Mustaqim - Musings of a flying Imam

The fallacy of growth

2012-05-23T16:42:00.000+01:00

Unwilling to have a bankers' technocrat government imposed, as happened in Italy, the Greek people have rejected the options usually put to the electorate in Western "democracies" to either tighten their belts or tighten their belts even more. By doing so they are challenging the Euro as a common currency for the European Union and with it the political edifice.
To avoid a domino effect from the forthcoming Greek repeat elections, governments throughout Europe have suddenly switched from talking austerity to talking growth. The idea is that rather than returning to living within our means we need to expand our economy in order to sustain our levels of production and consumption. It is the fallacy of growth which has driven Europe, and the rest of the world, to near financial collapse.
Growth is a natural phenomenon for any developing organism. Once the organism reaches maturity, growth slows down and, eventually, stops. Unstoppable continued growth, the dream of economists, is unnatural. It is exhibited, for example, in cancer, and cancer, if not stopped by drastic intervention, always kills the host.
Likewise, the growth-oriented economic model is bound to self-destruct if not stopped in its tracks. The days when countries could go around colonising other countries in order to expand have gone, although some in the power echelons of Western nations still dream of being able to conquer the rest of the world through war and plundering. Within established borders, nations have natural limits to their capacity to produce and consume. There is, of course, the export-on-credit option, but that's yet another fallacy which has landed us with much of the troubles we suffer from today.
So why has growth become the modern idol for politicians, economists and commentators? The need for growth is a result of the interest-based economy where money is not issued or regulated by the state but lent to the state as an interest-bearing debt by private financial institutions. Worse even, those institutions create the money they lend to government without having to put up any tangible collateral in real goods or properties.
In itself, growth is a rather poor indicator of the health of a national economy. Financial scams and pyramid schemes, for example, exhibit enormous growth rates, as do non-profitable internet businesses and other investment bubbles. But for most, growth does not equate profits, and just because a company is growing does not mean it is even breaking even. For the lenders, however, growth is an indicator of how likely they are going to be paid the interest on their loans, as a contracting economy has less capacity to shoulder the tax burden by which the productivity of the general public is translated into private profit. Banks create loans underwritten by government bonds, and hence making a direct claim on taxation, and various treasonous national laws as well as the Maastricht Treaty ensure that they have a monopoly on such money creation, preventing national and local governments from doing the same, thereby saving their subjects the interest and taxation. But the same banks only create the capital, not the means to pay the interest, so the money supply must continually be expanded by artificial means (e.g. quantitative easing) and grow if the system is not to burst at the seams very soon.
There is no doubt that the system needs fixing, but neither more austerity nor more growth are the answer. An abolition of fractional reserve banking, forcing all lenders to back their loans with real tangible securities would be the more likely solution.
For Greece, leaving the Euro and returning to the Drachme, would be a wiser option to being at the mercy of bank-elected technocrats. European integration and the common currency were promising improvements for citizens of Europe being able to cross borders with less formalities and without having to repeatedly change currencies, but all that has long since been mitigated by a stifling bureaucratic central administration with poorly conceived one-size-fits-all rule-making and general political alienation.
If Greece were to go one step further than just leaving the Euro and reclaim her sovereign right to the issue of currency and legal tender, she would soon move from a country drowning in national debt to a country of sustainable prosperity without the need for artificial growth. And maybe, there might even be an incentive for China as the upcoming power, to make more significant inroads into Europe than by trade alone through direct investment to balance the current American world hegemony. Provided, of course, China does not also fall for the banker's lie that money equals wealth.

The Damascus Dimension

2012-02-27T20:42:00.001Z

On the face of it, events in Syria are not much different from the recent pattern of "Arab Spring" events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya: stir up trouble and then come in to arbitrate in order to achieve regime change. It marks a departure from the standards of international law which were upheld until then, namely the integrity of a nation's internal affairs and the illegality of outside interference. The humanitarian argument is weak. Imagine somebody had armed the Manchester and London rioters with machine guns so that they could go on looting for longer. This would then be followed by declarations that the looters were deeply unhappy with their government and that they were an expression of the will of the people. Finally, after more heavy-handed policing attempts, outside interference would recognise them as the real representatives of the British people and justify military action against the government due to their continued suppression of the revolt. The only key difference in the Western stance regarding Syria, and other Arab countries before, is that they had a hand in organising the nascent rebellion from the start.

Using this new ploy of political and, in Libya, military intervention without the need to declare hostilities or obey the rules of war, the USA, Britain and France redrew the political map of the Middle East with great ease whilst the people of those countries, long fed up with their rulers, fell for the rhetoric. In all those countries, the Muslim Brotherhood was installed in government. Not many people are aware that this organisation has been a tool in the service of imperial America since the second World War (see my book Surrendering Islam). Populist democracy remains well out of reach for the people of Egypt or Libya. In Egypt, the democratic process has been postponed. The one thing the West cannot afford is to give the people a real voice, knowing their opposition to Israel and support for the Palestinian cause.

In Iran and Syria, however, the price has evaded the West, not because those countries are inherently stronger, but because they are protected by China and Russia. Russia has not forgotten the humiliation she was subjected to by the West after having effectively been bankrupted and bought out and is gradually regaining her national pride. Whilst still a formidable military power, she has realised that she can't put up much resistance on her own and has finally teamed up as a junior partner with China. China in turn, has stepped up to a new phase in establishing its supremacy vis-a-vis the United States after having quietly waited for a long time for the only super power surviving the "Cold War" to weaken. Its oil deal with Iran in exchange for commodities is a direct affront to the supremacy of the dollar and, in particular after the US and European sanctions banning the import of Iranian oil, nothing short of a declaration of war. India did a similar deal with Iran at the same time, and the US has been powerless in preventing it. The gradual weakening of the dollar as the universal reserve currency means that the "free trade" ideology that served as a justification for imperial expansion in the past is irretrievably damaged and the empire will have to retreat slowly back into more clearly defined borders, in other words: the end of Pax Americana.

Like the British Empire before, we can expect that the American empire will not contract quietly or peacefully. We may well be heading for full-blown confrontation any time soon, but with a Chino-Russian alliance the USA is facing a superior enemy and one that also holds an economic trump card in that China owns much of America's debt and can thus accelerate the dollar's demise. Since Israel is also forcing America's hand, making the case for the supreme importance of her own security needs, this war is likely going to spark off in Syria once the exchange of insults goes out of hand. Already China has rebuffed Hilary Clinton for her arrogance with regard to comments about the alleged in-humanitarian Russian and Chinese veto of a UN security council resolution on Syria. China pointed the finger at America's poor human rights record in occupied Iraq. No mention was made yet of America's long history of using its veto to protect Israel against being censored for its human rights abuses against Palestinians.

In spite of the ongoing polemics against Iran's nuclear programme as well as numerous attempts of portraying Iran as an international terrorist threat, albeit so amateurish that one could conclude that if this is the best the Iranian government could manage, then we needn't worry about its nuclear capability, from the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the recent bodged terrorist attack in Bangkok - Syria remains the more likely candidate for the start of hostilities between the old and the new super power, not only because it is right at the doorstep of Israel, but also because Iran is a much more difficult target due to its excellent defence capability against an attack from the Persian gulf and, recently, its demonstration of the ability to interfere with drones that would be used in an aerial attack. China is already fighting a proxy war with the USA in Afghanistan, just like the USA fought on Afghan territory with Russia, and the war is not going well for the Western coalition. China also has bought support and forged alliances in South America and Central Africa, the latter being an added reason why the West needed to take a more direct control of North-African countries. However, China is moving at a slow pace and unlikely to go for an all-out confrontation unless the US forces her onto the battle field.

For the West, China remains a closed world, and likewise, China is not sufficiently aware of the way Western propaganda operates. Therefore, she missed many an opportunity at scoring points. Hosting the Olympics, for example, did not assist China in repairing its tainted image in the West. It seems, China also fails to fully comprehend the economic warfare in which the West engages through monetary manipulation. Instead of, for example, pledging to support the stability of the Euro, without giving much detail, however, probably in an attempt to impress on Western opinion or to gain a greater stake in policy deliberations of the IMF, China could have through bilateral arrangements assisted troubled European countries, such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, to exit the Euro zone, thus gaining direct political influence in the midst of Europe without risking a collapse of its European markets due to the break-up of the Euro. Such a strategy would have isolated the United States even further and would have been extremely smart given the American approach of trying to weaken the European Union on the one hand whilst resting assured, on the other hand, that Europe completely depends on her in political and defence terms.

A further dimension, highlighting the crucial importance of what is currently being played out in Syria, is the religious and prophetic narrative: Both Christian and Muslim prophecies describe the region as a key battle field during the end times. According to Muslim tradition, the dictator of the united Western (one-world) empire, as-Sufyani, will emerge out of the conflict in Damascus and wreak havoc in the Muslim world. He will be confronted by a re-united Muslim army which eventually rallies around the Mahdi. After their victory, the Dajjal, or Anti-Christ, emerges, and finally his slayer, Jesus, the Messiah, who descends again to earth at a mosque near Damascus. Watch this space!

Europe's stunning arrogance

2011-12-01T17:21:00.002Z

Whilst the European is mainly making the news for its strenuous efforts of cancelling even the pretence of democracy to preserve the interest (pun intended) of the bankers, they have not entirely taken their eyes off the "Muslim menace" within their midst, maybe because the Islamic faith remains the last and final obstacle in the secularists dream of technocratic government unhindered by conscience or reference to divine commandments. As I am preparing for a talk at Greenwich Islamic Centre (my "Greenwich Mean Talk") on Friday, 9 December, about whether Fortress Europe will ever accept full Muslim integration, I am stumbling across yet another article on the BBC News website giving publicity to the Dutch campaign for outlawing Jewish and Islamic slaughter methods. If it wasn't for the Jews fighting their corner, we Muslims would already be on a hiding to nowhere, but luckily they have picked holes in the argument of the so-called scientific and humane method of stunning animals prior to slaughter as well as the associated terminology. Dutch chief rabbi Benjamin Jacobs is quoted as taking issue with the term "ritual slaughter", saying that "it's not dancing around a cow". "In my opinion", he says, "stunning is torture. Just because it can't say 'moo' or move anymore, it's very nice for the human eye, but the animal is alive and the scientists don't actually know if it's suffering or not."

Well, the "scientists" do know, but don't want you to: In my article The halal slaughter controversy I have quoted and provided a translation of a study performed by veterinary scientists in Hanover, Germany, in 1978, comparing the Jewish shechita method of slaughter (identical to the Muslim halal method) and the captive bolt stunning method. The results were clear-cut: Cows and sheep dispatched using the shechita/halal method were fully unconscious quicker and suffered less pain, measured by EEG, than those stunned prior to slaughter. For sheep slaughtered using the Jewish/Muslim method, a zero brain activity line was recorded after a maximum of 14 seconds, whereas for sheep slaughtered using pre-stunning, brain activity responding to pain stimuli could still be observed until 200 seconds from the animal having been stunned. So, in the worst case scenario, sheep slaughtered Islamically suffer and feel pain a whole 186 seconds less than those subjected to captive bolt stunning. For those who have been brainwashed into believing that animals slaughtered Islamically suffer unduly, I highly recommend a demonstration video produced by a Muslim small holding in Texas.

These results are, of course, not palatable to animal rights campaigners whose real agenda is to deter people from eating meat altogether, using the "barbaric" Islamic slaughter as a welcome weapon in their arsenal of tricks. In past discussions I had with them, they tend to dismiss the German scientific study as outdated, but when asked to commission a new study, they argue that this would not be ethical since animals would be subjected to pain in the process. Hence, due to this circle never potentially being squared, and Jewish and Islamic slaughter only affecting less than one percent of all animals slaughtered for food, they happily acquiescence into the other ninety-nine plus percent of animals suffering a good two to three minutes longer than those mercifully killed the Jewish or Muslim way.

The minute numbers involved and the large hysteria created by everything presented in the media as the Islamic threat are in themselves telling. There are a dozen Muslim women wearing the full niqab in France, yet the French parliament sees the need to pass a specific law outlawing this attire in public places and prosecute a woman for her defiance. Here in Britain, the Daily Mail has run a whole series of articles about unsuspecting British consumers being served "halal" meat, for example from New Zealand, conveniently forgetting to mention that such meat is about as halal as the proverbial halal or kosher pork chop (or the so-called Islamic mortgage, for this matter), since all meat in New Zealand is by law stunned prior to slaughter. At the Commonwealth Business Forum in Perth, British prime minister David Cameron had the nerve to suggest the giving of foreign aid by Britain should be tied to a commitment to accept homosexuality as a basic human right, a suggestion flatly rejected by African nations. The attack against Muslim, (orthodox) Jewish and (traditional) Christian values coming out of the corridors of power of the European super state and its constituent emasculated nation states is of a purely political nature.

Comparisons with the Spanish inquisition are not entirely inappropriate. The difference is one of scale rather than mindset. And Europe no longer wants to be Christian, but secular, a goal pursued with equal passion and fanaticism. Nobody is suggesting that Jews and Muslims ought to convert, confess and eat pork as a sign of the sincerity of having mended their ways or else they would be expelled or culled. In today's Europe Jews may remain Jews, provided they subscribe to the secular Zionist Israel project, and Muslims may remain Muslims, provided they abrogate the Qur'an as being no longer above human-made law, denounce the heretic idea of an Islamic state, pay lip-service to democracy as the best thing since sliced bread (as long as they don't demand popular rule for themselves), become vegetarian or eat only stunned meat, and concede that homosexuality is an entirely acceptable lifestyle for everybody but maybe themselves. Europe is willing to tolerate Muslims as long as they are moderate, non-Islamic and non-interfering. If not, they are radicals, potential terrorists, and must be monitored, locked up or sent "back home", where they can then be assassinated, preferably by remote control drone strike.

So far, our self-appointed leaders have made a good job of compliance on our behalf. They are apologetic and accommodating. They are grateful for being tolerated and receiving the occasional grant or other state funding. They try to outdo each other with ingenious arguments how Islam must evolve and its traditional sources be re-interpreted. They happily approve a "halal" seal for stunned meat now making up the majority of alleged halal produce in the UK. Thankfully, they have not yet managed to delivery us, the Muslim public, wholesale to the altar of Europe, which is why they vehemently object for genuinely halal meat to carry the added label "Derived from animals that have not been stunned prior to slaughter." And the popular (democratic) mood is expressed by the increasing presence of outlets approved by the Halal Monitoring Committee, who only approve non-stunned meat.

If there are enough Muslims to stem the tide of the commercialisation and emasculation of Islam, the rest of the European public may one day thank us for it. The public is suspicious of Europe whose structure is not democratic and has already blessed us with plenty of unnecessary bureaucracy of the type previously only seen in the Soviet Union of yesteryear. The centre of power has shifted to being more remote and less approachable. Make no mistake: Secular Europe (or European secularists) want total control. On the back of the excuse of the Muslim threat of terrorism they are introducing laws aimed to be used to control their own, increasingly disenfranchised, populations. As a contrast to heavy-handed policing of demonstrations, they let rioters run wild without much police interference to spread fear, a proven recipe to make people surrender their freedom to the state. Airport security serve the same purpose, frightening, harassing and controlling a compliant public: Never mind the idiocy of liquid explosives carried in hand luggage: if it is perfectly save to let planes land at European airports arriving from destinations where liquids are not controlled, why do Europeans have to have to surrender their water and coke bottles when they go abroad?

If our leadership hadn't sold us out and we weren't so trusting of them (and possibly ignorant of true Islam, including its animal welfare provisions), then maybe we could start to fill the political vacuum and provide much needed leadership at a time where the people rise up against the slavery brought unto them by fraudulent fractional reserve banking (The People against the Banks), and it could no longer be said of the "Occupy Wall Street" and "Occupy the City" movements that they lack a programme and an ideology. Until then, we will continue to be stunned by the arrogance of our self-appointed masters and remain the "scum of the sea" as in the prophetic warning: "You shall be numerous, but you will be like the foam of the sea, and Allah will take the fear of you away from your enemies and will place weakness into your hearts.". Until then, let them re-interpret Islam for us and reshape the Middle East and the rest of the world to their liking. An Islam, in which Allah is stripped of His sovereignty, is not going to impress anybody, even if it is momentarily still tolerable to European supremacists.

Monkey Science

2011-09-28T10:50:00.002+01:00

You might think scientists have gone mad when you read about a project involving millions of "virtual" monkeys tapping randomly on "virtual" keyboards. The project is an extension of a previous attempt to get real monkeys type on real keyboards, but the monkeys hit the same key until the keyboard broke. So costing only around £5000 a year using virtual monkeys and virtual keyboards works out a lot cheaper.

What's the point of the exercise? The idea is that by random chance if keys are pressed in no particular order and given enough time meaningful sentences would eventually result. And yes, by simplifying the task and not insisting on punctuation, the virtual monkeys have apparently managed to produce a part of a poem of Shakespeare. The wonders of "cloud computing".

Computer programmers have long been living in some kind of parallel universe. There is a pet theory amongst many of them that if all, or most, of human experience could be uploaded to a powerful computer, that computer would eventually be more intelligent than any human being, making human beings kind of obsolete. In other words, we humans would evolve into a higher form of intelligence not dependent on our physical existence but existing in some kind of virtual reality instead. Besides this sort of life form not being much fun, the theory is also seriously flawed.

Besides the mathematical probability of eventually arriving at a flawless copy of the complete works of Shakespeare suggesting it would take longer than the age of the universe, there is still nothing intelligent about any of it. To the computers a poem of Shakespeare makes no more sense than the single letter sequence typed by the real monkeys. The poem only attains meaning by having been written by a conscious poet and read by an appreciative audience. Computers compute or count, they do not create or appreciate meaning. The random sequence matching Shakespeare's poem only stands out from the crowd of random sequences because we distinguish it as something meaningful. Without our aesthetic sense of beauty the sequence would simply remain a string of characters.

In his book "You are not a gadget" computer guru Jaron Lanier provided a lone voice of dissent, warning against the depersonalisation of human experience through the "hive mind" to which his colleagues aspired to. His key argument was that computers, however refined they may be, do not, will not and cannot have consciousness or a soul. Unperturbed by such warnings, computer scientists like Jesse Anderson, who set up the monkey project, will want to prove that intelligence can evolve and higher forms of intelligence are entirely accidental.

The folly is not refined to wacky programmers: it is the expression of the materialist mindset which gave us the theory of evolution, denying both the existence of God and of a soul. The problem they need to face up to is that each time they run this kind of experiment, the results provide clear evidence against them. If it will take millions of virtual monkeys hitting millions of virtual keyboards longer than the age of the universe to produce the complete works of only one writer in human history, what are the chances of humans and other higher life forms having evolved by pure chance (and without the aid of virtual computer networks) from a single cell in a mere fraction of that time, namely life on earth? In his excellent "Atlas of creation", which mainly demonstrates that the fossil record of life on earth does in no way support evolution, Turkish author Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar) provides detailed evidence that even the formation of a protein as the building block of higher organisms had a zero probability of coming about by chance. He quotes the mathematician and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle as comparing it to the probability that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."

None of that will deter the continuation of monkey science providing evidence that no matter of how powerful the tools at their disposal, scientists are ultimately no more reasonable or intelligent than the "average" human being. And without divine guidance, the average human is guided by ambition and dogma.

The occident is coming apart

2011-08-07T02:05:00.001+01:00

Dynasties rise and fall, and the decline of the British-American empire has been long in the making. Of late, pax americana it is unravelling fast. Ever more ambitious and hasty wars, such as the support of a hotchpotch band of Libyan dreamers as the official rebel government, increase the overstretch of NATO armed forces who are gradually getting worn down and suffering defeat across the globe. At the same time, international law is in tatters and economic stability and security at home a thing of the past. Painting Muslims as the universal enemy has emboldened home-grown self-styled patriots who, having been ignored by the political establishment shocked Western civilisation with the recent Norway massacre. Not wanting to deflect from the war against Muslim terrorists, the bombing and shooting has quickly been described as the work of a lone madman, however, the reality is that over 95% of terrorist attacks in the the US and over 99% of terrorist attacks in Europe over the last decade were perpetrated not by Muslims but by indigenous secessionists, people who want to break away from the ever more oppressive and all-permeating power of government. Meanwhile the financial markets are collapsing in Europe and America as the scam of bank-created credit is once more spiralling out of control. Whereas Iraq, Iran and lately Libya paid a high price for daring to challenge the supremacy of the dollar and suggesting oil to be traded in a different currency, China, de facto owning the American economy, is emboldened to demand the end of the dollar as world reserve currency whilst at the same time ensuring that the US cannot establish itself near her borders in Afghanistan. With the dollar nearly gone as the tool to command the obedience of the world, American hegemonic influence is finally coming to an abrupt end.

Of course, like fish out of water, we cannot expect present-day power elites to go down without throwing a fit. They have tried to re-arrange the geopolitical situation in Africa and the Middle East with limited success. After the Norway massacre by one of their own and the Tottenham riots out of frustration against the increasing encroachment of the police state, with riots also plaguing Italy, Greece, and Spain due to austerity measures to placate the banking oligarchy, and violence returning to Northern Ireland, Western security forces would need to stage another false flag Islamic terrorist attack to re-focus public attention where they want it. Yet, even when they had plenty of time for planning the perfect crime before callously sacrificing their own people in 9/11 and 7/7, the cracks of the official story soon showed with endless inconsistencies, discrediting the official story, to the point where a UK jury, not usually a group of people known to be gullible or inclined to support political protesters, found the maker of the "7/7 Ripple Effect" film John Hill alias Muadib not guilty of the offence he was charged with, in other words, they found his questioning of the official story of events of the tube bombings entirely justified. So we can expect for anything they might cook up in a hurry to come unstuck rather quickly, and in the face of the death toll caused by Breivik in Norway the simple arrest of a Muslim for the thought-crime of glorifying terrorism without the means or wherewithal to harm a fly just won't do. There is, of course, the other option of staging an extra-terrestrial invasion to create sufficient fear to rally people behind their self-appointed leaders and give up their freedom willingly. Interestingly, UFO sighting stories are all the rage again lately in the UK.

So what does the immediate future hold in store? With Western armies being driven back at most fronts, their own people will question the need to sacrifice and tighten belts whilst wasting money on unwinnable wars abroad. The power of the state will increasingly be directed at people at home to prevent unrest and "keep the peace". People no longer trust their governments whom they perceive to be living off them rather than serving their interests, and being seen in bed with corrupt and powerful international media corporations has not helped to ward off the accusations of sleaze. Democratic systems are not very apt at keeping an angry populace under control, so expect the powers governments awarded themselves to fight alleged Muslim terrorists to be used more and more to placate their own people. No doubt, the scaremongering against Islam and the alleged deluge of immigrants will continue in the hope that people will fight amongst themselves rather than unite against the abuses of government. There is little hope, of course, that Muslims will be the catalyst for unity. Whilst Islam is well placed to rally a new liberation movement, including an uprising against the usurers who have enslaved most of the world into their "global village", Muslims world-wide lack even a basic understanding of political Islam and most Islamic movements have been subverted from within. If the British-American establishment simply hand over to China, it is yet again another change of shift without change of management, as the same mafia banking cartels running the show in the West, have also succeeded in pulling the strings in the East, China having become another economy manipulated and controlled through interest-based fractional reserve banking based on the power of fictitious money. Not having stepped into the breach will be Islam's greatest global failure so far.

Magistrates Courts: if you plead not guilty you will be!

2011-07-04T11:05:00.000+01:00

I've been attending a couple of magistrate's court hearings in England as press observer for contested speeding charges. Mobile speed cameras operated by rogue police officers are the British equivalent of third world countries' police road checks extracting bribes. They're about generating revenue rather than enhancing road safety. In a letter to a local newspaper an outraged motorist recently compared the police speed enforcement action to that of cowboy clampers who immobilise cars on allegedly private land in order to cash in on a hefty release fee.

Modern laser speed detection guns do not provide a print-out of recorded speed. They display a speed figure to the operator and the charge of speeding relies entirely on a single police officer's claim or memory. It is therefore easily open to abuse. Most motorists will not contest speeding charges in the knowledge that magistrates courts rarely find against the word of a police officer. However, there are cases where the police officer operating the equipment makes such major blunders or has such blatant disregard for established procedure that challenging the charge in court appears reasonable. My observations of a number of such cases reveal more about the courts than the police and lead me to the conclusion that in the interest of both justice and reducing public expenditure we might as well do away with magistrates courts altogether.

Whilst more serious offences are tried by a judge and jury in the county court, magistrates or justices of the peace deal with "summary" or petty offences. Magistrates are lay people, drawn mostly from the upper middle classes, with no formal legal training whatsoever. In passing judgment they rely on the legal advice of the clerk to the Justices, and given the magistrates' lack of legal knowledge and experience, these court clerks in a way "own" the court. So instead of keeping up pretences and running the whole show of theatre justice, offenders might as well present before a court clerk in an administrative office to be told their sentence. As there is an automatic right of appeal against the decisions of magistrates courts, not much would change. Contested changes would go to the county court and for the rest the tax payer would be saved considerable sums of money.

My experience of numerous cases is that the clerk always sides with the prosecution, and the magistrates always side with the clerk. There are very few notable exceptions to this rule. Knowing this, the police act with impunity. I have witnessed the very same officer stating under oath in the same magistrates court the exact opposite to what he stated under oath in a case a few weeks prior, in other words, he lied under oath, but even if the defendant had knowledge of the previous case, he would be prevented by the clerk from raising his concern as it would not be "relevant" to the case. The above reference is to a police officer stating when questioned under oath about the code of practice issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers of England and Wales (ACPO) regarding police conduct during speed enforcement action that he had never heard of it. In a subsequent trial the same officer stated with regard to a speed enforcement action at an earlier date that he was fully aware of those guidelines and had observed them throughout. This was an officer who had taken readings of traffic from the opposite side of the road, then jumping out into the road to stop cars on double yellow lines - so much for road safety through speed enforcement action!

Those guidelines contain recommendations for police officers to follow when carrying out road enforcement checks, e.g. that they must wear high-visibility clothing, on which side of the road they must be positioned to take a reading, that they must form a prior opinion of a vehicle speeding (i.e. no fishing operations by taking a continuous reading of oncoming traffic in the hope some motorists might eventually exceed the speed limit), the necessary checks to be carried out on the equipment before and after use, and that if there was any doubt in relation to any of those procedures not having been followed properly, then a prosecution should not be brought. It appears the guidelines were issued in an attempt to placate the public who has long taken the cynical view that speed enforcement by the police is a money-making exercise. However, unless an officer can be held accountable in court for following this code of practice mandated by his superiors, it is hardly worth the paper it is written on and thus a rather pointless waste of tax payers' money. I requested clarification from the ACPO's press office as to the degree to which the guidelines were binding on individual police officers, but they chose not to reply, confirming my suspicion that the guidelines were more of a public relations exercise than serious advice to police officers on the road.

Almost all officers' witness statements I have seen as well as their competence certificates contain a reference to the ACPO guidelines in accordance with which training was received and devices were allegedly operated. It should therefore be only right that a defendant be allowed to question officers on their adherence to those guidelines, yet I sat in a magistrates court hearing in Milton Keynes where the prosecution claimed that since these were only guidelines and, furthermore, they were currently under review, they were not relevant, after which the clerk in a hysterical voice told the defendant off for asking any questions relating to those guidelines, shouting at him as if he was a little school boy that "you were already told that these guidelines are not relevant to your case". The same clerk, who hardly opened her mouth when the prosecution spoke, also constantly interrupted the defendant during his questioning of witnesses. Frequently she would demand: "What is the relevance of this question?", thus making it near impossible to conduct an effective cross examination. For if you were to try to catch a witness out to show that he was either lying or his memory was defective, then having first to explain why you were asking a question and with what purpose ruins the exercise. Imagine the following explanation: "I am asking the officer about the timing of the check he carried out because I want to show that what he says contradicts the evidence given by his colleague earlier who gave a different time. So officer, are you still sure you carried out the check at 14.20 hours?". Being forwarned, the officer is likely going to avoid getting himself into a pickle.

A magistrate's court hearing starts with a plea of guilty or not guilty. The expectation is that you plead guilty. If you plead not guilty, the clerk will give you a long lecture that it could cost you a lot more money in court costs if you do so. So from the outset the case is about how much justice you can afford, not whether you committed an offence or not. In the past, a defendant had the right to a "duty solicitor" who would represent him or her free of charge. This provision has been axed and remains available only for offences which carry a prison sentence. In any case, a duty solicitor would normally go through the motions only and not stick his neck out for a client except that he might negotiate a lighter sentence at the end. Since the outcome of a case at the magistrates court is a foregone conclusion, it makes little sense for a defendant to hire an expensive private solicitor; that cost is best deferred for the appeals stage. Inevitably, when pleading not guilty, people rely on defending themselves. This is when they are at the mercy of the court clerk.

One should normally expect that the court try to assist a "defendant in person" who is a lay person not versed in the law. After all, the purpose of the proceedings ought to be to arrive at the truth. Not so in magistrates courts, it seems. Defendants in person are routinely intimidated and gagged by the clerk to the justices who wants to get the hearing over with as speedily as possible. In some rare cases a magistrates court hearing is presided over by a District Judge, and I have witnessed a judge tell the over-confident clerk to shut up. Of course, a proper judge knows the law and can opt to ignore advice or guidance offered by a clerk. Lay magistrates, on the other hand, lack the competence and confidence to do so and are thus at the clerk's mercy who runs the court as his or her personal fiefdom.

Motorists are well aware that short of giving up to drive they are an easy target for government tax collectors. There road taxes and fuel taxes, the cost of car insurance as well as parking fees and congestion charges, and all of those tend to go up regularly year after year. Since the tax income goes into central government coffers, local partnerships composed of local councils, local police forces and other agencies are regularly using speed checks as a means to complement income at a local level. If this is the intention it would be a lot easier to simply add a speed levy on all motorists using certain roads or use road tolls, like they do in France, instead of criminalising the motorist. The effectiveness of speed limits as a means of road safety is doubtful in any case. German motorways without speed limit are no less safe than British ones, but they are a lot less clogged up because you don't find cars hugging the overtaking lane at 70 mph. Speed limits are sensible at certain dangerous stretches of road, but their overuse for monetary purposes means that they are generally ignored, having the opposite effect on safety. Drivers who know where speed cameras are (and there is equipment on sale which superimposes those locations on GPS navigation systems) will temporarily slow down before and speed up after that location. Those who notice the cameras late will brake suddenly, endangering traffic behind them.

As for magistrate's courts, they are a total waste of time. Given that they are neither willing nor able to challenge police authority, no matter how little regard an officer might have for the law he is meant to enforce and uphold, they become "Kafka" courts where the outcome is almost predetermined and procedure, not justice, is the main objective. Instead, both police misconduct and miscarriages of justice are encouraged. In the interest of justice, and for the benefit of the public purse, the magistrates court system in England and Wales ought to be abolished.

Fifty ways to loose your luggage (The budget airline song)

2011-05-20T19:05:00.002+01:00

The budget airline song - Fifty ways to loose your luggage

to be sung to the tune of Paul Simon's Fifty ways to leave your lover

This song is inspired by the endless frustration at airports where the glamour of air travel has given way to an experience not far removed from that of the coach stations of old. To make up for their government-subsidised cheap ticket prices budget airlines have resorted to all kinds of surcharges combined with cost savings which can tire the most seasoned traveller. Whilst the situation is global, in Europe, Ryanair, the airline whose executive pondered about charging for the use of toilets whilst in flight and suggested the introduction of planes with standing room instead of seats to pack in more passengers, is the most notorious contender, charging you for the privilege to print your own boarding cards, offering you "priority boarding", which is really "priority waiting", since after you've been allowed to go first through the barrier, you simply wait at the end of the corridor whilst the remaining passengers wait to be let through, after which all passengers are let out to the aircraft together scrambling for any available seat. As the saying goes: Time to spare, go by air. To make you buy expensive low quality food on board, the airline insists that even the sandwich you bought at the airport has to fit into your one piece of hand luggage. Many passengers are going through the embarrassment of repacking their bags to match the prescribed dimensions. Should your reading book not fit inside you will have to conceal it somewhere on your body to avoid being surcharged, which lead me to paraphrase Paul Simon's song. I could have added many more rhymes but wanted to keep as close to the original song as possible. You're welcome to add your own version via comments.

Air travel used to be a joy some time ago
Service was good but prices were not too low
Then along came budget flights at prices you'd afford
And with it came limits of how much to take on board
There must be fifty ways to loose your luggage

She sad it's really not my habit to be rude
But to defeat the constant checks, the method must be crude
To stop yourself from being pursued
There must be fifty ways to loose your luggage
Fifty ways to loose your luggage

Hide it under your hat, Pat
They'll never spot that
Put on an extra coat
And get yourself free
Hop on the plane, Jane
Don't let them drive you insane
Just fill all your pockets, Lee
And get yourself free

She said why don't you get a waist belt to conceal
All your belongings, so they don't look as real
Plus all the duty free you bought for the in-flight meal
There must be fifty ways to loose your luggage
Fifty ways to loose your luggage

Hide it under your hat, Pat
They'll never spot that
Put on an extra coat
And get yourself free
Hop on the plane, Jane
Don't let them drive you insane
Just fill all your pockets, Lee
And get yourself free

Did Osama kill Obama?

2011-05-02T14:31:00.001+01:00

The news that Qaddafi's son and three grandchildren were killed in a bomb raid in Tripoli was soon eclipsed by the announcement that Osama bin Laden had been found, killed in combat and quickly buried at sea, some seven hundred miles away, and thus not the most obvious choice of burial location unless you wanted to hide something. But these days, journalists don't ask difficult questions anymore, and the world media were full with world leaders grasping the opportunity to sound jubilant and reassert their unswerving loyalty to America and the so-called war on terror. That war, we are told, is not dead with Osama, but likely to be intensified. Al-Qaeda, by now having outdone even McDonald's as a true American brand name, lives on and the soap opera continues.

For a soap opera it is, and bin Laden, one of the main actors, had eventually to be written out of the script, since he no longer participated in any of the episodes and his occasional appearances by audio or video tape lacked the credibility of the real actor in the flesh. The war on terror needs its success stories, and tracking down, confronting and eradicating bin Laden fits the bill perfectly. It also puts to rest the pertinent questions about the whereabouts of the absent actor. Happy with the "mission accomplished" statement, there is no longer any need to speculate about the frail man on a dialysis machine who could not possibly have survived the aerial bombardment at the start of the Afghan war hiding out in a cave in Tora Bora.

Does it matter? Actors change and the show goes on. Now and then a "radical" Muslim youth guilty of the equivalent of the pub banter that those in authority "all ought to be shot" and that "he'd be the first send them to hell" gets arrested, as recently in Germany, proof that terrorism is alive and kicking although incapable of going beyond the stage of wishful thinking, possibly helped by a good measure of entrapment from the security services. When this doesn't suffice and people stop tuning into the series, something more dramatic gets orchestrated to attract the crowds back to the set: a real explosion in a place where security is easy to evade, for example Marrakesh. The entrance roads to all major Moroccan towns now sport police check points where police do exactly what their Western counterparts do: cash in on the suffering of ordinary people. In Morocco they specialise in taking bribes of motorists (akin to the use of speed cameras in the West), whereas in Europe and America they sell expensive body scanners.

Incidentally, amongst the innocent victims of the carnage in Marrakesh was an Israeli who lived in Shanghai and visited his relatives in Morocco for Passover, putting paid to the lie that Jews (at least those who were not persuaded by the Zionists to migrate to Israel) could not live peacefully amongst their Muslim neighbours in Arab countries. But who pays notice to the facts? Who goes back to the original 9/11 videos and wonders how comes that airoplanes made from lightweight metal penetrate undamaged through buildings made from concrete and heavy steel, melting into the structure and even popping out the other side? It does not matter whether the attack happened as presented on the television screens, what matters for the ordinary viewer is who ordered it, and since Osama has now sunk to the bottom of the sea, the good guys have finally regained the upper hand again in this cops and robbers show. Two questions are never asked (or allowed to ask): who wrote the original script and who benefits from the outcome?

Since the war on terror is mainly fought in the media, anything goes. New wars can now be fought without a declaration of war upon the spurious excuse that we must protect rebels who want to overthrow their government against the repercussions from the the machine of state. By that logic America should have supported the IRA aforetime against the British government who did not willingly give in to their demands. Or the Palestinians against Israel, for that matter, but for sympathy for the underdog to go quite that far is, of course, unthinkable.

Sadly, the people are always the losers. Playing on their hopes of real democracy and fears of terror and violence, the world is being restructured. European countries are turning into police states in order to deal with the expected disquiet over the economic meltdown caused by fraudulent bank created credit. Sudan is partitioned in order to put an end to the war over the oil fields found at the disputed border line. Egypt retains a military government but is given a secular, rather than Islamic, constitution. American stooges who willingly agree to be written out of the script are rewarded with a gracious pension, from Idi Amin to Husni Mubarak. Those who refuse and want to carry on playing a major role, are punished severely, such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. And with some, the script writers had simply forgotten to carry on their story, so Osama, long since dead, had to be publicly killed once more to achieve closure. Maybe Obama, having only just recently released his own birth certificate after many years of agonising hesitation, can now proceed to fake his near namesake's death certificate.

Portugal - same folly again

2011-04-08T16:06:00.002+01:00

Another European country is declaring bankruptcy and asking for a bail-out, yet the real issues remain hidden from the public eye. All nations of the world are deeply in debt, so it would be legitimate to ask who this fantastic lender is, who owns more assets than all the peoples of the world put together. There isn't one, of course. Fractional reserve banking by the banks or debt merchants is the greatest fraud ever committed in recent history. In the case of Portugal, we are told the state can only raise more money on the financial markets by paying higher interest rates. Why should the state have to pay anything for money which the banks issue as credit without anything to underwrite its value other than the creditworthiness of the nation itself? The state should issue its own currency and the function of the banks should be restricted to accounting and book-keeping.

What happens, when a state like Portugal raises money? They issue government securities which are bought by the banks. A government security is a promise to pay, in other words, a promise that the banks will have a claim on tax revenue collected from the working population. The banks add these securities to their assets as deposits and, by the ludicrous system of fractional reserve banking, they are permitted to issue tenfold of their deposits in new credits. And it is this new money, created out of nothing on the basis of the state's promise to pay them back, which they then land to the government for its expenditure and charge interest on top of it! And so the vicious cycle continues: The state allows the banks to create credit and charge the cost to the state until the state can no longer bear the costs. Now if a bank overstretches itself and goes broke, the state (through the national bank as lender of last resort) bails it out. If the state consequently goes broke, as it must, other states in the Confederation, in this case the European Union, come to its rescue. They attach so-called austerity measures, measures designed to make sure that the banks get their illegitimate gain for the money they never had, no matter how tough it will be for the people to raise the revenue.

In the UK we had the same twisted logic: banks were failing. In the past it was always justified that they charge interest because of the risks they take. In fact, they take no risks at all as every credit they issue is new money at no cost to them. So what did the government do? It bailed out the banks with a rescue package. Where did it get the money from for bailing out the banks? By borrowing from those very same banks! Makes sense, doesn't it? And then there was quantitative easing, in other words, expanding the money supply. But instead of injecting new cash in the economy pay for education or health care, the government gave the increase to the banks as government securities to allow them to issue the very same money and multiples of it with an interest charge attached to it. Heads, the people loose and the banks win. Tails, the banks win and the people loose.

For centuries now, governments have been the servants not of the people but of the banks. They have permitted those financial institutions to defraud whole nations for their private gain, laying claim to a nation's resources and real assets through foreclosures on loans they issued without putting up any real assets of their own. Portugal is not needing a bail-out because of some natural disaster, or having lost all its working manpower in a war, or having had a bad harvest or lost all its natural resources. It is going to the wall because the banking system of compound interest on credit created based on the empty promises of repayments of earlier credits is bound to self-destruct, and instead of taking the blame, the banks want the government to carry the can. We're going to see a lot more misery until common sense returns and governments represent their own people and issue their nations' money supply free of interest charges to facilitate trade, ultimately to be cancelled out again by taxation. But then, common sense is in particularly short supply at the moment, whereas bank-created money abounds.

There is always money for war

2011-03-20T11:50:00.000Z

Taking a break from lecturing the British people on tightening their belts, accepting pay freezes and bearing with cuts in social services and infrastructure, British prime minister Cameron has found the necessary resources without batting an eye lid to send expensive British war planes to Libya for an imperialist intervention justified as support for the Libyan democratic movement and protection for the country's civilians. This argument is, of course, badly flawed:

Saudi Arabia's military has just recently intervened with arms bought from America and Britain in supporting the Bahraini government against a popular uprising; no wonder the Arab league has repaid Western nations for their support by adding their voice to intervention in Libya. More poignantly, when Israel went on the rampage during operation "Cast lead", neither Britain, nor France nor the US nor the UN security council thought it necessary to declare and enforce a "no fly zone", although the brutality meted out by Israel against Palestinian civilians - since officially declared a war crime - dwarfs anything Gaddafi has done or might do into complete oblivion.

The all-out war against Libya's defence capability is essentially a small scale "shock and awe" operation after having learnt the lessons from Iraq: that declaring an official war is highly unpopular and costs credibility at home: Let the people believe that this is a humanitarian mission. Far from it, however, it is a grab for oil just like Iraq and proves that the recent restructuring of the Middle East has not been about democracy but about securing the region for Big Oil and Israel, with not tangible outcome or benefits for the people themselves who naively believed in the false promises of the West.

What is unprecedented in the Libyan adventure is the shameless dropping of the last fig leave of legality: The UN security council, an exclusive club of second war victor nations completely unrepresentative of the UN general assembly, has never before authorised force against a government dealing with an internal opposition. Using the justification for intervention, it would have been equally acceptable for Russia or China to have bombed the UK in order to stop the British government from cracking down on Irish terrorism and "brutalising" Irish dissidents, and it thus sets a dangerous precedent. Maybe the American people will soon rise up against their ever more dictatorial government and ask for outside help?

America, France and Britain, having propped up so many unpopular dictatorships around the world, are not the least bothered about humanitarian or democracy abroad. Cameron's reference to the national interest, a euphemism for the interests of the national industries and banks who run the country, is a more honest admission. And it is in the interest of the very same corporations that the British people should remain enslaved to them perpetually and pay off the debts the government has got into by borrowing money from banks after allowing them to create this very credit out of thin air in the first place, backed by nothing tangible other than a fraudulent claim on tax revenue. So taxes have to go up, wages have to go down, services have to be cut, but there is always plenty of money for war.

Cameron's failure on multiculturalism

2011-02-06T11:24:00.002Z

There is the old adage that it is better to look intelligent and keep your mouth shut than to open it and remove all doubt. British prime minister David Cameron has just made that big mistake by talking, or rather trying to read a speech written for him, about issues he fails to comprehend. His focus at the Munich Security Conference focused on terrorism and extremism, and besides the folly of washing British laundry publicly abroad, it seemed evident that he was not at home with the subject he had chosen or that had been imposed on him.

After reassuring the attendants that Britain was going to continue to support the NATO mission in Afghanistan, without for a moment reflecting on its futility or redefining its objectives - if ever they were clearly defined -, the prime minister offers the platitude that "We will not defeat terrorism simply by the action we take outside our borders". Bravo! Has it ever occurred to him that it is the action Britain takes outside her borders that make her a target for terrorism? Would any group around the world bother with this wet and dark island in the North Sea if it stopped meddling in other people's affairs? What makes Britain and America prime targets of terrorism is that they continually moved to deny other people the freedom, democracy and right of self-determination they postulate as their own birth right and greatest achievement. And in Afghanistan it was them who trained and armed the very "extremists" to fight their war against the Soviet Union for them, pretending that they would were only there to help the "Mujahidin" to liberate their own country. Now that they have been made to swap one occupier for another, does that longing for liberation not burn equally strong in them? The same holds true for the people of Iraq, Somalia, Palestine etc., but Cameron wants us to believe that the world's problems are merely the result of a few Muslim youth in the UK failing to integrate into the Great British way of life.

Indeed, he goes as far as stating that multiculturalism has failed. In passing he admits that the "United Kingdom still faces threats from dissident republicans in Northern Ireland" (probably because the Irish youth wasn't too apt on integration either?), but then states that the "root of the problem" is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism". I so love the use of that postmodern term "Islamist" (only "Islamicist" could be worse) as a ruse to put the blame on Islam and Muslims without explicitly having to say so. Once more, Cameron pays lip-service to Islam as a "a religion observed peacefully and devoutly by over a billion people" and "Islamist extremism is a political ideology supported by a minority", but then displays his ignorance when identifying the latter with the ultimate goal of "an entire Islamist realm, governed by an interpretation of Sharia". "Sharia", of course, is another of those emotive words in the West, conjuring up images of beheadings and cutting of hands, yet it is actual the name of the complex legal code of Islam governing both private and public life and without which Islam would be reduced to a few pious prayers said quietly at home, which is, of course, what Cameron and his ilk would love to see, the separation of religion and politics. Yet, in the West too, religion and politics, or indeed religiously motivated ideologies and politics, are hardly kept apart, as evidenced in the total sell out of Western politicians to Israel and its supremacist ideology of Zionism with the ultimate goal of an entire Zionist realm permitting neither dissent nor criticism.

British prime minister Cameron, heading a country whose legacy includes the conflict in Palestine due to the infamous duplicity of Britain and the Balfour declaration, does not view Israeli piracy on international waters against a humanitarian mission, the "aid flotilla", as an act of extremism even worth mentioning. The total absence of Zionist terrorism as a constant catalyst for an "Islamist" counter-reaction tells us in whose camp his script writers belong.

Instead he beats the old mantra of Islamic "real hostility towards Western democracy and liberal values", when the fact is that Islamic movements in Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and so on are the ones asking for democracy and liberal values, freedom of speech and freedom of organisation, as well as their nations' right to their own resources and to deciding their own destiny, and it is Britain and America, and to a lesser degree France, who by their never-ending support for the dictators oppressing the people of those countries prevent democracy and liberal values from interfering with their ongoing political and economic exploitation of those regions.

Anticipating this argument Cameron spends a little time explaining that extremism is not intrinsic to Islam, nor is it the result of poverty or lack of democracy or indeed Western foreign policy, for otherwise there would be not extremism to be found in midst of the rich and democratic Western nations. A very hollow and short-sighted argument, for do not the people living in the West have the capacity to empathise with those in countries where protest is not allowed? Moreover, in its attempt to have a finger on the pulse of every political event in the world, Britain (and to a lesser degree France) has actively sought to attract dissident groups to set up home in the UK, partly to better be able to spy on them, partly to forge a relationship with them should the tide turn. When Rashid Ghannoushi, leader of the Tunisian opposition party An-Nahda, recently returned to Tunis, he did so from exile in London; when Khomenei replaced the Shah in Iran, he came straight from France.

For Cameron, however, it is easier to put the blame squarely on problems Muslims in Britain have with identity and integration, and this aspect of his speech has been the most widely quoted: "In the UK , some young men find it hard to identify with the traditional Islam practiced at home by their parents, whose customs can seem staid when transplanted to modern Western countries. But these young men also find it hard to identify with Britain too, because we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity. Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values." The media mostly reported this as "British PM says multiculturalism has failed", but the truth is that Cameron is admitting that "Britain has failed with regard to multiculturalism".

Let's be clear: For the British PM to sum up the problem as white Brits having been too tolerant and hands-off to criticise the more radical views amongst their coloured neighbours, and that this led to enforcing segregation and some Muslims feeling rootless, is laughably naive. Maybe a little history lesson on multiracial, multicultural Britain would benefit Mr. Cameron: First of all, West Indians and Muslims came to Britain because they were called and needed to build the British economy after the war. Secondly, they were never welcomed with open arms but always viewed with suspicion. Britain wanted cheap labour, semi-slaves, not people making their home in this "green and pleasant land". Nor did they segregate out of choice but partly because they were placed into ghettos by town planners and partly because they felt the need to protect themselves against racism. Over the time span of half a century and now in their third, if not fourth, generation those immigrants eventually became part and parcel of British society, providing valuable and essential services without which the British economy would collapse over night, but are still viewed by the host society as outsiders. And now that there is large-scale immigration from Eastern Europe of people who are white Christians (and who ironically can't be lectured on having to learn English and integrate, because as EU nationals they have an automatic right to stay), right-wing politicians like Cameron finally think they can turn up the heat against the darker skinned Brits, hoping they might leave. A sophisticated politician's version of the common British thug observation: "I love curry but hate Pakis".

Actually, it's not just Blacks and Asians who are looking for an exodus from Britain. Approx. 200,000 Brits leave the UK every year seeking a better life abroad, and about 1 in every 10 British citizens lives abroad. With Cameron's belt tightening measures and tax increases this number might soar. Out of the total of some 5.5 million Brits living abroad, there are about 1.3 million Brits living in Australia, some 800,000 in the USA, those being natural English-speaking alternatives, but there are as many as 800,000 Brits living in Spain where most neither bother to learn the language nor to integrate into Spanish society or politics. Talk about hypocrisy!

These are people who have permanently turned their backs on their home country and settled elsewhere, not holiday makers. Both, however, expect to be welcomed with open arms wherever they go and are happy to accept local hospitality. Yet, this hospitality is not extended by domestic Brits to visitors coming to visit or live amongst them from overseas. "There are practical things that we can do as well", says Cameron. "That includes making sure that immigrants speak the language of their new home and ensuring that people are educated in the elements of a common culture and curriculum." Wake up Mr. Cameron: Maybe it is not the children of immigrants but the children of indigenous Britons who need citizenship lessons and who need to learn to live along peacefully with everybody else, including those from different cultures or who hold different views to themselves.

And for the British prime minister himself, as an advanced programme of citizenship lessons, I highly recommend a book recently published by Pluto Press: "The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam" edited by Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi' from the University of Alberta who describes his task as researcher thus: "We, as critical theorists, need to make Western audiences aware that Islamism as a political discourse embraces far more than the dogmatic fundamentalism and terrorist violence that dominate in the Western press." The book contains translations of various contributions by Arab Islamist thinkers from the Middle East and North Africa, covering the whole spectrum from government appointed scholars to jihadist theologians. It demonstrates that far from Islam being monolithic, there is a lively political debate going on in the Muslim world, below the radar of the Western media and political establishment who, as Abu-Rabi' observes, write about the Islamic movement whilst failing "to even consult original Islamist sources", and sets out as the aim of the 312-page publication to come to grips "with the conceptual framework of the 'many varieties of Islamism'." Maybe just what Mr. Cameron needs, but seeing he had difficulty reading even the script prepared for him at Munich without constantly stumbling over his words, it might be a little above his intellectual acumen.

Arabian Peristroika

2011-01-30T16:27:00.003Z

The governments of Tunisia and Egypt were amongst the most brutal regimes in the Muslim world and hitherto survived largely because of the support they received from the USA as pretended democracies on account of their unfailing ability to oppress the political and economic aspirations of their own populations, ensure the supremacy of Israel in the Middle East balance of power and prevent Islam from becoming a meaningful influence on those countries' politics. That they had to give in to popular pressure within a matter of weeks is both unprecedented and historic in the post-colonial Arab world. It has put fear into the hearts of the rulers of other states in the region and made them understand that once their own people wake up and demand their rights even the US is powerless in helping them hold on to power. In the face of indiscriminate police violence and killing, wanton interference with the internet and mobile phone communications and the disregard for organisational and individual rights - given that even the BBC had to complain about one of their journalists having been arrested and beaten - it is no longer possible for Western "democracies" to side with those governments against their own people in the name of "fighting terrorism" without risking a backlash at home, too, where unnecessary economic austerity measures in the interest of bankers and large corporations are also breeding unrest and resentment.
Before getting too excited about the consequences of these recent events, however, a word of caution: Whilst popular anger is capable of removing an unpopular regime, be it the Shah in Iran, the Communist party in Poland, East Germany or Russia, Ben Ali in Tunisia or Mubarak in Egypt, it is not enough when it comes to wanting to replace the established order with a more benign and accountable one. Whereas the USA cannot stem the unrest and prevent the fall of puppet dictators, they were not entirely unprepared for such events. During the Egyptian national uprising lead by Gamal Abd el Nasser, notwithstanding his anti-American rhetoric, American intelligence officers were writing his speeches for him as we revealed in our book Satanic Voices Ancient and Modern while ago. In the more recent book Surrendering Islam - The subversion of Muslim politics throughout history until the present day I co-authored with Canadian Muslim historian David Livingstone we show how the various opposition movements, including Islamic organisations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, are carefully groomed by Western intelligence to come into play when it is time for a regime change. Lech Walensa and Gorbachev may have freed Poles and Russians from the yoke of Communism, but simultaneously delivered them into the commercial exploitation of US capitalism. In Tunisia, likewise, the personalities at the head of the state will change, but the policies are likely going to be more of the same. For Egypt, the name of Mohamed al-Baradai, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is already being promoted as that of the future leader of a "government of unity", with the media choosing a leader on behalf of the Egyptian people and above their heads. Some might suspect that he serves establishment interests, but few know how well-linked he is, for example, by sitting on the Board of Trustees of the "International Crisis Group" together with Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of the "Grand Chessboard", and George Soros. Whereas some of the oppressive measures from which the people of Tunisia and Egypt suffered might be temporarily eased, once in government, any opposition party will serve the same pay-masters. The Liberal Party in the UK is a prime example for this ability to betray empty promises to voters. And a second caution: popular unrest might even be purposefully fermented by the ruling elite in order to make people call for law and order and usher in marshal law. Ultimately, the puppeteers behind the scenes still want world government, not democracy, and French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde recently confirmed this commenting on President Sarkozy's support for the dollar and an expanded mandate for the IMF at the Davos World Economic Forum by calling for moving towards "global governance". One of the key topics at the Forum was that rising food prices would lead to unrest and economic warfare. Be warned and don't let emotions carry the day!

Selling England by the pound

2010-12-10T12:17:00.002Z

As in the old Genesis song, England's future is being sold out by the coalition government. Finally having made it into government, the Liberal party demonstrated swiftly that all political parties put their principles behind once in power - actually, they do so because they are not in power, nor do they work for the people, they work for the banks and financial institutions who have enslaved us for far too long. Since those financial manipulators managed to get the government to give them the right to create (yes, create - out of nothing) the credit and money supply of the nation and then lend it back to the government at interest, we have all been trying to pay of the national debt, which has cost the banks nothing and the nation everything. All countries of the world are now tied in the same web, and there is ultimately no way out of the crisis other than either a popular uprising against the banks or direct, tyrannical rule by our financial masters.

The student protests against extortionate tuition fees have mainly hit the news because of violence. On the first occasion a fire extinguisher was thrown from a building with the potential to seriously hurt people. On the second occasion, the car in which the prince of Wales was travelling to attend a theatre performance had its windows smashed. That the future heir of the throne (if his mother abdicates before he himself has to retire) has no power either is evident in that he went to be entertained rather than dealing with the crisis his country is facing. But leaving that aside, the UK is not used to violent protest. It only happens when people loose hope and are pushed against the wall. Last time that was during the poll tax riots under Mrs. Thatcher, but nobody seems to make the connection. The most recent protests are not just about tuition fees, they are about depriving the next generation of Brits of a future: their parents and grandparents have to save up to afford their studies, knowing all too well that after graduation there are no jobs waiting for them. The higher education sector in the UK might deserve the knock - it has been overpriced and underrated for far too long - but the students and their families deserve better - the people deserve better.

Britain is heading for confrontation. People have lost respect for authority. For a government that sends its young into illegal wars. For a government that deprives pensioners of a decent retirement after life-long service to the country. For politicians who show their corruptibility by grabbing whatever expenses they can in addition to inflated salaries. For the police who regularly consider themselves above the law. And some people, only some at the moment, are fighting back. The shock expressed in the media, owned by the same financial institutions as our government, is like crying crocodile tears. Many have warned about things getting rough, and the writing has long been on the wall.

And now enter Islamophobia, that artificially created hate image of Muslims in Britain. It is about time people realised why this is happening and who the real enemies are. Islam is being demonised because it is the only religion left which opposes bank interest and the power of the banks. And anti-terrorist legislation has not been introduced to deal with a real threat from Muslims in our midst, but in order to give the state the powers to tackle protesters when the going gets rough, non-Muslim protesters, students, ordinary people. The pretext of a terrorist threat gives the police the powers to declare curfews and exclusion zones, to stop and search without reasonable intelligence or suspicion, to spy on people and, ultimately, to shoot to kill, as they did a few years back on the London underground. And the courts will always exonerate the police. Anywhere else in the world this is called a police state. Travellers at UK airports are regularly exposed to police patrols with machine guns, serving no other purpose but to intimidate. In the past, such heavy armed presence at public places would always be identified with living in a dictatorship, and that's exactly where Britain is heading. You don't need a university degree to figure it out.

Policing in Britain - the slippery slope towards tyranny

2010-10-10T14:28:00.003+01:00

We all learn from first-hand experience, hence there should be no objection when some of my observations are prompted and based, not exclusively of course, on a recent unjustified arrest of my own son for no arrestable crime whatsoever. Since under anti-terrorism legislation police in Britain were given the right to stop and search people without prior intelligence as to a potential crime having been permitted they have disproportionally targetted members of racial minorities, and earlier this year the European Court in Strasbourg ruled those arbitrary powers illegal. That members of minority communities were more likely to be stopped and searched says more about the police than the communities targetted. For this reason those in charge of policy decisions for the police have been at pain to try and recruit more members of the minority into the force, since in this respect, too, it is not at all representative of the overall population. Given the attitudes displayed by numerous police officers in public, these efforts have been largely unsuccessful.

British politicians often proudly refer to the country's democratic traditions as housing "the mother of parliaments" and deride third world countries for their lack of due process and the corruptibility and bribability of their officials, including the police. Whilst police officers in Britain cannot usually be bribed easily (which has more to do with the general affluence of society than their alleged integrity), they nonetheless abuse their position and disregard due process, and therefore, in common with countries where wearing a uniform brings tangible benefits resulting from an abuse of power, the police force in Britain also attracts an undue share of applicants who wish to join not so much to uphold law and order but to take advantage of the position of a police officer in society - some are common thugs (and the low level of educational requirements for joining the police gives them a fair chance to fulfil their aspirations), others are ideologically motivated, such as members of the BNP. Although members of the BNP are officially banned from joining, a leaked list of 13,000 BNP members serving as police officers two years ago showed that in practice this prohibition was not being enforced. Individual officers abusing their power may be one thing, but Where the abuse of process by individual officers goes unchecked because of tendency within authorities and especially the courts to always unquestioningly favour the account of a police officer over that of any other witnesses, we have the beginnings of the slippery slope towards a police state where abuses are committed with impunity and the police gradually becomes a tyrannical institution without checks and balances.

In most countries of the world, the police will go after the easy targets rather than risking a show
-down with hardened criminals (the latter are often controlled by way of infiltration instead), and in most countries of the world that easy target is the motorist. In many third world countries, police officers will stop motorists under the pretence of speeding offences or in order to check the driver's paperwork or the roadworthiness of the vehicle for the sole purpose of extracting a bribe. It has often been said that in the UK, too, speed checks are mainly conducted for the purpose of gathering revenue rather than road safety, and countries without motorway speed limits, like Germany, are no less safe with regard to motoring accidents. Of course, in Britain the individual officer does not get the money, rather it is the whole system which is taking advantage of the power of police to interfere with the free movement of people. In order to maximise revenue the burden of proof has been tilted in the favour of the state and against the motorist: if your car is recorded by a stationary speed camera as being in excess of the speed limit, you are presumed to be guilty simply by virtue of being the owner of the owner of the car even if there is no photographic evidence that you were yourself the driver; for this you are required to supply the evidence: guilty until proven innocent. If you are recorded by a mobile speed camera in the hands of a police officer, then his word that you were in excess of a given speed is sufficient to convict you, even if there is no recorded evidence of that alleged fact.

To further encourage motorists to cough up the money and avoid making use of legal processes, a system of conditional fines has been introduced whereby you save some money if you pay within a given time limit, and the fine goes up if you dispute the veracity of the charge. In any other field we would call this kind of practice coercion. In any case, the task of the police officer on traffic patrol, just like that of his often maligned lesser counterpart, the common traffic warden, is to find victims to extract money from, and both tend to be overzealous in the discharge of this duty. Both also tend to get very irate if challenged by a motorist as to the legality of what they are doing. So there is nothing unusual at all in my son being pulled over by a police officer with a mobile speed gun, even though the officer's speed gun was pointed at the floor until the moment he decided to pull him over when it was rapidly raised and pointed at the car and allegedly produced an excess speed reading. What is unusual for that police officer is that my son is a law graduate who, rightly, pointed out to the officer that operating a speed gun in this manner would produce an erroneous reading. However, in a police state, you must never challenge a police officer!

Once challenged, the officer goes into defence mode and becomes aggressive. In his mind he has the right to demand compliance and you have a duty to obey. If you were aggressive he could simply "book" you for your behaviour, but if you challenge him intellectually then, given the low educational threshold for becoming a police officer, he starts feeling intimidated even more and, to bring you to his level, will try to make you behave aggressively so as to get an excuse for arresting you. I must therefore stress that whilst my son was arrested for allegedly driving without a licence or insurance, both since proven untrue, and for driving with excess speed, a charge for which no evidence has yet been provided, he was never charged with behaving inappropriately or threatening in any way - his crime thus was to have been more intelligent than the officer he was dealing with and that he did not hesitate letting him know that he was making serious mistakes in his dealings with him.

As to those blunders it included dropping the speed gun onto the floor, after which it surely shouldn't be used anymore without recalibration, to refuse identifying himself or to search my son without giving, as required, the reason as to what suspicion was giving rise to the search, dropping and damaging his mobile phone in the process, or that he was subsequently searched a second time by a female officer - two violations in one since after he had already been searched there was no further reason, other than harassment, for another search, and a body search should always be carried out by an officer of the same sex. Subsequent blunders included that the female officer who, after his car had been confiscated for allegedly driving without a licence, found she had difficulty in operating a large estate car and subsequently requested from the female passenger in his car that she help her put the car into first gear - which rightly she refused since she did not have a driving licence herself! Everybody can make mistakes, but this is where training and ongoing professional development should have had their place, suggesting that there is a serious deficiency in that respect within the police service.

More worrying, however, is that such transgressions were supported by the officers' superiors at
sergeant level and the collective mindset of those tasked to uphold law and order but being careless about adhering to the law themselves in the course of duty. From my own experience of having spent many hours translating for clients at police custody suits, officers like to impress on new arrivals as to who is in charge, assuming that if they have been arrested they are by definition guilty and hardened criminals and deserve to be treated accordingly. Hence the exchanges are never polite and often more aggressive and patronising than warranted by the situation. Totally unacceptable, however, is to ridicule a person who, as the word "custody" suggests, is now under their care. For a custody sergeant to mock the law qualification of the person in his charge as not being of much use now that he is held displays both an inferiority complex and serious bad manners.

Every now and then individual officers run into persons who challenge their actions. If the right
checks and balances were in place, bad apples amongst the force would soon be thrown out, but since the process is tilted towards exonerating the officer, right or wrong, the abuses become endemic. Complaints against the police in Britain are either dealt with by the police themselves or referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, a body set up after it had become evident that the police's own handling of complaints was not robust enough. Yet, since that new body is made up partly of ex-police officers and operates from police premises, and given that they hardly ever uphold any complaint, their alleged independence appears highly doubtful. In the case of Barbar Ahmed, a young Asian who sustained the most abhorrent injuries during a raid by anti-terrorist police and subsequent arrest before being released without charge, he only managed to get the police to agree to the payment of damages after bringing a civil law suit - the "Independent" Police Complaints Commission had previously found that the officers had behaved impeccably.

What is the ultimate result of an abuse of police powers backed up by political institutions and the courts? In the long run it serves to create a deep-seated and often irreparable mistrust of the police within the population, initially those most targetted like the Irish in earlier days and
Muslims today, antagonising them against the police and making them unwilling to work with the police even where this would be the right thing to do. The lack of success of recruitment campaigns amongst young Asians already bears this out. Ultimately, community policing becomes an impossible task since it requires the goodwill and cooperation of law-abiding citizens who, however, fear that they themselves will be criminalised if they come into contact with the police voluntarily. Such a rift between the "law enforcement" bodies of the state and the intimidated population normally characterises dictatorships: Britain, where are you heading?

Provocation? Let them burn the Qur'an!

2010-09-09T10:07:00.002+01:00

It must have been a small-town priest's wildest dream come true when his marketing ploy to raise the importance of his obscure and dwindling parish by attacking the common Muslim foe worked so well that all the leading politicians of the world came out in defence of the Qur'an - or did they? Whilst appearing to make the distinction between moderate and radical Islam - one of their favourite topics lately, with the terms purposefully left ambiguous - in reality they probably savoured this new onslaught on Muslims following closely on the footsteps of the most recent storm in a tea cup, the non-debate about the 'mosque about to be built on ground zero'. In both scenarios their argument went that it would be wrong to hold ordinary moderate Muslims responsible for the actions of the radical and violent terrorists amongst them: a typical false set of alternatives, for it serves to cover up the factual reality which is that the success of the 9/11 operation could only have been possible as an insider job at the highest level within the American administration, overriding established checking mechanisms. Conspiracy theory? Well the weirdest conspiracy theory out there is that a few bearded and turban-clad individuals somewhere in an unknown Afghan cave could have duped American air traffic control and penetrated the defences of the Pentagon with such apparent ease. Sure, bin Laden is still out there somewhere and Elvis lives, let's not question those truths!

The public "news" discourse within the global media environment is carefully crafted by what in the book Satanic Voices we called "Satanic Presses", paid for by "Satanic Purses". It does not take much to find a mentally challenged parish priest with a grudge against Islam, but to catapult him to world-wide celebrity status, even if with negative associations, rather than ignore him, does not happen by accident. From the media-instigated burning of Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" via the Danish cartoons to the public burning of Qur'ans on 9/11 (coinciding with Eid-ul-Fitr), these show-downs are intentional provocations to drive a rift between communities and condition them for the next war between Islam and the West. As I pointed out in my latest book Surrendering Islam, ordinary Muslims are "blissfully" unaware how their own assumed Islamic discourse is equally being distorted to serve a wider agenda. Mentally challenged "radical" Muslim preachers are as easy to find as their Christian counterparts, and all too often they have been planted as agents provocateurs to hype up the Muslim response. Since the second world war the CIA has a long history of covert action in the Middle East using Muslim agents originally trained by ex-Nazi secret service personnel through the subterfuge of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Likewise, the British-installed Saudi kingdom provides a safe haven for a US military presence to protect Israel against any potential threat whilst Muslims have bought into the myth that this authoritarian regime is the protector of the two holy places, having systematically destroyed all other historical evidence of Islam's past glory without hardly anybody noticing. Innocence may be bliss, but ignorance isn't. There is a propaganda war going on out there as a run-up to another shooting war, and we are not winning it. No, don't point me to the alleged success of (CIA-created) al-Qaeda or those mystical Afghan warriors. Islam is not winning in Afghanistan where Muslims are sacrificed in a proxy war between America and China, just as Muslims were the cannon fodder for the proxy war between America and Russia in this strategically important region.

So what should the Muslim response be? Certainly not burning Bibles, but I'm sure somebody sooner or later will fall into that trap. When in the year of the prophet Muhammad's birth - peace be with him - Abraha, the ruler of Yemen marched against Makkah to destroy the Kaabah, Abdu-l-Mutallib the chief of Makkah and grandfather of the prophet astounded the invading general by only asking for the return of his confiscated camels: I am the Lord of camels, he declared. The Kaabah has its own Lord, let Him protect it. And He did. The Qur'an is Allah's eternal word and He ensures its protection and survival. It lives in the hearts of believing Muslims and burning a written copy of it can't do it the least of harm. In fact, we ourselves burn copies of the Qur'an to dispose of them cleanly when they have become worn out. So let them burn it and earn Allah's wrath in return, but let us look after ourselves. We are no longer "lords of camels" either, we are nowhere in charge of our own affairs. In our economic dealings, in our communications, in our "freedom" of movement we have become totally dependent on those who want to condition us or destroy us. Let us defend the spirit of Islam by rebuilding communities which can wither the storms and survive, spiritually and materially, even if those ruling over us want to tighten their grip or pull the plug. That's a very difficult task, of course, and like with the Florida preacher, it is much easier to rise to notorious fame with hot air and provocation. Plenty of "radical" leaders have been handpicked for us to do just that, and if we fall for them, we deserve no better.

Rules of engagement - fighting the non-war

2010-08-03T08:02:00.000+01:00

Us President Obama has just squared the circle: he announced the end of the war and all combat operations in Iraq by the end of the month and in the same breath stated that most of the US soldiers currently engaged in those operations would remain in the country to assist the Iraqi army and to involve in counter-terrorism operations. Since his predecessor Bush had foolishly declared the war over prematurely, the entanglement of US army personnel in Iraq has continued for years with numerous military and civil casualties, and there is no real end in sight. The US is legally required under international law to withdraw from Iraq since its mandate under already doubtful UN authorisations has already run out, and now the extension granted by the Iraqi puppet government is also coming to an end. Back at home, Americans are equally weary of the constant drain of the Iraqi operations on American lives and funds.

Basically, what Obama is telling us is that he thinks - and knows - that the people who elected him are stupid and will fall for whatever rhetoric they are given, at least for some time. Moving the goal post, redefining objectives, relabelling facts has become the government response to any situation which has become unpalatable.

Any child can do the maths that if 65,000 American troops are currently stationed in Iraq involved in combat operations and to train the Iraqi army, and 50,000 of them will stay on to involve in counter-terrorism operations and train the Iraqi army, then nothing much has changed, except that the enemy has been relabelled from a combatant under the laws of war to a terrorist or "illegal combatant", the term first coined for the detainees held in limbo, and illegally under international law, in Guantanamo Bay, which Obama also promised to close but didn't.
Those 15,000 soldiers leaving Iraq are actually being redeployed since the US is boosting its presence there by an additional 30,000 troops as, according to Obama, they face "huge challenges" there.

Afghanistan is an even more deadly place for American soldiers where they are fighting yet another war that isn't officially a war but another counter-terrorism operation with equally unclear and non-defined objectives. No doubt the US government knows only too well that it can't win on either of the two battle fields, but the logic is that if you don't define your operations as a war and don't state a clear war objective, then you can't possibly loose either. So it is not until the casualties keep mounting that the American public will eventually put more pressure on their government and tell them that rhetoric is not enough as an exit strategy.

Finkelstein on Gaza

2010-05-13T18:50:00.001+01:00

"The era of the "beautiful" Israel has passed, it seems irrevocably, and the disfigured Israel that in recent years has replaced it in the public consciousness is a growing embarrassment. It is not so much that Israel's behavior is worse than it was before, but rather that the record of that behavior has, finally, caught up with it. The truth can no longer be denied or dismissed."

"For a long while Israel's "supporters" deflected the impact of this accumulating documentary record by wielding the twin swords of The Holocaust and the "new anti-Semitism"... if 'another flare-up in the region, similar to the Gaza operation, will probably lead to an even more severe out-break of anti-Semitic activity against communities worldwide' (quote from the Israeli Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism), then an efficacious method to fight anti-Semitism would appear to be for Israel to stop committing massacres."

In his book analysing the Israeli invasion into Gaza, Norman Finkelstein takes a clear and uncompromising position. It is a well researched and referenced polemic that does not shirk from pointing the finger at those responsible for what the UN Goldstone report (whose author is both Jewish and a self-declared Zionist who "worked for Israel all of my adult life") clearly termed war crimes, stating that "the Israeli assault on Gaza constituted "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability." Anybody still in doubt about the justification of this characterisation should read Finkelstein's book as the testimony of a Jew who speaks out against crimes committed in the name of people who used to keep quiet about it, but now, he asserts are increasingly coming off the fence whilst Israel grows more and more distant from its alleged support amongst the Jewish people in the diaspora.

In a brief history of the Israel-Palestine conflict Finkelstein explains the rationale for Israel to have broken a ceasefire with the Hamas-led Palestinian government after first ensuring that both that government and its people were weakened by a prolonged economic blockade: After the blunders in the Lebanon, where Israel also stands accused of having committed widespread war crimes, the Israeli governing elite felt the need to restore Israel's "deterrence capacity", and that could only be achieved by showing unrestrained and disproportionate force against a defenceless civil population. Israel's two major concerns which it hoped to deal with by its Gaza invasion were that its enemies were less afraid of it than they once were, and that any future peace initiative might succeed in forcing Israel to concede in a compromise what it never had any intention to concede, the existence of a Palestinian people with sovereignty over any territory of their own.

Dealing with "Operation Cast Lead" as Israel termed the invasion, Finkelstein takes apart any attempt of Israeli apologists to justify the carnage it unleashed and describes minutely the progression of the military operation, based on testimonies from Palestinians, independent observers and human rights organisations as well as Israeli soldiers themselves, leaving no doubt that the intended humanitarian disaster was not by accident but by design. As a fan of Mahatma Ghandi he tries to show that Ghandi's advocacy for non-violent protest did not extend to a call for oppressed people to take oppression lying down but instead supported resistance in the face of impossible odds as "a refusal to bend before overwhelming might in the full knowledge that it means certain death", and he quotes Ghandi's response in 1947 to what might be the most acceptable solution to the Palestinian problem as "The abandonment wholly by the Jews of terrorism and other forms of violence".

Finkelstein supports a two-state solution of peaceful coexistence for Palestine. He is hopeful that after the Israeli propaganda has had to take a serious dent when the extens of Israel's crimes became known, the Palestinian position of only asking for what the International Court of Justice and the United Nations General Assembly repeatedly stated as their inviolable right - freedom from occupation and self-determination - might gradually shift public opinion and, with it, policy makers. I am not that optimistic since in my understanding Israel is only a stepping stone on the road to world government (as predicted by Ben Gurion in 1962), with Israel's designs not being limited to controlling and subjugating people on the territories occupied so far. Nor do I support an artificial two-state solution: Israel claims to be a democracy yet gives favoured status to a set of people perceived as genetically Jewish. A single-state solution with "one person, one vote" is what democracy would demand instead. In spite those differences, Palestinians do have a strong advocate in Norman Finkelstein, and I highly recommend his passionately written book in their support.

Norman G. Finkelstein's book "This Time We Went Too Far. Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion." is published by O/R Books, New York.

Hang parliament!

2010-05-06T09:24:00.002+01:00

As the UK public is going to cast their votes at polling stations around the country, there has been, as in previous general elections, much talk of a "hung parliament" or the fear of the two main parties that neither of them might manage to get an absolute majority in spite of the unique British "first-past-the-post" electoral system usually resulting in a sizable majority for a party who only has a minority backing amongst the population. This whole discussion misses the crucial point that neither of the parties potentially forming a government after today will have a popular mandate, because they are not bound to listen to the voice of the people, but rather carry out the policies of their paymasters, the banks.

Each of the parties contesting the current UK elections have already made it clear that there will be "cuts" in spending, "austerity" measures in order to pay back the large deficit amassed by bailing out the banks whose profiteering charges were in the past justified by the suggestion that they took a commercial risk when lending. Instead, it is the people who take the risk and the people who pay the price.

None of the parties have dared looking at alternatives to the current madness, because questioning the supremacy of private banks as the originators of the nation's money supply is heresy. Hence it will not make an iota of difference who gets elected today.

Only a year ago we had the bizarre scenario that we were told that the banks did no longer have the funds to lend money, therefore governments had to bail them out by lending the money to them, but in order to do so, they first had to raise those funds on the money markets, in other words, obtain them from those same banks that didn't have the funds in the first place. The real problem is that governments do not supply the currency they issue, but borrow the money they put into circulation from private banks, who in turn have been given the right to issue those loans without any material backing - out of thin air as it were - and then charge for it. In this crazy system of fractional reserve banking, banks are allowed to issue a multiple of their asset base in credits, that is lend money that they do not have nor doesn't in fact exist, and charge for the privilege. Yet, governments are denied to put money into circulation by the same means, clearly indicating that we are governed by banks, not governments.

Were our governments to issue the necessary credit directly into circulation, saving the high cost of interest on borrowing, there would be no need for cuts and austerity measures. This argument has been put to the treasury countless times, and the replies and excuses have been as ingenious as that there was "not enough demand" for this kind of government-issued money (known to economists as M0), or that the Maastricht treaty prevented European governments from doing so.

Hence, the best course of action for troubled countries like Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and sooner or later the UK would be to leave the Euro and the restraints imposed by the European Union, issue their own interest-free currency to facilitate trade and prosperity, and preventing banks from continually creaming off the lion's share of our tax payments. Don't bother voting for UKIP as an alternative though, or the SNP, they're no more wanting to upset the status quo than the rest. When it comes to political parties and their MPs, they're all in the pocket of the bankers. A hung parliament wouldn't be too bad, provided they hang them all properly.

War and Empire - The American Way of Life

2010-03-29T15:05:00.002+01:00

American school children are not known for their detailed knowledge of geography or history, depriving them of the essential tools to understand their country's place in the world. It is thus refreshing when an American professor of history sets the record straight in showing that in spite of the lofty principles upon which the American enterprise was allegedly founded and which it keeps pronouncing, its actual rise has been built on brute force from the very start. In "War and Empire - The American Way of Life", published by Pluto Press (ISBN 978-0-7453-2764-8), Paul L. Atwood does not mince his words. Its introduction alone would serve as a primer for those who need to acquaint themselves with what drives the current American psyche.

"By and large the nation's students imbibe what the American historian James W. Loewen calls the 'Disney version' of the nation's past which propagates a collective hallucination that the US is the primary source of human progress.", he states, and continues:

"Americans delude themselves when they insist that we are a peace-loving people who will go to any extreme to avoid violence. War is the American way of life. The American project began in violence, the nation was born amidst blood and the growth of the American republic is matched by a corresponding chain of carnage from the Pequot Massacre to Wounded Knee to My Lai and to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; all alleged to be the fault of others."

"For a people outraged at the murder of our civilians on 9/11 we are morally anesthetized when it comes to admitting the crimes our own actions, votes and tax dollars have wrought."

Atwood starts his exposition of how war featured in the American mindset from the very beginning - provided it was carried out by choice and against an enemy with little chance of posing an existential danger - by first describing the brutal reality of exterminating the indigenous red Indian population and then the revolt against British rule, followed by a continuous land grab and extension of America's sphere of influence, culminating in her role as global police to enforce her "Open Door" trade policy.

"The real history of Columbus' arrival in the 'New World' is a woeful account of enslavement, murder, torture and genocide that, in terms of proportion and absolute numbers, was far more successful than the race murder that Hitler attempted. Within 50 years of Columbus' arrival the indigenous population of the island of Hispaniola dropped from 8 million to a mere five hundred. That was only the beginning." - Luckily for Atwood he is not a German citizen where he could face a prison sentence under German's Draconian laws against "dishonouring the memory of the dead", where comparing the extermination of any other people to that of the Jewish race amounts to unacceptable "relativism". Unperturbed by such censorship he writes:

"All Americans know that the native peoples of the Americas were largely displaced, but little attention is paid to the methods. Just as Indian lands in the seventeenth century were 'expropriated through trickery, legal manipulation, intimidation, deportation, concentration camps, and murder', so the model continued, becoming, in short, the prototype of what is now condemned by the US as 'ethnic cleansing'. All of these measures have been employed against every non-white enemy the US has created for itself: from Virginia to Vietnam, from the Pequot massacre to Sand Creek, to Wounded Kne, to My Lai to Haditha and Falluja."

"The fate imposed upon the native peoples of the Americas has justifiably been called the 'American Holocaust'. As Stanard rightly says in American Holocaust, 'massacres of this sort were so numerous and routine that recounting them becomes numbing'."

"Of course the co-called civilizing mission was always ultimately a lie. The real venture was to take land and resources from others and transfer these to the conquerors, or to open or maintain sources of gain that would deprive the other of self-determination."

As for the lofty aims of American independence: "In the United States the American Revolution is celebrated as a near impossible victory over a mighty and tyrannical empire made possible by the heroism of those who introduced the concept of equality and self-government into a benighted world. ... Had the crown not been so preoccupied with continental threats from France the real strength of imperial Britain would have been deployed, instead of inept commanders and foreign mercenaries."

"From the beginning in the US a self-selected and tiny elite spoke of 'We the people' and 'democracy' but actually feared popular rule, and created two-tiered political institutions designed to thwart it, much like their model, the British Parliament."

"The signers of the Declaration of Independence and the US constitution selected themselves as representatives of 'We the People' but acted primarily in their own interests. Virtually all of them were plantation owners and slaveholders, or had extensive commercial and banking interests, and all feared genuine popular democracy."

"So the American revolution was not really a revolution. It was a rebellion that was fortunate to win and while it instituted key reforms and unique adaptations, such as a written constitution and a Bill of Rights, it was really a transfer of power from the British government to an American self-elected elite who ensured that governance would be held by them."

Atwood then proceeds to describe the gradual empire building the Founders of the new Republic engaged in: "The war in North America quickly led to naval engagement in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and Asia. Thus the Seven Years War was the first truly global war which foreshadowed ever more destructive wars and signaled the degree to which imperial rivalries would shape the future of the planet. In this early stage of world-wide struggle for supremacy, unconventional methods of warfare would first make their appearance."

"In their efforts to banish Spain from the hemisphere US policy-makers faced a glaring problem. The Cuban liberation movement was winning and it seemed quite likely that Spain would grant independence to Cubans. Since the real goal of US policy was to take over from the Spanish and then label American rule a victory for 'democracy', this turn of events simply would not do. American war hawks now moved with alacrity."

"In short order, with a crushing victory over Spain, the Caribbean Sea became, as the Romans used to say, mare nostrum, 'our sea'. All four island-nations became de facto American colonies, exploited as bases for the American navy and for their resources, their people now serving American masters. Cuba's constitution was written in Washington and came with the proviso known as the Platt Amendment that the US could intervene militarily on the island any time American interests were said to be at risk."

For those who think the current cancellation of civil rights as part of the "War on Terror" is an aberration in the history of the United States of America, the mention of laws enacted with similar ferocity and intent during the World War I is instructive:

"Many groups had been outraged over Wilson's betrayal of neutrality. His government's response was to enact legislation designed to silence the opposition, going so far as to jail many of those who took the First Amendment at face value. A highly unpopular draft law was enacted, only the second in American history. The Espionage Act of 1917 outlawed speech against the war as interference with military recruitment and carried 20-year jail sentences for those convicted... Effectively nullifying the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the Sedition Act of 1918 made any speech against the government's wartime policies illegal."

"Most chilling of all was the Sedition Act that effectively nullified the First Amendment to the constitution and led to the arrest of numerous journalists and editors who voiced opposition to the war with France. They were condemned as traitors. These measures, coming so soon after passage of the Bill of Rights, were an overt attempt to invalidate it and revealed how deeply many of the Framers opposed popular dissent and democracy itself, especially when the issue was war or peace. Their counterparts in every era of American history would enact similar measures intended to cow the voice of popular opposition, right up to the present."

"Though most Americans have been conditioned recently to perceive the FBI as a primary force in the 'war on terror', its initial mandate was to intimidate political opposition to the dominant parties."

With war there always came justification, usually by describing the opponents as uncivilised or subhumans, deserving of subjugation or extermination. "Well before the nation of Germany came into existence the roots of Nazi race theories were being set in the United States, and for the same reasons. New pseudo-sciences of phrenology and 'craniology' in response to abolitionism, focused on claims of African inferiority, but were also put to use rationalizing the conquest of Mexico and native peoples. These ideas were paralleled by the ever more popular doctrine of 'Anglo=Saxonism'."

Atwood illustrates this doctrine by a quote from a senator from Virginia at the time: "It is peculiar to the character of this Anglo-Saxon race of men to which we belong, that it has never been contended to live in the same country with any other distinct race, upon terms of equality; it has, invariably, when placed in that situation, proceeded to exterminate or enslave the other race in some form or other, or, failing that to abandon the country."

In both world wars, it wasn't the support of idealistic principles, but the interests of the industrial ruling oligarchy that America had become, which motivated America's entry. "War production was manifestly the only real factor that had ended the Great Depression, but even so it had absorbed only a fraction of those formerly unemployed. The bulk of young would-be workers were now wearing military uniforms, Wilson's answer was a 'permanent war economy'. But for that a permanent enemy, or enemies, would be required."

"Though American policy-makers asserted that lassez-faire principles continued to drive the economy, and decried state management of the economies in the communist world, the marriage of political Washington to the industrial-financial sectors created as similar model in the US, with the critical difference that public investment would result not in social returns but in private profit. Sometimes called the 'welfare-warfare state' American prosperity would be maintained via a permanent war economy."

"In the final analysis the US entered World War II by stealth, not to redress the crimes committed by Axis powers such as saving Jews, liberating enslaved peoples and fostering democracy, but to preserve the mainstay of American foreign policy - the Open Door to the resources, markets and labor power of the territories that were threatened with closure. Popular culture maintains that the oft-repeated ideals were the nation's primary motivations but the genuine circumstances surrounding the war's outcome belie such mythology."

"One reason that the state of Israel was supported and created by allied post-war leaders was precisely to prevent large numbers from settling in the United States and England."

"The primary motivation for US entry into the war was the prospect that Germany would dominate most of the European continent and the oil reserves of the Middle East, and establish a closed continental system that would exclude most American trade and investment, a 'nightmare' scenario from the perspective of American policy-makers. Yet there was no possibility of defeating Hitler without an alliance with the Soviet Union. The American public forgets, or the reality has been consistently downplayed, that the Soviets did most of the dying to defeat Hitler."

A quote from Truman in 1941 illustrates the American "pragmatism" and duplicity that has been in evidence then and now: "If we see that Germany is winning the war we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible."

I have only two criticisms of Atwood's analysis: When it comes to the Soviet Union, he seems to ignore the fact that the Bolshevik revolution was originally instigated by American bankers or that, in the arms race following the deliberate detonation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, America secretly helped Russia in the development of its military capability in order to maintain the perception of the Soviet threat. Secondly, whilst deploring the hypocritical response by Washington to 9/11, he continues to buy the official line that al-Qaedah bore responsibility for the attacks on the twin towers, an official story increasingly discredited by now. Atwood's account of how the American administration deliberately engineered the attack on Pearl Harbor as a pretext for entering the war shows that it was not out of character for them, to sacrifice some of their own people for corporate ends.

Driving Islam underground

2010-02-10T13:51:00.002Z

Attacking ordinary Muslims has become the relentless pastime of a government and media that have lost their purpose. Be it the banning of Islam4UK as a group allegedly sympathising with terrorism, the French hullaballoo about fining women who want to cover their faces or the Swiss ban on minarets (with its leading campaigner since having converted to Islam!), they are all attempts by desperate governments and corrupt self-serving politicians to channel the anger at their own mismanagement into a different direction, hoping that their popularity might recover from its current depths by beating a scapegoat. And the media lap it up as it makes for cheap programme thrillers without requiring much original research or investigative journalism.

The BBC has just sunk to its lowest with a poorly scripted, badly presented and amateurishly filmed series called "Generation Jihad" in which John Taylor wants to scare viewers into believing that a whole generation of British-born Muslims are being radicalised and either ponder about carrying out a terror attack on their neighbours or at least admire those who do. His whole first episode, shot low-budget at a barber's, a meat shop and a basketball court, centres around two Muslims, Rizwan Ditta and Bilal Mohammed, who were convicted under the UK's draconian anti-terror laws for possessing material likely to be of use to terrorists. Similar charges have been brought against scores of young Muslims in their teens and twens, for a trivial a crime as possessing a copy of "The anarchist's cookbook", ab book in wide circulation since the days of the Vietnam war. It actually carries an ISBN number. Maybe it is unreliable sources like this that explain why the explosives produced by the "shoe bomber" or the "underwear bomber" quickly disappeared in an embarrassing flash?

Since Taylor broadcast some of this material likely to be of such valuable use to would-be terrorists, he should be arrested and imprisoned for at least 20 years, not just the 2 years those poor souls interviewed by him served, in order to save the British licence payer (you have to pay for the BBC if you own equipment capable of receiving a TV broadcast, irrespective of whether you watch it or not, and can go to prison if you don't comply) further shaky out-of focus shots giving the impression that in order to qualify as a cameraman for the BBC it is now sufficient to simply be able to point the lens of the camera at least somewhere in the right direction. Taylor's excuse would probably be that the material was in the public domain anyway, the same reason why Mohammad Atif Siddique had just had his conviction overturned. Unfortunately for Yorkshiremen Rizwan Ditta and Bilal Mohammed they had pleaded guilty, probably to reduce their sentence or to ward of an extradition to the USA, an infinitely worse evil than spending a couple of years in a British prison.

The lack of convictions for real terrorist offences has led the police and security services to charge and convict Muslim individuals for thought crimes in order to justify the huge sums spent on counter-terrorism measures. But the criminalisation of the innocent goes a lot further. Since the "underwear bomber" Umar Faruk Abdulmuttalab once attended University College London and was elected president of the Islamic Society there during 2006 and 2007, the counter-terrorism command of the Metropolitan Police obtained the membership records of Islamic Society members for the years 2006 - 2009 together with those of the Islamic Medical Society from the Students Union who put up little resistance against the request. Those members' data will be held on file for seven years to come and shared with foreign security services, although there is not a shred of evidence that they were involved in anything but legitimate student activities. Neither the BBC nor any other mainstream media found the story worth reporting, which was only covered as headline item by the Muslim News.

Yet, the ramifications are immense and deal another blow to freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of action in the UK. The UK already has the most surveillance cameras per individual, it's stop-and-search police powers have recently found to be illegal by the European Court of Human Rights, a British appeal court just censored the British government from hiding its knowledge of complicity in torture under the spurious excuse of national security, and the UK also has the strictest gagging laws in the Western world, matching, if not exceeding, those available in China it regularly criticises: Newspapers are frequently issued with orders not to report a specific event, even a parliamentary question, and are then even prevented from disclosing that such an order was served on them. No wonder investigative journalism is a dying art in the UK and the media go for the safe pastime of Muslim-bashing. For Muslims it means, retreat into the ghetto or get picked on, and if you want to get involved in any activity at all, keep it stumm.

Gone are decades of work trying to bring Muslim aspirations into the mainstream environment, get Muslims to identify as British citizens or even feel proud of their and their country's achievements. After fledgling attempts of getting involved in society and politics, British Muslims are back retreating into their own unformalised networks. More like "Generation under Siege" than "Generation Jihad".

What would be worth investigating by the BBC, if they still prided themselves for original work, would be the tactics used by the security services and the police in radicalising young Muslims themselves in order to justify the fight against them. Just like minors are being sent into shops to buy cigarettes or alcohol, watched by adult handlers, who then bring charges against the shop keepers, our security services actively promote the expression of radical Islamic views in order to then bring a successful prosecution. Umar Abdulmuttalab was, upon the available evidence, also actively recruited and handled by the security services.

More was hidden than a bomb in some underpants

2010-01-29T15:23:00.002Z

Kurt Haskell, the lawyer on the Detroit bound flight who witnessed the Nigerian "underwear bomber" suspect to be boarded by a "handler" at Amsterdam Schiphol airport without a passport, has just published some of his conclusions how this could have happened and why mainstream media took only a cursery interest in his story. The alternative news agency Mathaba has published some extensive background information on the incident.

The fact that in spite of clear warnings and intelligence information Abudlmutallab's multiple entry visa was not revoked is currently subject to much debate in the USA, and Haskell quotes an article in the Detroit News stating that his visa was kept valid in order to not foil a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States, so that investigators could get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with.

So effectively, the latest twist is that American security agents knew about Abdulmutallab and let him enter the United States unhindered, or even helped him enter the United States, so that he could lead them to other members of his terrorist network. Haskell quotes the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Michael E. Leiter, admitting that: "I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another."

For a law-abiding patriotic American law professional like Haskell this is a stark discovery, but in his analysis he fails to take the matter to ultimate conclusion:
If US intelligence followed Abdulmuttalab, then they would not want this to be apparent to his alleged co-conspirators. However, they must have been following him for some time, in fact given the help they provided him with, he must have already turned informer or, have been trained and handled by them as an infiltrator of the alleged terror network. Hence, they must also have known about the explosives he was carrying aboard the aircraft. Now if they did not want him and their tracking of other terrorists to be found out, then they would not want an incident that obviously would warn off any others and stop him and them from getting anywhere near them. On the other hand, unless they expected him to try and detonate the device, they would not have had somebody filming the whole episode as witnessed by Haskell.

Further, if they knew about the man carrying a "bomb", then they either a) also knew that the device would not detonate or b) willingly put themselves and the travelling public at serious risk. The first option sounds more plausible.

Now if they knew he would attempt to detonate a device that could not cause serious damage, then the purpose of the exercise must be different from the one officially declared as the scare and his subsequent arrest would have foiled any plans of following him and tracing others through him, in fact warning them off. There only remain two possible objectives: either the whole occurrence it was staged to generate public fear or it was a test run to see how a youngster like that carries out a mission like that. If the first holds true, then the war on terror has become a grand propaganda exercise. If the latter is the case, then US officials are actively involved in the training and deployment of alleged terrorists. Either scenario raises a lot more serious questions than Haskell has dared to voice.

I doubt that he will be able to go any further with what he and his wife clearly saw. He has already received some intimidating phone calls as a result. The logical facts of the course of events also explain why the mainstream media won't touch the story or probe into it as it is the story of the collusion between the security services and the alleged terror networks they claim to fight, similar to the earlier CIA involvement in the "red scare", where whole communist cells in the USA where run exclusively by secret agents.

In my forthcoming book "Surrendering Islam", co-authored with American historian David Livingstone, we show how the subversion of Muslim organisations to further the ends of unholy and clandestine interests beset with wanting to dominate the world is not a recent phenomenon but one that has been accomplished a long time ago. Far from being dead, the Neocon clash of civilisations theory put forward by Huntingdon is being put into practice, fermenting an increasingly violent show-down between "Islam" and the "West", with both controlled in their declarations and actions by the same people.

The Age of paranoia

2010-01-26T20:28:00.002Z

Be afraid, be very afraid! There may be a terrorist living in your neighbourhood. Don't take any chances. If you know of Muslim student looking up information on the location of airports around the world, don't hesitate to report him, so he can be duly arrested for possessing material likely to be of use to potential terrorists. If a non-Muslim student posing as pacifist protests by holding up a placard outside an army training base, don't leave things to chance, get police dogs and helicopter back-up. We can't have army cadets put in harms way before they even go to Afghanistan. If you're an airline pilot and one of your passengers is an orthodox Jew wanting to say his morning prayers, you better head for the nearest airport. If your passenger is a Muslim about to pray, you should try an immediate crash landing, maybe the Hudson River. We need better security. Ban the Burkha. Don't let those Muslim women get away with hiding their faces. God only knows what else they may be hiding. We live in very dangerous times.

Troubles is, where do you start and where do you stop. Why should there be naked body scanners only at airports? Did not the 7/7 terrorists try and blow up trains and buses? So did the Madrid train bombers. Why are we not strip-searched when entering a train station. Why can I board a coach or bus with as many bottles of water (or peroxide) as I like? Those terrorists sure are clever people. They've understood that it is getting harder to board a plane with explosives. Knowing that you can cause just as much carnage outside of airports, they're sure to diversify, so where are the risk assessments for public spaces unrelated to aviation? In Iraq scores of people get killed daily in bomb attacks since that glorious "liberation", and none of them at an airport.

Whenever a past attempted terrorist attack gets widely reported, the US government raises the security threat level from elevated to high or from yellow to orange, and the UK government follows suit by raising its threat level from substantial to severe. But if it's severe in the USA, then it's critical in the UK. So much for cooperation in fighting terror - they can't even agree on the terminology. What's severe on the European side of the Atlantic, isn't quite severe yet on American soil. But leaving this aside, why does the threat level never go up before an attack? Don't we all spend enough money on so-called intelligence? What is the basis of those classifications? Since they are for our own protection, shouldn't we be getting some transparency at least?

Unfortunately, there's nothing intelligent at all about the whole hocuspocus. In fact, whenever the threat level indicates that an attack is highly likely, we usually get a period of calm, whereas the attacks that lead to the subsequent raising of the threat level usually take place after the threat level has been indicating a lower risk. Of course, it is not for us lesser mortals to probe into the wisdom of such things. This is the job of security experts who sadly would be out of a job if things made sense or added up.

If an alien came to earth and read the papers or listened to the radio or watched television, he would immediately be on guard against those nasty terrorists. He'd be watching his back. He'd stop drinking water in case it exploded inside him. He'd wonder why people are allowed to wear clothes at all since they could be hiding explosives. He wouldn't ever risk using public transport. Chances are, he'd die in a car accident.

About 115 people die daily in car accidents across the United States. In the UK, a much smaller place, it is 8 people a day. Three times as many die in other accidents, for example at work or at home. In fact, people's homes are the most dangerous places of all. And as far as violent killings go, most people are murdered by somebody who knew them. Thus whilst going out is dangerous, staying home might not be an option either to prevent harm. Besides, your own children might have been radicalised by terrorist recruiters and start experimenting with explosives in the bathroom. Did I mention swine flu?

Anxiety disorder, characterised by irrational fear, used to be a psychiatric condition. Now it's become the social norm. If our governments really want to protect us and have our best interest at heart, they should invest in something rather cheap: a sense of proportion.

There, I said it. Now I'm waiting for that knock on the door.

Keeping the terror threat alive

2009-12-29T19:43:00.002Z

"It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive.
But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State."
George Orwell, 1984

The war in Afghanistan isn't going well at all. The economy is near collapse. There is a constant feeling of doom and gloom. Life is a drag for most, more so for international travellers. There is dissatisfaction with bureaucracy, delays, lack of customer service, and the constant harassment of make-belief security. Citizens are weary, staff and officials are bored. A petty airline official or security officer will be ready to call the police the moment you question his or her motives; customer service operatives will chat away on the phone with friends and colleagues whilst passengers needing help are waiting in a queue. The system is at breaking point, tempers rise, the level of complaints goes up, but there is respite on the horizon: mortal danger, another terror threat.

As long as fear can be generated, people fall into place. America, the West, the "free" world, the "international community" are at war, a never-ending, perpetual war, the "Totale Krieg" Hitler only promised, but America delivered. And in the face of the threat even the most intelligent members of society shut up and fall into place. Here is Orwell again: "Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist."

As we were treated to another near fatal al-Qaeda attack on an American airliner, the usual pattern emerges slowly: The alleged terrorist perpetrator was "known to the authorities", he was allowed to enter the United States in spite of security warnings, there were even suggestions that he was permitted to board the Amsterdam to Detroit plane without a passport, if fellow travellers Kurt and Lori Haskell are to be believed, and considering that they are both attorneys in a Michigan law firm, maybe their evidence counts for something.
They state that the very same man who burnt his leg on board the plane, was accompanied by a man in an expensive suit who convinced ticket agents to let him on board without a passport. In such matters expensive suits alone don't do the talking, but government credentials do, so we're talking about the poor dupe's handlers who made sure that he was given an opportunity to do the job he was assigned to do.

Like those idiots who drove a van filled with propane canisters into the doors of Glasgow airport, causing damage to nobody but themselves, or the infamous shoe bomber, or the youngsters who believed you could make shampoo or mouthwash explode aboard a plane - they all did a great service to the ever expanding security industry and a great disservice to travellers. Each incident has the same characteristics, minimum damage with maximum drama. As long as such incidents can pop up credibly here and there, there is no need for those who brought us 9/11 to stage another elaborate, expensive and difficult to contain catastrophe, although one shouldn't but it beyond power-hungry cynics to contemplate a repeat performance. Each terror scare opens the doors for endless coverage, new, "even tougher" security measures, high profile raids on innocent people (e.g. the Forest Gate brothers or the Pakistani students in Manchester) and a reinforcement of the "state of war" mentality. Two German novellists argue in their book "Angriff auf die Freiheit" (Attack on Freedom) that the over-reaction to the "terrorist threat" is a much greater danger than terrorism itself and that today's surveillance society makes Orwell's 1984 look harmless. Terrorism, according to them, has become a convenient excuse for governments to spy on their own people.

Foolish executors of new terror threats are easy to find and recruit. A spoof MI6 recruiting website regularly receives applications, complete with CVs, addresses and telephone numbers, of would-be-patriots whose level of intelligence is such that they never realised that they were applying to a make-belief site. Here are some amusing examples, uncorrected for spelling mistakes:

"It with all due respect that i wish to inquire if your Organization has Recruitment offer for Nigerians that are resident in Nigeria? I am a God-fearing & law abiding citizen of my country, i also have a passion for law & order. So i wish to utilize my Intelligence quota in fighting crime both locally & internationally. pls keep me informed. Thank you for your anticipated co-operation."
"I was wondering exactly what qualifications you would need to join a government organisation eg; British intelligance for example if you would need a degree in a foriegn language, as i do not intend on studying a foriegn language at University. I was researching the police force and others in the UK and i could not find anything stating if not having a degree in a foreign languauge would present a problem. If you could reply and clear up this problem for me it would be much appreciated. Thanks."
"Born 1944 - Male - married 34 years - retired - served 1968-1971 army intelligence (analyst)"
"To whom it may consern, i am looking for information obout working for mi6, i am a Australian but i do beleave we are still part of the British commonwealth looking forward to your responce....regards james"
"...US passport 71****710, I have alway tried to do the right thing, now I really need a job. I am a known commodity, I know multiple Governments. Once hired I am completely reliable and discreet."
"I have been a Operational Officer for about four Years now and have been Deep undercover for Four Years in a Organisation called Oversight Committee. I was Recruited back in 2004 by Sir Richard Dearlove Previous Director of the Secret Inteligence Service the agency has forgotten all about me in the past four years. I would like to Continue Mobile: 079******81"
"I would like to know what I have to do to work with SIS M16, I'm working overseas doing Security, for the Army, at this time. I will be going back to the US, I will be ready for work after I get home I'm would like to learn more about Security. I have done Security for 11 years, all kinds of security I will be happy to send you a resume and there is one thing you need to know is I have a Secret Security Clearance, with DOD, if that will help. I hope to here from you soon I'm ready to go to work."
"i'm currently serving in the british army and would like to find out more about a transfer to this line of work! any infomation you could send me would be greatly appreciated."
"I am a iraqi weth brtsh passport .spike & rigt both arbic & farsi . livd in both .born in basra. mor subject to exp."
"Sir, I would like some info regarding the post because i am interested in joining. I have a military backgroung, presently a Lieutenant serving in a specialised unit."
"sir, my name is adeel tahir. age 27 from lahore pakistan. i am very interested to work for ur organization. i hope sir u consider my mail for job in ur organization. sir after 7/7 i feel ur organization need people who understand urdu language i am understand urdu very well because urdu id my mother tongue and national language of pakistan sir i think u organization me i am very interested to work for ur organization. looking forward for ur co-operation. bye sir."
If the CIA and MI6 set up similar fake al-Qaeda recruitment sites, as they most probably have, they will catch the opposite extreme of the spectrum.

Blissfully unaware, that al-Qaeda was an American invention all along, an off-spin of the days the USA was fighting Soviet Russia in Afghanistan, people feel threatened and scared, thank their governments for protecting them, and accept further inconvenience limiting their freedom of movement as a necessary evil. In line with the restrictions on liquid items, maybe, after the discovery that the latest foiled terrorist had sewn explosives into his underpants, all passengers should be made to remove their underwear before boarding a flight; a brisk sale in fresh underwear could develop in duty free shops at the airport. We could introduce the "two minute hate" sessions from 1984 before queuing at the security check-in, to get them into the spirit for the strip search. The actual choice of the security industry is, however, likely going to be expensive body scanners that peep beneath people's clothing as already trialled in Manchester.
The number of perverts applying for security jobs at airports is then probably going to match the number of idiots applying for "spy jobs" with the security agencies.

In the long run, all these reactions to the perceived terror threat are mere hysteric responses by a dying empire. A timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan has not yet been set, but the Pax Americana has long been dead. More Chinese arms might accelerate the process in Afghanistan, and China is the real threat to the USA, with Islamic terrorism a mere diversion. With America and Europe increasingly barricading themselves in, they will become more isolated and less attractive as visiting and business destinations, and thus only hasten their final implosion. It did not save the East German state that the Stasi had a file on every one of its citizens. Tightening control, will not save the American project either, and the de facto handover to China is only a question of time. Sadly, for Muslims, who believed in al-Qaeda as soon as the brand was created for them by the CIA and who are as brainwashed as the rest of Western consumers, it won't make much difference. They will be passed from one ruling world power to another, neither taking them seriously except for propaganda purposes.

Spain - Franco is back

2009-11-18T14:20:00.002Z

As British expatriates are abandoning the Spanish sunshine due to the devaluation of the pound against the Euro, Spain, predominantly dependent on tourism, is sinking deeper into recession. With the economic downturn comes a rise in right-wing politics, as is also the case in other countries of Europe. Whilst some countries view this development and its concomitant racism as a threat, Spain seems to embrace it with open arms. For the erstwhile dictatorship where fascism lingered another three decades after the end of the second world war, being a police state seems only too natural. For foreign visitors to Spain the arrogance of the Guardia Civil, the Spanish paramilitary police, and the deference showed to them by civilians and officials alike are becoming more evident.

Case study Girona airport: an airport entirely dependent on Ryanair who fly to numerous European destinations as well as Morocco from there. Many come here for the sun, but many are transit passengers on a stop-over to another Ryanair destination, since in spite of the substandard service, queuing system and hand luggage checks bordering on harassment, Ryanair flights, heavily subsidised by the regions to which they fly, remain the cheapest way to get around Europe at the moment. Whereas most airports in Europe only have X-ray machines for departure check-in, Spanish airports also feature X-ray machines for arrivals, which are used discretionary. Discretion always leaves room for abuse, and where nationalist tendencies prevail, this takes the form of racial profiling.

From observation it appears that travellers of Moroccan appearance (and for the Spanish police that includes all manners of Asians) stand a much greater chance of being asked to put their hand luggage through a scanner on arrival. So far, this is only a minor inconvenience, but the scanning, although showing that no contraband is being carried, is frequently followed by a passport check after which the inspecting officer walks off with the document to a security office room where he photocopies the passport and enters details on his computer for a purpose undisclosed to the perplexed passenger. Any attempt to question the purpose or even legality of the move is swiftly followed by the questioner being subjected to prolonged questioning (exclusively in Spanish and often deteriorating into being shouted at) before he is eventually released without explanation. There have been cases where police locked the door of the examination room from the inside before intimidating the "suspects". Demands for an interpreter are regularly ignored.

A similar treatment is sometimes also meted out to passengers on departure check-in, although it is less serious since the passenger wants to leave Spain anyway and non-cooperation could hardly have the more damaging result of being denied entry to the country. Nonetheless, it is disruptive and may eventually turn the visit to, or stop-over in, Spain into an experience the weary traveller does not want to repeat. One should think that Spain can hardly afford turning people away who might help save the Spanish economy by spending their money there, but the police at least have no such scruples.

On an occasion, when I challenged their inappropriate behaviour, they responded by subjecting me to the very same treatment of running off with my passport and subjecting me to questioning, the process being prolonged by the fact that the examining officer was unable to operate his own computer equipment! I did manage to arrange for an interpreter who, however, seemed clearly awe-stricken by the police officers and more intent on arguing their case than translating between the parties. What I was repeatedly told was that when you are in Spain, Spanish police can do whatever they want, basta. A reminder that Spain was a signatory to numerous European conventions cut no ice.

Officers with the following badge numbers currently have an official complaint filed against them with the municipality of Catalunya or the airport authority: 2510, 84613, 88336, 99142. It remains to be seen whether they are at all accountable and effective checks on an abuse of police power exist in Spain - the historic evidence is not encouraging.

Terrorising the laws of physics

2009-09-08T09:48:00.001+01:00

What do 9/11 and the liquid bomb plot have in common? They both replace reality with make-belief by seriously violating the laws of physics. And they represent a propaganda effort by today's war governments Joseph Goebbels would be proud of, thereby demonstrating that the masses in a democratic society can be easily fooled through the repeated use of media and are thus unable to make informed choices - dictatorship by consent.

Let's start with 9/11: According to the propaganda the heat of burning kerosene fuel from the aircraft which hit the high-rise buildings melted the steel reinforcements and made the steel/concrete structure collapse. This is an impossibility unless all the teachings of physics are going to be more radically revised than ever before: the hottest possible temperature of burning kerosene is 825°C, whilst steel starts melting at 1510°C. If burning kerosene melted steel or other metals (such as aluminium, with a lower melting point), airo engines would arrive liquidised before any jet plane ever made a safe landing. Even if the steel melted, the collapse of the building would have been gradual and not immediate; instead it simply disappeared into its own footprint with all the concrete being pulverised and none of the lower floors putting up resistance to the collapsing upper ones. According to the current state of the art of physics, this can only be achieved by a controlled demolition, and recent finds of thermite in the rubble support this claim. Yet, the myth wins over the facts.

Likewise with the liquid bomb plot for which three alleged Muslim terrorists have just been convicted of plotting mass murder in the sky. According to the official propaganda story, the key ingredient was hydrogen peroxide, readily available as hair bleach or medicated mouthwash, albeit at low concentrations. To buy it at the high concentrations needed for manufacturing an explosive would spark an immediate detection. But as the story goes, this was to be mixed with sulphuric acid and acetone (also known as nail polish remover) and smuggled in drinks bottles onto an aircraft together with detonators. Fantastic! Here's the physics of it: if you mix high-strength hydrogen peroxide with sulphuric acid it gets very hot, so you do get some kind of a mini explosion, or more likely a big splash. It would also soon melt through the plastic drinks bottle you were going to carry it in. To turn it into a potent explosive you still have to mix in the acetone, which has to be done at below zero temperatures, typically around -78°C, if you want an explosive you can ignite later. Now it does get very cold in the upper airways, but not inside the pressurised aircraft cabin. The very best our wannabe terrorist could achieve is to injure himself in the airplane's bathroom. The wild stories of ripping open the fuselage of the aircraft are pure imagination. By the way, airport security were not at all bothered about the potency of the liquids: On the day John Reid announced the discovery of the plot, they simply poured all liquids confiscated from the travelling public into one big container, and nothing went bang. Of course, the foul smell of sulphuric acid and acetone would immediately have revealed any harmful chemicals from amongst the gallons of harmful water and body shampoo taken of the unsuspecting public.

The stuff described makes for a nice chemical experiment with the potential to cause serious injury to the experimenter. It does not make a liquid explosive with the potential to blow a hole in an airliner, such as e.g. nitroglycerine. There are no ready-to-mix liquid explosive components out there, which detonate when mixed together, and any self-respecting chemical scientist knows that. All the whole saga tells us is that the teaching of physics and chemistry in American and British schools is very poor. And that the jury members were schooled in Britain.