A statement on the flotilla massacre from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions -

"This was a callous attack on innocent civilians which showed an utter disregard for all precepts of international law and human rights.
"The people on those boats were civilians engaged in peaceful humanitarian work, bringing much needed aid to the Gaza Strip and were no threat to anyone.
"To launch a military assault on a humanitarian convoy is beyond the bounds of all that is acceptable and should be judged as such by the international community. The assault was akin to the actions of a rogue state.
"On behalf of the Irish Trade Union movement we would like to extend our sympathies to those killed and injured in this attack and we are thankful that the Irish contingent appears to be safe and well.
"We lend our support to calls for an immediate suspension of the EU's trade agreement with Israel and we also believe that the recent decision to accept Israel into full membership of the OECD should be reversed with immediate effect."

This is as near as any statement I've read so far to my own feelings. I would just amend "The assault was akin to the actions of a rogue state" to "The assault was the action of a rogue state".

How is it that when the rich and well connected are caught with their hands in the till they are only guilty of a regrettable "lapse of judgement"? Theft, fraud, peculation; such terms are reserved for the lower orders.

"But there is an equally compelling point that Laws is a millionaire. If he wanted to keep his relationship secret then why spend any taxpayer money at all? Why the need to claim it back? After all the other MPs who thought they were obeying the rules at the time weren’t spared were they?"

(Sunny Hurndal on pickled politics)

I had been wondering how long it would be before PM Cameron flew off to Murdoch's control centre to pay homage to the great man. No hurry as it turns out. The boss couldn't wait, and has already called in at Downing Street admin with his shopping list*. Let's hope the new boys were on their toes and made a good impression.

*As reported in Private Eye.

"Military authorities said that masked naval commandos would greet the eight ships deep out at sea, escort the vessels to port and give each of the activists a stark choice: leave the country or go to jail."
Which country would that be?

The progress of the flotilla can be followed here
and here.

The link to Imran Ahmed's posting on Clegg's treachery doesn't seem to be working (for me anyway) so I've borrowed this image from Graham Cluley's blog.
Clegg's weasel-out statement was made on Tuesday.

"Gary McKinnon, you've been clegged."

[Link removed]

The things you miss when you don't read the "mindwarping shitsheets" (© Charlie Brooker). Luckily others have stronger stomachs. The Hate Mail's latest piece of racist disinformation didn't stand up for long. I reckon Ms. Fardon is just the kind of person Mail readers admire. I wonder if she was paid for this story.

"Driver orders toddler off bus for wearing offensive England football shirt"

"England-Shirt-Issue-Statement"

David Miliband, the only one lucky enough to be an MP at the time, says he supported the war because of evidence of Saddam's famous "weapons", adding he would have opposed it "if we had known then what we know now". But the only reason people believed Saddam had those weapons was because Miliband's government was telling everyone he did. So, he's saying: "If I'd known I was lying it would have been different, but how could I possibly know I was making stuff up? You can't blame me for fooling myself, as I'm very persuasive."
David Miliband is also accused of being complicit in handing suspects over to be tortured, so maybe he'll try a similar defence, saying: "If I'd known at the time that torture could include pain I would never have approved of it. But someone told me electrodes were more tingly than unpleasant, like one of those strange chairs that massages your back. Still, you live and learn."

(Mark Steel)

Last week, the BBC reported Barack Obama’s request to Congress for $200 million in military aid to assist Israel’s construction of a short-range rocket defence system, Iron Dome. The funding will be in addition to the $3 billion in military aid the US annually sends to Israel.

“It grieves me to the core,” said Steele, “to have to admit that today the American government has abdicated her traditional solidarity with Israel”:
Today, Israel truly stands alone among governments. Facing existential threats more dangerous and more imminent than ever before. That’s not to say that Israel has been abandoned, however, by the American people. But there is no denying that the current administration and its Congressional collaborators have left Israel to fend for herself.

"Why is this bastard lying to me?" (Claude Cockburn on interviewing politicians)

Still more than a fortnight to go to the World (yawn!) Cup and I'm sick of it already. It seems that the hucksters can link any product to this competition, from haemorrhoid cream to rosary beads. Every other advert on the telly has a football reference. How these promoters of any old thing love the beautiful game. How they love throwing bucketfuls of money at spoilt millionaires in return for a stupid grin. I hate them all; players, officials, journalists, hucksters, all trying to persuade me that they care. Why am I not convinced?
The most important contribution that we the public can make to this celebration of talent, determination, patriotism, and actual bodily harm, is to purchase and consume gallons and gallons, litres and litres, of BEER (preferably of non-UK origin). We must drink and drink, stagger about shouting Engulund, Engulund, and causing alarm and despondency by urinating alfresco. Some of my neighbours are already getting some serious training in. I just hope they don't peak too early.

Read any gid biks lately?
I've already railed against this affectation of media types - or is it more widespread? - of pronouncing 'good' as gid, gyid, or gyed. Well this morning on Radio4 I heard some "expert" say "What we are licking at ..." LICKING, you prat?
How far will this degradation of the OO-sound be carried? Will we hear singers delivering "These Fillish Things" or "I'm Licking Over a Four-Leaf Clover"? Oh, and middle class tossers already pronounce their ubiquitous "cool!" as "cyul!" If we're going to have conformity in trendy distortions, let's make it "kill!"

Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie
avec ses chants et ses longs loisirs

and then the shrapnel penetrated his skull and shortened his life.
Those lines of verse have been on my mind a lot lately. Maybe because of people who claim that war is an integral part of the human experience.
Was Apollinaire genuinely keen on the military way of life? Surely his response to war would have been more complex. But I believe he was reported as having been seduced by the ceremonial and the flag-wagging. Maybe those lines are not ironic, though someone is killed in the poem,

... tandis qu'elle
riait au destin surprenant.


"You would feel that after so many centuries
God would give man to repent; yet he can kill
As Cain could, but with multitudinous will.
No farther advanced than his ancient furies."
(Richard Eberhart)

"Bella, horrida bella."
(Virgil)

"War is the health of the state."
(Randolph Bourne)

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation; the second is war. Both bring temporary prosperity, both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."
(Ernest Hemingway)

"We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened." Liam Fox, our new defence secretary.
On the radio this morning some high ranking officer echoed the British security line. Without that fig-leaf we might think the whole thing was just the UK armed forces on hire to Globocop.

Let's see now -
Invasion of Afghanistan, October 2001
London bombings, July 2005.
Pre-invasion Islamic terrorist atrocities in the UK, 0 (that's a zero).

" ... broken 13th century country", a better description than the one I'm prone to use - (censored). I remember some Yankee bigmouth threatening to bomb Afghanistan back into the Stone Age. Still some way to go then.

I wonder exactly what Fox meant by "global interests".

Ed Balls, another leadership contender who was not an MP in 2003, has in the past said he would have voted for the war. But he tells tomorrow's Telegraph: "It was a mistake. On the information we had, we shouldn't have prosecuted the war ... It was an error for which we as a country paid a heavy price, and for which many people paid with their lives." Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, and I am pleased he is no longer running Iraq. But the war was wrong."

The more I see and hear of this loathsome creature the more I feel the need to witness him suffering great pain. Fortunately a lot of other people will be experiencing similar sentiments, and his chances of becoming a leader instead of a toady are remote.

Ed Miliband too did not approve of the war. He thought at the time that it was wrong, but never managed to put his thoughts into words for public consumption. Then he became an MP in the party guilty of prosecuting the illegal war, and later joined the cabinet of war supporters. He too wants to be leader of his disgraced party.

I wish Rupert Murdoch would hurry up and tell the Labour Party who he wants for leader. I'm getting confused by all these people putting their names forward.

A breathing space for Gary McKinnon and his legal team. Fair play to Theresa May.
Is this an aberration?

Message to Fleming -

If you 'd care to send in a joke insulting Jesus, and one insulting Moses, then I'll post your semi-joke insulting Muhammad along with them. Otherwise I, who have no time for religion, will just assume that you are using your crappy humour as a vehicle for your bigotry; and my blog as a medium for the same bigotry. It isn't going to work, my man.
You just happen to be targetting the monotheistic religion on which it is open season in your benighted country. Try picking on the Christian fundamentalists and the Jewish pro-Israel fanatics for a change. Have a pop at the people who fund your rabid neo-con propaganda machine.
If you lived in Sa'udi Arabia, flem, you'd be sneering at the cross worshippers. You'll always be with the biggest bully in the yard.

What can you read on Jemmy Hope's blog that you can't read in the Financial Times? Just about everything on J.H.'s blog I suppose, including the above advertisement.

(via Pickled Politics)

Well, hush my mouth! I'm just after writing that Rahm Emanuel's background makes him a man to be wary of, and what do I read? A quote from the same Rahm, "I am more hawkish than 50 percent of the people in Israel." This from a bloke whose boss claims to favour peace in the Middle East.
Admittedly the statement was made to an Israeli billionaire who has donated millions to the Democrats, but even that gent appears to have been taken aback by it.

(via Angry Arabs' Comment Section)

Rahm Emmanuel is Obama's Whitehouse Chief of Staff (but of course everyone knows that). I'm sure William Hague, PC, got on like a (Gazan) house on fire when our Foreign Secretary of three days went over to Washington to learn what our foreign policy is. The following piece is lifted from onlinejournal.com

Rahm Emanuel's father specialized in bus bombings in Palestine
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

May 13, 2010, 00:15

A well-placed British source informed WMR [http://www.waynemadsenreport.com] that Rahm Emanuel's father, Benjamin Emanuel, specialized in the terrorist bombings of buses carrying British troops and policemen during the British Mandate in Palestine.
British MI-6 files contain information on the elder Emanuel's participation in the terrorist activities of Irgun Zvai Leumi, a Jewish terrorist organization that targeted British forces, UN officials, and Palestinian Arabs in the lead up to Israeli independence in 1948.
Benjamin Emanuel, a Jew from Russia whose real name was Ezekiel Auerbach, was arrested by British police for terrorist activities in the months prior to Israeli independence. Many of the British policemen killed by Emanuel and his Irgun colleagues between 1947 and 1948 had been transferred to Palestine upon Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947. Irgun saw the increase of British policemen from the Indian subcontinent as a major threat.
The Jewish terrorist murders of British troops and policemen resulted in massive anti-Jewish riots in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, and Cardiff in 1947. In 1946, Emanuel's Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people, including 28 British soldiers and policemen.
British intelligence also believed that Benjamin Emanuel may have been related to Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Russian Jew from Odessa who founded Irgun. Jabotinksy, who was an admirer of Benito Mussolini and who secretly negotiated for the expatriation of Jews to Palestine with the Nazi government in Germany and Admiral Miklos Horthy's pro-Nazi regime in Hungary, died of a heart attack in New York in 1940.
Wikipedia deleted Benjamin Emanuel's entry in 2008, shortly after Rahm Emanuel was designated as President Obama's chief of staff. Wikipedia is a favorite device for the perception management goals of Dr. Cass Sunstein, Obama's director of the White House Office of Regulatory Affairs.
With a record of terrorist acts contained in his MI-6 files, Benjamin Emanuel was permitted by U.S. authorities to emigrate to Chicago from Israel in the 1950s, becoming a citizen. Rahm Emanuel was born in 1959.

There is a certain right wing British "historian" named Sebag-Montefiore who pretends not to know about those anti-Jewish riots in British cities. Or why did he refer to similar anti-jewish mob activity in Limerick in the 1900s as the last pogrom in the the British Isles?

"Notice something different?" (wikipedia). Yes, it's not working.

Shahid Farzad Kamangar, schoolteacher, trade unionist, murdered in secret by the Iranian régime. He had been sentenced to death after a trial which lasted five minutes.

So the foul deed has been perpetrated and the "fish in a condom"* is our new prime minister. Now poor Adam Boulton can calm down, his master has the result he demanded.
What's that jounalist's rule - don't become the story?

*© Steve Bell

HEY ELTON from John Greyson on Vimeo.

I saw this on Angry Arab's Comment Section and had to clone it. Let's see if it works.

On Thursday morning the BNP had 12 members on Barking and Dagenham Council. On Friday morning it had none.
Applications for the soon to be vacant role of British Fuehrer should be signed in blood (for DNA testing). And the soon to be ousted Fuehrer can console himself with continued nasal insertion in the EU trough (metaphor courtesy of a disillusioned BNP member).

Is this our new prime minister?

It seems that Clegg is getting into bed with Dave/David. Out with the New Labour/Old Tories, in with the New Old Tories propped up by the Lib Dem Tories. So shiny Clegg (rapidly tarnishing) can haggle for a top cabinet post and forget all that nonsense about not arming the Israelis and not being subservient to the US. I feel a "realistic" approach coming on. Up yours, Cleggalomaniacs. Here comes the new politics, just like the old politics.

One Green MP, no Nazis.

This morning - for the first time since 1969 when I began taking note - I heard a reporter on a BBC station say "Derry" instead of "Londonderry". It was only in a long list of airports likely to be closed by the recurrence of volcanic ash in the air, so he might have got away with it. Or he might be admonished. Let's hope he doesn't get the sack.

I see Rod Stewart is appearing in concert in Tel Aviv on the 1st July.
"Before arriving in Israel, Stewart, 65, is scheduled to perform in Romania, Austria and Hungary, as part of his current world tour." While he's in Romania he might like to join the locals in killing a few gypsies.
He will be preceded in his ritual dance on Palestinian corpses by the noble knight Sir Elton John (because you can never be too rich or too callous).
Let's see now, they've been around long enough to have played Sun City in the good old days when the krugerrands spilled out like blood at Sharpeville. I wonder if they did.

There are no parties, there are no policies, there are only three blokes competing to be the next Prime Minister. This is how the media have decided to play the election. This is politics as organised by the Murdoch machine. It doesn't really matter who wins, the country's going down the pan; it'll just go a little faster with the Cameronians, and Murdoch will get to see the BBC dismantled.

This is Charlie Brooker's take on Murdoch's three stooges -

Brown - "Technical in the social situation, sociable in the technical situation? That's the hallmark of a nerd. And most nerds are simply too gawky – gawky, not aloof – to connect with the general public."

Clegg - "roughly 50% daytime soap, 40% human, and 10% statesman."

Cameron - "100% something. He isn't even a man; more a texture-mapped character model. There's a different kind of software at work here, some advanced alien technology projecting a passable simulation of affability; a straight-to-DVD retread of the Blair ascendancy re-enacted by androids."

Same fellow on our press -"Two-faced contempt is the basic mode of operation for many newspapers: mindwarping shitsheets filled with selective reporting and audacious bias. The popular press is a shrill, idiotic, bullying echo chamber; a hopelessly poisoned Petri dish in which our politicians seem resigned to grow."

The "shitsheets" have already written off Brown (though the electorate might decide to vote for a party not a leader). That may be a "mitzvah", because, according to Mervyn King, whichever party forms the next government will have to unleash such a savage assault on our living standards that they will render themselves unelectable for some time thereafter.
Me, I won't be voting for any of them, or their useless parties, or their anti-social policies.

According to the current 'Private Eye' Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has threatened to set the libel lawyers on any newspaper mentioning his association with the Papal Knight Nadhmi Auchi.

Frankie Boyle, "The BBC are cowards."

Well, he's not the first to say that, and he won't be the last.

"I don't understand why everybody lies. The president of my former club Lens, Gervais Martel, said I left because I got more money in England, that I didn't care about the shirt. I said: 'Is there one player in the world who signs for a club and says, Oh, I love your shirt?' Your shirt is red. I love it. He doesn't care. The first thing that you speak about is the money.

Benoît Assou-Ekotto of Tottenham Hotspur.

What a refreshing change!

Comedian Andy Hamilton said (News Quiz, Radio 4, today) he'd heard that Gordon Brown's "bigoted woman" had been offered £30,000 to say that she was voting Conservative in the general election. She turned the offer down. I hope it's true, that there is at least one person in this country Murdoch can't buy.