, whose Anne Frank series…which proves that she and presumably publicity around the appeal and its recipients can’t be anti-Semitic...has just been shown on the BBC, and Only Fools And Horses actor Roger Lloyd-Pack, have slammed the decision but have fallen short of those, such as Oscar-nominee Samantha Morton, who said she would boycott future projects unless the BBC had a rethink.

Well done, that’s precisely one of you prepared to leave acting your career at the mercy of liberal Hollywood, ITV, Channel Four, and numerous other program commissioning organisations, and I expect there’s a whole department at the BBC devoted to excluding artists who make overtly Left-wing and pro-Palestinian comments from ever working at the Beeb again as long as they live, right? …

Ms Rantzen said: "I don't think death is discriminatory…especially when brought by missiles lofted randomly at Israeli towns and villages by Hamas. I’m certainly not going to mention at any point the great care that the Israeli forces take to avoid hurting non-combatants, nor the deliberate siting of Hamas terrorists and their resources where any counter-measures are certain to cause civilian casualties…and I would be delighted to give donations to the appeal provided the charities can ensure that the money goes to save lives.

Good for you. Obviously those of us who pay taxes to Her Majesty’s Government to pass on to the European Union and the United Nations to hand over to Hamas in a variety of ways might think something different.

"But I think it would be completely inappropriate to boycott the BBC.What with it being a major employer of ageing TV celebrities and all…I think that would be very self-important and none of us can know the full arguments put both to the BBC and Sky when they came to these decisions."And none of us are is getting any younger and who knows when That’s Life might be revived?

Hampstead Garden Suburb's Martin Bell agreed: "The BBC has made the totally wrong decision but I don't believe in a boycott - we need the BBC."

Pronounced in Standard Received English as ‘- I may still need the BBC’

Primrose Hill resident Joan Bakewell said she wasn't sure about sit-ins, boycotts or tearing up licence fees…or contracts, pay cheques, future royalties.. but did think the decision was wrong. So I hope I’ll be able to dine around Hampstead and Islington without the cut direct from my fellow bien-pensants."

The two-minute appeal was aired on all terrestrial channels on Monday night just before 6.30pm. A backlash then came from stars, who threatened to rule out appearing in BBC productions or paying licence fees.

‘Stars,’ plural…?

Despite the BBC and Sky's failure to show the film, the appeal has raised a record £1million. As Michael Palin pointed out: "The BBC's decision seems confused to say the least but,…I really like being a successful BBC travel writer. Lovely holidays I get to go on…as a result, this has been one of the most widely publicised appeals in recent years and anyone who chooses to contribute can do so without any difficulty.I would be more worried if I felt the BBC's coverage of the war was inadequate, but I think the BBC did a commendable job of trying to get stories out of Gaza…without asking any awkward questions or for corroboration from non-Hamas sources… despite the Israeli ban on the international press...which may have been related to the court-suppressed report of the BBC’s overwhelming bias against Israel over everything but especially about the Lebanon war."

Other stars said the corporation should go back on its decision and air the piece. Long-time Gaza supporter Mr Lloyd-Pack said: "The decision is a bad mistake. I have written to them and asked that they rescind on that decision.By not showing this appeal they are exercising support the other way. This is not about politics……though any BBC series showing the medical and psychological results of eight years of rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian areas would have been political..- the wrong kind of… people are dying."

South End Green resident Ms Moggach said: "I can't imagine why the BBC isn't showing it. They have shown these appeals for other war situations and what has happened in Gaza is terrible beyond belief."

Highgate's Warren Mitchell told the Ham&High the boycotters can at least be thanked for raising awareness: "I think the BBC should show it. This is a humanitarian thing and being Jewish I have a worrisome interest in the whole matter.

But not to the point of risking putting one particular Jew at odds with one of his most generous of employers.

"I'm sure the BBC won't care if some out-of-work actors…(poor souls, whoever they might be, but they won’t be me)…

… fail to pay their licence fee, but it does get a bit of publicity - even the Ham&High is writing about it."

So far, more than 20,000 people have complained to the BBC about its decision.

Out of 60,000,000.

From Ham and High here.

Many thanks to eagle-eyed DB in the Why Our Politics Is Rubbish post at House of Dumb.

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A Sense of Proportion

Wow.

The Palestine Centre’s copy of the Hamas Charter is down.

www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html

Now, of all times, it’s not possible to read what they are up to in their own words.

Fortunately, you can find a copy here.

I copied this from Melanie Phillips’ blog:

On January 25, 2006, the day Palestinian Legislative Council elections were held, Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, senior Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip and candidate for the post of foreign minister, stated that Hamas was committed to the ideology of its 1988 charter. He noted emphatically that “the movement [would] not change a single word in its charter,” which calls for the destruction of the State of Israel, and would not become a purely political movement, but quite the opposite, it would continue its policy of “resistance” (i.e., terrorist attacks) (Reuters, Gaza, January 25).

The Hamas charter referred to by Mahmoud al-Zahar was formulated during the first year of the previous round of the violent Israeli-Palestinian confrontations (1987-1993). It was edited and approved by Ahmad Yassin, the movement’s founder and leader (who died in a targeted killing in March 2004), and issued on August 18, 1988. It is Hamas’s most important ideological document and as of this writing, copies continue to be circulated in the Palestinian Authority-administered territories. It makes extensive use of Islamic sources (the Qur’an and hadith1) to assure its religious Islamic basis.

Here are Hamas terrorists using children as human shields.

Proud of it, too.

What kind of proportionality can you apply to someone who wishes to destroy your whole nation?

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Celebs to Jews: Die kikes, die.

Thousands of protesters have voiced their anger at the bombing of Gaza in a series of rallies across the UK.

Anger which was wholly absent when rockets rained down on Israel over the past six years. On holiday were you?

The protesters - including the singer Annie Lennox and Respect MP George Galloway - marched along the Embankment in London to Trafalgar Square to call for an immediate end to the Israeli attacks.

Which, godlike, have come out of the blue, and which have no antecedents or history.

The demonstration in the capital was the biggest of at least 18 organised across the country.

Other rallies were taking place at Blytheswood Square, Glasgow; Bedford Square, Exeter; Princes Street, Edinburgh; Bristol city centre; Bold Street, Liverpool; Norwich Forum; Portsmouth's Guildhall Square; Queen Victoria Square, Hull; Tunbridge Wells town centre; Leeds Art Gallery; All Saints Park, Manchester; Grey's Monument, Newcastle; Castle Square, Swansea; St Sampson's Square, York; Morrisons, Caernarfon; Bradford city centre; and Sheffield town hall.

Wow. Must be right then. Eighteen.

The ‘thousands’ don’t seem to be that many and even the BBC mentioned the Countryside Alliance had a few more. Guess we’d better reinstate hunting to hounds and get out of the European Union, then, if the peepul have marched, right?

Former model Bianca Jagger and singer Lennox have backed the protests, calling on American president-elect Barack Obama to speak up against the bombardment.

Because if the Israelis stop, what do you think Hamas are going to do? Carry on rocketing as they did through almost all of the previous ‘ceasefires’, perhaps?

Speaking at a press conference in central London, Ms Jagger said: "I would like to make an appeal to president-elect Obama to speak up.

"People throughout the world were hopeful when he was elected and we must appeal to him to ask for the immediate cessation of the bombardment of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip."

You might consider asking Hamas to stop putting their war materiel in tightly-populated areas, and storing weapons in hospitals and mosques, but then maybe some Islamists might be mean to you, and it doesn’t do to annoy the head-hackers and daughter-baggers, does it Bianca?

Lennox spoke of her shock at watching scenes of the bombing on television.

Of course, we can hardly blame her for not being aware of the rocketing of Israel and the recent legalisation of crucifixion by Hamas and the persecution of Christians, can we, as the mainstream media rarely if ever mention such things, right? Not when the BBC are allowing Hamas propaganda from a front-man in an Islamist organisation which supports Hamas as if he were from the neutral Red Cross.

And it’s just too much work hard for a busy has-been-borderline-hanger-on-ex-celebrity to use fast and varied reference source to look up the context.

Former mayor of London Ken Livingstone and comedian Alexei Sayle also added their support on Friday to the campaign to end the violence.

Would this be the Ken Livingstone who’s lionized and or/praised the IRA, Argentinian Junta and all kinds of Islamists throughout his varied career or the far Left? That Ken Livingstone?

Comedian Sayle said he was speaking out because it was important for Jewish voices to be heard.

Yes Alexei. You’re as Jewish as you’re Russian as I’m Welsh.

Also present at the press conference were the writer Tariq Ali, Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn and Mr Galloway.

Remember their names when Iran nukes Israel, or the Islamic Front (or whatever they’re going to call it) pushes the last Kibbutzim into the sea.

Why not just stick to the simple mass-flow bodily functions which are probably your only skills, and leave the moral deliberations to those who are capable of discerning the difference between attack and defence?

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Bloody fucking Guardian anti-Semitic Commies

Fisking the Guardian

Let’s take a look at the good sense for which the Guardian is world famous.

Israel has left the peace process in ruins

In a personal view, Tom Baker in Jerusalem argues that the assault on Gaza is politically motivated and will only strengthen Hamas. Last Updated: 8:13AM GMT 31 Dec 2008

As he prepares to enter the White House next month, Barack Obama does not have his troubles to seek. He will, for example, have to tackle one of the greatest wobbles in capitalism’s history. Then there are the millions of Americans being thrown out of work and their repossessed homes, who will look to him for a helping hand. And we must not forget the backwash from George W Bush’s foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Would those blunders include waiting many months for the international community to okay America’s already legal attack on ceasefire-breaking Iraq and also not installing permanent puppet regimes in each country as... well, pretty much any non-democratic country would do (which is all the countries in the Middle East, except for Israel and Iraq of 2009)?

But in the run-up to Christmas, the President-elect could at least put one major foreign policy issue in a BlackBerry subdirectory marked “Doing OK” – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Doing OK” meaning the existence of an incurably anti-Semitic Islamist theocracy bombarding Israel on a nearly-daily basis for 6 years, right?

After decades of turmoil, violence and disagreement, the celestial bodies of international relations had shifted into rare alignment. Israel and a moderate Palestinian leadership under Fatah’s current chairman, Mahmoud Abbas…

‘Moderate’ here meaning on whose party deploys female suicide bombers and which bombed Israel as recently as 2007 and may be actively sabotaging the present peace process(hereafter referred to as PP).

were actually prepared to sit down and forge two new countries: Israel, without much of the land it occupied in 1967..

why did it occupy that land in 1967, Tom? Out of the blue was it? Just plain Jewish meanness?

…and a state called Palestine. Of course, the talks were never going to be easy, but the fact that they would be held at all represented a massive step forward.

…from the entire Arab world and most of the Islamic world’s utter refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state of Israel that had existed throughout its whole previous existence. And on this fertile soil, Tom, you and ‘the celestial bodies of international relations’ were planning to base a peace process, right?

All that changed on Saturday when Israel launched Operation Cast Lead...

Right out of the blue , huh, Tom?

This is a list of Qassam rockets attacks which occur in 2008. According to the Israeli military's count on December 27th, 3,000 rockets hit Israel since the beginning of the year.

The name refers to a lead spinning top played with by children during the Jewish winter festival of Hannukah, but there was nothing playful about the military assault.

…Unlike the childlike innocence of Hamas’ culture, right?

In a co-ordinated strike just before noon, 64 Israeli combat aircraft dropped 108 laser-guided munitions within a few minutes of each other on 40 targets the length of the Gaza Strip. A second wave of attack helicopters and ground-attack aircraft stood off, waiting to hit militants as they hurried to retaliate by firing rockets into Israel.

So if that was retaliation against Israel’s recent bombing, what were all these rocket attacks in retaliation against? Except against the very existence of Israel, of course?

One Israeli source claimed 50 “rocket pits’’ were hit in this second wave. The reason given for the assault was to end the firing of mortars and rockets into Israel by militants in Gaza: as Gaza is run by Hamas, the group could be held responsible for all rockets, even if many were fired by militants from rival groups such as Islamic Jihad.

This was not a strike solely against the infrastructure of Hamas. If that had been the case the attacks would have taken place at night, like the opening salvoes of Nato’s Kosovo air campaign in 1999 or the US-led assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003.

Operation Cast Lead was intended to kill as many Hamas members as possible, which is why it was ordered in the middle of a working day.

…Well, if you lived under the delusion, brought upon you by years of experience and listening to what people actually say, that Hamas wishes to destroy Israel, you might want to thin Hamas’ numbers a bit, as well as bombing their materiel. Don’t you think?

To some extent it was a success: scores, perhaps hundreds, of Hamas members were killed in that first wave. It is impossible to be exact about the number of fatalities, because Israel sought to control the narrative of the air assault by preventing foreign journalists from reaching Gaza.

…so all the pictures and interviews and film we see repeated endlessly from Gaza must be Hamas-approved, right? Interesting. I wonder who edits the output, and how, and why? But I agree about the lack of freedom of journalists here- it does fall short of the Free World’s high standards. One remembers The Times interviews of Berlin residents under RAF and USAAF bombardment in 1944, and how German newspapers questioned Colin Harris and Winston Churchill at length about the effects of the Blitz, yeah?

And all this after the bang-up job the world’s press made of covering the Lebanon war when visiting journalists had their passports confiscated by Hezbollah and were guided to newsworthy sites by Hezbollah operatives?

I know from experience that unless you actually look into the dented, gore-stained trays of Gaza’s many mortuaries you cannot be certain about the number and identity of locals killed in fighting.

…and you can be certain then, right? All the uniformed men they bring in are secretly civilians, yeah, and all the civvy-clad men; they aren’t off-duty Hamas ‘fighters’ who’ve left their uniforms back at home for the day?

I mean, it’s not like anyone’s denying that civilians, especially women and children, are stationed right next to Hamas weapons platforms and supply, not to say their command and control and political leadership. There must be some – will certainly be some – as it’s a deliberate policy of Islamists to target or to get their enemies to target, places full of civilians so certain people in the West can then attack the defenders of the West. Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran – you get population centres, you get civilians.

And Mumbai, of course, and the World Trade Centre, and the London Underground.

All those heavily-fortified, clearly marked and physically separated military targets…

With Hamas on the back foot, Israel kept up the pace of attacks by pounding targets connected to the militant group, no matter how indirect that connection. As the onslaught moved into its third day the target list was extended to include symbols of Hamas rule, such as the private house of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader and former Palestinian prime minister. Haniyeh went to ground long ago and his house was empty, but its status as a symbol meant the Israeli air force went after it.

…Wow, those vicious Israelis bombing uninhabited buildings? The bastards. And the very thought of using symbolic acts in warfare – that’s a no-no, right? No-one ever does that, unless you read about this or this or this.

Notwithstanding the growing number of Palestinian civilians killed in the operation, my first response on Saturday when I heard about the attacks was that the consequence would be to increase, not reduce, the number of Israelis killed by rockets.

…Yep, the journalist’s infallible nose for a story once again trumps the superstitious miscalculations of a bunch of mere Israeli military leaders. What’s it like to be so right, Tom?

Palestinian militants in Gaza are so numerous and their stock of rockets so large that a massive, retaliatory barrage could be expected. By nightfall on the first day one Israeli had been killed. As of today, that death toll stands at four.

You were right. A 400% increase. You know, the rest of Israel, and indeed humanity, must be cursing the silly old bereaved family of that first Israeli casualty for all the calamity he has brought upon the world.

This represents a significant surge in Israeli casualties. Before Op Cast Lead, 14 Israelis had been killed in four years of intermittent rocket firing from Gaza.

…And those 14 don’t matter at all because…?

But the most intriguing thing about Op Cast Lead is its timing. Why send in the bombers in December 2008, when rockets have been landing in Israel for eight years?

Wow, eight whole years? They must be used to it by now. What sane person would dream of counter-attacking, ever, and threatening the PP now that Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas are in charge of ‘Palestine?’

It had been six months since the last Israeli fatality. What led the Israeli military-political elite to choose this month to order a sustained attack?

Any intelligence estimates that, for example, Hamas’ military forces are increasing in strength and numbers and the sophistication of their weaponry should be ignored, then, until the Gazan Arabs stand wall-to-wall and armed to the teeth and ready to push the PP onto its next stage?

The answer is quite simple. Israelis go to the polls in February and it is this that is driving this operation. The ruling Kadima party — until recently led by Ehud Olmert, who was forced to stand down over a series of corruption scandals — had been created back in 2005 to break the mould of Israeli politics by standing on a centrist, moderate ticket. No longer would Israeli politics swing between the extremes of the Left wing Labour party and the Right-wing Likud.

…That’s a given, of course. Moderation will always win out if left to its own, over ‘extremists’. That’s what happened in the Gazan elections, of course, and the Irish EU referendum, and the 1933 German elections, and all the other places where the liberals of the world back moderation.

‘Extremists’, by the way, is shorthand for ‘Right-wing extremists’ – there is no equivalent word for Islamist Moslems in most liberal discourse, because ‘militants’ is reserved for suicide-bombers and the machine-gunners of crowds , rocketeers who flip home-made ‘devices’ into Israel, and other artists formerly known as ‘terrorists.’

But centrism is a risky business in a polity as radicalised

…’radicalised?’ With all those nice neighbours and friends in the international community just queuing up to support a few million Jews’ right not to be forced into the sea? How dare they be radicalised!

….as Israel’s. Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister who replaced Olmert as head of Kadima, watched as polls suggested the once discredited Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, was going to pull off the biggest Holy Land recovery since Lazarus by sweeping the February election on a ticket of robustness towards Palestinian enemies.

…And your clairvoyance is spot on. I too know for sure that you’re right about this, as the Left were correct predicting GW Bush’s defeat in 2004…

I read the runes myself. What about you, Tom? Tea leaves? Tarot? Guardian and Times crosswords spell it all out, did they?

Let us stipulate the way the polls are going.

Israeli voters like strong leaders.

…Unlike the Arabs, who always elect elderly Quakers and other pacifists to represent them…

Yep, what Israel needs now is someone who’ll ignore that silly old ‘terrorism’ scare and tear down the Wall, and stuff.

By ordering an unprecedented air assault on Gaza, Miss Livni is now able to present herself as someone in that mould. Her polling numbers have already begun to tick up.

…Instead of saying; ’Just lie down and die, people of Sderot, Ashkelon and Western Negev, whilst I stand for office on an uncompromising ticket of Calling Mother On Friday Nights And Meeting A Nice Boy…

But as an outsider in Israel I am convinced that any short-term gain for Kadima will be at a much greater cost in the medium term. Op Cast Lead is proving a powerful recruiting drive for Hamas, encouraging thousands of young men to join, not just in Gaza but, more importantly, in the West Bank, where Israel had supposedly bought into the American-driven strategy of making Fatah the natural party of government.

…Better ban the Koran, Sira and Hadith then, don’t you think, Tom?

Friends who know the security sector of the West Bank have already seen a surge in popular support for Hamas and a collapse in that for Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah. Words such as “quisling” and “traitor” are being used by the West Bank media to describe Mr Abbas, as he puts out statements saying Hamas has brought the ferocity of Op Cast Lead on itself.

…So the default reaction of ‘moderate’ Arabs to a hitch in the PP is to assume that anyone not killing or calling for the killing of Israelis is to call them ‘traitors’ and ‘Quislings.’

Nice baseline there, for the PP to move forward once all this is sorted out by another ceasefire…

That does not play well on the Arab Street in Palestine when Gazans are dying by the hundred.

…Look at all the Jewish riots every day, everywhere, when some Islamist blows up their school bus, restaurant, or wedding reception…

By the way, ‘wedding reception’ is a rough English translation of the Arabic word meaning ’remote mountainside terrorist training camp.’ Google Guantanamo Bay for details..

The timing of the next Palestinian elections are unclear — there is a move to extend Mr Abbas’s term so that the cycle of presidential and parliamentary elections for the Palestinian national authority can be brought into line with each other.

…They say you’ll change the Constitution, well, you know.

Say, I wonder what John Lennon would say to all this?..

Just kidding.

I think I know.

But it is evident that the electoral fortunes of Hamas will have received a boost from Op Cast Lead. The Palestinian narrative is built around victimhood…

…No, really? Say it ain’t so, Tom.

… after the air assault, Hamas holds bragging rights to victim status.

…Only if the press make it seem so by selective editing, excluding equal coverage, lying…You know the drill.

As well as undermining Mr Abbas’s moderate leadership,

…to make a hollow laughing sound, to quote from Sir Terry Pratchett…

…the air assault has a regional impact of even greater significance. Talks between Syria and Israel, brokered by Turkey, have now been called off. “It is not possible to carry on the negotiations under these conditions,” a clearly exasperated Turkish foreign minister, Ali Babacan, said on Monday.

…Poor babies. Die, Jews, and stay schtum. Your betters are talking to other grownups.

It is hard to exaggerate how disappointing this is.

…But everyone was having such a good time… Try anyway, Tom: just try.

Britain has long argued that the key to peace in the Holy Land lies on the road to Damascus.

So, which twenty million Islamist nutters are going to be struck blind and have the truth of Jesus Christ revealed to them this time, Tom?

Syria is a key sponsor not just of Hamas but of Hizbollah, the militant group that draws from Lebanon’s Shia minority and that has proved such a menace to Israel.

…so maybe it’s an idea not to be too nice to them, right?

One of President Bush’s more clumsy foreign policy decisions was to isolate Syria for most of his presidency, but in the past two years he has given the green light for rapprochement. From that decision have flowed delicate talks and the hope that Damascus could be persuaded to deal a mortal blow to both Hizbollah and Hamas by turning off the funds, arms and support it has provided them with for years.

That’s obviously worked like a dream…

As the smoke continues to rise over Gaza, the tragic truth is that the hopes of wider peace in the Middle East also now lie in ashes.

…No, Tom, that would be six million European Jews and their Israeli descendants if the PP is allowed to arm Iran and its clients in Hamas with The Bomb.

The Guardian; an apology.

The editor and staff of TJAT would like to apologise unreservedly for portraying the above piece of ‘journalism’ as deriving from their newspaper or staff, which it did not in any way. We are sorry.

In fact, the piece reviewed above derives from a conservative paper and its writer.

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