Political Peccadillo
More indication caretaker government will have no influence
From the Boston Globe, 27 May
‘…The diplomat said [UN envoy Lakhdar] Brahimi gave no answer about how much a caretaker government would be consulted about US-led military actions, but the issue sparked debate. If the caretaker government was consulted on military action, "it could hurt its legitimacy," the diplomat said. "The point was raised that perhaps it would be better if the caretaker actually had no input on military activities at all.”’
Brahimi knows the script. Soon-to-be US ambassador Negroponte is saying the same thing. And the 1 July transitional administration is very much a dress rehearsal for the powers that the actual, ‘sovereign’ (ha-ha) government will have in Baghdad. Defence will be just one of those areas where local politicians will be subdued by the noise coming from Negroponte’s Baghdad mission, which will take over Coalition Provisional Authority duties.
As that human rights protester correctly asserted, Negroponte is mired in the sort of death squad sleaze that most of the US press choose to ignore. The 'career diplomat' is far from a reasonable man in his objectives. He will be de facto governor of Iraq. All the time this political massage parlour is in session, raw sewage continues to spew into the Euphrates, electricity and water supplies decline and US troops get increasingly itchy trigger fingers because they have no prospect of leave until after the summer, while still considering themselves liberators in contrast to objecting Iraqis as Saddam-sodomized-terrorist-insurgent-Arabs (who are racially inferior).
Cull has also heard that Oliver North is in Iraq. As a journalist. Nothing else. Not even remotely connected to his status as founder of the Freedom Alliance, whose catchphrase is the rectally regal “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” Ollie is kindly providing us with a ‘Common Sense Commentary’ while in Iraq and isn't there to reassure his fellow freedom reamers in the White House that everything they are doing is right. At all.
Further reading:
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/onorth.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50566,00.html
http://www.freedomalliance.org/view_article.php?a_id=362
http://www.freedomalliance.org
and for a patriotic treat…
http://www.takeoneforthecountry.com
¶ 9:30 PM
Our latest Israeli row
Last week George Bush unilaterally approved Ariel Sharon’s plan for Gaza ‘disengagement’ (a deliberately ambiguous term) and for keeping hold of some of the largest Judea & Samaria (West Bank) settlements, possibly the biggest moving of goalposts since the 1967 war. Then the Israel Defence Force followed up the assassination of Shaikh Yassin with one on new leader Abdel-Aziz Rantisi. Prime UK apologist Melanie Phillips
trotted out the usual blind diatribe against ‘terror masters’ in the Daily Mail
(19/4/04). Our man Leo Cortex, who only recently was having to defend our stance that the West Bank’s security wall is not the wisest idea, felt compelled to email Associated Newspapers.
“The history of modern terrorism is a history of appeasement. From the first Palestinian plane hijacking in 1968, the response of the West was to assume there were legitimate grievances that had to be addressed. From that point, terrorists had every incentive to continue” – Phillips article
Dear Melanie
I read your above titled article from today's issue of the Daily Mail and was flabbergasted by the bellicose Zionism and flagrant anti-Muslim tone of the piece.
The continuity of your article with the long term objectives of Likud and the other far right poisons on the Israeli political scene is obviously no accident but the repeated assertion that Palestinians/terrorists/Arabs/Muslims all 'love death' and 'hate life' is an odious device. It is clear to me (as a secular man born in post-Christian England) that you are eager to push the Likud objective of provoking the Palestinians into repeatedly desperate acts of retaliatory violence that justifies their ultimate clearance from the shrinking lands they currently cling to so that history (or at least compliant historians) will record that the Palestinians were undone by there own militant hand.
All acts of murder, whether committed by jittery kids carrying out their national service in the Israeli army or suicide bombers beguiled by a false sense of religious destiny are deplorable but this does not preclude understanding. Just as we MUST understand Israel's right (as you would have it) to occupy Palestinian territory, assassinate at will, economically strangle the West Bank and Gaza, put up a separation wall to steal water supplies and openly discuss the merits of assassinating Yasser Arafat on national radio, we must understand the motives of the oppressed - even you, Melanie, cannot deny that they are oppressed by the Israeli state.
Clearly the Palestinians are not reluctant to express sadistic sentiment toward Israel and Israelis but I know that 'all' Palestinians (as you heinously imply) do not wish to see the outright eradication of Israel. One thing that will guarantee the take up of such a suicidal attitude is further abuse of power by the Israelis. Targeted killings are an illustration of the outrageous economic and military imbalance between the two sides, not some admirable example of Israeli resourcefulness. These are the 'terror masters' who are 'turning the screw ever tighter'. Contrasting the crude cruelty of suicide bombs with the expert 'precision' (even though Palestinian civilians are always killed or injured) of targeted killing is a disingenuous moral choice, to which you clearly subscribe because you regard Palestinians as inferior to Israelis. Naturally, any Muslim hothead reading your intentionally ignorant and provocative diatribe will see the conflict as Jews v Muslims. Such a person would have more in common with you than you would like to admit.
Your disdain for compromise and discussion as a solution to this currently intractable and deadly dispute is apparent and it is no surprise to read that your hysterical conclusion distills Israel-Palestine and the advent of 'global terrorism' to a simple moral paradigm that conveniently invites racial supremacy, once again, to the table of right wing solutions.
As your frothy polemics often conclude this way, let me try to imitate, in the spirit of resolution and 'accord'. Jewish people around the world are harassed and harried by the collective memory of the murder of millions on millions of their kind and the experience and understandable determination not to fall victim to such vile political mechanics has brutalised the Jews of Israel to such an extent that they are deaf to the cries of those Palestinians who need support to overcome the social and cultural supremacy of Hamas et al and therefore have no qualms in planning a genocide of a people.
Oh, should Israel use her nuclear weapons on the quiet? I give it two more attempted (by the way, you're very 'tight', as James Ellroy would have it, with the Israeli military if you know the frequency of thwarted suicide bombings) suicide bombs before you start advocating this policy, in defence of 'values'.
Anyway, there are just some of the thoughts your nauseous piece evoked.
Leo Cortex
creams74@hotmail.com
Ms Phillips was compelled to reply
Your remarks are totally ignorant, offensive and absurd. Virtually every one of your assertions is demonstrably wrong. I do not support Likud. Likud does not provoke retaliatory violence. Israel is under attack through systematic terror acts. The Palestinians themselves say they love death and threaten genocidal annihilation. No-one is clearing them from anywhere. They were offered a state in 1936, 1947 and 2000 and could have had one any time between 1948 and 1967. Instead they and their Arab backers tried to destroy Israel, a war which continues. I do not support the things you say I support. Far from economically strangling the Palestinians, until they started this current war of mass murder the Palestinians in the territories enjoyed the fastest growth and the lowest infant mortality rates in the whole of the Arab world.
Go learn some real facts instead of recycling propaganda. Israel is not planning genocide. It is the Arabs who have targeted Jews around the world for death. Your remarks, in short, are a museum piece of racial hatred against the Jews.
m.phillips@dailymail.co.uk
¶ 5:01 PM
Labour v Tory - The Difference
In Westminster just this April afternoon was an odious spectacle – Paul Boateng hugging Blairite backbencher Linda Gilroy as if they were about to be shot or they’d just been appointed prime minister and deputy prime minister (respectively, Paul is already a cabinet minister so would, naturally, expect the top job ahead of Linda, were it up for grabs).
This is, increasingly, the only real difference between Labour and Tory - the style and nature of their interaction within the separate camps. A Tory would be loath to express such affection (genuine or not) in this manner (particularly to a lady, sir!). Whereas the new Labour disciples positively relish the opportunity to pretend that they’re emotionally open by grabbing, hugging, frotting and/or molesting any colleague (or, better still, compliant member of the public) they can lay their hands on/in. More sympathy might be towards the Tories here, as at least they know the boundaries and reasons for their reticence - they want to privatise everything and restore Christian values in public life.
New Labour, however, will do anything to give the impression that they are not following a similarly rightwing US Republican line of IDEOLOGY while doing exactly that. As Blair’s malign policy stoat Stephen Byers told the Social Market Foundation last week: “We should consider the impact of choice in the context of ‘social justice’ and allow groups within society, as well as individuals, to express genuine choices.” Cancers on a postcard, to: whiff whiff whiff, 37 Sandra Gardens, Whiffsville, STENCH PQ4 1JJ.
We certainly should “consider the impact of choice in the context of ‘social justice’” and how they are not compatible, demonstrated by the fact that the Tories first cottoned on to the seductive and wholly misleading nature of the word ‘choice’ in essential public service in the title of their 1992 Education White Paper: "Choice & Diversity: A New Framework for Schools". It’s all become unquestioned parlance now, just like ‘rogue states’ and ‘war on terror’
¶ 8:15 PM
US reacts to Iraqi inversion of rules
Post-Fallujah the US protectorate is planning a pretty damn serious reprioritisation of objectives. Sport is affected
After a year of trying, the occupation has now given the US its ‘Mogadishu moment’ – absolute horror at the sight of footage of mutilated American contractors in the key Sunni triangle town. “Offensive and despicable” cried the White House.
What ungrateful shits. We get rid of the dictator (and a third of the major buildings in Baghdad) who has been making life difficult for them for so long and then pass all the contracts and jobs for reconstruction to ourselves, while law and order is non-existent, petrol is scarce, jobs are scarcer still, water is difficult to get hold of, the currency has inflated beyond existence and then start arresting any Iraqi with a gun in their house before carting them off for days of pointless interrogation.
But, as Fallujah shows, they're so savage aren't they? Forget about the fact that black people are still lynched/dragged to death behind redneck trucks in the American deep south, if these terminally impoverished Iraqis who have had their hopes and ambitions ominously intertwined with the those of the Bush & Blair administrations can’t forego their base natures to win a brighter future for America, sorry, the world, then I’m afraid the gloves will have to come off. And then the shoes. But hopefully it won’t come to that.
What about their tops? I hear you say. Not surprisingly the omniscient US has that covered too. It has been instigating Shia-Sunni wrestling matches in central Baghdad for some time now. Under CPA rules, tops are very much on to begin with and it is up to the rapacious, feral Arab to remove his or his foe’s top within minutes or face the wrath of an angry mob, etc.
Paul Bremer, who on 30 June goes back to anonymity but because of his comprehensive reconstructurizing of i-Rraq will still need considerable steel and concrete compounds for his own safety, has stressed that such Top Removal Contests are a treat. “I hardly think those nasty Iraqis (especially the Saddam-obsessed Sunnis) deserve such luxuries after the slaughter of four ‘security consultants’ from the States,” the CPA said. Obviously their jobs weren't to do with personal security.
Indeed, after years of wearing UN-distributed tops ’Raqis now don US-approved garments but were also issued with strict guidelines for their resale and use. To see a dead American strung up on pole or dragged along street with his top (and torso) a ripped mess was the final straw. Along with sovereign powers, free speech, local newspapers and so on, wrestling has been cancelled indefinitely.
¶ 4:42 PM
