Israel Will Never Change - And Never Should

It never should, is my point, when its very existence is at stake. Now, I have to be careful what I say here because of my line of work. I can't afford to get too mixed up in the political side of this latest hooha over Israel's security policies and the nefarious activities of spurious 'aid workers' who themselves seemed to think they needed to be armed and travel in division strength to perform best in their capacity as putative angels of mercy. With that in mind, I think I'll stick to the historical dimension. (Possibly - we'll see how it goes ;)

In addition, I have to be careful because some pointless commenter on my last post has said that my writing style (I didn't think I had one) stinks and that I don't know how to punctuate. Now, I don't mind the first meaningless dig - that's about taste - but the second one is patently bollocks. Nobody know's how, to punctuate better than me. they really dont. It felt like I was being told off by Pee Wee Herman. What a weirdo. And all because the twit in question thinks that David Laws isn't a troughing thief who deserved all he got - and more.

Anyway, back to Israel. I would like to make a couple of points about this latest non-story coming out of that part of the world, and they mainly concern the British reaction to it and what history tells us the Israeli reaction to that British reaction will be. There is a prejudice against Israel that runs so deep in this country that it is pretty difficult to quantify. It emanates from several sources and comes in a number of varieties but it all amounts to the same thing: loathing. Powerful political, lobbyist and media blocs in the UK indulge a fairly private agenda that is driven by a desire to kick Israel, and to see Israel kicked, as hard and as often as possible. That Israel's desire to search 10,000 tonnes of 'humanitarian' gear being shipped to terrorist-run Gaza warranted such a vicious reaction from the suspiciously well-armed, boarder-repelling 'aid workers' was very telling to me.

That these terrorist sympathisers' film of the inevitable firefight, as Israeli soldiers sought to defend themselves from what must have felt like a deadly assault, was the footage preferred and shown over and over again on British televisions speaks volumes about the unconscionable bias of Britain's mainstream media, especially (naturally) the BBC. Just imagine if this had been the USA and ATF officers or the US Coast Guard had been violently repelled by a foreign ship's crew and passengers. "Nine dead?" people would say, "Uncle Sam must be going soft in his old age. They were lucky they weren't all shot!" No one would have batted an eyelid.

But oh no. This is the plight of the Palestinians, so we have to bring out the standard, Pavlovian hyperbole and hysteria. The Left, the George Galloways of this world, who hijacked this issue long ago as they do with all issues they think possess the required propaganda potential to further the Marxist cause and the coming dictatorship of the workers, make the worn-out, cliched Israel=USA=Zionist Conspiracy=Great Satan lunatic link and condemn both the Jews and the USA for just about everything in the entire world they can think of (and probably things they can't), while the Establishment blames Israel because that's been official Foreign Office policy since the end of WWII, when Britain was humiliated by the new Israeli state into very kindly buggering off.

Allied - or maybe alloyed - to these unsavoury truths is the role of a highly partisan and blinkered media, whose journalists fall into one of the two above categories: leftwing dogma on Israel (BBC, Channel 4 etc.), or Establishment dogma on Israel (Telegraph, Times and so on). I've ignored the Far Right anti-Jewish dogma because as far as I'm concerned, it's fundamentally so far beneath contempt that it's not worth contemplating seriously. Suffice to say, however, it does complete a rather ugly picture. And then there are the Arabs!

But both the key positions in Britain, Left and Establishment, are equally corrupt when it comes right down to it because both are motivated by the same thing: prejudice. And this grows from shared characteristics of basic dishonesty, ignorance and/or malice. Without fully appreciating the entire history of Israel and Palestine unadorned with propaganda, from the late nineteenth century onwards, for instance,and Britain and America's roles in the creation of the new state post-war - America leading, Britain marginalised - then no possible resolution of the situation is remotely possible today. Furthermore, it would be wise not to forget the events leading up to and during WWII that directly led to the creation of the state in the first place. The Jews certainly haven't. Nor should we because when nutters start talking about wiping Israel off the face of the earth, Israel takes it deadly seriously; she will defend herself, as would we if we were in the same boat. They have every right to do so. They will not just quietly go down to the gas chambers this time around.

Finally, a note about the moderate, objective, professional media voices who always make me think there might be hope for truth in this country, and, therefore, hope for Israel after all. Today, the two Iains, Martin and Dale, deserve a special mention. Their writing on the subject of this unfortunate incident has been right out of the top drawer so far, and both should be commended for showing the rest of UK MSM journo-land what real unbiased reporting and commentary looks like.

(Incidentally, I don't "do" unbiased because this is my blog and these are my thoughts. If you don't like them, or how they are presented or expressed (or punctuated, grrr), then vote with your feet, do, there's a good punter.)

New Day, Same Old Story

Yesterday, we were greeted with the second morning in a row of that nauseating LibDum father and son double act (the Cable and Clegg show) on the BBC. Full coverage of two very dull press conferences. Today, it was the turn of the Marx (as in Karl) brothers: Mandy, Balls & Burnham. The BBC provided them with as much live airtime as they wanted to spread what I can only call, having read (bits of) the Conservative manifesto (it was free!), outright, barefaced, scurrilous, amoral, wickedly misleading lies. From start to finish, you had the three of these strangers to reality, let alone the truth, dishing out scaremongering propaganda that simply wasn't true. None of it. Nada. Not a thing. Labour's dirty tricks are big news for the BBC.

I didn't have time to wait for the Q/A section. Was there one? Or has the BBC finally given up even the pretence of impartiality now and decided to allow any attacks on the Tories, however perfidious and, in this case, outrageously smearing, in some cases personally, to go unchallenged altogether? It's a fair question and the answer to it, if the past two mornings of its coverage are any evidence, is disturbing.

Don't get me started on the Today programme. Suffice to say, its editors appear to be attempting to maintain some kind of 'balance' - by at least allowing a few, you know, Conservatives actually to answer the critics wheeled on, conveyor belt-style to trash policies, especially good ones. But the agenda is crystal clear. Treat the Tories like they've been in power for thirteen years - and treat Labour like the official opposition. Clever. But a nightmare to listen to and watch, a sign of how corrupt and contaminated the BBC really is, and bad news for the Conservative party.

Even I'm beginning to think that the political bias of the BBC, ever-more flagrant, and the hard-nosed commercial agenda of Sky/Murdoch (hung parliaments sell papers and boost viewing figures) is beginning to influence the direction of this general election campaign. If these factors influence the outcome, then the outcome will be meaningless and the country will have been betrayed. That much is at stake so wouldn't it be nice to hear a little more complaining from the big boy bloggers from now on, too? Or don't they care?

If you think I'm exaggerating, just ask yourself this question: where is the BBC's coverage of a Tory press conference? If there isn't any coverage in the next few days, maybe then people will begin to realise what is happening; it's not just tinfoilhattery on my part.

I'm assuming the Tories have planned a few press conferences. They have, haven't they? Well, if they haven't, they damn well should!

Slow News

Or, the calm before the storm.

Not very much has happened over the past few days, save for a massive earthquake on the far side of the world, the split-up Home Office's disagreement between its two new halves (that was always going to happen) over the recent behaviour of one of a pair of individuals who committed infanticide in 1993 at the age of ten, and the death of Michael Foot, an ancient Labour 'highly principled' leader (a nutter, in other words) who wanted to redifine the shape of Europe by ditching NATO and joining the Warsaw Pact - (failing that, to disarm ourselves utterly to send a powerful signal to the USSR that we were totally 'on their side' - but for pacific reasons, naturally).

May Foot rest in peace. He had a jolly good knock, and it's clear he had admirers (lots more in death). But I think I will remember my uncle more fondly, who heroically fought in one theatre after another for six long years in WWII, and who died at the age of 90, in 1996. I'll always remember him, simply because he was a hero, but also because he was a cantankerous old cuss for whom I never could do anything right. My kind of old git.

Loud speaker and half-decent critic though he was, I can't quite muster the same level of admiration for a man -a stranger- like Foot. But I will pray for him. My upbringing informs me that that's my duty. I'm not an especially religious person, but I'm a stickler for duty, so I'll try my best.

Anyway, back to the point. This must be the calm before the political, election storm. If not, then we are in for the most boring election battle in living memory. That would be a shame, given that this is the most important election battle in living memory.

Are we, the cradle of modern democracy, really that far gone? Has the deepest battle for the nation's soul since 1979 become no more and no less than a talent contest?

Yeah, maybe. We'll just have to wait and see. If it has; if we as a nation are that far gone, then I will be joining the 300,000 people who worked that out last year, and left forever for some other, less compromised country. Three of my (very successful) cousins can be included in that statistic.

The nice thing is, I guess, is that I'll be fitting right into Labour's decade-long 'thinning-out' immigration policy if I finally decide to sod off out of it. Towards the socialist cause, every little helps, after all. Even little me.

But what about the Conservative/conservative cause?

What about Britain?

Guardian Declares War On Journalism

The Guardian's chief political correspondent, Nicholas Watts, has launched a ludicrous attack on Rupert Murdoch on behalf of Peter Mandelson (who else?) that'll appear in tomorrow's edition. There are some extraordinary claims that suggest a distinct and burgeoning paranoia on the part of the Labour Party - (you remember them, the ones that sucked-up to, erm, Rupert Murdoch for 12 years); a familiar, hypocritical stench surrounding Mandelson; and typically ovine support for any old nonsense from his pet newspaper, the good ol' Graun.

However ridiculous the story, though, it's might (ought to) cause one hell of a row, not least with the Tories.

Here are a couple of the more extraordinary claims (supported by zero evidence in the article itself, as far as I can see):

Lord Mandelson declared war on the Murdoch empire today when he accused News Corporation of maintaining an "iron grip" on pay television and warned that the company wants to import rightwing Fox News-style journalism to Britain.

Um, what? I know News International's just announced that it no longer wants people like me nicking their stories (big deal - and fair enough, they don't belong to me, and they're usually naff anyway) but that hardly amounts to an 'iron grip'. As for wanting to 'import rightwing [sic] Fox News-style to Britain', well, no complaints here. It might at least break the monopoly of the biased BBC - and be interesting, to boot. Again, though, Watts doesn't feel the need to substantiate the claim.

In a sign that Murdoch also faces a fight in Britain, Mandelson turned his fire on a joint Tory-News Corp campaign to dismantle the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom.

Again, no substantiation or evidence, just a repetition of an increasingly shrill Mandelson slur about a joint Tory-News Corp 'campaign'. This is the Guardian at its very, very worst in terms of journalistic standards. Have they seen any documents that support Mandelson's bizarre, shrill charges? Of course not. Do they care? Well, if Watts was a genuine journalist he would. But he doesn't so he's not. He's just a mouthpiece for mad Mandy.

But wait, what's this - further into the article? Evidence?

Cameron pledged to dismantle Ofcom during a speech in July devoted to "cutting back the quango state". The Tory leader said: "With a Conservative government, Ofcom as we know it will cease to exist."

James Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp in Europe and Asia, accused Ofcom in August of imposing an "astonishing" burden of regulation on Sky.

Sorry folks, 'fraid not. For one thing, Cameron made his speech (about quangos) a month before Murdoch Jnr's machinegun assault on anything not Sky (which is sort of his job, after all - to make daddy proud). But still no 'evidence' there. Just more half-baked accusations and the flimsiest of flimsy circumstantial claptrap bordering on a waking dream. And anyway, James Murdoch was right, too! The burden of regulation on broadcasting generally in Britain is outrageous. Oh, unless you're the Beeb of course. Then you can do whatever they like, editorially and financially, despite being funded by a legally enforced tax.

In the end, of course, this is all about Mandelson who, ably served by his tame Guardian journalist, is pushing his ultra-partisan 'Digital Britain' bill, which is actually designed to do just one thing, and its not to secure Britain's digital future (there's no 'we' in Labour). It's to secure the left's control of the BBC from now until doomsday. Well, Pete, doomsday for you could be coming sooner than you think, with or without Murdoch's (junior or senior) help.

As for the Guardian, well, we've long known that its standards of journalism are basically the lowest in the entire legacy press, at least in terms of giving two hoots about even the pretence of impartiality, but this joke article represents an outright declaration of war on the profession itself. No evidence, just mindlessly parroted Mandelsonian smears; no attempt to qualify those claims, just dutifully reinforced prejudices.

I mean, how can it hope to be taken seriously if it keeps on behaving like the BBC? Obviously, we can expect more of this kind of crap as the general election nears, and it should be criticised for precisely what it is: activism and cynicism, not journalism.

The Graun had better remember that the Tories will probably win that election...and that they have long memories.

The Swarm Intelligence

Just scanned this very interesting article about Climategate in the journal of the American Enterprise Institute's "Enterprise" blog by someone very bright called Jay Richards. The specific points he makes (extremely well) about the ongoing, forensic analysis and reconstruction of the leaked data, revealing some of the worst abuses of the scientific process imaginable, are by now quite familiar and can be found in the usual places, several of which are linked to on this blog. It's not these legitimate observations so much, explosive as they are, as his conclusions about the significance and cultural impact of the blogosphere that really intrigued me. Here's an extract:

Of course, most of the big broadcast media are still in full blackout mode on this story, choosing instead to report on breaking news about Pete the orphaned moose. They’re following the pattern of the Dan Rather Memogate controversy in 2004. With that history-making story, the legacy media mostly tried to ignore the story, and then, when it got too big, began to spin it. Rather and CBS issued increasingly bizarre denials. Even though the gig was up within a couple of days, they continued to defend the document in question, and the stories based on it, for two excruciating weeks. (Compare CRU’s Phil Jones offering similarly risible explanations.) Meanwhile, in the parallel universe called reality, unknown and often apolitical bloggers with specialized expertise in font styles, IBM Executive Series and Selectric typewriters, military protocol, and word-processing software dismantled the details for any curious person with an Internet connection. Other, politically oriented blogs consolidated, analyzed, and broadcast the findings.

MemoGate gave many of us our first taste of the swarm-intelligence of the blogosphere, and showed that it cab beat the legacy media for getting to the bottom of a story via a networked, open-source form of peer review, with a highly refined division of labor.

We may just now be seeing the potential for this new way of transferring and analyzing information. In Memogate, remember, we were talking about a single one-page Word document. With Climategate, we’re dealing with thousands of detailed, often technical documents. They may even have been compiled internally at the CRU in response to a Freedom of Information request and were then leaked instead. So the revenge of the nerds could be especially brutal and prolonged. Already, insights and analyses are proliferating on the climate blogosphere so quickly that it’s becoming impossible for even the best consolidators to keep up.

I hadn't really grasped what Guido Fawkes meant when he talked about similar things regarding, if memory serves, the expenses scandal* . I do now. The blogosphere, with its "swarm intelligence," is no longer potentially the most powerful communication medium in the world, Climategate has proved (at least to me) that it now is the most powerful communication medium in the world.

It therefore seems that it was no accident the Climategate documents weren't first leaked to a newspaper, as with the expenses scandal (the last real scoop of the dead tree press?) but to a blog instead, albeit what turned out to be the virtual dead end of a BBC weatherman's blog. I think it likely that given the technical complexity of the material, the whistleblower eventually appreciated that no MSM (what Jay Richards calls the "legacy media") provider would even want to touch it, all compromised as they more or less all are, much less spend a lot of time and money unpacking its secrets. It needed some serious processing power to do that, and, as Mr Richards asserts, the only place that that could be found was in the blogosphere.

So, complete paradigm shifts all round, then - not just in terms of the AGW belief system, but in terms of how we produce, analyse and trust our news-information supply, too.

I for one am pretty proud to contribute my modest (some would say infinitesimal) intellectual resources to The Swarm Intelligence.

(*It could have been something else, though, I'd need to check. But he does bang on about that and the fall of the dead tree press fairly regularly, it seems to me.)